Assessment #2

Since the assessment for week 7 that I posted to my blog on the 23rd of April I have been working on my sites every few days. I’m going to miss posting to them; every time I find something of interest or think of something to look up on the net, my first thought is that I can use whatever it is for MPI104!

Summarising the work completed since the 23rd of April:
- My blog has increased by 25 postings, taking the total to 47.
- My my Delicious account has increased by 36 to a total of 56 bookmarks, spread over 12 bundles.
- My Fickr account had 79 photos, then when it reached the maximum of (free account) 200 images, I had to delete a lot make way for new ones, taking its current total to 159 images which have been organized into 3 sets.

Functionally, changes to my blog include an updated sidebar that includes links to fellow MPI104-2007 students in Friends (most if not all); and a Favourite’s link. The site counter has been changed to enable me to access site statistics (details).

From an aesthetic perspective I did try other templates (see here) and alterations to my current template but found that the one I’m using is still the most aesthetically pleasing to me. I did, however, rearrange the sidebar contents into a more logical format, with Blog Archive at the top, instead of Friends, which has now moved to the bottom of the sidebar. I would like to be able to make the Friends section into a scrollable window, to reduce the physical size it takes up on the blog page, but am unable to work out how through “Customise” and I don’t know enough HTML to do it myself. I also added the RSS feed for my Delicious site.

Some of my more interesting links include a Those were the Days story in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3; a Mature Age rant; and a look at Sadomasochism.

Still interesting, but on a lighter note (pun unintended) there are the posts featuring The Piano Juggler; Phil Collins and a familiar tune by Queen.

Delicious appears to have no capabilities for improving your sites' aesthetics, except through function. By this I mean that by bundling tags and then collapsing their categories, the site is visually tidier.

The same can be done with “Your Network” and “Your Fans”, all of which I’ve done.


I’m unable to work out how to clear “Links saved for you by other people” – I tried saving all of them and then deleting the ones I didn’t want from my bookmarks, but they still appear on the save for you page, stopping me from ‘tidying up’ this page. The Subscriptions page can be neatened by creating labels for types of Subscriptions and grouping them appropriately.


I believe my Delicious account meets the 'interestingness' criteria because of the breadth of websites that are bookmarked: comedy, sculpture, tutorials that can help me in my studies, research that has enabled me to integrate Delicious into my workflow. Additionally I have 1 of a kind bookmarks such as Joseph Merrick, jewellery making and The Eagles.

Flickr has provided me with a challenge of sorts; by uploading images for my GRP224-2007 workflow (which I initially perceived to be a good thing) I discovered that the maximum number of photos for a free account is 200, leaving me with the decision as to which photos could be deleted over which ones I really wanted to keep. My current total of 159 images has been put into 3 sets (General and downloaded, Craft and Uni related), facilitating searches. My current uni courses GRP224-2007 and MPI104-2007 both have images uploaded to Flickr as part of them.

Aesthetically I chose to have the sets present in the home page,


rather than have all small images, which I used when working on the site earlier.


My Flickr interestingness is due to the same eclecticism that is present in my Blog and Delicious sites. I have images of my crafts which I feel are interesting to other like-minded crafters. A comparison of the student-rated aesthetically pleasing Technorati top 100 is of interest to members of MPI104-2007. I have design-related images, images of contemporary musicians, animals and images that are simply pleasing.

While I don't believe that I know the full potential of these sites, I've enjoyed discovering their applicability, and time permitting, will continue to use them, especially Delicious whose usability potential for students is astounding.

Changes to site

No matter how many time I go into customise to change elements of my blog, I still come back to what I currently have. The current blog does have changes made to it from when I first set it up, but none since the first assessment.






None are as aesthetically pleasing to me (without masses of fiddling around) as the blog is now, although I did go in and change fonts and colours, without any aesthetic improvement.

Blog visitors

As I mentioned in this post I didn't realise the counter I'd been using since the middle of the first part of the semester was as useful as tits on a bull. I therefore don't have many statistics to report from Sitemeter, which I joined on the 28th of May.
What I do have is as follows:



Further than this, my visitors have been primarily from Australia, with 9 from the US, 1 from Canada, 2 from Germany, while Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, Italy and the Philipines all provided me with 1 visitor apiece. Quite an ecelectic bunch, or is this range of country of origins normal?

Visitors found their way into my site primarily from my home page. Other entries were for the entry on penis splitting (3), Firefox (5), counter (3) and aesthetics (1).

The longest visit was for 144:32 and the second longest for 52:17, and they were both me, I know this because I am online with my blog at the moment, coinciding the the longest visit (oh, and I can see at the "who's on your site page"). 20 of the 36 visits timed in at 00:00.....

Disapointing, I'm glad I'm not using my blog for business purposes, as so many of the blogs I looked at from the Technorati top 100 list were.

Metablog favourite

I thought I'd save whoever is marking my work a bit of time by including an image showing that the ba-ma metablog is a favourite on my Technorati account as well as provide a link to it.

Firefox

Joh,
to continue with my metablog comment; my problem with Firefox is that it doesn't load well at CSU. I'm computer-less at home at the moment, so I have no alternative but to use the Jack Cross computers. I tried loading the sites that we are working within with the following results, all within a 5 minute timeframe:

Blogger with Firefox
Blogger with Safari
Flickr with Firefox
Flickr with Safari
Delicious with Firefox
Delicious with Safari

I have also had similar problems in the VPA labs. With the above dificulties, I can't check my sites in Firefox, so I've done my best in Safari.

Thanks
Bonnie

DPI

With a background in the printing industry and a future in the graphic design industry I've decided to try and work out the difference between DPI, PPI and what I used to know as "screen ruling" - LPI.

I know that DPI refers to dots per inch and the greater the number of dots, the finer the detail will be. But how does this relate to the physical size of an image? Wikipedia states that inkjet printers (the most common type of personal and small business printer) are mostly capable of up to 360 DPI.

PPI stands for pixels per inch and refers to the measurement of a video display, but is more commonly called DPI.

"The DPI measurement of a printer often needs to be considerably higher than the pixels per inch (PPI) measurement of a video display in order to produce similar-quality output. This is due to the limited range of colours for each dot typically available on a printer." Because of the differences in the RGB colour system of a monitor which can produce 16,777,216 colours and CMYK system of a printer which can produce 8 colours (CMYK, brown [c+y+m], blue, green and red); "most printers must therefore produce additional colours through a halftone or dithering process". (DPI is also used incorrectly when examining the scanning process. About.com and Wikipedia refer to the accurate measurement as SPI - samples per inch, but i'm not considering that here.)

LPI refers to lines per inch and measures the number of lines in a halftone grid. The higher the LPI, the better the image quality. Newspapers used to be 85 LPI, standard quality colour printing was 150 LPI.

The closest information I could find regarding the relationship of DPI and LPI was from My Design Primer "A bitmap image's resolution should be twice the linescreen." For example, "a color magazine would require an image be 300dpi for best reproduction at 150lpi." Desk Top Publishing has a chart to get an idea of the typical LPI needed based on method of printing and type of paper.

All in all, a very unsatisfactory investigation, I really needed someone with me who could explain in person, but at least I've bookmarked some sites that can help me to sort out individual scenarios when i come across them.

Counter

I was using a counter with Easy Hit Counters that I'd installed prior to the first assessment. With todays class and a second look at what this counter service provides, I realised that I may as well have had no counter at all because there was no way to gather any statistics. So, I'm changing counters to Sitemeter. When I closed off Easy Hit I had 145 visits. Because of the poor quality of my original counter I can't determine how many of those hits were from myself or from others.

That will change from now on.

Technorati ratings update

I'm getting more popular - I now have 3 authorities and have gone from a rank of 2,090,250 to 1,504,548!!! I'm jumping for joy!!!

Those were the days part 3

The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... the first part & the second part
The third person to live with me in Lakemba was Mark, a really great guy. We moved from there to a ‘secure’ apartment building in Burwood, (still in Sydney) with about 12 or 15 floors. The building had a body corporate that was quite strict and we had to sneak my cat in. Every time we had someone come to the door we had to hide her, especially as the ‘secure’ part of the building – having a key to get in to the front door or having to buzz the apartment you wanted – didn’t usually work. All ‘guests’ had to do was wait for a resident to open the door and make an excuse about having forgotten their key and the (usually) older tenants would happily help.

While in Burwood I held my first party; I slaved all day marinating chicken wings and making meatballs and didn’t have anything to eat all day. Needless to say, approaching party time, I downed a few wines and not long into the party found myself in bed, as sick as a dog with all the alcohol having gone straight to my head. Fortunately my mother was a guest and she took over for me. It was a bit embarrassing as my boss was also there, but had a positive consequence, because one of the guys who came as a guest of Marks became a boyfriend for a time. He very attentively looked after me while I was recovering in bed… Nothing too serious though, all the guests were coming in to see me and mum kept coming in to find out what else I wanted done.

This particular boyfriend had a motorbike – I don’t remember what kind anymore, but it was turbo charged (nearly thrown off the back many times) and being very enthusiastic and anal about his bike, he refused to have anything other than the grab bar at the back, which was like having your wrists tied together behind you. You had that or hold onto him. Oh, and if my clothes didn’t go with the colour of his bike, well….

We were at Burwood for about a year during the time of the bicentennial celebrations when we watched the special air force planes fly overhead from our 9th floor balcony.

The next stop was 1 suburb towards Sydney – Croydon and it was here that my accommodation-sharing days really took off. Mark and I moved into a great federation-style 3 bedroom house with a huge enclosed veranda at the back that we used as a 4th bedroom. 2 girls joined Mark and me; Kathy; a Novocastrian with a sometimes boyfriend and Karen; a country girl with a uni-student boyfriend. Kathy was (and hopefully still is) a pretty laid back girl who introduced me to lots music that was just outside the top 20 type of stuff I tended to listen to – REM is one that stands out. Karen, on the other hand was into heavy metal in a very full-on way. She used to listen to it really softly in her bedroom, which still seems to me to be a complete contradiction, while she read romance novels. I saw quite a few metal bands during those years, including Christian thrash (another contradiction), which is what her boyfriend was into.

Going to gigs was the go during the Croydon years – yes, I actually did live in 1 place for more than a year (but I can’t remember how long it actually was). One of our favourites was The Croydon; a local pub within walking distance that used to have Irish bands on Sunday nights. The place would be wall-to-wall footballers and Irish – it was absolutely great – the atmosphere, lots of alcohol, great music and just a walk home.

Used to go out quite often with mates from work, too. A favourite haunt when we went out was the pub across the road from the Balmain tigers footy club (can’t remember the name). We used to see Tommy Emanuel and his brother Phil, the Bondi Cigars and loads of other blues bands. The night was always finished off with a hot dog, the likes of which you don’t see anymore – a roadside vendor with sauerkraut, onions, pickles, cheese and anything else you could want on a hotdog. They were really, really good.

Had a couple of parties here, but the one that remains strongest in my memory was a ‘black party’. The food was typical party fare, but everything else was back; decorations, clothes and we used black ultraviolet light bulbs and black candles. We were cleaning candle wax off the carpet for ages.

One party that Mark and I went to that was the best party I’ve ever been to was a Halloween cocktail party. Everybody was told to bring a specific type of spirit or liqueur. They had a couple of blenders, lots of ice, juice and fruit and cocktail recipes plastered all over the walls. They also had lots of dry ice and stuff that looked very like cobwebs and cool coloured lighting and Halloween-themed decorations. Nobody left sober, that much was certain, but it was a great change from beer and cask wine!

technorati top 100

I've actually looked through all 100 of the top site listed in technorati, and even followed some interesting links that I've bookmarked. Some are really dreadful, some so plain that you wouldn't know hat you were on someone blog. Of the 35 sites that I've put into flickr as having some aesthetical appeal to me, my favourite overall site would have to be xiaxue. Pink is not a colour I'm particularly drawn to, but I really like the graphic on the page and the typography works well with it. Variety of the blog entries is added by the use of bold, all caps, italicised etc type, as her entries are about her life, she types them as she'd speak them. Here's her site

engadget

Ok, 1st site of the Technorati top 100 and I get a blog that is a commercial site!!?? Okay they say that they're not, that they're purpose is "we're here to keep you informed about what's up", but at first glance commercial appears to be what they're all about. Turns out their digital everything reviewers/advisors and a way for like-minded digital geeks (no offence intended) to communicate with the team at Engadget and each other. I though blogs were a personal thing - product reviews seem, to me, to fall outside this definition. Do I have to review my definition? Or can blogs have a multitude of purposes?

Bohemian Rhapsody

One of the greatest songs ever! Youtube has the original video and soundtrack. the video's not great, but the music sure is!

Technorati

The diffrence between Technorati and a search engine is in the way they search content. The Help in Technorati refers to this difference as live vs wide; the live engine is Technorati, whose tools cause it to be notified of new content as it happens. A wide search engine, such as Google, searches static, inactive material, occasionally searching for new content. "Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time." In addition to being places for people to use as diaries many blogs are reviews of current affair items - news, gossip and technology to name a few. On the Popular page there are links to show users the most popular links (from within blogs, I think) to sites about music, videos, movies, games, DVDs, news and blogs
I have Authority: 1 · Rank: 2,090,250 - Woohooo

In addition, Technorati allows you to save favourites within the program, different to a search engine whose pages can be saved in your browsers favourites

piano juggler

No, this guy doesn't juggle pianos, he plays the piaqno by juggling balls... quite clever!

Hotel California

Yes, another favourite of mine, definitely a classic! One of the few songs I know all the lyrics to without faltering, or forgetting what verse I'm up to LOL

aesthetics

This myspace site is stunning in its ugliness. It's garish, extremely busy and the content is almost impossible to read. The background is static, so even when trying to read, the type is moving over new parts of the background, contributing strongly to its unreadability. Magically disappearing and reappearing type is distracting and the font used with it so elaborate that there isn't enough time to read what's flashing the first couple of times.The links down the left hand side of the page in the "interests" are indistinct - it's hard to find where one ends and the next begins. The type is in all caps, nullifying the advantage of using a sans serif font (increasedreadability than a serif font on a screen).

This site, however is relatively plain, but has a strong design. It's purpose is "The main idea is to provide information for new media designers, graphic designers, creative people, and also to any of you who take a keen interest in the area of creative industry and its aspects. We also would like to see designers throughout the world sharing their ideas, knowledge and inspiration." The sections within a page are clearly deliniated, the colour palette limited and bright and the font is a good size and highly readable. Navigation is simple, there is no horizontal scroll and the whole site is bright and clear with plenty of white space. I like it.

RSS reader account

I looked into both Bloglines and Google Reader and couldn't work out what, if any, the differences were between them. At first I though it might have been the ability of Bloglines to add images, but was able to do so in Google, so that can't be it. I decided to go with Google Feeder becasue of the linking between Google products.
I can't seem to link my Google Feeder account to anything because the URL is generic - it doesn't link to me specifically. I think this is becasue as a feeder account it's not designed to be read by anybody but the account holder. I did note that ability to email items from the account's page though, so maybe this is in lieu of a URL link.

Those were the days part 2

The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... (the first part)
My third place was in Lakemba. My boyfriend didn’t come with me, but a friend of his did move in – I was still an apprentice, someone had to help pay the rent. This fellow was of a fairly traditional Greek family and my now ex-boyfriend knew his family well. Shame he didn’t tell me what a pig he was! Do the dishes? Sweep the carpet in his room (didn’t have a vacuum in those days)? Do anything else domestic? Forget it – “women’s work”!! Needless to say, this particular flatmate didn’t last real long. Good thing? I got to know that upstairs neighbours when I went to ask if I could borrow their vacuum to clean out the foot of dust and crap that he’d left behind in his room.

My next flatmate was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, although I knew her as well. She was the sister of my exe’s best mate, who I got on really well with. This mate begged me, (and so did his mother) to let this girl stay with me; someone to look after her… I went looking for some knickers in her room one day, mine seemed to have gone missing and I found a desert-sized spoon in one of her drawers. I should add at this point that this girl was a heroin addict and my proviso on her living with me was that she didn’t use in the flat. I confronted her and she broke down, promised to never do it again etc etc. Anyone who knows an addict (I hadn’t before) will know that such a promise is worthless. At one stage she asked me if her boyfriend could move in and took some efforts to persuade me. I didn’t know him and the flat was small, so I kept saying no. Good thing I did… I got a call from the police one night; her boyfriend was actually her pimp and I was advised to stay away from him. How they knew me, or the fact that this girl was living with me and bringing her boyfriend home for visits I still to this day don’t know. But I not long after asked her to move out. I found out several years later that she died, alone, on her 21st birthday in a flat in Kings Cross from; you guessed it, a heroin overdose. Apparently the stuff she had bought was too pure and the overdosed was accidentally.

My third flatmate in Lakemba, where I lived for all of a year, was someone who would move with me for years to come. The atmosphere in Lakemba in those days was pretty tense; I live 4 apartment blocks down from a public school, which was regularly burnt-out. One of the girls living in the apartments across from our driveway was a teacher there and her stories of being sworn at in Lebanese, and the treatment she received from the Lebanese boys she taught were enough to curl your hair. I used to stack shelves in the supermarket as a 2nd job and walk to the station to go to work, so I was in the main street of Lakemba quite a lot. Not a great place to be if you were blond, young slim and pretty (yes, I was once). I used to cop a lot from the men standing in shop doorways. On one occasion while in the flat I was lying in bed, reading, naked, with my cat, when a hand stuck itself through my venetian blinds (no screens but the windows key-locked open about 3 inches wide) and watched me. I couldn’t reach the light to turn it off without revealing myself, so I threw my book at the blind and yelled and screamed. I was living with the Greek guy at the time and when I later confronted him, he said that he thought I was yelling at the cat……….. So much for having a male on hand for safety!

Another eventful occurrence was when I was living alone in the flat (in-between flatmates) and I’d gotten into bed when the phone rang, it was the friends upstairs who said they’d spotted a guy lurking around my ground-floor flat. Don’t panic and keep talking like you’re still on the phone was their advice to me before they hung up and phoned the police. I hung up and called my mother, all the while talking like I knew nothing. By the time the police got there, they’d gone of course; in fact guys trying to get away from someone or something often jumped the fences between the blocks of flats down that stretch of road. I had a cat, given to me by my boyfriend, for company and during the times I was living alone she’d be my ‘guard dog’. My flat was alongside the driveway and on the other side of that was the neighbouring fence and some shrubbery, then next-door flats. She used to raise her hackles and growl, and I knew that there was someone watching me, so I could lock the door out on to the balcony and pull the blinds. I’m sure that she saved me several times during my yearlong stay in that flat.
part 3

Sadomasochism!?

Hungappa had an article entitled "Power Exchange" in week 2's edition which caught my eye, and me, being who I am, decided to do some research on the subject and share it with you. (Sorry, can't provide a link 'cause it's not online yet - shame Hungappa, shame)

Hungappa refers to sadomasochism in the first instance as 'power exchange'. Other aliases include B&D, 'bondage and discipline', S&M, 'sadism and masochism', 'slave and master', D&S, "dominance and submission and the term I'll be using; bdsm.

To quote a very interesting article "SM is fantasy-sharing, which can only be consensual."and "But that's exactly what SM is: discovering and playing with our limits." - Hence Hungappa's use of 'power exchange'.

Photographer of bdsm, Barbara Nitke comments: "Communicating the reality of s/m interaction is challenging, in part because so much of what happens in s/m runs directly counter to everything we've been taught about sex, intimacy, love, and pleasure. Tenderness experienced through whipping? Personal empowerment through submission? Intimacy through abandonment? Pleasure through pain? What strange ideas these are to people who have no personal experience with s/m, and never witnessed others in the throes of a transformative s/m scene. And yet all of these dynamics are all utterly familiar, powerfully important, and quite matter-of-factly real to anyone who has made s/m play a significant part of his or her personal and sexual life." Maybe that's why popular media has iconicised bdsm for so long, usually in an aggressive or humourous light - it is so hard for non-practicing people to conceptualise.

Psychology Today states that psychologist Roy E Baumeister believes that masochism is a way of taking a breather from 'the self'; having to be the self-reliant, in control, responsible and driven. By having someone else control what's happening, you are getting a break from all that every-day stress. Interestingly, the article states that it's usually the priveledged 'classes' that are drawn to masochism; society's real victims don't go looking for masochistic sex. It also states that it's men who are most commonly looking to be sex slaves! Submission (societal, and sexual) is historically a feminine thing and "if anything, female masochists desire to be turned into an extreme caricature version of femininity, something far removed from their normal selves."

Often associated with sex toys it seems the possibilities that are open to bdsm's are infinite.

I have been on the internet actively reading and searching for information relating to bdsm for about 4 hours, and to try and encapsulate what bdsm is and what it means is impossible - it means different things to different people and there are so many things tied up (no pun intended) with it - leather fetishes, catheterisation, fisting, same-sex relationships, clubs, fetishes involving urine and faeces.... I have neither the time, nor the space to venture further into this unusual world. Here are a few links that can take you further if you so choose - http://www.geocities.com/stheory/contents.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadism_and_masochism.

Wikipaedia, in its usual manner have numerous links throughout their articles, which in turn have links and so on in the true manner of the web. Have fun perusing. Me? I'm thankful that I'm vanilla (you'll have to look that one up kiddies) - it's all too complicated!

Definition RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication is the most accepted definition) is a family of web-feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content such as news feeds or blogs. A Web feed is a data format used for serving users who frequently update their digital content, which can be syndicated thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.

Its value lies in the fact that by way of software known as 'feed aggregators', users can to subscribe to web feeds. Aggregators reduce the time a user needs to stay online to perform tasks, such as get news or blog updates, that they do on a regular basis. By way of the user's aggregator software the sites the users wants to regularly check on are combined into a "personal newspaper" where all updates are announced. These sites need to have an RSS feed in order for this to happen.

In order for a site to be accessed by RSS feed the language used to write it must be XML.

Definition XML

XML (extensible markup language) is a language primarily used to facilitate the sharing of language across the internet. It's purpose is to combine text and the 'markup' is to show extra information about the text such as structure or presentation.

It's recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium and was designed to simplify SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

Those were the days part 1

I'm married with 2 children, we have 2 cars, a mortgage and all the stuff that goes with living the life we live, but my life hasn't always been this way... I though I might fill you in on what some of those years were like. I’ll do it in instalments, or you’ll be reading forever, so here’s part 1.

I moved out of home 1 month after I turned 18 in 1985 (after being shunted from parent to youth hostel to parent) into a terrace house in Cleveland St, Redfern in Sydney with a girlfriend, her ex-con boyfriend and my boyfriend, whom I'd known for a month. We didn't stay there long - the downstairs windows wouldn't shut, let alone lock.

One of my 'girlfriend’s' stay-overs (her boyfriend was often 'away') couldn't be woken one morning, she had already gone for work, and I had to get going too; so he was left there. I came home to a cleaned-out house. Being my first place all that there pretty much was for him to take was my cassette collection, but it scared the s*** out of me and I broke the lease after 4 months to get out of there. Apparently the reason we hadn't been able to get rid of him was because he was too stoned on heroin.

My girlfriends and I used to visit her boyfriend (before we shared the house) in Silverwater Gaol (interesting experience). Me, being the nice person that I am, decided someone needed to give him a go, and it may as well be me! During our short stay in Redfern (which they called Surrey Hills on the real estate ad, just so it'd look better - Surry Hills was actually the other side of Cleveland St) we were raided by the police one weekday morning at 6am. They were looking for the boyfriend on suspicion of having done an armed robbery! As they stormed up the stairs and into our bedroom, my boyfriend and I were busily trying to get rid of the evidence of dope – bong, bowl of mix, lighters everywhere etc. I stuffed the bong into the bag I used to take to tech (I was a 1st year apprentice) and it spilled everywhere. For those of you who don’t know, dirty bong water smells very strongly, and this one reeked, and was all through the bag. Good thing the police were intent on looking for this guy, or we could have been in deep doodoo. In the short time we lived there, this very intelligent guy my girlfriend had hooked up with robbed the petrol station that we just so happened to live right next door to. The best thing about living there was my discovery of Lebanese pizza.

The second place certainly looked better than its predecessor and the windows all locked. My boyfriend moved with me and we got a guy in to share the rent – my girlfriend had moved back home. I'm always the one who has held the leases, no matter where I've lived; it has always made me feel more secure. We stayed in this town house in Ashfield, Sydney for a year. The guy who stayed with us was a bit strange, my boyfriend and I used to sneak into his room and look through his collection of swinger's mags!

The friends my boyfriend had hung out with for years were in our lives in a big way during our year here. RSL clubs were the go, and live bands were what we went there for – the Radiators and Angels were big then. We’d all get stoned and then drive to Bankstown RSL, where we’d dance all night, get pissed, throw up, and then go home to get stoned again and play board games all night. The only variation to this was when speed was added to the mix and we’d play board games all night, and the next day. I only tried speed once, made me throw up – didn’t do it again. My boyfriend was (and probably still is) a waxhead and every weekend saw us at Cronulla beach, me frying in the sun or shivering in the car while I watched him turn blue out in the water. I was a cone heads back then, (along with my boyfriend who introduced me to it), smoking before work, and all afternoon and night. We had some good times while living there. I was 18 and 19.
part 2

Mel Blanc

I was reading Ryan's blog about cartoons and I was reminded of the great talents of Mel Blanc. An amazing man, Mel is known as the man of 1000 voices, and I wouldn't be surprised he really has done that many. Wikipedia has a great biography, and metacafe has a great interview, with Mel doing a good range of his voices. What a shame that such talent has to die!

Phil Collins

This man's voice is shown off wonderfully in the song In the Air Tonight. A classic in my book.

Mature age!!?

For the 2 weeks of the school holidays my family disappeared over the NSW/QLD border without me... they went visiting and I stayed home doing assignments - 5 of them to be precise. Funny, I thought I only signed up for 3 courses! Ok, I know it's not supposed to be smooth sailing all the way, but this is getting ridiculous. More importantly, is this a glimpse into the future of of what my remaining studies will be like or an aberration? I can only hope for the second option.

School has been back for a week. Oh, except for the pupil-free day on Monday, and Anzac day on Wednesday. Besides those times I have spent at least 5 hours in the computer lab on campus every day (my home 'puter just isn't up to it). BTW, did I mention that just becasue school's back, it doesn't necessarily follow that uni is too? Whose great idead was that?? Bet they weren't a parent with young kids!

The time not spent in the computer lab would be a good time to spend with the family... wouldn't it? Ha! Got you! 5 hours a week are spent in the local hydrotherapy pool, trying to help my fibromyalgic body cope with what I'm currently putting it through. The rest of the time? Sleeping! No visits to my friend who'se just had a baby that I haven't seen since before she left hospital, no taking the kids to extracurricular activities, no TV, no time for my crafts (I promised myself that this was the year I would scrapbook once every week), no time for a bit of you-know-what with my hubby!

I still don't seem to be making much progress with my assignments! I don't know about these single, free, 20-somethings cope with it. Not only do most of them do a full-time study-load (mine's 3/4), but they go out, socialise, do the things that I remember doing in the long-ago time of my 20's. And some of them are even doing double degrees. I can't cope with thinking about more than 1 topic at a sitting. If I go in to work on ABC123, then that's all I'll work on, the poor brain can't cope with chopping and changing.

I'm now down to having 1 ongoing assignment and 3 set assignments, 2 of which have assessable progress checks in the next 2 weeks. Where am I on these? Nowhere near where I should be.

Is it just me or does this sound familiar to all those who have undertaken 'mature age' study?

It's not my first year, not even my first degree. I've been studying at Uni for about 7 years, at 3 different universities (portable family). I started with an Arts degree - philosophy, anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, media studies, basic IT, web design and management, illustration, digital design, photography and I'm sure I've forgotten 1 or 2! No, I'm not a permanent student, just trying to find something I can do part time - because of my fibromyalgia, that is mobile - because my husband gets posted every 3 - 4 years, that I like - I spent 10 years as a tradesperson in an industry I hated and have vowed never to work again in a job I don't like, AND that I'm good at - so far, so good; is that so much to ask?

I've found it with graphic design. Ironic really because that 10 years I mentioned? was as a graphic reproducer (printing industry; before the printing and after the final artwork has been created) But is my current workload which sees me sleeping twice as much as most other people and popping more painkillers and associated drugs than anybody should have to (especially at 40) an indication of what my not-too-far-down-the-road worklife will be like? If I'm forever 'catching up' now what will it be like then?

Somebody, please tell me how these 20-somethings do it!

I feel like dancing!

After more that a year I went out last weekend. I don't mean out to dinner, which my hubby anad I do occasionally, or going around to someone's house for a barbie, but OUT. A girls night out to be precise, and I had a ball. I maxed out on my painkillers, had a few drinks and danced!!!!! Last time I tried that I managed to last maybe for 1 1/2 tracks. The hydrotherapy must be paying off because I danced for hours. Sure, I needed to top up my pain meds, sure I had a few more drinks - I'm not supposed to mix the 2, but after that long a time of not doing something that you love to do, you tend to say "stuff it". Hello to my fellow students that I bumped into along the way, no you weren't hallucinating, I really did go to the Tourist, no 96 and the Vic. I even went upstairs to the night club at the Vic. That pushed the limits a bit though; after all I'm not quite as young as I used to be:) My husband and the kids were away for all of the school holidays and it was the night before they returned, so the timing couldn't have been better. I woke up a little seedy and spent the next 3 days getting my pain levels back to normal, but it was SO worth it.

Dress-up, whack on some makeup and heels, buy some nice drinbks (other than beer...) and boogie! Thanks girls.

assessment #1

Finally… I have spent a great deal of time in the last few weeks catching up to where I should be in MPI104-2007. At least, I hope I’ve caught up!

I have 21 posts in my blog account, plus a Technorati link, a counter, sidebar links to my flickr and delicious accounts and a YouTube video bar that I’ve set to play music. I have also imbedded photos from the net and from flickr. The items on the assessment checklist have all been completed.

My flickr account has 79 photos. I had trouble with organising these because of the free-account limit of 3 sets; I’d already created 2 for GRP224-2007 as part of my submission for an assignment. When I tried to combine them I ran into difficulty and accidentally deleted an image. I’ll have to delete all images from 1 of the sets and re-upload them into the other. I’ll then divide the remaining photo’s I’ve already uploaded and those ready to upload into some sort of order. All images have been correctly tagged and the assessment checklist points accomplished.

The delicious account has 20 bookmarks, bundled tags, links for others and bookmarks to my blog and flickr accounts. All other checklist items from the assessment list have been completed.

All of my accounts have degrees of ‘interestingness’, although that is highly subjective and hard to quantify. I believe this is the case because of the eclectic nature of the material I have uploaded or posted. My blog, for example has information about extreme body modification, pavement art and The John Butler Trio. In addition to items of interest I have posted materials that will be of benefit to me over the course of my graphic design studies - animating in Photoshop.

Delicious really came to be useful for me, not only did I learn the basics of the interface, but I've been able to bookmark sites that I will actually be using this semester for another course. All items in the bundled tag refer to information relating to BMW - specifically its logo and identity. Additionally I've bookmarked information about creating vector art; also need for this semester. There are links to sites related to comedy, music and art.

Flickr is not as eclectic as my other 2 accounts- the time needed to resize, crop and retouch images has prevented me from uploading all that I'm intending to. In addition to the visual diary information for GRP224-2007, I have images for GRP223-2007 and photos from my own life. Already selected and scanned, but still to resize etc, are photos relating to my uni work in illustration and design and images of my scrapbooking and cardmaking.

Of the 3 sites we have used in the first 1/2 of this semester blogger has been the most fun, flickr the most work and delicious the most potentially useful.

technorati

This post is confirming that I have a Technorati Profile

delicious RSS feed

here is the rss feed to my delicious account. I don't understand its purpose. can anybody enlighten me?

anamorphic art

I think anamorphic art is very clever. Julian Beever is one of the more famous 3d pavement artists and one of his most clever works is the Make Poverty History globe done for Live8.

Body Modification - ADULT CONTENT

WARNING this is not for the faint of heart and links are to graphic images and articles...
I did a semester of anthropology several years ago and the subject covered, among other things, body modification. I've told stories many times of the weird and wonderful things I came across during that time. My research was very much driven by my interest that semester. Tatooing and piercing are pretty much accepted in Western cultures these days, but there is stuff out there that people are doing to themselves and others that is mind boggling. One thing in particular has always stuck out to me (no pun intended), and that is genital bisection. There is an amazing article by a 41 year old gay American guy who goes into the psychology behind his decision to "split his cock", his background and the mechanics of the procedure.

This site has a lot of interesting body modification info, as well as stuff relating more to fetishes of various types. And for those cocky males out there who need binging down a peg or two try this on for size!STRONG STOMACH NEEDED!

Animation

Flash is something I have trouble getting my head around. This video shows a way of animating in Photoshop CS2 that's easy to understand and do-able even for me.

Bob Sinclair

Ok, so this guy doesn't even exist... Sinclair is the alter-ego of Chris The French Kiss - a French DJ. The vocalist he often works with is a guy named Cutee B. Sinclair's got some great songs out - Love Generation and Rock this Party are my 2 fav's but he's done a heap more (to access, go to Discography, click on a song and when iTunes asks you to change stores click 'yes' - this site only has samples, not full tracks).

bored graphic artists

I was originally sent this as an email from a friend and then stumbled across it when browsing through LiveVideo.com. Some of the images are so-so, some quite clever - good practice for whoever did them though!

Scarlett Johansson

Another great speed-painting with Photoshop - this time Scarlett is made to look almost as gorgeous as she is in her publicity photos

Funky Town

This one's a classic from around when I was night-clubbing - Lucy's Tavern in Sydney (Elizabeth St??), for anyone who was around at the time. Still gets me bopping!

Time-lapse Photoshop

I stumbled across this beauty while looking for other stuff. If you're into Photoshop or illustration, give it a look. It's amazing!

Black Betty

I can't stand any of their other stuff, but this track's great (click on view video clip 2/3 down the page on the right)- maybe because I was around for an earlier version. Here's the lyrics to it - it's been banned from Universities because of them. Here's a slightly crazier version of the song done by Nick Cave that you can almost imagine the black slaves singing to.

Flaunt It

I love this song, it's been around for a while now, but the beat and the guys voice get me boppin along every time. Don't think much of their other stuff, but check it out if you're into techno dance music.

fibromyalgia

I mentioned fibromyalgia in my profile. It's a little-know condition so I thought I might use this opportunity to let you guys know what it's about.
As I mentioned, fibromyalgia is like muscular rheumatism. It's diagnosed by a rheumatologist (arthritis specialist) primarily by the identification of a number of tender points on the body. They don't know what causes it and it's not actually a disease, it's a syndrome. That means it's a group of symptoms including body-wide pain, limited muscular endurance and fatigue.
I was diagnosed with FM (fibromyalgia) about 8 years ago. One of the main reasons I started going to Uni was to find a career that I liked and am good at but that I can work on a part-time basis so that my body can cope and that can move with our family (we move every 3 years or so because my husband is in the RAAF). I dabbled quite a bit before finding graphic design, and hopefully I will eventually be able to work from home as a designer in some way.
I live on pain-killers, taking panadeine forte (pain-reliever), ibuprofen (anti-inflamatory), Restavit (a muscle relaxant)and Tramal (another pain-reliever). I use magnets - the sash-like thing I wear is a strand of magnets, an essential oil for headaches and do hydrotherapy twice a week. I also have a muscle rub cream and use a body-length electric body-massager. My next level of medication, which I'm trying to avoid, is morpheine.
It's not uncommon to have people's jaws hit the floor when I tell them of the medications that I take to cope with day-to-day life, but you've got to remember, I've been taking some of them for years - literally - and the body builds up a degree of tolerance; the Tramal is only a new addition, because the others weren't working as effectively any more. Some days though, the only thing to do is go to bed.
I couldn't manage without my husband who cooks, cleans, washes, etc etc etc, especially with 2 kids. I'm on a disability pension, have a disabled parking permit and on an average day can't walk 500m (we've used a pedometer to measure it) without my back seizing up.
My boys are great; they've nearly always had a mum who can't pick them up or play on the floor with them. They know to keep the noise down if I come home from Uni and collapse in bed for a couple of hours. If I say I'm sore, they know that I'm more likely to get cranky quickly and will try and tone things down if I ask them.
I've encountered a lot of doubting Thomases over the years, (including doctors and family members) after all I look 'normal'.
So that pretty much sums it up. I tell people when they ask that FM is like muscular rheumatism, it seems to make sense to people. I'm not after sympathy - just understanding.

John Butler Trio

There has been one song on the radio done by this group that I've heard, and I really like it, but it wasn't until I saw an ad on ABC2 that I was in the right place at the right time to look them up on the net. I found their web site and thought you might like a look. This 1st song isn't my favourite, but I think the guitar playing is brilliant. Great to listen with the stereo loud and lights out. This is the one I really like... Most of the stuff on their site links up with You Tube. Really worth a look.

Sue Harding_1

Sue Harding_1, originally uploaded by bonblis01.

Image taken by myself as the 'hero' shot for an interview conducted for GRP223. The interview will feature in a fake magazine called SCM (Square Circle Magazine). Sue is pictured here with her 3 dogs at her home 28km's from Wagga. My own photo

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

using flickr

Initially I had trouble registering with Flickr because I tried to retrieve my old Yahoo user details. I eventually made a new account and things went fine from there. It took a little bit of messing around to find the pages where I could do what we had been instructed to do, but it didn't take long to get going. Uploading the photos was dead easy. BTW using _ instead of - doesn't separate tags comprised of more than 1 word, and MPI104-2007 becomes MPI1042007 and the system doesn't read it!!
Here's a link to my Flickr account

delicious account

Ok, so the whole thing is really confusing to me at this time. I've never really even been interested in reading other peoples blogs - I'm usually on the net looking for factual/practical information, rather than just randomly surfing (this isn't to say that I don't get sidetracked once I get started).

So far it seems different students have done different things in terms of where they're posting and what they're responding to, so I've no real benchmark at this stage to help me confirm that what I'm doing is right.

So... I'm going to try to put a link to my delicious account from here, and have something reasonably interesting for you to look at once you get there.

try again

Ok, this time with the hyperlink working properly... I hope

Inspiration!

found this when looking through the blog's that Joh has listed for inspiration on the course site. Just thought I'd share. Some are pretty good!

everything is possible with the Simpsons

In response to the post on the Multimedia Metablog; the Simpsons have a multigenerational feel - kids enjoy the banality while older viewers enjoy the humour that often has adult-themed undertones; sexual, political, reference to other media eg popular film. I watch it with the kids (except for the endless repeats) and can't say I have a favourite episode, but Lisa is definitely my favourite character.