I was looking for info about the battle bots contest at UB tomorrow and I found out there is a bunch of robot stuff going on in Buffalo.

Buffalo Robotics Club -

UB Robotics -

Maybe once I am done with school I will begin building robots.

So I was happily working with Fedora Core 3 after Linux got me started. Okay I meant (e:ajay) - that was really a typo but I think linux is a good nickname for him - so I am going to leave it. Anyways, so after 1 hour of having fun with it I went ahead and messed it up to the point of no return. Like seriously I think I did the equivalent of deleting the mac OS X library or the window system32 folder.

Ya, so I am back to square one and back to Suse 9.2. I actually liked Fedora Core a lot - and think I will switch at the end of the semester but right now I really need a functional operating system ASAP and I know that Suse gives me wireless out of the box and is now "qualified" by alias for running Maya 6.5. When I have time to figit more, I will figure it out on Fedora Core. Or maybe tomorrow seeing as I seem to enjoy installing linux everyday!!!

Hopefully, I will end up making it work this time. I have learned so much from watching (e:ajay) type.

Okay, so I am really not into interactive performance art with audience participation. Let me re-phrase that. I am not into it when I am in the audience but I still managed to have fun last night at The Saucy Seven event.

The location was, a factory basement on Niagara Street near the foot of Ferry complete with a conveyer belt. There was a long dinner table, with enough room to hold 40 people. On either end were large projection screens.

I will recap the performances here.

Julie Perini - our very own former (e:churchofjulie) created a video about factory work in honor of the location which was quite appropriate. On the video screen was a video of people, maybe I lLove Lucy, working in a factory. I feel bad but I didn't pay any attention to the video and not because I was not interested. The was the the performance involved us performing the act of making sandwiches. We each got a bag and we each had a task. I had the plates and was in spot number one. I past the plates down the table and each person got one. They also carried out their own personal task. For example. adding break, cheese, lettuce, toothpick, olive, napkin, etc.

At one point I tried to speak out against it, like why are we doing this but (e:terry) told me that it wasn't cool to protest and I wouldn't be proving anything so I silenced and pushed my plates. At least my job was the easiest.

Eventually each person had their own fully made sandwich. At that point we were supposed to eat them. Well, I was too grossed out by all the people sniffling because of the freezing conditions. I also forgot to put on my sanitary rubber gloves until the end and figured other people did that too. Overall it was a quite overwhelming experience but probably simulates the feelling of working on the line doing a timed task quite well.

Some Girl - Asian girl burns folded swans in a wok and read a story. It made lots of smoke as it went on for like 15 minutes and I kept have pyrophobia (if thats a word) because the oil or whatever in the wok kept sizzling only like 3 feet away from being on the next faces of death. I think it was probably so overhwlmeiong only cause I was like right up in it. I couldn't pay attention to the words she was reading because of my constant concenr with the fire so I have no idea what the story was about. I think if I had sat further away I would have gotten more out of it.

Soyeon - (e:soyeons) video was really awesome. It was a little slow for me at times because of my very short attention span (thanks to multitasking on the computer) but it was truly a visual masterpeice in my opinion. It was all of these images superimposed and juxtaposed and filtered and moving.

Robin - (e:robin) 's video was really well done as always. Maybe it was one video with two parts, maybe it was one video. Part one robin juxtaposed conversations she had here about the south and then conversations about the north she had while home in Adairesville. She is so good at editing sound. The other part was about how she had her butt wiped as a child but then when she grew up no one would wipe her butt and the real question was why not. She klept talking about shitting while videos of her and her little neice played of them smearing chocolate pudding all over their lips and faces. It was very robin.

Liz - (e:liz) 's performance was by far the most intense. As I said before there were two video screens one on each end of the table. On one end liz was eating cherryies, real zoomed into her face. ON THE OTHER END - liz was singing "Cherry Baby" live. She was wearing a red dress and had a mic. But the kicker was on the video screen right next to her she was popping marachino cherries out of her vagina. This went on for a long time, like 15 minutes and the audience had a hard
time deciding where to look. I decided to watch the audience for a while. Then at the end we all recieived a jello vagina with a cherry inside and were supposed to eat it. Probably because of too much beer or because jello reminds me of horse hooves and being sick to begin I thought I was going to throw up at that point. Also the girl next to me saying hers smelled really funny was making it worse. Mine was also different than everybody else's as it was the mold that the other jellos were molded after.

The entire performance was actually quite thought provoking because the audience was confronted with the lyrics of the song, which are quite explicit, plus the explicit video depicting what the song is actually about it seems.

Chris Barr - Chris wore tube that was connected to his mouth on one end and connected to headphoens of the other. He went aroudn the tabel and someone would put the the headphones on your head. Then he would speak and you could go. I wonder if he told everyone the same thing? Maybe we were supposed to talk about that. I will ask (e:terry) and (e:matthew) when they get home from skiing.

We took off at that point cause we thought it was the end. All in all they were quite entertaining and thought provoking.

There was, however, one major problem with the evening. The fact that it was about 9 degrees and there was no heat. I was shaking so hard from freezing that I looked like I was on crack. I really don't have much protection when it comes to fat reserves.

After we got home Dave stopped by and me and (e:terry) helped someone online translate a ghettotastic rap song. The person before us on the forum translated "pop some bubblies" as pop some platic packing bubbles for fun. We clearly had to correct that. It was probably the most fun I even had with German.

I made two pages with images of some of my students' artwork. There are about 100 other artworks I want to add but they are all on my office comp so they will have to wait till next week.

3D Graphic Design-

2D Graphics Design -

(e:scud) , if you read this I need your dragon and still frames from your capstone.

(e:dan,73) Dan the sidekick doesn't have bluetooth or video. Maybe it is a hoax.

It was freakin' lame, in fact I am embarrassed to be recording it here. (e:rachel) was sick, late, and tired. (e:drchlorine) showed up with his new girl, who is (e:rachel) 's boss or something (she was pretty cool), and left early. (e:soyeon) refused to go because of a misunderstanding. (e:mike) was at rent, (e:dan) at a poker game, (e:lilho) and (e:flacidness) were sick. So none of their gangs showed up either and (e:ajay) drank at home. Basically, (e:matthew) , (e:terry) and I could have just drank in the mansion and had (e:rachel) and (e:drchlorine) stop by.

Apparently, taking the highway to school is not a shortcut but a giant circle. I guess I knew that but this map makes it ever more obvious.

Missing Image ;(

Elmwoodstrip.org is a community dataspace based in the elmwood strip community of Buffalo, NY. This digital public space brings local residents together by allowing them to digitally share and embed their local experience within the data structures of the site.

Elmwoodstrip. org recreates a public sphere in a place where public meeting places have been largely commodified (e.g. Spot Coffee), by providing a cost free place to exchange ideas. By using open source software in the programming and design of the site, I have been able to keep the cost at such a minimum as to provide this service free of charge to the public within this community. There are currently there are about 200 users and hundreds of local readers with a daily data consumption of about 200-500MB shared between around 200 unique visitors/day.

Users can embed text, sound, animation, and video without any previous web programming experience and without the use of any expensive proprietary or commercial software. After a user finishes click-publishing their media, the embedded data becomes immediately available to the public via the elmwoodstrip.com interface.

By lowering the learning curve for publication to the web, and tying the publication process in with a dedicated local readership, elmwoodstrip.org opens up this digital documentation process to a segment of the population that typically does not produce their own media or record their own historical experience. As with swatches in a quilt, the embedded media files are "sewn" together using MySQL, an open source database software package, and delivered to the public with PHP, another open source scripting language, to form a digital quilt of the elmwood experience from 2003-2005.

Elmwoodstrip. org is intended to counteract the negative effects on local community that have resulted from globalized communication on the internet by creating an immersive local web experience. Time spent at the site focuses the residents on communicating with each other and revitalizes the sense of local community. As the project site continues to grow, a people's history of this community begins to emerge and the interpretation of the local experience becomes more colorful and accurate.

Elmwoodstrip.org is based on open standards technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, RSS, and XML. User to user communication is handled via journals, cell phone SMS messages, site posts, integrated AOL AIM, integrated yahoo YIM, and email. Users can view the site from computer web browsers and even read the site, post and receive reader feedback from their mobile phones.

Although all users are essentially writing public journals, reader initiated comments are allowed only on the readers journals, as to promote a sense of responsibility when interacting with other users. By creating a method for inlinking between the writers and the readers journals, other readers can follow along the logical path of a discussion while avoiding the problem of spam that plagues many other online forums and journaling sites.

In the written segment of my thesis I will be exploring necessary technical and developmental decisions in the construction of such a data intensive and highly interactive web site, as well as, addressing issues of privacy, security, and public image in relation to elmwoodstrip.org and its users. Furthermore, I will be investigating and contrasting elmwoodstrip.org to other online communities that focus on the interaction of local residents such as the famous WELL online community in San Francisco, Craig's List, and others.

When I said I learned nothing useful at UB I lied. I learned to solder in my electronics class and tonight I needed to recharge batteries so that I can test the GPS for the web tracekr project I am working on. Unfortunately, the battery charger was broken. So I opened it up with the new found courage I developed in electronics class and soldered the power supply back onto the circuit board where it was severed. It worked and my batteries are recharging happily ever after.

Of course, I did this in a totally unventialted area and inhaled a bunch of chemical that are known to cause cancer in the state of california. I am so glad I don't live there. It seems like everything is so much more dangerous on that side of the country. Here I can safely inhale spray paint, right? I wonder what about the california environment makes everything so much more toxic to use there. lol.