all over the place

April 26, 2003

Everybody is getting so sentimental as the year wraps up. It is a little sad to hear the hallway quieting down, and to see our suites being packed up, but mostly I'm in the camp of 'get over it'. If there are people who meant something to you this year, they will mean something to you again (if not in the exact same way) next year. Instant messaging, telephones, and trains are really very simple things. Use them and lose the angst.
In addition to a lot of slobbery phrases like "Thanks for the great year guys, I'll never forget it", the end of first year university means photos. Lots of photos. Drunk photos, bad photos, really bad photos, and, of course, stoned photos. Here are two UWO MIT collections put together by people on the MIT floor at Essex Hall. One and two.

- posted by K. @ 4:51 p.m. |

April 25, 2003

ANTS!
Sweet jesus, it's all about the ants lately. They're popping up everywhere. If it's not literal ant behaviour, it's figurative ant behaviour. It all started with Tim Berners-Lee's book, "Weaving the Web". The text, a look at the history and development of the WWW (along with its prospects), is full of inferences to emergent behaviour and complexity theory. This book was a primer for "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson, the next book along this string of freak connections. Obviously, more ants. And to bring things up to date, this evening I followed a link whilst looking for alternative blog services and ended up at Microcontent News, reading yet another piece on ants. The entry, 'Artificial Ants', dated Friday, December 20, 2002, draws a comparison between the insects and the blogged world. Of course I could easily have made these connections had I set out to find them; but I didn't set out to find them. I just stumbled across them while I was studying for a class on information retrieval, reading for pleasure, and exploring a new hobby. Which probably means that there are a gazillion times more of the same connections worked through sooo many more parts of my life...and you know what that means?? It means more ants.
- posted by K. @ 6:49 p.m. |

all over the place -- it's a warning, it's a disclaimer, it's a blog. Entry number one.

Three days ago, I was an ardent hater of the term 'blog'; such a sluggish, blunt, objectionable word. I swore that I would never create one. Any online, editorial assemblage of mine would be referred to as a weblog or a journal. No trendy 'blogging' for this girl. And then sometime between not studying for Introduction to Information Retrieval on Wednesday and not studying for CompSci today I rolled my eyes in defeat and started up this. . .blog. Geah!
While it's possible that I may soon invite a friend or two to submit their own thoughts, images, announcements, feeble accusations, for now it's just me doing the posting. The fact that I am incapable of focussing my attention for long to enough to aquire any sort of web design skills means that things will remain plain. Not plain and simple, just plain; things are rarely simple.

So there are a couple of things that I want to start off with.
First is the txt file that was to be my first entry (which was created all the way back on Tuesday when I still firmly resisted the dastardly b word). I've given it its own sad little home, please go and visit.
Second is toy camera photography. How much am I enjoying some of the sites that are devoted to taking pictures through plastic lenses. Such lofi charm is wonderful. Toronto blogger and photo fiend Rannie Turingan keeps his photojunkie.org site well enough to lure me back again and again. Although the photos on his site are taken with a variety of toy cameras, the Holga photos are what thrill me. Weirdly enough, the site is "under quarantine" today. SARS is changing the way Torontonians think. Off topic for a moment: the worldwide SARS outbreak coincided with my burgeoning awareness of the re-emerging threat posed by TB.
The last that I read on the topic was in MotherJones. A really brief version of the magazine article is available on their site. Back on topic. While I think that the growing popularity of toy or lofi photography is generally great, I hate the marketing that is bringing some of this popularity along. Case in point, lomo. The marketing people at Lomography.com are insanely clever in the same evil way that the marketers of pogs, tamagotchis, and tickle me elmos were insanely clever. Everything to do with the lomo cameras are cheap, except the actual price. Yes, yes, I know, it's a pop culture thing, fine. But all the money that is changing hands makes feel a little queazy. Another case of trying to buy the lifestyle/community, not just the product, I think. Me, I'll take a $40 Holga any day. Hey, I'm serious. Please, send me an Holga! Preferably a souped up one from Randy at holgamods.com (which, btw, would still cost less than a lomo!).
- posted by K. @ 12:04 p.m. |

apples