Webcams!

I've blogged about how you can find webcams with a google search before, but I'm thinking about a project involving them so I'm bringing it up again. Anyway, if you type the following into google :
inurl:/view.shtml
and do a search, google will spit out a list of online cameras made by a certain manufacturer. Click on the links and you can see their output. Some of the cameras are clearly meant to be public. Some aren't so clear. Anyway, I find clicking through the list discovering little windows on the world to be a fun little past-time. Here are some fun cameras I found today:

Somebody put their cube farm on the web!
A bar in Munich.
The front desk of an office on Long Island.
A place called "Friends Bar" - according to its IP address, it's in the Canary Islands.

Anyway, I'm trying to find fun webcams for a project, so I thought I would share how to find them with you and see what you find! Comment me if you find any fun ones!

Martha Henehan

My maternal grandmother, Martha Henehan, died on Sunday. She was a good woman, a loving mother and grandmother, and someone who remained close to the message of compassion at the core of her Christian faith in an age when many used that faith to advance an agenda of hatred, mistrust, and division. She will be missed by her children and grandchildren.

In September I visited my grandmother. I didn't know it then, but that visit proved to be the last time I would see her alive. She knew she didn't have long. She was at peace with that. She had been in pain for a long time, and her mobility was limited. She believed she would be reunited after her death with her departed husband, and she desired that dearly.

Still, she said to me, "there just isn't enough time."

Life is with us for just this brief moment. We will all wish for more time. None of us will get it.

Let's make the best of it.

The Lights Are On

Across the street from me, there is a light industrial zone. The factory that casts those giant concrete tubular things I like to post pictures of on my flickr page. A row of storage spaces for rent. What smells to be a plastic factory of some kind.

Stuck in the middle of the parking lot/loading zone for all this, is a small beat-up white building that looks to be a one story house. Tonight, as I was having some tea on my steps, I noticed a light on. Is somebody home?

I snapped a picture just to show what it looks like. It seemed lonely, but also somehow romantic. That little building is nowhere I would want to live, but it is somewhere I would love to have lived in the past. What a story!

What is old is new again

Lately, I've been finding ways to fit Narrative Prose, short stories especially, back into my life. It has largely been absent since I stopped pursuing writing fiction myself, my recent academic work has been theory-based and left little room for reading stories to read. It was only when I started listening to the podcast of NPR's "Selected Shorts" program - in which actors and other performers read short stories to a studio audience. That I even remembered what I was missing.

Today, Salon.com published a series of excerpts from Red, an upcoming collection of short prose by teenage girls. I really like it. These girls have written some powerful, insightful, and original stuff. I don't know how much stock to put in the editor's assertion that social networking sites and other internet-facilitated communications are creating "a generation of writers." I'd like to believe it though, and certainly these examples suggest that for whatever reason, there are some talented young writers out there. Check it out.

I think if the editor's assertion is true, and we are looking at a whole generation learning to write online, the ramifications for those of us who are educators in the humanities will be very significant. A groundswell of unruly expression alarms some of us, I think, but we should see it as an opportunity. A potential mass movement of students interested in self-expression. The problem for us will be how to offer these students tools they need and want to use, challenge them to grow and explore, and avoid trying too hard to mold them into a "proper" format - without falling into the fallacy that they already have everything they might need to express themselves and any input on our part is somehow oppression.

Why Yes, I am a Mindless Sheep

Because a friend posted her Simpsons Avatar, I feel compelled to do the same. Baaaa.

Create a Venn Diagram

Make one category: "Things That Are Ironic."

Make the other category: "Things That Are a Pain in My Ass."

Here is what would currently be in the space where the two intersect

-Digital Culture researchers who can't figure out how to link properly
-The fact that the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) can't get their "digital library" to talk to my university's library search engine properly and consistently (when other journals can)
-The wide variety of documents on "Free Culture" and "Open Source Software" that are locked behind paywalls of various types (why yes, I will pay 80 dollars to read about how informations should be free...)

On the other hand, completely outside those two categories would be the many digital culture researchers who post up their work in weird hidden places in the internet where you can download them for free, and/or happily e-mail work to fellow researchers on request. Woot!

Where have all the Fafnirs Gone?

Picture above is the last installment of the Fluble webcomic, circa 2001. It was posted on the author's leaving undergraduate school, and the anxieties it expresses were mine too. One reason I've been hiding in grad school. Fluble's author, Chris Mastrangelo, would go on to work on his blog, fafblog a truly surreal and hilarious website, and write some of the funniest, most cutting satire of the Bush administration and the 2004 Presidential race. Around mid-summer 2006, it was clear the site was in trouble however. He was posting repeated pleas for donations, and the site would often go without updates for weeks. The last post was put up on July 12, 2006. The site is still there, but has remained without a new update since.

Every so often I cruise by the ol' fafblog, hoping that some new update may announce the re-birth of the blog, or direct me to some new work by the author. I always find the same old page.

Here's what, I think, says something about the power of internet culture - at least for me. I worry about Chris Mastrangelo. I worry that I can't find any evidence of a new artistic project attached to him. I worry that he may have passed away. I worry even more that the dismal prediction he made in the last Fluble may have come true, and he may be stuck in an office cube farm somewhere, slowly dying.

So, here's all the best to Fluble and Fafnir and Giblets and Clown. I hope some fraction of them still lives.

I, for one, miss them.

Airships and the Future That Wasn't

I obtained the picture above, of Moffet Field's Hangar One, from this boingboing post. The post seeks to drum up some publicity for the campaign to save the structure, which the Navy wants to tear down as it is contaminated with PCBs and thus useless. Boingboing makes the case that the structure should be saved as it is one of the few distinctive buildings in Silicon Valley, a region that, despite its economic power, is otherwise fairly void of interesting architecture.

I read about this just a few hours after I had been teaching my "cyberculture" class and discussing the transition of the Silicon Valley area from being dominated by the aerospace industry to electronics industry and using that as a parallel for corresponding shift in American Popular culture from space travel as an emblem of the future - the future of the rocketship, if you will - to cyberspace as an emblem of the future - the future of the matrix. I wished I had read about Hanger One before my class, so I could have used it as an example.

Hanger One, you see, was a part of a yet older, and less remembered future. The future of the airship. Hanger One was, believe it or not, the hanger for America's flying aircraft carrier: the USS Macon.

For those who didn't already know, during the 1930s the United States built and briefly operated two huge airships, Macon and her sister ship Akron, each outfitted to carry five small biplane fighters. Both, sadly, were lost in bad weather. This ended the flying aircraft carrier project.

I am, as you've probably guessed by now, a sort of airship enthusiast. For me, the lost future of the airship is interesting and romantic, I think because it is in some ways a more human future than the one we live in now. The Akron and the Macon were intended to scout for enemy vessels using human eyes and brains and pilots. Their technology augmented the body, but still relied on human control and skill. Instead of the flying aircraft carrier, the technology that would become the eyes of the fleet in World War II was radar. Radar, married to the electronic digital computer, has evolved over the last 60 years to give us the "future" warship that is the Navy's present - the AEGIS destroyer. Instead of the swashbuckling crews of the Akron and Macon, launching their tiny fighters with their hair in the wind, we got the plugged in crews of the AEGIS ships, who monitor an automated combat system in a darkened room. The major choice the crew makes is to turn the system on, after that most functions are automatic, guided missiles fight guided missiles at speeds too fast for a human being to make a meaningful decision.

I am often a cyber-enthusiast. I am, after all, right now plugged in to a massive automated system, which will deliver my words to far away friends without further intervention on my part. Remembering the airship past, however, puts me in a more cyber-pessimistic mood. Internet socializing is not unlike the AEGIS ship, digital expressions flying around at light speed while bodies and their senses stay at home. Perhaps a packet with my words in it will be, in an unlikely circumstance, routed through one of the antenna arrays on the mast of the Empire State Building (originally, the mast was to be an airship mooring point) but I will not be there to see it, to feel it, to taste the wind.

The danger, I think, comes when we try to build a new world in our computers, as John Parry Barlow and others sometimes seem to advocate, and thus forget material circumstances in a rush of postmodern digital exuberance. If we keep material circumstances in mind however, we might build a new world with our computers and that might open some interesting possibilities.

The Akron and the Macon were brought down by weather, after all. With weather radar and GPS to guide them, the new generation of airships being worked on by Zeppelin and others
might just have a fighting chance...

For JS and MP

From the webcomic Nothing Nice to Say

More Evidence of Global Warming... or Something

Besides the 90 degree October in Ohio I just saw a flock of geese flying... east

Fun on the Internets

Just some, um, research into internet-mediated pop culture... yeah, that's it

http://www.blimptv.net/academyofwar.html

Even Jesus Only Had To Suffer Three Days

The Next five days are my comprehensive exams. Ack.

Actually, they have been pretty do-able so far, I put one question behind me today. Four more to go!

In the meantime - web-ephemera for all you boys and girls

http://www.cerberoleso.it/media/sloth/sloth.mov

Happier Internet Content

I like this. Fun stuff.

Apparently Guns Don't Kill People...

Black folks kill people, at least according to this cartoon:


Racism, alive and well in the United States...

Flowers Behind the Dustbin

IMG_1903.JPG
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I found this plant growing behind my complex dumpster. I liked it, and shot a few pictures of it and posted them to flickr.

They need cropping and contrast adjustment, but they are there for folks to see, if they are so inclined.

A Wiki Project

Hey all, I'm putting my money where my mouth is (a little) and starting a (small) collaborative on-line project. I'd like to invite you all to join. The project is called the "cheat sheet to history" and the idea is just to list events and their dates in chronological order, and build together a sort of very basic "map" of history. I think chronology can be interesting, and show some weird coincidences and possibilities. I also think it is an ideal collective project, since the process of adding a little to the list is easy, and the list taken together can start to be interesting fairly quickly.

Anyway, if you are interested, I'd really appreciate your participation. Try it out! Tell me what you think. There are other projects like this out there, but I'm still curious as to what we might get if we work on this one together.

Synchronicity

I finish reading bell hooks' "Eating the Other" and what do I find on the Internets but this:



Polish rappers appropriating Indian beats and instruments, and presenting their music in a video that gives a wildly exoticized (re)presentation of South Asian people. The youtube comments, at least the ones in English, gush about the creativity and originality of the music. I wonder what the ones in Polish say. I also wonder what extent the English praise is boosted by the doubly exotic position of the music from the point of view of an English-speaking audience.

Just short thoughts and sharing.

Guess where this photo came from

Well? What do you think?

It wasn't the space shuttle or the space station.

Not a military spy satellite or plane.

Not a commercial satellite.

Not the concord.

Not Spaceship One.

This picture was taken by SABLE-3 (the Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment 3) a nikon coolpix digital camera lashed to a weather balloon by a bunch of Canadian amateur radio hobbyists. They reached an altitude of 120,000 feet, and took that picture - showing the curvature of the earth, the thin blue haze of the atmosphere, and the cold black of space - with over-the-counter and DIY built equipment, and what must have been a relatively modest budget. Certainly no more than many other middle-class folks plow into boats and sporting gear.

I think that's pretty cool.

Naomi Klein on "Shock Capitalism"

A short film to promoter her new book. Looks interesting.

A True Name, A Name To Conjour With

There is a line from Neuromancer, I can't remember it exactly. Case is talking about names with one of the AIs, Neuromancer probably. At some point the idea comes up that if Case had the AI's name, he could wield some power over it.

An idea Gibson probably gleaned from watching early computer operators playing with command line interfaces on old time-share mainframes. The operator traces a thin green string of characters in an arcane language, maybe something like "ls -al|grep config," unreadable to those who have not been trained in the art, across a black screen, and in response to his utterance, his magic spell, the machine-demon jumps to life, does the bidding of its master. A magic language for postmodernity. Words made electrons made actions. A semiotic conundrum.

And nothing new. After all, in the beginning there was the Word...

Command lines are buried now, lost behind the flash of modern graphical operating systems. Windows, especially, has only the faintest traces of old DOS - its command line ancestor - left. My little MacBook, with its spiffy OSX, actually has a bit more command line there if one should want it, and it even responds to incantions in UNIX, the same ancient magical tongue (more or less) that the mainframe operators of yore summoned their creatures with. But I rarely invoke this feature. The graphical age does all I need it to. Sometimes I play with the command line, just for fun. Just for the feeling (an illusion, in my case) of having "bare metal" mastery over my machine.

But the age of Google has brought about a new form of the Digital True Name. The search string. Take for example, my search this evening for a long lost old friend. I tried to google his real name, but to no avail. Then several pseudonyms I knew him to write fiction under. Still, no dice. Finally, I entered the name of an old cable access television show he and another friend had produced, long ago.

And there he was, or at least, some aspect of him, conjured into being by my utterance of his name. One of his names. The right one. He had, as I suspected he would, succumbed to the temptation of dropping his old cable access show onto YouTube. He had also uploaded some more recent work.

So, despite the years and miles between us, despite our long ago falling out, despite my terrible suspicion that sending any message to him would just reveal there was nothing for us to say to each other anymore, I was able tonight to see the current face and hear the current voice of my old friend. Just by guessing the right name to call him by.

McLuhan said that communications technology would both "extend" our nervous systems and expose us to "auto-amputation" of senses and other capacities not carried by the media we relied on for this extension. I am reminded by this by my episode with my old friend tonight, and even more so by my experience lately with some more recent friends, who have just moved some distance away and thus retreated into the electronic ghost-hood that characterizes long-distance friendships in our electronic age.

I'm grateful for the "magic" technology that allows us to remain, at least in some tenuous way, linked to each other, but at the same time frustrated by the high-speed, instrumental, capitalist system that seems to insist that we must all remain in constant motion, always shedding our friends, never having the chance to build lasting communities, if we wish to "succeed."

What to do about it, though, is a question I can't find a search string to answer.