flickr foto Brother and Sisteravailable on flickr Today is Cadu’s birthday! She (black lab on the left) and Mickey (right) were from the same litter, though differed in just about every other form factor. Cadu will be 5 today; Mickey is forever frozen at 2 and a half. Doggie party tonight!
I have oft professed my deep love for flickr. I have been a user of it since March 2004, when it had that hokey black flash interface. I have uploaded almost 1400 photos, not nearly prolific as some. But recently I was slapped by one of their policies regarding a new way I was using […]
RSS was the cutting bleeding edge in 2002, or at least it seemed to me. Few people knew what it was if you muttered it (well that has not changed), but very little of the things we are excited about now would have have their oomph without the underlying, humble glue, of RSS, ugly to […]
I don’t know the words, but am ready to make them up. Apple, grant me the serenity to accept the firmware I cannot change; courage to update the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Maybe not. This morning, I installed the latest firmware update for my MacBookPro, and worked through the morning. […]
I am about shoulder deep in trying to learn Drupal as intended for a new platform to implement for the NMC web site– obviously since it can do so much, it lends itself for creating a multi-faceted site with customizable themes, separate domains for different projects, and all the 2.0-ish tools you’d hope are in […]
OR if at first you don’t succeed, search and search again? What started as a simple task chewed up a good hour of time today… Eager to start dabbling in Drupal, I decided to get the needed parts running locally on my MacBookPro. I got MySQL 5.x downloaded and installed. I mucked up my root […]
There’s been more then enough sound and loud reverberations to the DOPA (or is it DOPE-A?) proposal hovering over Washington D.C. to do.. Tom Hoffman has summarized it better than I could under Being Unreasonably Reasonable (and here too): When it comes to dubious web filtering laws like DOPA, I think you should start with […]
It only took like 2+ years, a big Yahoo buy out, and finally they have gotten enough kinks out of flickr to drop the “beta” form the logo– now they are “gamma”: It caught my eye as soon as I loaded my photos. The changes are subtle (more previews per page, drop down menus to […]
flickr foto New Tech Deviceavailable on flickr No, this is not another cool mini MP3 recorder– this is an insulin pump that is tethered to my belly. I am getting up to speed with the functionality before I put it in action. It’s a bit larger than the MP3 recorders I’ve been researching, but this […]
The clever blog post entry title not used here was “Museum People Have Great Assets”. Last week I was in Austin all week, not to soak up cool music or wander aimlessly down 6th Street, but holed up in an anonymous, freeway junction hotel for the first of several NMC training sessions in support a new project. The web site is yet to be done (ummm, that is in my court now). This project is supporting art museums from across the state of Texas to develop new online interactive pieces, built in Pachyderm — and tying in with the concepts of digital storytelling, with the aid of the Center for Digital Storytelling.
So this was a 3 day ‘boot camp’– not only in technology, Pachyderm, digital video, photography, editing sound, lighting, but also sessions by the brilliant Joe Lambert on the notions of “Storymining” an approach for creating content that was not so… well, sterotypical of a museum tour. Hanging out with Joe and seeing how he works a crowd was a gas, as was my colleagues Rachel and Larry at NMC, our incredible support staff, and Tim S from the SFMOMA, birthplace, if you will, of Pachyderm.
We all pitched in for the entire workshop; my specialty was showing folks how to record and edit audio in Audacity (“is it really free software? why?”) and they were very intrigued my the recording capability of my new little iAudio.
I am still processing and reflecting on the experience– by the end of the third day, we had some great frameworks for perhaps 7, 8 new Pachyderm produced content pieces, participants had a good sense (it seemed) of the basics of digitizing assets and building Pachyderm content.
I must admit my level of expertise in Pachyderm is novice (never having pried enough time in my previous gig to do anything with it). Authoring in this runs counter to most strategies and approaches for your typical linear or minimally branching multimedia content (see the Pachyderm Showcase for some sense of how on linear it can be). It truly demands a lot of upfront planning, sketching, outlining, storyboarding, not jump in and start free will authoring. And you can only (it seems) go about Pachyderm building once you have a strong sense of the structure, features, and link-ness of the different screen types, and you only get that sense by building in Pachyderm. So your first 2 products ought to be considered “practice” unless you are good, lucky, or better planned than moi.
So rather than try and wax on in words, I’ll let some photos tell the story, or at least suggest it.
