youtube

Last night we went on YouTube to see the latest news and guess what, we could not figure out how to see the videos. My techie roommate, who is comfortable anywhere there is a cyberspace, was at a loss. And we ended up returning to CBC.ca for our news on-line. I have CBC on constantly on my radio, we do not have cable or satellite TV, as a matter of fact, we have no TV at all here. We actually watch a lot of TV DVDs, just no overt commercials. of course I acknowledge that we are not in any way avoiding the pop culture infiltrations of our psyches. commerciality and consumerism are after all insidious, but we control the input of advertisements run by and for and on big media. Because we listen to and wach the nations broadcaster we are liable to hear very biased news considering the provider and who controls the purse strings at the corporation. CBC has always been a place for radicals to rest on their laurels before passing into relative oblivion and as such it is venerable. But it is NOT cutting edge in the sense that it is out there on the edge of technology. But it does have a competent web page and access to information not generally provided to listeners/viewers. For example, it has direct links on its main page to topics of concern for and about First Nations issues. CBC has also been in the forefront of the demands for clarity and truth in the taser incident at the Vancouver Airport, and CBC has done some excellent work towards child advocacy and protection. OK, the luddite speaks but just the same, if even my tech room mate cannot figure out how to get some satisfaction from You Tube and Paris Hilton can – I have to wonder what kind of world I am living in.

scanning my ideas

I have been working all day on a paste up for my newspaper. I am going to take pictures of the people who have submitted their works for me. I am going to make my comics but I am not sure if I will do them in one big picture or in frames like I did this summer. There are a lot of topics I could address such as poverty, child advocacy, treaties, reform of the child welfare system, children in care, etc.

This has been a very exciting week for me technology wise. Last week \\\i did my very first powerpoint and I was amazed at how easy it was to access and use. Linux Open Office has a program for the web called Impress which is a clone of powerpoint but for open source users (like me). When I have time not dedicated to school work i am going to experiment with it to see if it is as easy as ppt. Also i was veery impressed (ha ha) with the students nin my class and the work they submitted for their projects – they utilized many aspects of the program that I did not know how to access. Such as the use of clip art – I made acollage and scanned it and added it to my project but they got pictures off of the web and added them and they looked excellent. Also they experimented with colour backgrounds, text, and graphics too. I will be more open to using thes themes now that i know a little of what powerpoint bcan do.

I have also been using google to find out about things that I would normally look for a book to reference. For example, i was playing poker with my roommate and we were not sure of the sequence of cards and their worth so I googled it and we kept the visual list on the screen while we played through the night. It is this kind of instant answers to questions that makes google so useful to me. I would not depend on it for academic referencing but a source to find out anything about just about anything it is superb!!!

I have been avoiding signing into facebook here at home. I feel as if it is too invasive of my privacy and even tho it probably does not make a difference I am keeping my use to the computers at the college. I see the computers at the college as different from my own home computer. I feel protective towards my privacy and my space here at home. At the college I feel as if everyone is on-line and I am just another one of many. Here at home I feel as if I am under surveillance for my use and that the trail that I leave electronically leads right to my inner sanctum. I know it sounds paranoid but that is how I feel. Of course doing technology at the college means I have to have a relationship with microsoft and one of the things I notice right away at the college is how long it takes to boot up and allow me to use it. I clocked it at 1:55 mins. one day. Here, with my linux – openSuse OS I am on-line in less than 30 secs.!!! OK so its slow – but the moodle tech told me it is because it is loading all of my personal settings – so that is why it takes so long. Who would have thought that there would be such a technological discrepancy between the two systems.

This monday in my poetry class we got into a very loud and assertive conversation about facebook. The teacher, who had asked students in two other classes to sign up to make communication between the group easier but when she asked our class we rebelled and said we did not want to do it. That was at the beginning of the semester when we refuse the sign in and now she says that she is very unhappy with the invasiveness of the site. She did not get the benefits she was looking for and many of the students refused to keep up their correspondence because of the endless e-mails from people they did not know asking them to join groups they would never think of joining and sending messages to their fun walls and all sorts of popular culture stuff that hopefully I do not have to get involved in after this class is over. My room mate has assured me that I will be able to close my facebook account and there will be no repercussions or continuing attachment to the site but I will believe that when I see it. Well gotta go and do some work on my page. heres a rough idea of my layout

something new

This is the result of my successful powerpoint presentation. I sent my project to my teacher and then made sure he recieved it, with his help I was able to find it and see what it looked like. When I came home to my linux system I was unable to access it. But my teacher sent me an e-mail in response to my query about what to do. Seems  I had to enable pop-ups because my browser is not accepting things. So I learned how to do that today – probably should have learned it long ago but I have let my roomie be the tech and I need to be more involoved at least in  my own work. So, I am working on my comics and the layout of my newspaper. I have two contributors besides myself and I am harrassing the rest. I hope to have a mix of graphics and text. I was really impressed by my fellow students work in my other media studies class. I hope to learn to do some of the things that they demonstrated so well in their presentations. Like the use of graphics – clip art and pictures, and the use of colour and different fonts. It is an exciting medium for artists – computer graphics. Anyhow I should be working not talking.

powerpoint

Hey today I had the greatest time with technology that I have ever had. An exaggeration, maybe but I was so impressed with the ease of powerpoint that I cannot believe it. I am so used to the hassel between microsoft and linux that I had forgotten how easy the web has become to navigate if you are a microsoft user. Anyhow, here is what happened. I had to do a powerpoint presentation for my other media studies and I have never used that program before. So I was a novice today when I approached the problem. I arrived at 11 am after working a four hour shift at my new job, and I sat down and with minimal instruction from the reference librarian and began to enter my essay into the slides. I did not have to read any directions because the slides just showed up and all I had to do was fill them with my content. Anyhow, you probably all know this stuff but it was all new to me. The end of my story is that I finished my project at 2 minutes to 2 pm (due 2pm) and the only problem I had was importing my graphics from hotmail. I did not know how to rotate or stretch them and I did not find out until I spoke with my teacher that I could have used photo shop ( something else I have never used) but it is OK. The project was delivered and my instructor showed me how to modify my graphics to fit into the slide. And finally a successfully completed assignment on time!!!!And no new media anxiety!!

making comics

Today I started on my paste up for my newspaper/e-zine.  I am making a collage for my other Media Studies class and I am going to do my comics at the same time. I also have an idea what Ravengirl is going to look like, stay tuned!! I have not made any graphics lately as I have been working on the text I want to place on my pages. It is beginning to seem doable. I have a major collection of news items to prompt some ideas for my first edition. I want to have a theme at least at first. marginalization, gender bias,racism, economics – something topical and interesting. Or I might just let my contributors set the tone. That would really be interesting – some of my friends are pretty radical and politically active.

new media

I am frustrated beyond belief. Now my blog site is acting up!! Whenever I sign in it puts another web site address in the tittle space and the web site I came from (hotmail) in the text body, what is that about? I just lost a whole posting because it went back to MSN instead of posting to my blog. What is it?

So this is a repeat complaint – what else is new. I am finding it very hard bucking the mainstream with my rival OS. My roomie is obsessed with new tech and he keeps putting new browsers, and OSs in my computer. The last time he did it he added Mandriva and it took over control of my hard drive and would not recognize my openSuse/KDE desktop. So I could not get at any of my files. He had to remove it and let me have my original file system. Thank the gods!! Next he introduced me to the new OPERA web browser, which is way faster than Mozilla Firefox but otherwise not that different so far. So here I sit surrounded by new tech and frustrated by it all.

I am scanning the paste-up of my e-zine this weekend. I have invited friends and collegues to submit articles, poems, photos, drawings, rants, comics, or short stories to my page and then I will create it!!

getting submissions

Well frustration has set in permanently now. Every time I go home I have a new web browse or a new OS to deal with . I have used so many new aplications that they are beginning to dance in my head like Xmas sugarplums!!!

As for my term project, I am asking my friends and aquaintances to submit articles, photos, poem, or short stories for my e-zine. I am making a paste-up this weekend and scanning the format so I can see what it will all look like as a web page.

 I have been frustrated by the disconnect between Microsoft and linux – what else is new. I am almost ready to admit defeat and return skulking to the mainstream camp being unable to stand the tension  and the travelling between the college and my house. Right now I am looking for a Frontage web site tutorial and before next week I will have to learn how to do power point for a presentation on-line. Whew!! Is digital life ever busy. I long for the quiet of the lake and the sounds of the birds (Instead of the constant clik-clak of the keyboard!).

web page blues

Hey I am back after another bout with that flu that seems to be stalking the campus. I have not been able to work and I am spending a lot of time reading. I think that I am going to try to make a web page on each of microsoft and linux and see which is easiest. I am going to draw and scan a picture of my page this weekend and then invite some of my friends to contribute poems,pictures, editorials, whatever that adress the issues of borderlands and marginality. I have decided to make a page that resembles a newspaper and that way I can chunk the information and pictures to make an interesting mosaic of text and visuals. Hopefully! Otherwise I am learninb how to do power point for my other media studies.

Oh yeah, a cool thing happened this weekend. My roomie was downloading openSUSE on his kids computer and it kept refusing to load so he goes into the bios to check for the error and it says error on line 17. So he says to me google error on line 17 and you would not believe what happened. Without hesitation google produced the information!! Imagine, what esoteric information can be accessed if only you know what to ask for. By the way, he was unable to correct the error, the computer was an old compaq, and he could not correct the problem and ended up downloading another program, Mandriva instead. I was absolutely amazed at the versatility of the search engine!! So that is my new digital media story for this week.