eightface

Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam

The following is the text of an email sent to the Queen’s Alumni mailing list. I graduated last year, so that means I’m alumni. Karen Hitchcock (the current principal of Queen’s) wants us alumni to write words about the school so she can get more money and everything will be better.

I met the former principal of Queen’s (Billy Leg$$$) and shook his hand. He was a fish doctor. He had a firm handshake and would look you straight in the eye and tell you that he was going to take your money.

Anyway, here is the letter with some annotations for clarity:

Dear Alumni,

Ontario is at a crossroads in its support for higher education and your help can make a positive difference for the future.

HI GLORIOUS READER. I AM PLEASED TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE, AND SORRY TO DISTURB YOU. I AM CONTACTING YOU BECAUSE I HAVE $25,000,000 IN A BANK ACCOUNT IN NIGERIA. I AM FORMER ASTRONAUT. IF YOU DONATE SMALL SUM OF MONEY I WILL WAVE TO YOU FROM HERE.

Thanks to the commendable work by former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, we now have a roadmap for the future of postsecondary education in this province. Mr. Rae recently presented his report, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, to Premier Dalton McGuinty and Minister of Training, Colleges & Universities Mary Anne Chambers.

Crossroads? Roadmap? Someone broke out the thesaurus. The letter goes on for awhile, and I continue to do this (if you’re interested).

(more…)

Top 100 Literary Characters

Here are the 100 favourite fictional characters… as chosen by 100 literary luminaries. I found this one kind of funny:

God: Polymorphic, unpredictable, unaccountable; omnipotent yet negligent, kind yet vicious. Suitable to any genre or period. Able to hold centre stage in plot, or work subtly in deep background. Never requires a deus ex machina. A character you can immerse yourself in, forever.

No Holden Caulfield. That’s a bit of disapointment, it is a British list though.

The New Deal

Went to The New Deal show at the Elixir last night, it was pretty solid. From a distance, it was akin to watching an iPod ad, with a silouetted crowd and musicians against solid neon colours. Throw in some flashing lights and some beer and you’ve got yourself a bumpin concert. The sound and intensity is pretty impressive for a drummer, bass and keyboards. Check them out if their in your neighbourhood.

New Conform Project image

I wanted a new desktop background, so I remixed an image from the Conform Project and ended up with this bright yellow shocker. There also hadn’t been much activity in the flickr group lately, so this kills two birds with one stone.

Updates - flickr plugin and website layout

I changed the theme over to this white one for now, it’s loosely based on Kubrick. I still need to clean up the CSS. It looks more consistent across browsers and platforms now (I had mangled the em text sizing, so I went pack to pt sizing). No graphics, lightweight, valid CSS & XHTML for the most part (a lot of the log posts probably have badly formed urls with unencoded ampersands).
**Update**: The CSS and XHTML are valid, albeit any old post with poorly encoded ampersands or a host of other problems will invalidate them.

There are some minor updates to the [FlickrRSS plugin](http://eightface.com/log/2005/02/28/flickr-badge-plugin-for-wordpress/ “WordPress Plugin”) as well. Thumbnail sized images are now an option for the photo stream, and you can isolate just one tag from your user stream (ie just display your photos tagged with blackandwhite or moblog).

Links, template land and personal design

There will be a short preamble concerning my website, followed by some lengthy longwinded ramblings about personal website design. Be warned.

**Preamble**

My links page is gone for now, and will probably reappear in the sidebar. For some reason, three paragraphs of text were appearing with the links page. I don’t really know where they were coming from, i couldn’t find them in the WordPress database or anywhere in my templates. Yet they would reappear without fail everytime I used just links as the page slug. It may be some sort of ghost holding out from an older version, I’m still running a WordPress gamma from a day or two before the official 1.5 release.

I’m getting sick of this brown design, although it probably looks fine (the text is a bit small in Safari). I was craving white again… I go through phases. There’s a theme switcher installed, so you don’t have to watch a layout in progress (although you can). I’m not sure if the theme selection persists between sessions (that also may be a gamma drawback).

**Happy template land**

I like to change how my site looks all the time, it’s a good think and a bad thing. I’m never happy with it but I enjoy the act of tweaking. These days, most people seem to drift along in happy template land, such is the wonderful ‘blog revolution’ that we’ve heard so much about. That said the internet looks a lot better and more consistent than it used to be.

As far as design goes, I always had trouble calling myself a designer. And I had just as much trouble calling myself an artist, neither seemed to fit properly. Nick and I had a conversation the other day, he summed it up nicely in a post titled Artists that design webpages. Art is about the art, design is about the content. So, I could probably lump myself into either category. Personally, I just like to say that I enjoy using a computer to make things.

**Oh Hello**

I drifted into the old design scene around the time Swanky.org was dying, it was too bad because I was looking for a community while they were falling apart. The collapse wasn’t sudden, it just kind of sagged under it’s own weight and fell apart. I found that people then fell into one of two camps: words and pictures. Some went for the pretentious journal communities, others for the pretentious design communities. Everyone knew what happened to Swanky and didn’t want the same thing happening to their new little group. I’m a fan of both words and pictures so, I had a tough time of things. In the end I chose both, joining an art community to make pretty pictures and using Blogger as a backend for my site, allowing me to publish from anywhere.

The art community that I was participated in was Suffocate.org, started up by Nick and c3dric. It provided me with a refuge for my art and design as well as a number of online friendships and people I could bounce ideas off. We produced a lot of great issues and pieces that made you think, as well as a number of side projects including trash and conform. But it also grew, became bloated, and fell apart.

The Conform Project is a partial effort to return to my webroots, although I haven’t been able to put as much time into it as I would have liked. It’s been effective though, because I’ve been able to regain contact with a number of talented artists and designers. Thanks to everyone who’s helped me out with it over the last year or so.

**Closing Remarks**

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about the good old days of personal design sites, but publishing is publishing, I’m just happy that people are producing things for other people. Hopefully, the publishing trend continues and people aren’t just bouncing around to whatever seems cool at the time. I’m not trying to trivialize the ‘blog’ phenomenon, remember newspapers were a seditious fad that wasn’t supposed to last. The picture and word communities finally seem to be drifting together again, as the acronym army of CSS, JS and XML help the design catch up with the text. That said, content is king right now, so leave a comment and enjoy happy template land. Fin.

Infrared webcam

Here’s an easy-to-follow guide for hacking up your webcam to take pictures in infrared. Essentially all you have to do is take apart your webcam, remove the little plastic plate over the camera sensor that acts like a filter and replace it with two black chunks of film (from the end of a roll of negatives). I have an old 3com HomeConnect, it wasn’t that hard to do but I pretty much had to take the whole thing apart. If that’s what you have, you’ll need a small allen-key, a small star screwdriver and possibly some tweezers (although it’s easy enough to drop the film bits into the holder).

flickrRSS Plugin

Just finished up the 1.0 release of my WordPress plugin. The biggest new feature is an options panel so you don’t have to mess around with the settings. There are some new features included on that panel, like the ability to empty the cache , you can now change the RSS cache timeout for Magpie and specify tags to go before and after the image.

At some point, I created a development site to test the plugin out on. When I was writing the delete function I didn’t have things quite right and ended up deleting all of the WordPress admin panel files. It’s fixed up now, but if you’re weary, delete things manually.

Buy my stupid t-shirt!

The internet is an amazing place — you can come up with a stupid idea one night while you’re out and have someone halfway accross the world selling it for you the next. This is the shiny future that I could see when I watched Sandra Bullock order that pizza in The Net I introduce to you yet another t-shirt that no one will buy, Goth T-Shirt (Yellow). The next thing on tap are some bumper stickers, I just need to find someone who can draw a good manatee.