RasterWeb!This song is best describe as weird intro with a funky drumbeat and chop-chop guitar. I did not play bass on this one, just used a loop. (There were only full cakes at the bake sale.) You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.
You can grab it from Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)
I am going to propose a new rule for IM communication. Ok, not so much a rule as a suggestion: Only correct typos that drastically change the meaning of the message, or that a reasonably logical person might misunderstand.
Supposedly your mind can recognize errors in text and correct for them. So let’s use that.
Here’s an example, if you are chatting with someone and they say:
them [12:44]: OMG, I am so hungry, I'm gonna go grab luncg them [12:44]: lunch you: [12:45]: get a burrito!
Ok, you see how he (the “them” guy) corrected himself, and typed “lunch” after they typed the word “luncg”? I think it may be unnecessary to do so. I got enough context clues from the time (12:44) and the mention of being hungry to know they meant “lunch” and not “luncg” (Unless “Luncg” is someone they work with, which could be bad.)
So that’s my idea for today. I’m sure you’ve come across countless examples of this happening. Just think how much time you would save by not fixing a simple typo unless clarification was required.
I’ve learned a lot more about Flickr in the last month or so. This is due to two things, me pushing Creative Commons and Creative Commons at BarCampMilwaukee2.
Here are my settings for Privacy & Permissions in Flickr. I’m pretty open. Others are not so much. There are various reasons people are not open on Flickr. For the professional photographer, or someone hoping to be a professional photographer, they sometimes think people will “steal” their photos. Welcome to the publishing world. People steal things all the time. I’ve chosen to deal with ths by trying to educate people about copyright issues. Anyway, I don’t have a solution for that, but what really bothers me is these great photographers who want to protect their work, and upload lo-res images. The photos are awesome, but I just can’t see them in their full glory. I hate that. Meanwhile my photos suck but you can view them large and do a dozen different things to them without even asking me.
Here we see my settings for who can download, print, and blog my photos. Everyone can. That’s it. Full access. As long as you respect the license for each photo, and the Flickr ToS, you are good.
Hiding? Why hide stuff? EXIF data is what your camera embeds in your photos: things like the date and time a photo was taken, but also technical details about your camera and it’s settings. I find this useful when I want to do research on a camera. Since I find it useful, I assume other do as well. (See an example.)
Wanna see my photos? Cool! Everyone can. I post them on my blog, and elsewhere. I like to share. Want to comment on something? You need to have a Flickr account, they don’t allow outsiders to comment (but they can on your own blog hosted elsewhere.) If you want to add notes and tags to my photos, you at least need to be someone I consider a contact on Flickr. You can open that one up to ‘Any Flickr User’ though I haven’t yet.
Ah, the license. You can choose from any of the Creative Common licenses, or the old ‘All Right Reserved’ if you don’t want to give out any rights without people chasing you down and asking you. Choosing a Creative Commons license does not mean you give up all your rights. It means you selectively allow certain uses without having to grant permission for each case. You still maintain copyright of your work. I usually choose the NonCommercial license for my stuff. I figure if someone wants to make money off of it, they should talk to me first. But if someone wants to use it for personal use, or to promote something that is not a money-making venture (BarCamp, Web414, etc.) I am cool with that. Since others use a CC license, it allows me to build things like this BarCampMilwaukee2 flyer.
Since I am also a geo-nerd, I like to see and show where my photos were taken. I put most of them on a map using Flickr’s mapping tool. That last one, about EXIF location data, that’s for cameras that support GPS. While some people might say “Egad! My camera knows where I took the photo?” I know a ton of people who have been saying “Why the hell can’t my camera automagically geotag my photos!?” But then, maybe it’s just the crowd I run with. :)
Ultimately, only you can decide how open you want to be. I’m hoping some people who never thought about it before read this post and put some thought into opening up a bit.
We stopped by the new venue for BarCampMilwaukee2 on Saturday… if you missed the news, we had to change venues, as Bucketworks will not be ready in time to host the event. Bucketworks is still involved, and are the ones who managed to get this new space for us. Anyway, we took a look at the place, and did a bit of cleanup and planning. The new space provides some challenges, but nothing we can’t overcome. First, some photos…
This is what you will be looking for when you arrive at BarCampMilwaukee2. That’s the door you go in. You may need to give your name to a security guard, so make sure we have your real name.
Inside the place, it’s pretty much wide open. We’ll do our best at breaking up the space, there are not really separate rooms, it’s just one big room. (It was a cube farm.) There are outlets as needed, but bring a power strip. There should be wifi access points, BUT! (and here’s the BIG BUT) We have no connection to the internet! Yup, that’s right… as of right now, there is no connection to the outside world, which, sort of sucks. This is the biggest problem we have to fix. And we’ve got under 30 days to do it. If you can help with this, let us know. It’s top of the list right now.
And now, more photos…
Some good news: We will have plenty of parking, there are bathrooms and vending machines right outside the big room, the floors are carpeted and nice to sit on. It’s clean, there are nice windows to look out of, and… it’ll work. We really could use an internet connection though…
One more photo, a panoramic view of the whole space. You’ll really need to view the large version for the full effect…
(P.S. If you can help us get an internet connection, please let us know.)
I’d like to get more familiar with Adobe Illustrator, which is an application I’ve used on and off for the past 15 years or so, but mainly as a utility, and not so much as an illustration tool. (Bézier curves are cool.)
I’d like to draw simple shapes to start with, so I did, and then I ended up making them into patterns, as you can see below.
swirl-001
claw-001
Pretty exciting, huh? I guess my motivation for making these may be caused by the fact that I’ve used other people patterns (with permission) in the past. Which brings up an interesting point… How do you license something like this? I guess a Creative Commons license makes sense. Attribution I suppose? So how would you attribute it to me? Well, if you use one of these, just say “Thanks!” really loudly in public, and assume that I heard you. (And if someone else hears you say it, that’s ok too…)