September 2008
18 posts
Futurismic: When 3D spam got old →
“Ever walk through a field and come out on the other end with burrs clinging to your clothes? Well, imagine something like those little burrs spilling out of your home fabber. Embedding themselves in the shag carpet. Attaching to an angry cat. Perforating your foot.”
ARK: Dealing With The Media →
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Shockwaves
Having left my last post on something of a cliffhanger, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to get an SMS from Luke, making sure I’d made it home okay. I know this platform is public access, but it took a while for me to get what he was talking about, poor chap.
So, yes, I made it home safely. Turns out that yesterday’s unreliable tube coverage was the result...
“I think this probably warrants a pint.”
– Mark’s reaction to the news of imminent societal collapse
Update on the college situation
- unoccupied student accomodation to be leased by the Greater London Authority, housing temporary migrants and those participating in welfare-to-work.
- revenue from the above lease to be invested in a major boost to our bandwidth, with the intent of securing a stable telepresence service for the year ahead.
- a new strategic plan for autumn next year, addressing...
Interesting times
Just left an emergency meeting with management’s upper echelons, attempting to deal with the revelation that a majority of this year’s student intake will be attending remotely - almost doubling the total of students off-site.
I would have thought that August’s ReDS scare would have some effect on enrollment but - even so - I don’t think anyone had...
“Bentham’s Nightmare”
– my new favourite nickname for London, courtesy of a heavily pierced gentleman on the Jubilee line
My latest nemesis: the multi-touch interface
Mark was using one of the full-size desks to test our course presentation on some of the associate tutors. It was going smoothly right up to me absent-mindedly leaning on a corner of the desk. Then bam! The first blue screen of death I’d seen in the best part of a decade.
We lost our lunch break to interface hysterics. It seems that even a...
Teaching?
This autumn, I’m taking a break from research (woo!) to help Mark with the first-year digital media & society course. Apparently, we were supposed to have submitted a course outline in time for next week’s pre-registration - a fact we discovered yesterday morning.
Yup. Even with EduCommons at our disposal, I get the feeling it’s going to be a long weekend.
Highlight of the last 2 days:
Encountering a full-size airship hovering over the Sussex countryside! Missed out on a photo, but dad picked up its GML ID on his new phone. Running that through the operator’s website, we identified our blimp as an unmanned (!) freight handler, trafficking a payload from France via Shoreham. Sadly (if unsurprisingly), the cargo was one data point which...
Rural headspace
Heading down to Sussex for a couple of days R&R. Barring some kind of agricultural accident, should be back on the 10th.
Launch
LifeStreamer seems to be down again - and, this time, it’s taken the UoL publishing platform with it. I’ve lost three weeks to the cloud, with no guarantee that I’ll see them again. :(
As a stop-gap measure, I thought I’d dust off my Tumblr account. It may be light on features, but it’s sturdy, and I won’t have to sign a EULA to make a backup of my...