infobong.com

maybe mod_pubsub

This image purports to be "what it looks like to cancel your Friendster account because they fired an employee for blogging." But it also seems to be what it looks like to have so many tabs open in Firefox you don't know what pages you're looking at anymore.

On a related note, I was at the South Lamar Goodwill yesterday, and found a black T-Shirt with the Friendster logo printed in gray. I was a little excited by the find, but I wondered, "Is this worth $1.99?" and "Is Friendster funny yet?"

hunger for it again

Wow, today's New York Times has a photo of the owner of Starbase 21. Starbase 21 was like one of two places in Tulsa to buy gaming miniatures and other nerd gear when I was a kid. My parents never wanted to take me there, partly because it was about a 9 mile drive from our house, and partly, I'm sure, because they didn't want me to turn into one of the guys hanging out in the store. (Ha ha mom! I wear untucked black t-shirts nearly every day, I haven't had a girlfriend in years, and I hang out in geeky record stores instead.) I didn't have much disposable income when I was a kid, either. It would have taken me two months to buy a packet of miniatures, so mostly I would just be sad looking at all the blister packs.

Anyway, I guess the reporter didn't realize that Starbase is also a store in T-town, since the caption reads, "John Harper, of Tulsa., Okla., in Starbase 21, his booth of memorabilia at the "Star Trek" convention in Los Angeles." I went to Starbase 21 the last time I was in Tulsa because it was sort of near the transmission shop that fixed my truck. It was pretty depressing, actually. It just seemed sad, dirty, and poorly lit - and barely stocked with miniatures or sci-fi ephemera. I remember it being such a carnival of nerddom. I remembered buying a green patch as a freshman that read "Live Long and Prosper under a Vulcan hand sign. I had my mom sew it on my backpack, but I later realized I probably just got it to fit in. I never really got into Star Trek.

BTW, it should be mentioned that Starbase 21 is in the same shopping center as Casa Bonita. 21st and Sheridan is surely the epicenter of Tulsa's tacky plastic underworld.

the ideal copy

Inspired by Eyebeam's reBlog, I downloaded the reBlog software and set up my own. Rebong has been up for about a week, but I wanted to futz around with the templates before it went "live." I guess its as close to fit-for-public-consumption as it will ever be. I do think it looks cool when I hold down the PgDn key, but I'm obviously easily entertained. The page is basically a repository for all the items I would like to blog, but would never get around to writing about.

animals of the ancient

Misha Nedeljkovich was one of our favorite film professors at OU. I had Misha for Intro to Film and Video, Documentary Film, and Oneiric and Non-Oneiric Cinema, but mostly what I remember about him was that he had an awesome collection of animation from all over eastern Europe, and he really, really liked Jim Jarmusch. He also had a great story about how he got a new dog as a teenager and was so excited about his dog, he missed an after-school meeting. As a result, he was never able to join the Communist party and was relegated after college to making TV shows about the wheat harvest. Over time, I may have forgotten details and he may have embelished some of the story.

I understand that he got a grant to go back to the Balkans and research mass media there. I poked around the OU Web, looking for information about his research and life, and this is what I found. Its not exactly what I was expecting, but interesting nonetheless. I suspect he may have made it as a demo in a Web-authoring class

invite six friends

This morning, I had six Gmail invites to hand out, and I decided to indiscriminately hand them out, largely because anyone I know off-line wouldn't really care about Gmail one way or another. First, I sent an email to a listserv for grad students in the Radio-TV-Film department, offering invites to the first people who email me. I got one immediate response, from a student who wanted a good alias. This student, whom I don't know, has a rather foreign-sounding name, and I wondered how quickly her desired alias would be snapped up.

RTF grad students are apparently not too keen on Gmail, as that was the only response I got. Later, I posted the same message to Converge, a mailing list for computer multimedia folks around UT, and the list and my inbox saw a flurry of requests for invites. As soon as I got home from class, I sent out another message saying that I had run out of invites, but I would hang on to the respondents' email addresses for invites down the road.

I learned an important thing today: people who subscribe to technology-related lists are probably more interested in tech stuff like Gmail than people who subscribe to lists that are only tangentially related to technology.

overcome this small impediment

I've been shopping around for an external hard drive for offloading files from my notebook and carting big files to school. I've already joked about the lack of portability for some drves, but this comment on Slashdot really made my day.

baby's brain and an old man's heart

Does anyone know where I might find the episode of The Muppet Show that featured guest host Alice Cooper? I was pretty scared of Alice Cooper as a little kid, but I knew that a evil looking guy cavorting with puppets was supposed to be funny. The show's finale was a rousing rendition of "School's Out" that featured exploding muppets. Maybe my memory is failing me, but that was such a striking image it seems unlikely I would have imagined it.

Appropriately enough, today is the first day of classes at "The University." My Historiography class meets today, and I have a meeting for the class I'm TAing, RTF 319. Yay hooray!

got a new camera

i like this image

mechanism to replace capital

This week, I'm working as a technical assistant at a video game workshop hosted by the RTF department. Just now, I was talking to two undergrads from UT-San Antonio, who expressed reservations about the quality of their school. I remarked, "I guess one of the main advantages in going to a big prestige school like this one is the facilities. The facilities here are awesome; at the place I did my undergrad, we had to use cameras you wound up by hand."

I guess they thought I was exaggerating, cause one student was like, "No way! You wound your cameras by hand?"

Of course I spoke the truth, referring to the little Bolex workhorses that film students everywhere knew and loved until the relatively recent emergence of DV. I'll bet there are still some hand-cranked Bolexes sitting around here some place.

Unfortunately, The equipment situation at OU doesn't seem to be much better these days, which is a real pity, considering the number of students interested in studying film and other media. By the time I left OU five years ago, film majors weren't even able to enroll in filmmaking classes; they were open only to studio art students.

efficiency through resistance

I thought the PowerLung Sport Trainer was a little strange, but not strange enough to blog. After I emailed the link to someone, I thought I should blog it after all.

amerikkka sux group

Hate creator Peter Bagge asks "who needs in Modern Art Museums?" on the libertarian site Reason Online. Of course, my politics are far from libertarian, and I happen to enjoy a lot of contemporary art, so its difficult for me to formulate a satisfying answer. I do think nurturing the arts keeps our culture healthy - the NEA protests in the nineties really opened my eyes to how nasty the Religious right is - didn't Serrano perform a public good by forcing those bigots out into the open? And we fund research scientists and humanities scholars in universities because we think they expand our understanding of the world around us; don't shock artists also help us understand the topics and concepts that small but powerful minoriites want to exclude from public debate?

BTW, I don't know if this gets NEA funding, but I like it.

breath silent

I'm still in Tulsa; my truck had transmission issues during the drive up from Austin and I've kicking it here while I had the tranny rebuilt. I just ran into my boy Reed Mathis from The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and, boy howdy, he is amped about their new record Slow Breath, Silent Mind, which will be released Tuesday. I haven't listened to it, but Reed showed me the packaging, and it is just gorgeous. The digipak features shots of the band recording at TU's Tyrrell Hall and a DVD of a live show. I think I'll pick it up when I get back to Austin.

blink makes the text disappear

Jared and I were just remeniscing about our first Web sites back in 1995. My Website featured a review of my professors' pants. Jared can't remember was about. John says his first site was about UFOs and conspiracies.

After discussing our first sites, we moved to a debate about the relative merits of HP48 calculators versus the TI 82/85 cheesebox. This is hard core street blogging.

Update I think this is the first time I've blogged socially; blogged as a parlor game.

i have a secret plan

Dude, I'm over at Jared and Kara's house right now, and Kara doesn't really get weallhaveaplan.com. I said that just because someone is still working their ideas out doesn't mean she should get angry.

tulsey time

Yo, I'm up in Tulsa for the next few days, lest you worry about my lack of blogage.