Today was a rather action packed day. I woke up about ten minutes before I had to take Terry to work. I was feeling kind of low because I was stressing about this stupid Safari javascipt bug and about the imap module freaking out after the transfer. The imap module is the part of the site that reads the emails that people send it from their phones or other places.

Since the upgrade, it hadn't worked with attachments which had to end soon because I am getting my new sidekick which can mail voice recordings to my journal soon. It was the only part of the site PHP code that I did not program entirely from scratch and it was killing me to try and fix someone else's crappy script.

I decided to just sit down and address the issue straight up starting at line 1. Within two hours I had a perfect working solution that is well commented and also helped me understand exactly how the imap_fetch_structure(); function is structured in PHP. I love PHP in case it is not obvious. So now you can email images to your journal from any picture phone again or even from your desktop computer!

This was the exact reason for the little lull in my journal. Without being able to send images from my mobile I was always sad. Hopefully life will get better now.

Eduardo kaks came to speak at UB today. He was an influencial member of the early digital poetry movement. You might think you haven't heard of him but he you probably have. He is most well known creating alba the green glowing bunny . This is is his website



He talked a lot about one of his latest projects called genesis, where he came up with a system for translating a bible passage from genesis into morse code and then into a DNA structure. It's all documented on his site . Then bacteria were impregnated with the dna sequence and are then exposed to UV light via interaction over the web. You can mutate the backteria yourself here .
Afterwards the bacteria is collected and the translation process is reverted so that the mutated bacteria end up saying something in english.

Most of his new art address issues with transgenic art and "genetic modified reality © " (I am coining that phrase which as of this moment is not found on google.). It's not really so much what the art itself looks like or does but that it makes people talk about the issues. I can respect that yet he seemes like a high price "intellectual prostitute." His work is flashy, seductive, trendy and expensive. I mean that in the best way possible. He is famous and wealthy - I would trade in a second.

So now that I got my cell-phone to work with my journal again, I can update with some photos (e:lilho) 's birthday visit. There arn't that many as I was not so motivated to take photos when I couldn't send them right away but here they are.

Basically it involved eating and chillaxing [search]chillax[/search] We had pigwings for the first time at fat bob's, I will write a review about it sometime today. They looked like giant 8ozchicken drumsticks but we really some port cut. They cam with tasty homemade chunky blue cheese sauce. I would suggest them to anyone who likeboth pork ribs and chicken wings.

I love my new CD, weel I haven't actually heard it yetbecause I'm not home and my car doesn't have a mp3 cd player but the package itself was the cutest thing ever, I especially liked the ransom note, it's good to see people using it.

I'l put I on the radio later today. Thank you (e:twisted) , you are the best.

I think I finally found a third member for my thesis committee which means I can hopefully start to move toward the graduarion process. He wrote this paper called Blogs and the “Social Weather" on blogging which I found on the net.

Here is the letter I wrote to him for historical evidence of this phase of my graduation.

Dr. Halavais,
My name is Paul Visco and I am a graduate Student in the Media Studies MFA program at UB. My thesis project is centered around a blogging community web site that I created for the Elmwood Strip ( ) community of Buffalo.

I have been looking for a third faculty member to join my thesis supervision commitee and Shawn Rider from media Studies pointed you out as someone who would possibly be interested in my work. Below is the official description of elmwoodstrip.com which has been around since June of 2003. We currently have ~170 members, with a total of 5809 journals and 2817 images uploaded. The users have written a total of over one million words and numerous friednships an intellectual engangements have been formed via the site. The site was recently reviewed in the Buffalo News' link section.

I was excited to hear that there is a faculty member at UB who is interested in this type of online community and research and who could push me in the rght direction for the written portion of my thesis. I am finishing my third year of study and would be graduating either in June or September of 2005. If you are interested I could meet anytime next week to discuss the issue further.

Sincerely,
Paul Visco