What was the quality control process behind the creation of this logo? Should that be “Discover Your Interest” or “Discover You’re Interesting”? I’m not sure I associate owls with curiosity. Owl from the Christopher Robin stories is pompous and oblique. The owl from the Tootsie Pop commercial is impatient and destructive. The Owl in “I…
Have I mentioned lately that I have awesome students? For a “Creative Critical Presentation” in my online American Literature survey, English major Tyler Carter created A Message from Hester Prynne, Â a 9-minute video that explores Hester’s psychology and spirituality, through music, dance, poetry, and cinematography. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivxfKoZmF5k All the technology Seton Hill offers to its students…
At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him—he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room. Then one morning the…
Fan Video Win
Have I mentioned lately that I have some really awesome students? Here’s a narrated screencast, presenting a progress report on a term project that involves programming in Inform 7 to create a text-adventure game designed to teach student journalists how to cover a campus event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKxPi3L6aDs This is what a 21st-century English major can do,…
I’ll have to look into this. Popcorn Maker. https://popcorn.webmaker.org
On the mobile version of my WordPress website, I made the subtlest stylesheet tweaks — adjusting the date text a few pixels to the right to align with the title text, resizing the comment box so that it fits on the screen, adjusting the whitespace ever so slightly. Most of the world will never notice…
I’m not sure “thank you” is the right way to acknowledge this painful link from Paul Crossman. “Oh, come on,” you’re probably saying. “It’s not the music that’s addictive. It’s the dance, from the goofy video. That’s what went viral.” (There’s that word again.) Well, it turns out that this programming effect could be embedded…
William Shatner and technology go way back, but it’s taken him until today to get his own smartphone app. Then again, he is a man known to take long pauses. Dubbed Shatoetry, the new app (iPhone-only, for the moment) lets you string together a variety of pre-recorded words — each with three different versions —…
In anticipation of the film, Sony turned to Wieden+Kennedy to give fans the opportunity to serve alongside the Royal Secret Intelligence Service’s most famous fictional agent, by passing a secretive five-part examination conducted through an online text adventure game. Finding the text adventure game in the first place required more than a little work. A…
Visitors often remark the campus reminds them of Hogwarts, so it’s fitting to learn that a Quidditch goal has been assembled at Seton Hill University, in preparation for a charity tournament Monday.
Mean technology. Mean, mean technology. The legal case brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google was a revelation, as important, if not as celebrated, as the obscenity trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the face of the openness and honest labor of engineers, the priestly class closed…
What is with the five-year-old photo illustrating this story that was published yesterday? That Kindle is ancient. Born digital describes works that are created with a computer and are meant to be read on the computer. They’re not works that you print out. The computational aspect of the work is part of its aesthetic and…
I have recently started managing the Facebook page for a local arts nonprofit. Tracking the number of views, likes, and shares generated by the items I post has been a lot of fun. I’ve definitely played fewer rounds of Civilization as a result of doing more Facebook page management. The recent experience means I am…
I teach my journalism students to write CSS and HTML by hand, to make simple games  in Scratch, and to write text adventure games in Inform 7 not because I expect them to get jobs doing any of those activities, but because a fundamental coding literacy, on top of their liberal arts education, will help…
By comparing the specimens’ ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and…
Here’s what it sounded like at our first rehearsal, after learning the parts for about 40 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV3xLg9KuiI Here’s how it looked opening night, two weeks later (I’m the surly guy in the white hat): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bXEF8B4wY
Silly fun, just in time for the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation. via KLINGON STYLE (Star Trek Parody of PSY – GANGNAM STYLE) – YouTube.
The elderly Spanish woman who ruined a religious fresco with her botched restoration is now demanding royalties from her work after it became an unlikely tourist attraction. An internet petition to keep the repair job garnered widespread support and seizing an opportunity to swell its coffers, the church began levying a 4 euro (£3) entrance…