jill/txt

Ah. The Mac Observer actually moved on from the “Macs don’t get infected by computer viruses” and tried to figure out how many viruses actually exist for Macs. Out of 71000 known viruses, there are 553 Microsoft Word Macro viruses which could affect Mac users using Word, there are 26 that can hit Mac Classic operating systems, and there are zero known viruses that target OS X.

We’re like Superman. Impervious. Ha.

The main thing about orkut.com that’s different from other social networking services is the network view it gives you of people’s friends. They’re arranged according to how many other Orkut users count them as their friends. If a user has a lot of friends, only the ones who have most friends themselves show up in the network view - the most popular in the middle of the patchwork friendship quilt. The strength of social ties is not visualised at all.

I’ve never met the people in the centre of my Orkut network, though I’ve communicated with them, I like them, and I expect I’ll hang out with them when I’m at a conference they’re at or in the same town as them. Luckily my network’s small enough that the people I care most about are still visible, albeit on the outskirts. In my standard profile view, though, there’s only room for nine friends. Out of these nine, I’ve only physically met two, and while I liked them both a lot, and I look forward to seeing them again, I’ve actually only met them once. My closest friends and collaborators, people far more important to me, are already invisible.

I suppose any representation of reality will have some blind spots. This one seems fairly severe.

Uh oh. Only a few days left till the deadline for submitting a 500-1000 word abstract to Internet Research 5.0, the annual Association of Internet Researchers’ conference. Place: Sussex. Theme: Ubiquity. Dates: September 19-22, 2004.

MUTE is filesharing inspired by ant colonies that keeps each individual anonymous. Like an ant.

The students had written about apple.com and microsoft.com, and today we added screenshots. The first group happily cut, paste, saved and uploaded screenshots of webpages almost identical to the ones we saw two days ago, Apple showing iPods instead of iLife, Microsoft having added a few more stock photos of smiling white people. An hour later the second group screamed in horror when they saw that apple.com had changed, a lot: Pepsi bottles all over the screen? “Why on earth are they advertising for Pepsi?”, the students asked. Tom Henrik had heard something on the news last night about Pepsi doing deals with all the cool kids, but strategy or not, this website looks ugly. And I love my Mac and hate Pepsi. I don’t want my Mac dirtied by a connection like that!

There’s work at our department on a project on norms and standardisations, and four of us are doing ten minute intros on how our fields relate to this in the department seminar tomorrow. Of course my requested ten minutes will be about blogs and norms and standards.

There are dozens of angles on this. I could talk about how fast the weblog genre is changing, and how standards eternally play tag with reality. RSS, for instance, was designed for news sites five years ago and doesn’t completely work for weblogs, so a new set of “specifications for syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites”, Atom, is being collaboratively developed by bloggers themselves. I could talk about how TrackBacks were implemented by Moveable Type but have been made open enough that other tools can follow the same standard, and many have. I could talk about how a peculiarity of one blogging tool - linking the timestamp to a stable URL for an entry (permalink) - became an unwritten standard despite hardly being intuitive or good usability. I still use this convention out of habit, though I’ve noticed many others have moved on to more obvious permalinks.

I could take a different angle and talk about how blogging becomes an expectation, as in the US presidential campaign, where candidates are expected to have weblogs. Dean was first, I think (Blog for America, Generation Dean Blog, Wired interview the others followed course (Kerry, Edwards, Clark), now even Bush has one, though it’s more the form (frequently updated posts) than the spirit (personal, subjective) of the weblog you see there. I could mention academics who’ve complained that they don’t want blogs but hate that their voices, because unblogged, are ignored by blogging colleagues.

Either angle could last for my allotted ten minutes. I think I’ll see what the others say and speak accordingly. Collecting a few links in advance never hurts, though.

A long morning of wild yet possible and incredibly inspiring ideas sent those grumps away! Brilliant!

I woke up grumpy. I cheered a little at my joyful child jumping on me but the relentless before-school routine of shower, coffee, breakfast, lunch packs, nagging, get dressed, come and eat, brush your teeth, hair, put on shoes gnawed that away away. Child safely at school I look at the calendar. It’s all red and blue: blue for work, red for parenting. There’s no orange for Jill, none at all, not between last Friday night and this Friday night.

The problem with loving your work is that it’s easy to work all the time. Just check this, fix that, write a bit of this, finish up that, write another email, read this book, it’s useful for work, you know. The problem with parenting alone, even if it’s only every other week, even if you have supportive grandparents for your child, is that you’ve always got to be sensible, adult. Enforce bedtime, get your child to school in time, help organise friendships, monitor homework, ensure warm enough clothes, administer cough syrup in the middle of the night. Oh, there’s silly bits too, heaps of fun bits, good bits, love, she dashes back to kiss me before running through the school gate, but oh I need orange time. Time for Jill.

Don’t worry, even IKEA has a walkthrough. (Via GTxA, and noted by many at Delicious)

One of my students (Helge? Eirik? I remember where they were sitting…) told the class that Dagbladet.no, major Norwegian newspaper site, emphasises serious news before six pm and silly news and games after six. Explains a lot. Would anyone know of a seriousish reference for this?

I love how students transform from unresponsive mutes to vibrant knowledge-spouters when you find ways to let them talk. Too bad I couldn’t find a way to wake the network in Auditorium B from its unresponsive state, too, but we did fine anyway. Students are quite able to chat with their neighbours to try and figure out the aim of a newspaper site and an auction site from memory (we did dagbladet.no and qxl.no), and to discuss the connotations of today’s MIT homepage. Here’s a screenshot in case it changes, and look, a handy, Norwegian, explanation of denotations, connotations and associations - the difference isn’t obvious the first time you hear the words. The biggest change came when I told the students they were experiencing problem-based learning (that must have been the voice in my head asking where the 2 x 45 min lecture was) and asked them to spend fifteen minutes pouring over printouts of microsoft.com and apple.com’s front pages discussing the differences with the two people closest to them. After all that at least ten different people (trust me, that’s a lot) took part in the larger discussion, and lots of great points were made. I even started getting the hang of their names! A great thing about teaching web design and how to read the web is that the students tend to have lots of very varied knowledge about the web.

For Wednesday the students are blogging posts comparing Microsoft and Apple’s websites. We’ll discuss these and do peer (and teacher) feedback on Wednesday - hopefully if we do a fair bit of very focussed writing like this, the graded blog post analysing a website, which is due in a month, will be totally honed and excellent. Perhaps they’ll spend a month writing and rewriting their Apple and Microsoft readings, or the posts they wrote about “Faen” and The Unknown, and their handed in work will be brilliant. Or at least they’ll have written several posts in the genre before handing one in.

I want to improve at writing productive assignments and tasks. I find it hard to describe what, exactly, a good, short post discussing a website should contain. Often my explanations seem far too long. Matt’s assignments are exemplary and I’m secretly planning to steal them all for next semester’s Digital Media Aesthetics (if they hire me) but sadly, they’re not quite right for web design. They’re great for general inspiration, though. Just look at the wisdom in that assignment on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Maximum learning for the students compressed down into a manageable assessment load for the teacher. Perfect.

News from Magic Lantern that there’s now a blog tracking their presidential election game Frontrunner as it progresses towards release in March. Screenshots show you can pick your candidate - Gore or Bush, from the looks of it. I suppose playing this year’s election might be a bit much…

Hey, the university newsletter has a photo of me and my beautiful daughter sipping wine and cordial after the graduation ceremony! And here are a gazillion or so official photos.

The going rate for an invitation to Orkut (the latest of many rather pointless social networking systems) is currently US$11. (via eleganthack)