danah boyd On The Oreilly Factor

Danah was on Oreilly Factor and Bill actually wasn’t a complete dick. Go figure 🙂
Wow. They call her a cultural anthropologist. Looks pretty cool on the screen. That’s fer sure.
Nice job Danah.
(Hey I wanna be a cultural anthropologist! Maybe I can call myself that when I finish my masters…)
Update! Hey I’m not trying to be a smartass! I’m just jealous 🙂
Sure, Danah looks like an ordinary anthropologist in this clip. But the few times I’ve met her, not long ago, she always had an extra sparkley dress or stripey pants or a huge floppy hat or something far from ordinary. It’s like she’s gone undercover.

Paul McCartney At HP Pavillion



Okay so it had been a long time since I’d been to a large concert. Like, I dunno, 5 years at least.
So I’m at the Paul McCartney concert at HP Pavillion last November 8, 2005. I always carry my Canon Exlim S3 in my pocket, and I had forgotten about it being in my pocket till we were 5 blocks away from the car and in line to get in.
“Well I just won’t use it.” I say to myself.
So then, right when Paul kicks in to “Drive My Car,” I start feeling guilty that I didn’t get a ticket for one of my favorite cousins, who recently played and sang the Beatles “I Will” in one of her recitals. I should take a little movie for her, I say to myself. Then the scientist in me kicked in. “I wonder what the sound would even be like on this thing? Would it just be distortion, or would its condensor microphone kick in and do its job?”
Then I started looking around. Wow. It seemed like everybody was using their phone or camera to take a little movie or picture. Oh. I get it. Things have sure changed, I thought to myself. I can’t believe I was worried about having this thing in my pocket.
So I start taking a movie, and then my dad noticed what I was doing and bumped into me and kinda wrecked my shot. (You can see at the end of the clip.)
“Oh dad.” I tell him. “It’s not a hassle anymore.”
“No, I don’t think you’re right.” He said.
About 15 minutes later, a guy a few rows in front of us starts recording with his little photo/video camera. Sure enough, after a few minutes, an usher called him on it, and escorted the guy from his seat — and confiscated his camera I think, because we saw him return to his seat later sans camera.
Ok. So things aren’t so progressive.
Well, at least I got my little experiment file. (I’m a grad student experimenting with digital media and this movie constitutes research for my grad exam.)
I am continually amazed at the sound quality I am able to achieve with this fairly-reasonably priced tiny little camera. (casio exlim s3)
So anyway, here it is:
30 seconds of Drive My Car

Interesting Eyestrain Information

I’ve been having a bit of eyestrain lately from staring at the computer 24-7 on three different machines.
(An unfortunate side effect of assuring in a timely manner that the web-based application I’ve been working on is cross-browser compatible. More on this very soon!)
I found this paper on eyestrain from Dr. Larry Bickford that had some helpful suggestions and information.
Thought you might be interested.

Nice April Fool’s From Google

Nice one: google romance.
I gotta tell ya, for a minute, they got me 🙂
Update: the tour actually has some ingenious ideas for selling stuff to online daters. For instance – sending emails where all they have to do is click to send flowers to their upcoming date, etc. Somebody’s gonna do this for real someday.

Songs From The Commons #12

Wow. I can’t believe I never posted my
Songs From The Commons show (#12). (Let’s just say I’m busier than I think I’ve ever been in my entire life, doubled. )
But still. How could I have forgotten to tell you about it, after all that work? It took me a long time and I remember feeling good about it when it was done, although right now I’m consumed by too many things to remember why…
Oh yeah, it has my remix of Mc Jack In The Box‘s remix of Brad Sucks in it, for one thing. I was also pleased with how well Cindy Sheehan and friends’ protesting at the UN was adapted to a beat.
The subject is recent developments in Creative Commons search tools:

1. http://creativecommons.org/find/
The CC folks threw a user interface on top of the google and yahoo searches.
It’s also a great place to see a lot of great CC repositories all in one place.
2. Flickr’s Creative Commons Page
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
Browse by license on this popular photography site.
3. Google’s Advanced search feature:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
Across from the heading “Usage Rights,” you will wee a drop down selector.

Colin Powell WMD Hoax Remix of Ashwan’s Borrow and Take2

Update: So I just pulled this track from the cc mixter website because I used samples from PBS NOW that I did not create myself. And although I believe that it is my fair use to use them, and for others to use them, it is an indisputably gray area, and therefore does not belong on CC Mixter, where everyone knows that reuse is free and clear. Fair enough 🙂

Here’s the new link:
Borrow and Take2 – Colin Powell WMD Hoax Remix
This adds a “vocal” track from Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson and David Brancaccio (PBS-NOW) over the top of Ashwan’s Borrow and Take2
The Colin Powell WMD Hoax Remix part comes from a PBS NOW show located here:
http://video.lisarein.com/pbs/now/feb2006/02-03-06/
The sound clips are from this episode of NOW on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/now/thisweek/index_020306.html
software/hardware: TIVO, Canon GL-2, dual G4 mac, itunes, protools
samples i used:
I believe it was my fair use to use the sound samples from the PBS Now program detailing Larry Wilkerson’s recount of the day’s events during Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council.
The video clips and MP3s are here:
http://video.lisarein.com/pbs/now/feb2006/02-03-06/
I used my tivo to capture NOW and then my camera to capture the video from my tivo via the analog hole. Then I used itunes to generate an mp3 from the .mov file, and imported that into protools, along with ASHWAN’s track, to create the first part of this track, which is my remix. (The rest of the track after Colin Powell stops talking is the same as the ASHWAN version.)
More:
The sound clips are from this episode of NOW on PBS.
This uses the clips from NOW with David Brancaccio that interviews Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s ex Chief of Staff, about how he and Colin played into the hands of the Shrub Administration when they unwittingly “participated in a hoax on the American People, the International Community, and the United Nations Security Council.”

Songs From The Commons #11 Up – Including A Colin Powell WMD Hoax Remix

Finally finished my latest
Songs From The Commons #11.
This one includes a Colin Powell WMD Hoax remix of Ashwan’s
Borrow and Take 2, courtesy of yours truly. It’s not available yet as a single on CC Mixter, but it will be soon.
It also has a cool remix by MC Jack In The Box of the Brad Sucks source files for “Work Out Fine.”
I’m really starting to dig doing these shows.
I’m also writing a lot of my own music lately, and can’t wait to finish my Masters in April, so I can get on with recording it…
The Colin Powell WMD Hoax files are from a NOW show that aired 2/3/06 – Video files and MP3s are located here.
A proper blog post is forthcoming…