jill/txt

Oh no. I bought World of Warcraft, fed all four CDs to my computer, and now the sign-up website won’t load. I suppose I should wait and try again in half an hour but instead I keep trying again and again. Sometimes I get to the first page, even the second page before it tells me there’s an error or that the server’s not responding. Sometimes I don’t get that far, either.

It was Hilde talked me into it. “We should write something together,” she said, and walked down to the gamestore with me after work today so I could get my own copy of the game. I suppose the last thing I need is more things to fill my time, but I’m curious!

I might go build some cupboards instead. Plenty of hands-on jobs in a freshly renovated flat.

Blogging’s too complicated. I post something then look at it, think of how it looks, and delete it. More often, I delete it in my head before it’s even posted.

OK, so maybe this is what I need to do. Or is this freaky? No: what’s freaky is juggling twenty-five projects at once.

So I Wordpressed my department’s website. We only need fairly minimal information on the website, but it’s been a pain keeping the old site updated. Now everyone can have their own account - including MA students, I reckon - and hopefully information will be more easily available. Being able to edit pages that are outside of the blog chronology makes Wordpress a good tool for a smallish site that needs to be regularly edited by several people. At least I think so at this point, we’ll see as we’ve used it for a while.

It took me about an hour to install it and add some very basic content, and then I (well, the department) hired a student to fix the design. Nice. About time our department has an RSS feed.

I planned my semester so that I work at home on Fridays and Mondays, not touching any kind of administration. So today I’m working on a book chapter about research blogging, and working at ignoring all those other nagging tasks that go with administrating. I think separate research days will be really good.

The source code of the early 3d first-person shooter Quake has been released. There’s already at least one art project (QQQ) that subverts the game aesthetics, Jeremy Douglass writes (Fortunately for people like me who want a quick shot, there are movie files available from QQQ, so you don’t have to actually play it), and he wonders further what a textual version of Quake might be like:

TextQuake would be an environment for 3d reading rather than combat, using the large virtual architectures to create narrative “gardens of forking paths” which go beyond the Pac-Man grid of CYOA narratives and into a kind of writing that would function like a 3d version of the Minotaur maze from Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel “House of Leaves.”

I don’t know that TextQuake would necessarily make a very good platform for electronic literature, but it would certainly make an interesting conceptual exercise to think about what kind of a work TextQuake might be. Would you tell a story? Stories? Poems? I think I’d go for something akin to Kafka’s Trial.

Your blog sounds like the blog of a busy person, a friend wrote. Such a pity it’s the wrong sort of busy-ness - writing busy-ness has me blogging and thinking, but this keep a dozen balls in the air busy-ness doesn’t. I bet I’m forgetting something as we speak. Write.

Right, the report that’s due tomorrow. And a list of publications for a possible project. And get that info to him, and follow up on that other meeting.

See, that’s really not very interesting or bloggable, is it? When I’m in this, I have trouble rising high enough above it to see the forest instead of the trees. It’s an unfamiliar kind of busy-ness. It makes me appreciate how teaching and research, though often pressured day-to-day deadlined kind of activities, do allow and require a good deal of thought. You get to see the forest. The views. I enjoy blogging that stuff.

I guess the four minutes spent writing this are a glimpse of the big picture. Now, back to the trees.

Back to school for heads of (small) departments means:

• Plan your teaching for the semester. As usual.
• Coordinate orientation meetings.
• Write a report about how the department will nurture research in next year.
• Write a report evaluating the MA program.
• Follow up on reorganisation plans. Remind people we exist.
• Realise since everyone wants to use other teaching rooms than the one with the built in projector (because built-in-projector room has no windows and not enough seats for students) we now need more projectors. Frantic emails. Wish someone (like me) had thought of this earlier.
• Realise can buy new projector. Arrange for one to be bought and installed in pleasant teaching room. Consider where money will come from.
• Plan department seminars.
• Set up roster for leading writing group for MA students.
• Nag bookshop about more copies of dossier due to more students than expected.
• Make sure Facade is installed in computer lab.
• Arrange office space for people.
• Try to get some research done.

I’ve done or am doing most of these things. It’s under control. It just takes way more time than I wish it would.

Here’s the semester plan for the course I’m coordinating this semester, Digital Media Aesthetics. Teaching starts Monday.

Treasuremytext is a website to which you can send SMSes you receive to create an SMS diary. Each SMS sent (by a member who ticked off “contribute to SMS log in their profile”) is shown briefly on the front page, anonymously, and fascinatingly.
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An interesting exhibition format: British artist Katie Lips is exhibiting 160 SMS messages that have meant a lot to her in the last 18 months. Thing is, she’s exhibiting them on your ipod - the idea is that you download em and pop them into your notes on the iPod, which lets you browse them while on the bus or wherever. I like the idea. And of course right now I can’t find my ipod (aargh, I had it the other day) so I’m left wondering whether to wait (and most likely forget to install it) or to just read the messages as text on my computer?

I found this while searching for a short narrative project I thought I remembered being called 160 (which of course is the maximum number of characters in a single SMS) after noticing this onesixty project (via Writer Response Theory) that’s not what I remembered. I’ll definitely be returning to the site where Lips’ project is exhibited: S19.Afflatus is devoted to art for mobile devices, and has a lot of different projects you can download for your mobile phone, Pocket PC, ipod, Palm and so on. I’ll be exploring that later.

I hadn’t realised Brian Eno wrote the Windows startup sound. Wow. 43 folders has a link to an interview with him:

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

Realising I couldn’t remember what the Windows startup sound sounded like, I hunted around and found this rather thorough discussion of it, with a sound file, too, though the author only thinks that this is the version of the Windows sound composed by Eno. The Mac startup sound was created by a sound engineer, not by a professional composer. You can read about the origins of many more tiny yet familiar sounds at Music Thing.

There must be a website somewhere with links to funny or parodic reviews at Amazon. Me, I followed the trail from the review of packing tape that Profgrrrrl mentioned to the complete works of porcupinebath, where I found multiple reviews of deodorant and tape. Nice little break from paper-writing.