Next week we start a two week segment of ds106 focussed (get it?) on photography. I’m putting out a request to add your suggestions in an open Google doc at http://bit.ly/ds106-better-photos.

Links to articles are great, but I am really looking for personal strategies and ideas that would help my students refine their approach to visualizing, composing, etc- not just the technical stuff, the things that move one from snapshots to art.

For example, Brian Metcalfe shared this audio narrated slideshow by Darren Kuropatawa:

Maybe I can arm twist Alec or Dean into echoing it, they do well with these Google Doc Tom Sawyer Fence Painting gigs.

Hint. Ahem. The link. http://bit.ly/ds106-better-photos

(click click click for view full sized artistic glory of this work of fine art)

Fine art, indeed, this limited edition original painting is available for auction coming soon.

This is my bit for the Fat Cats Make Art Better ds106 assignment contributed by Annie Belle who is just rocking the class so far. The instructions, if you please…

Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat.

Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better.

(Tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments334)

I use “classic art” in its most literal sense, for what gallery is not complete without a large painting of Dogs PLaying Poker?

For this one, I found the base painting on flickr (search “dogs poker” in compfight.com)

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by allspice1

and then it is rather easy to find photos of fat cats in the same place- here is my subject because he/she is posed in a poker position

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by AlyssssylA

In Photoshop, I positioned the cat in a layer above the base scene. I aplied the paint daubs filter to make it look a bit more textured. Then, I use the selection tool to grab the outline of the chair and table as areas, I flip back to the cat and use to delete so it appears behind key objects. Finally I added (rotated too) a few copies of this playing card to fill out the feline’s royal straight flush.

I am next thinking of a whole series of feline Velvet Elvises….

My last stop before arriving in Fredericksburg was an overnight visit with Gardner Campbell, in Blacksburg VA, and what evening of great food and conversation does not get greater when he says, “Do you want to hear some vinyl?”

Is the sky up there?

Of course I do, especially given the bag of gold that was our last conversation in October of 2011.

My question is, how about if I broadcast to ds106 radio?

And thus we go- I have about an hour and forty minutes (see below), but missed recording the first section where he played “Rocks Off” and “Loving Cup: from Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones.

This was timely, considering I had a little audio clip to play back. Over last year, I’ve been working my way through the audio book version of Keith Richards’ autobiography “Life”. I had heard a section I really wanted to come back to, but there is no way to bookmark audio on your iThing while driving.

But the same section had come up again when I was listening while driving across Tennessee. The thing is, the audio book is being red bu Johnny Depp, and this section is where Richards shares a quote from Tom Waits on their musical collaboration. Once more, this is Johnny Depp doing an imitation of Keith Richards imitating Tom Waits talking about Keith Richards.

And this was only recorded by my hand held iPhone in a moving car, and I kept turning it over thinking I had it sitting on ther mic on the cup holder.

Tom Waits on Keith Richards

Everyone loves music… what you really want is music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it with Keith. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute, or its trumpet, or its strings. Thats real obvious around Keith.

He’s like a frying pan, made from one piece of metal. You can heat it up really high, and it won’t crack. Just changes color.

That is so poetic, and visual. I love it.

And the part about writing makes me think about Gardner as well as the closing bit:

I found some things they say about music that seem to apply to Keith. You know that in the old days, they said that the sound of the guitar could cure gout and epilepsy, sciatica, migraines.

I think nowadays, there seems to be a deficit of… wonder. And Keith, still seems to wonder about this stuff. He will stop and hold his guitar up, just stare at it for a while, just be rather mystified by it. Life all the great things in the world– women, religion, and the sky– you wonder about it. And you don’t stop wondering about it.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

To me, that sense of wonder is something that typifies Gardner Campbell, he has a surplus of wonder. And he shares it so well.

So for the rest of the session, I did record it, and we listened to some Stevie Wonder, played some Guess Who for Brian Lamb, then some Rasberries, and closed, of course, with a few songs by the Who.

More Vinyl with Gardner

I go there for the conversation, the musiuc, the learning of the little codes in the dead wax, to tap into the magic of musical recordings, and the nuances I barely even might notice– where it not for this man of wonder.

Thank you, friend.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I’m catching up on my audio reflections, this one is from before I left Arizona. On January 22, the weekend before I left, I drove down to Cottonwood Arizona to visit Todd Conaway. It’s a majestic drive down Highway 260, falling off of the top of the Mogollon Rim down through Campe Verde.

Slices of Life 007

Most of this slice was reflecting on my first class of teaching ds106 for the University of Mary Washington, albeit remotely from Strawberry, via Skyoe with the help of Jim Groom. The first meeting went fairly well, me introducing the class and the students introducing themselves.

I was pretty darn nervous, and felt the combination of that excitement and the drain of energy after being tuned in for that session. It is hardly the best way to teach, and is only a bridge til I get there.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I enjoyed the time chatting with Todd at his home in Cornville, and as a bonus audio (hah, some bonus), I recorded a conversation we had talking about the StoryBox. I appreciate and am doing some later to be schedule reflection on his interest in what comes out of that experience.

Conversation with Todd Conaway

We then drove over to the town of Cottonwood where I got a tour of main street by Todd and some fine local food.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

I was a bit frantic at this time to get ready for the upcoming drive to Virginia, but it was well worth taking the afternoon to visit Todd and see a bit of Arizona I’d not been to before.

And all of this being part of the larger slice of embracing the unknown and reflecting on what it might offer.

Red Dog parked in Fredericksburg, Virginia on Monday afternoon, and has not moved since. It feels both odd and rewarding to not be in motion, yet I am still very much in a place of transition.

Here is the place to insert the standard apology for not blogging. There is a queue of backlog posts, at least 3 or 4 Slices of Life audio to hang here.

For the quick recap, I rushed here to be present in person to teach my section of ds106. I have a teaching blog set up using the same instructions we give students at http://106tricks.net – I was using Feed WordPress to pull posts in here, but noticed they were double posted and thrice tweeted. I might just put a sidebar RSS feed widget.

In some ways my start was a side parallel of the Summer of Oblivion, where the teacher appeared after being present only in video, without the drama and hair shaving. Maybe. I’m definitely quickly trying to find my way in the teaching mode, it is both invigorating and draining.

Then on top of all; the hurdles we give students in setting up their blogs, we suffered this week through a hacking incident that affected all student blogs (and my own) on the host we recommend. Most are recovered, and while it sets a dark, confusing cloud on this, in many ways it helps expose some of the dark underbelly of the internet. To me, you cannot have the shiny bright kum-ba-ya sharing of the net, without having the slimy stuff…

Jim posted examples of how we countered it, by giving our students a 15 minute rapid challenge to work in groups and create a web story about the character Enre5807. My students got much more animated than during our class discussion given this challenge, relying on tools they knew like Meme Generator:

So far Virginia is sporting warm sunny weather I am happy to take credit for brining from Arizona. I owe a big thanks to Jim Groom for setting me up here and for offering me the basement complex at La Maison du Bava, not to mention the warm enthusiasm of the Groom Family, all three kids call me “CogDog”.

I’ve still got a lot to do to get acquainted with the new surroundings.

More to be blogged, just glad to be off the road a while. But I am rather portable…

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by James Jordan

Each time you send an email, and perhaps by extension of the convention, you should thank Ray Tomlinson and his inspiration, @rmando’s Pizza Shop in Cambridge, MA.

Tomlinson, a graduate of MIT, started work as a programmer in the mid 1960s at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the firm working with ARPANET to develop the first computer network that evolved into the Internet we know today.

The concept of computer messaging had been around a while, but was limited to people sending messages only to other people using the same computer. The program was called SNDMSG, and Tomlinsons idea was to improve it be able to send messages to other nodes on the network BBN was connecting.

He typically credits the use of the @ sign to be common sense, of Person AT machine, but BBN insiders know that the idea came from Armando’s Pizzas, which were the favorite snack for programmers doing all night era at BBN– Armando typically arranged his toppings in that swirl pattern of the @ sign, said Armando:

it really was my signature!

Tomlinson envisioned a network of computers at the pizza shop, and the ability to order pies via network messaging.

Although people typically cite the first email message to be the keyboard row QWERTYUIOP, Tomlinson frequently reminded us that he does not exactly recall the first message since it was a test. However, renovators working on a remodel of Armando’s pizza shop have unearthed a tattered copy of this first message that read:

Large pepperoni, mushroom, olive, and, pick up at 11pm, Ray

According to the history, email was not even something the ARPANET directors did not ask for. Why did he create it?

Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive to “go forth and create email”. The ARPANET was a solution looking for a problem. A colleague suggested to my boss I not tell him what I had done because email wasn’t in our statement of work.

See more about the history of email…

This is my contribution for the brilliant Patty Pioneers meme/assignment triggered by Scott Lockmans class in Tokyo. The photo of Tomlinson was found on Photobucket, and the shape of the computer he is holding immediately suggested to me– PIZZA! I found a photo of a pizza box from All Things Pizza.

In PhotoShop, I used the polygon selection tool to trace the shape of the laptop, and used Edit-Paste Special to insert the pizza in place of the laptop. I had to use Edit-Transform-Distort to shape the box, after deleting the white background. It did not quite work, so I lined up the hinge of the pizza box to that of the computer. I selected the top half of the box, and did option-shift to copy the box top and fill the top half. A bit if magic brush smoothed out the seam.

Finally, using the text tool (Marker Felt font) I added the @ sign, using the Vivid Light style on the layer, dropping opacity to 67%.

This assigment makes me hungry for more Patties!

This will not only make it easier for me to track, it will, more importantly, provide them a way to organize all their DCs in one place. I have already created a screencast on how to do this with WordPress Categories but one can also do it with tags.

This week is not over, but I wanted to create a demo. On this blog, I am tagging all my posts for this as dailycreate which becomes likable via http://cogdogblog.com/tag/dailycreate

The other thing I want them to do is to embed their content in the blog, not link to it or upload it. For both YouTube and Flickr, this is easily done in WordPress by putting the URL for anyof those item pages on its own line– no copy/paste of HTML, no plugins needed (for soundcloud they will have to use embed codes).

So here is what I have DC’d this week…

TDC 015 make a recording of the most lively laugh you can make someone do
Can I tickle someone via Skype? I tried.

TDC 016 Photograph something ugly and make it beautiful
My compost container smiled at me.

TDC 017 show us your keys
I don’t like a lot of keys, but my bike tool is essential

TDC 018 video of an object in motion
Shot hastily while moving myself (do not try this at home). Relative speed?

This photo is somewhere near the Arizona / New Mexico border. It was fitting to see a sign for Grants Road, since I had been listening to @grantpotter playing a set of road tunes for me on ds106radio.

It was epic, and carried me clear from east of Holbrook AZ into Albuquerque NM.

It’s just a small example of how generous a spirit Grant is, he deserves more than a road, even more than a town, heck they name a new Canadian province for him.

Thanks!

There is no moss on this roving stone. In 30 minutes, me and Red Dog are headed back up this hill on AZ 87 towards Winslow, turning right on I40, and beelining for the East Coast.

A new odyssey.

My destination is Fredericksburg VA, where I am teaching a section of ds106 thanks to the awesome support from Jim Groom, who has been pinch hitting for me in class til I show up Monday. I have been beaming in via Skype, but not all in the vein of Dr Oblivion (I have all my hair and sanity).

Why go? I still have the means, if I choose, to be a bum for another year, but I want to try some new things, like teaching a real class. I am keen to hang out with the DTLT crew if they will spare me a table, cause Tim, Martha, Andy, and Jim do Rick the house. I will also be close to my sisters in Baltimore, and a hop from a favorite spot in Canada.

The truck is almost loaded, including kayak and road bike, and with some sadness, I close up my house in Strawberry, which will wait patiently til I come back down the curve.

The plan is maybe Albuquerque tonight, Oklahoma City Friday (and visit Wes Fryer), then Nashville by Saturday night, and on to Blacksburg Sunday to see Gardner Campbell (and hopefully catch David Carter-Tod for breakfast Monday?). I should get to Freddy by Monday afternoon, and show up for class at 6pm.

Like a rolllllllllllllllllling stone, says Muddy.

I wanted to experiment with showing this via an audio screen cast, which demonstrates how to create categories, how to update existing posts to be included in new categories, how to use them on a new post, how to find the URL for you category page, and how to add a menu item to point to your category.

FYI I made this on my iPad with Explain Everything, made screenshots, annotated them, recorded audio, and upload directly to YouTube. That was easy!