jill/txt

Some mornings I find lots of stuff all at once. In the last ten minutes, I came across Query Letters, a blog consisting of plot summaries for movie proposals, supposedly (and possibly) posted by someone in Hollywood who has the honour of reading all these proposals. Thankfully she only posts the one-paragraph version of the plots, which makes for a fun, quick read. Before that, I found Susan Herzog’s lovely annotated list of essays and blog posts about academics who use blogs in their teaching. Since we’re still feeling rather French, Scott sent me a link to the issue of Magazine Litteraire where Umberto Eco enthusases over the hypertextual era we’re entering, and I found a page of links to e-lit (anno 2000), some of which is in French.

Now it’s time for brunch!

Look! A game conference in Bergen! Aesthetics of Play, 14-15 October, deadline for submitting abstracts is April 18. Rune Klevjer and the Infomedia department are organising it, and it’s in conjunction with Norway’s first art exhibition of videogames! Yay!

I like this paragraph from a comment François Lachance posted here nearly a year ago.

Blogging itself can be seen as psychologically attractive because of its potential to give duration to the punctual. It was not just the appearance of software that helped blogging catch on (it was possible to upload and update sites daily before blogware came on the scene). The global village wanted to reinstitute the vigil as a practice of relay.

I like watching as my friends upload their photos to Flickr. My evening, their morning, or their tomorrow, my this evening, and I can see the photos arriving in their photostreams and later being titled and tagged.

I am the superhero of .htaccess! I wrote an .htaccess file so that now when someone follows an old link to one of my old blogposts, they’re redirected to that exact same blogpost but at my new domain!!! I’m so awesome!

OK, so all I actually had to do is make a file in my main public_html directory called .htaccess containing the single line:

Redirect /~jill http://jilltxt.net

which is dead easy once you know it, but you know, you need to look up the .htaccess tutorial, and then regular editors won’t save stuff with just an extension and no filename, and so then you need to try and rename the file in the command line, and when that doesn’t work, you need to learn to use the command line text editor, which also turns out to be easy enough if you simply follow the rules, and then you need to figure out whether .htaccess wants the unix path name of the directory or the URL. But when all that’s done, well, YIPPPEEEE!

I know I still have to fix the layout for Explorer (sigh) and also I could update the template, but we’re just going to have to take this one step at a time.

Prix Möbius Nordica recently announced the winners for 2005, and quickly skimming the jury’s description of the winners and reasoning for their choices (Word doc for some reason) it looks like there are some really interesting projects there. Unfortunately, they’re mostly not accessible online. The main prize-winner, Switching, an interactive film from Danish Oncomedia, has a wonderful-looking website, but it’s only available on DVD, and there’s no info about whether one can buy the DVD, though I’ve written to ask. [UPDATE: it can be bought from
the Danish Film Institute’s website] Situations is a mobile phone project not documented online. The third is a massively multi-player game which would probably be fun but I don’t have time, the fourth is an interactive, narrative-based documentary but it’s in Finnish and also the full version is DVD-only (I think, I can’t really read Finnish), and the fifth, Timedreams is a Flash piece about busy-ness that makes my computer run really slowly and I’m not sure whether something other than busy quotes coming at me will happen. I wish more of this was online!

Time to go home, I think.

The winners will compete in the international Prix Möbius in France.

Look at that! I fixed everything! Thank you for your patience in the last day - the blog’s been morphing in and out of existence and templates as I figure the system out…

It took about five minutes after I stopped trying to figure it out by myself and simply read the manual. Which is short and sweet: the main issue with upgrading from Wordpress 1.2.2 to 1.5 is that the templates work differently, but you can easily adapt your old templates to the new system by replacing a few lines.

Hanna asked how I like the new version of Wordpress. I’ve barely used it yet, but it looks pretty, and there’s a dashboard with news about Wordpress and a direct link to all the spammish comments in my moderation queue (6,262) which is interesting although I’ve got to say a button to delete all 6,262 in one fell swoop would be even more useful. I suppose now I’m a MySQL expert I could go into the database and delete it by hand, as it were, but I think I’ll apply a face mask, pour some wine and consider packing my bags for Paris instead of figuring that out right now.

No, I’m not leaving for another 35 hours but doesn’t it sound lovely to have already packed?

In the “for goodness sakes!” category: I lost my formatting palette in Word. Showing and hiding it from the View meny just got me an animation of it flying off the bottom of the screen. Some searching showed I’m not the only person to have mislaid it in this way, and look! There’s a script that brings it back! Hereby blogged for future reference.

Searching an application’s help files for “lost” was quite amusing. I might make it a daily habit. Which other words should one search help files for?

OK, I know the comments aren’t working. I upgraded to a new version of Wordpress and everything works completely differently and tomorrow I’ll either downgrade or figure it out because it sucks.

I did it! This blog has now more or less successfully moved to jilltxt.net. Well, except for that hiccup about the undefined function: get_recent_comments() in /home/www/jilltxt.net/htdocs/index.php on line 186 which I’ll try and fix tomorrow.

Tomorrow I shall coax my students into finding groups for their semester long group projects, I shall force other students to fill out forms, my colleagues and I shall discuss the relative merits of four different possible ways of reorganising, and then, oh, after correcting the references in the copyedited version of a paper I shall fix my blog.

Actually Friday’s going to be the really cool day this week. Wanna know what I’m doing? Ooh, I don’t know whether I should tell you…

By Norwegian law, making copies of media for your own private use has always been legal. Right now, downloading music or movies is legal, but uploading isn’t. Now a suggested law will make it illegal to download music (except from close friends, if I’ve understood it correctly), which I can at least see the point of, sort of, but far worse: the law will make it illegal to make even private copies of that CD you bought (say, so you can listen to the music on your mp3-player) if the CD is copy protected.

Right.

So now I’ll buy a CD and find I can’t listen to it except on that trashy old CD player I never use any more? The funniest part of this is the explanation that you’re allowed to make a copy for your own private use on relevant equipment (the quotes below are from this PDF):

Etter forslaget vil omgåelse av vernede kopisperrer være forbudt. Forbudet mot omgåelse skal sikre at det ikke skjer en ukontrollert og økonomisk skadelig spredning av vernet innhold. Det skal likevel være tillatt å omgå sperrer dersom dette er nødvendig for privat avspilling på relevant utstyr. F.eks. vil en CD-plate kunne omgås for å spille av platen i bilstereoen, da en CD-spiller vil være relevant avspiller for en CD-plate, men sperren kan ikke omgås for å legge platen over på en MP3-spiller, da en slik spiller ikke kan anses for å være relevant for en CD-plate.

I’ll have to translate that last bit:

For instance, you can circumvent the copy protection on a CD so you can play it in your car stereo, since a CD-player will be a relevant player for a CD, but you can’t break the copy protection so you can transfer the music to an MP3-player, because such a player can’t be seen as relevant to a CD.

They added extra protection for being able to play the CD in your car stereo:

Det vil ikke være adgang til å omgå en kopisperre for å kopiere til privat bruk. Omgåelse er bare lov om det er nødvendig for privat avspilling på relevant utstyr. I den grad det er nødvendig å kopiere platen for å få spilt den av, f.eks. i bilstereoen, vil også det være tillatt.

which means

It will not be legal to break a copy protection to copy for your own private use. Circumvention is only permitted if it is necessary for private playing on relevant equiptment. If it is necessary to copy the CD in order to play it, for instance on your car stereo, copying is permitted.

Isn’t that an astoundingly clichéed example of Why We Need Young People In Government?

If the industry start copyprotecting more media, the law might get changed, the authorities say. If. They are insane.

I have to say it’s just as freaky to see Rød Ungdom - the communist youth organisation - dressing up as iPods for a demonstration against this law. That’s right: the communists are advertising for Apple.

[Read more: Elektronisk forpost Norge / Cory Doctorow’s excellent explanation of why technical restrictions on our media are dangerous (read my notes from his talk, Scott’s more carefully edited notes or watch the video)

I’ve been enjoying the streetart and graffiti on the old student centre in the last week or so. The building’s going to be torn down, so it’s been declared fair game for decoration, and every morning when I walk past it new additions have appeared.

The stencil art interests me most. This piece is by Strøk, who says in an interview at grafitti.no that his inspiration and practical skills come from stencilrevolution.com. Look how easy it is to use Photoshop to create a stencil from a photo! And then you simply cut it out and spray. A three layer stencil would take more time, but doesn’t look impossibly difficult. Timeconsuming and requiring skill and imagination, definitely, but no longer secret knowledge.

Now when I take photos I’ll be wondering whether they’d be stencilable.

The next Digital Arts and Culture conference is going to be in Copenhagen, December 1-3, and the call for papers is just out! Full papers to be submitted by August 1.

My advisor, Espen Aarseth, started the Digital Arts and Culture series with a generous four-year grant from the Norwegian Research Council. I was the local coordinator for the first DAC, back in 1998, in charge of emails and the website and practical details. I had lots of help from Torill and others in the final weeks - I was finishing my MA at the same time and it was really exhausting! Look, the conference website is still there, papers and all! The year after, Terry Harpold chaired the second iteration at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and it was excellent: twice as big as the year before and webcast and full of art installations and far more food than anyone could eat. (I met my not-yet-then-boyfriend for the first time; he was sitting in the sun with a group of young men and they fascinated me though I didn’t speak with them much. Later I insisted they come to the hotelroom party and he and I flirted but that was all.) I haven’t checked whether the webcasts still work - perhaps you can still watch quarrels about narrative and cybertext and fiction? The year after that, the conference returned to Bergen, chaired by Jan Rune Holmevik, and new people turned up, lots of people I still know and love to meet at conferences. The DAC 2000 website (designed by Elin) is still there too. 2001 was the final year of Norwegian Research Council funding, and the conference was held at Brown, where Espen was a visiting scholar. I arrived late for this conference, having - uh - well, actually I turned up at the airport with my daughter’s passport and understandably wasn’t let on the plane. Interestingly it only cost $50 to change my non-refundable dirt-cheap ticket to one leaving the next day, so I turned up a day late and the conference was already in motion and I never quite caught up. (I barely spoke with my not-yet-boyfriend but there was a smile as we rushed past each other; his hands were full of ELO t-shirts and he gave me one. I was surprised, and pleased.) There was a gap after that, until RMIT in Melbourne sponsored DAC 2003, which featured kangaroos and bite-sized lamingtons in addition to excellent shopping and a lot of very good papers.

I’m so pleased that the IT University in Copenhagen is keeping DAC alive with DAC 2005. Obviously I’m partial, having been involved in this baby’s conception, but the Digital Arts and Culture conferences have been my home ground, the place I meet people doing things like me and things I’d never have though of but intensely related to what I might want to do. They’ve combined art and literature and theory, and they’ve usually been small enough to be social, though I guess I got a pretty serious head start in the socialising. I hope I’ll see you there!

This is interesting. The Eyes of Laura. Will read more later. Blog, surveillance, videos, narrative, yeah, interesting.

Anders got the job! Hooray for førsteamanuensis Anders!