Monday, 27th March, 2006

Working For The (Wicker) Man

sweatshop

In my continuing efforts to transform my house from a persistent Trannie Explosion™ into something that resembles a space you can actually move around in, I had the brainwave the other day of buying a little wicker basket to store all the bottles and wipes and stuff¹ that usually live on my bathroom floor.

A step in the right direction there, I feel

But a moment ago, I was sitting on the loo (as one does in the mornings), and a thought struck me...

...I bought that basket for £2.50 from a local tat-shop. £2.50 is, I think you'll agree, rather cheap for something like that. It may not be very sturdy — and probably won't last more than a year or so — but making a wicker basket takes time does it not?

(I'm guessing at least an hour or two)

So, considering that the shop has to have marked-up the price, and there are probably shipping costs and the like involved, there's either someone out there making wicker baskets at a rate of £1 an hour, or there's a machine that can make them.

And, considering that I can't for the life of me imagine how a machine could make something quite so fiddly, then it must be 'someone'.

I suddenly feel part of some global exploitative mechanism

(¹ I was going to write "bottles and wipes and shit" there, but I thought that the concept of me storing 'shit' in a wicker basket in my toilet could get misconstrued as being literal, rather than metaphorical)

De (Jitter) Bug

dev video tranniefesto

Sorry about this — please do ignore me

One of the reasons why I went ahead with the redesign, was because I wanted to start using film clips — stuff I've made, stuff I've shot with my phone — here. Putting in things by hand is OK — but I've wanted to be able to do the same with video that I can do with photos: Upload them via email

Video Blogging ... Mmmmm

I've already written a complete web-app that lets me (and my students) shove film online via the web and our phones, and I'm wanting to adapt it a bit to use here too.

The problem though, is that every time I put video online, I get fifty million emails all complaining that I've crashed everyone's browsers (a QT7 bug, that I think is fixed in 7.0.4, but who knows?)

So, um, I wanted to ask a favour I just want to know if this page that the image below links to crashes at all (you need to click on the image to play the movie).

Cheers

Cheers guys So that's two Firefox 1.5, and one Safari.

Firefox was the one I was worried about — it's not really worth going into, but I'm using and MPEG4 rather than a .mov

a vague sense of unease.

Funnily enough, that's exactly how I felt at the time. (It was the morning after our staff booze-up dinner party a few weeks ago

ADHD?

Which reminds me, I need to make a video about badly designed vaginal douches...

OK, I'm not even going to ask

Are You A Being

moving-image work

Have I posted this one before? I'm not entirely sure

This was the first film I made after I graduated in 1999 (I was a 'mature' student). At the time, I was heavily into messing around with Adobe After Effects — trying to see just what I could get it to do.

I was also thinking that what I wanted to do in life was make very commercial-based graphics, and in a sense, this film was all about showcasing what I could do.

I've since moved on in terms of what the purpose of my films are, but it's nice every now and again to watch this, and remember layering fifty million sequences over the top of themselves, and tying the audio to the movement of the video with a host of Motion Math scripts.

And, for what it's worth, the final sequence — the 'waterfall' of numbers — was done a long time before the Matrix came out

(Apologies for the quality and the file-size — I only had a crappy version lying around. Somewhere I've got the original...)

what I wanted to know is: Is that an 'eyes front head-shot' (like the 'dress different' pose) and is your hair in bunches?

No — quite the opposite

I refused to get drawn into this debate

nope

Alumni

technical-support

I'm not sure how other courses at other universities keep up-to-date with what their ex-students are up to, or whether or not they keep in touch with them at all.

We have our own clever system. It's called "Siobhan is still technical support for them".

*brrrrrring brrrrrrring*

<ex student>: "Hiya. Remember me? I graduated two years ago"
<me>: Hey! How's it going? Whatcha up to these days?
<ex student>: "Um, this and that. Listen I wanted to ask a favour ... my computer..."

(Nah, I love it really )

"What do you want to turn to shite today?"

Yeah, I noticed that when I was testing it all out in MSIE the other day. I can't for the life of me think why that would be the case though

eBay: APPLE II

ebay apple

I *so* want this. I wrote my first ever program on one of these. It would complete my set

Grey box!

I see monkey

Sometimes

random rant

Sometimes, you want to grab the Internet by the lobes and pull it as far into your face as you possibly can, and scream into its eardrums.

Sometimes, you just want the whole world to stop turning while it gives you a chance to work out what the fuck it is that's going on in your head.

Sometimes, you want to pull every last bit of coded tendril out of every website you've ever been to, and use it as some kind of aggregated whipping stick to beat seven shades of shit out of everyone you've come across in an evening.

And sometimes, well, sometimes you just want some people to leave you the fuck alone.

...

Hi. My name's Siobhan Curran. And tonight I've got a big stick, and I'm taking requests.