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I briefly wonder
If mama knows that ‘gaga’
Is baby for ‘braiiiiiiiins’
(Not traditional haiku form or fodder, I know, but hey – the mental image was too good to pass up. Special thanks to li’l Scott Edge. We’re onto you, buddy.)
Old friend back in town
Chicago Comedian
Sorry Ken Cubs suck 🙂
(Does an emoticon count as a syllable?)
Four in the morning
Abruptly rudely awake
Stupid little cat
Berlin or Boston
A cold wind, another strange room
Where the hell am I
(Note: although I have little to no hope that I’ll be able to pull off another 30|30 project, as I did for National Poetry Month in 2007 and attempted in 2008, a man’s gotta try. Since I’m still a little run-down from my recent travels, I thought I’d ease into things with a timely haiku.)
Back in January I posted about how GAMBIT alum Skeel Lee Keng Siang‘s “Introduction to Soft Body Physics” won the Ziggyware Fall 2008 XNA Article contest, but apparently the accolades for Skeel’s work don’t stop there! The piece was also entered into the Intel Havok Physics contest, where it won two more prizes:
For his win, Skeel took home a gaming PC worth a cool two grand. I said it before and I’ll say it again: “Way to go, Skeel! Congratulations!”
Okay, so I’m having a little bit of a strange crisis at the moment. I’ve noticed lately that Remiel, my 2006-era MacBook Pro, has been slo-o-o-o-owing do-o-o-own. The spinny pinwheel of death has been appearing more and more frequently, and the poor little guy just ain’t what he used to be. Loading my email takes forever, as does loading applications. When I approached my friend Mike about it, he groaned and said that he’d seen those symptoms before. He suggested that maybe I was nearing a catastrophic hard drive failure.
Frak.
Okay, so maybe I need a new hard drive. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – the beastie only has a 100GB drive in her to start with, which has grown increasingly stuffed with various applications, media and other bric-a-brac. Clearing a bunch of that out is likely to help as well, but this has brought me to something of a philosophical quandary: given my recent decision to move into the cloud, how much sense does it make to buy a 7200RPM 500GB hard drive, even if is less than $150 now? I could buy this monster and thus have enough hard drive space to never worry about offloading photos and videos from my 16GB miniSD card again (well, not for a while anyway), but I’m growing increasingly concerned with the idea of data loss. That’s why I bought the Western Digital Mirror Edition 2TB drive for backups at home – and the idea is that I’d offload all the photos and videos and whatnot onto that – but this recent trip showed me that when you’re on the road, the cloud isn’t always there for you, and it’s not always feasible to try and move large amounts of data up and down that way. Worse, the bigger the hard drive, the more likely it is that (knowing me) the time between backups will just get bigger and bigger, thus increasing the likelihood of total catastrophic data loss if something should go wrong with said laptop. So theoretically I should buy a smaller hard drive to enforce my ‘encloudification’ and minimize any data loss, but it’s hard to buck the notion of “yeah, but it’s only a few bucks more…” Et cetera, et cetera.
What do you folks think?
I’ve returned from CONATHON09 and am now playing some serious catch-up. If I owe you an email, hopefully you’ll hear from me by Friday, if not sooner. I’m also hoping to get a bunch of new photos up onto Flickr and the rest of my videoblog entries up onto here, hopefully before my hard drive fails (as my friend and tech guy Mike at the office is warning me might be the cause of my machine’s recent super slowdowns and erratic behavior). As always, stay tuned – I’ve got some great stories and media coming up.
Well, damn. My attempts at videoblogging have been temporarily paused due to an unforeseen circumstance: a shortage of hard drive space on my laptop. Once I land in San Francisco and drop my stuff off at the hotel, I may go searching for an el cheapo Flash drive or card to offload some of these files - I’m not really feeling the idea of uploading several gigs to my website just to clear up some video editing room - but this project might be halted for just a little bit. Stay tuned.
Pictoplasma was amazing, by the by. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my day, and I think this one was one of my very favorites – seriously, right up there with vintage SXSW. Truly amazing events, art, city and people. More details to follow.
A brief interlude (hence the XX in the title) to say that my talk at Pictoplasma this afternoon went smashingly well, although I was up until 4AM last night reworking my slides into a fairly heavily reworked edition. A 25MB .zip file of the Keynote slides and PDF of said new edition is now available on my lectures and presentations page, or by clicking right here, or by clicking the below title card graphic.
Those of you who are interested in the rest of the stuff I have to say on transmedia narratives should check out my Master’s thesis, “Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company”, right here. (I really need to finish converting this into a book – the demand is definitely there.)
I’ve also been making a ton of great new friends and contacts while hanging out here – in a way, Pictoplasma feels like SXSW back in 2003. More details (and more videoblogs) tomorrow!
In which our hero wraps up his sightseeing for the day with a somber visit to the monument to the Berlin Wall.
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