You should have seen this one coming – it’s the fourth of five IDM(Inspiration Design Model) posts for my “Interactive Media I”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/ course!
This week on the class chopping block: “Rustboy”:http://www.rustboy.com/, a Flash site for the Brian Taylor short film project.
So for the last week and a half, I’ve been building a Rails application for my HTML course – Interactive Media I. The “Final Project”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/?page_id=3 for my class is to create a “significant” website by manually coding HTML and CSS, in a small group. Well, we are definitely shooting for “significant.” I’m not going to spoil the surprise – but I’ll tell you it’s Web 2.0ish, and our professor was really excited about the idea.
I’m coding (with much help from “the b/f”:http://threadbox.net) a lot of Rails for this, and at first it was extremely frustrating. But, I’m starting to get the hang of things and we’re making a lot of progress. My teammate, AJ (a computer sciences major), is struggling to get MySQL functioning on his XP system – but once that’s up, he is going to try and help out with it as well.
At the moment, I’d say a good portion of the back-end is good to go. Now, we need to begin focusing on and implementing the actual design of the site. So, it’s time for all of us to do some Photoshop explorations.
We’re all pretty excited about the site and I think it will turn out pretty well for my first Rails/HTML/CSS project. Stay tuned for the launch, which should be around early December.
Jewls
Well the bad luck of Friday the 13th started a day early this year. On Thursday the 12th (of _October_!), it snowed. This is the earliest snowfall Michigan has seen in somewhere around the last 125 years. I like snow…but not until the end of November, and only until the middle of January. Any sooner or later then that and I’ll probably not be too thrilled. Luckily, I live in Michigan where the temperature goes from 30 degrees to 60 in a weekend. So you can be sure that come Monday, I’ll be wearing a t-shirt and enjoying the sun.
Aside from the Friday the 13th induced bad weather, I’ve discovered that both of my cats have fleas. And, Gibby has a hole poked into her abdomen. So they’re both on flea medications, and I get to vacuum all the carpets and furniture, and wash all of the sheets and blankets, and spray to kill all the eggs. And, I have to give Gibby antibiotics and keep her from licking her wound. If she keeps licking it – we have to buy her one of those white plastic shields that go around the head. She’d love that.
I can only assume that this bad luck will continue through tomorrow, I will keep you all updated.
Maybe since the Spartans are already having a horrible season, the bad luck of Friday the 13th will have a reverse effect and we’ll beat #1 Ohio State… I could also be dreaming.
Here it is, the third of five IDM(Inspiration Design Model) posts for my “Interactive Media I”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/ class. This weeks website is “Jason Santa Maria”:http://www.jasonsantamaria.com, a personal weblog/portfolio for a graphic designer in Philly.
UPDATE: Jason has “commented”:http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/archive/2006/10/10/class_critique.php on the collection of critiques by our class and I urge you all to read his response. He’s obviously a very intelligent and humble designer and I’m grateful to have had his feedback.
It’s been a few weeks since Facebook first started making _tsunamis_ in the sea of social networking sites. We’ve seen the “emergence of the News Feed”:http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130 (and the massive “backlash”:http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2006/09/facebook_redesi.html that followed), the “implementation of an open admissions”:http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2210227130 policy (not so huge, but still a major area of debate – check out the comments on “this”:http://digg.com/tech_news/Facebook_plans_to_completely_ditch_its_admissions_policy digg story), and recently announced – a “new advertising plan”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/28/facebook-to-put-viral-ads-in-your-news-feeds/ that places ads (either banners or video clips) inside the News Feed will be launched within the next few weeks.
When launching the News Feed without proper privacy options exploded in Zuckerberg’s face, written protest showed its power. Interestingly enough, the venue of our demonstrations was Facebook itself. User-made groups shot up all over the site and within hours had thousands of members. At this moment, the “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)”:http://msu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208288769 group _still_ has 642,000 members.
When Tracy Schmidt suggested that this was Generation Y’s “”first official revolution”:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1532225,00.html?cnn=yes,” I proposed that this first revolution could be the “beginning of many”:http://jewlofthelotus.com/articles/2006/09/08/facebook-gets-generation-y-off-its-ass-figuratively:
bq. _Maybe now that we’ve got our activism juices flowing, we’ll find the inspiration to work at other issues we feel strongly about but have never had the courage to act on._
|=.!http://jewlofthelotus.com/files/2006-09-24_themewinner.png (theme of the week winner!)!:http://community.livejournal.com/snapshot_seeker/ |
To see the full size image visit: “JewloftheLotus at deviantART”:http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40141906/?qo=15&q=by%3Ajewlofthelotus&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps
:)
Well, here is the second of five IDM(Inspiration Design Model) posts for my “Interactive Media I”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/ class. I liked this website a lot less than the first one: “smallTransport”:http://jewlofthelotus.com/articles/2006/09/07/smalltransport-idm, but I didn’t really like that one much either…
OMG, WTF!! I totally and entirely thought that Grey’s Anatomy started next week. *still catching my breath on this one*
NO ONE TELL ME ANYTHING!!!!!
I will see it soon enough…
Until next time.
Jewls
Whoa, this Writely thing is pretty sweet! As long as you have an Internet connection, there is no need to buy Word ever again!!
Here is a good article that got dugg a couple weeks back: Google’s Writely
If your regularly working with text documents this could be a handy tool to access your work from multiple locations and allow others to edit your documents as well. There are so many neat little features to this site – you can do almost anything!
So here it is! My blog entry composed in Writely. :)
Good stuff.
Here’s an interesting interview (found on “digg”:http://digg.com/music/How_Music_Gets_you_High) with a record producer-turned-neuroscientist, who is currently researching how the brain and mind handle and interpret music. “Read the article here.”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,71631-0.html?tw=wn_index_2
This guy is awesome. I am inspired just by his history alone. A guy going from a kick-ass job as a record producer for the Grateful Dead to a freaking neuroscientist. I can’t even fathom that transition.
Anyway, I thought the interview was very exciting. I never really tried to think about how we perceive music and why we all perceive it differently. I just knew it happened. Now, we’re beginning to understand all these little functions of the human mind and the more we learn the more we can begin to advance and the more we’ll be able to achieve (both, good and bad).
Peace, Jewls
@jewlofthelotus
