The Geecologist

Now, Voyager

The Geecologist — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:06:13 +0000

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.

The film takes it’s title from Walt Whitman’s The Untold Want (complete above), and the voyager of the title is played by Bette Davis.

The nature of her voyage is perhaps less obvious. There are a number of journeys throughout the film, including much real travel by ship, but there is also her mental journey from a psychiatric hospital to a confident young woman, and at least one other possibility of a societal nature; Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) represents the wave of independent young women not defining themselves in relation to a man.

One disappointing aspect of the film is that Charlotte’s happiness isn’t due to her discovering her independence or ability to control her own destiny (pulling away from both a controlling mother and various suitors), but results from a lowering of her expectations; expectations that sit well within traditional norms.

The much quoted line of the film sort of captures this in a bittersweet way:

Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars

Imagine all this in the context of the studios just beginning to relinquish their stranglehold on stars and productions, and the reality of Bette Davis exploring the power of her own stardom at this point. She is said to have had significant input into the decisions regarding her co-stars for the production, and even the Director, Irvine Rapper, was selected to ensure she would be happy.

Now,Voyager is an interesting document of social change in the early ’40s, and also provides a fascinating insight into how actors like Bette Davis challenged the system.

N.B. This is absolutely not to be confused with the punctuationless and bizarre Now Voyager starring Barry Gibb of BeeGees fame.

La Bonne Chanson

The Geecologist — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:58:21 +0000

The morning sun serenely warms and gilds
The rye and corn still damp in dewy fields,
The sky has kept the freshness of the night.
One wanders out just for the sake of it,
Beside the river with dim yellow weeds,
Along a grass path edged by alder-trees.
The air is sharp. At times a bird will soar,
Bearing some honey from the hedge, or straw,
And it’s reflection lingers, when it’s gone.
That’s all.
But it delights the pensive man,
For, bright and gentle, with a swift caress
It’s stirred his dream of wondrous happiness,
Recalled a girl, the charming vision,
The white and sparkling apparition
The poet dreams of, and the man holds dear,
Invoking in his prayers, though some may sneer,
The spouse he has found at last, the soul adored
Which, from the first, his soul has mourned, implored.

Catch 22

The Geecologist — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:16:30 +0000

They were the most depressing group of people Yossarian had ever been with. They were always in high spirits. They laughed at everything. They called him ‘Yo-Yo’ jocularly and came in tipsy late at night and woke him up with their clumsy, bumping, giggling efforts to be quiet, then bombarded him with asinine shouts of hilarious good-fellowship when he sat up cursing to complain. He wanted to massacre them each time they did. They reminded him of Donald Duck’s nephews. They were afraid of Yossarian and persecuted him incessantly with nagging generosity and with their exasperating insistence on doing small favours for him. They were reckless, puerile, congenial, naive, presumptuous, deferential and rambunctious. They were dumb; they had no complaints. They admired Colonel Cathcart and they found Colonel Korn witty. They were afraid of Yossarian, but they were not the least bit afraid of Colonel Cathcart’s seventy missions. They were four cleancut kids who were having lots of fun, and they were driving Yossarian nuts. He could not make them understand that he was a crotchety old fogey of twenty-eight, that he belonged to another generation, another era, another world, that having a good time bored him and was not worth the effort, and that they bored him, too. He could not make them shut up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

CSS3 transformations

The Geecologist — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:06:58 +0000

Experimenting with the possibilities of CSS3 transformations and the timed element of them. No longer does a CSS rollover state simply mean a colour change, you now have movement that you can schedule.

Prior to this the options for this were basically Flash or Javascript, both of which had their own issues, especially for accessibility on slow connections, and a requirement for up to date software and bad degradation when that wasn’t present.

So anyway, you can now rotate, slide or rescale your objects using only good old CSS.

In the wrong hands this could take us down the road of scrolling marquees/animated gifs from the 90′s where everything would flash or whizz around. The timed element of this is only supported by the webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc) at the moment, and the timings are disregarded by Firefox which makes the movement abrupt.

Here are some other helpful articles about HTML5 & CSS3:
the-art-of-web.com
net.tutsplus.com

Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor

The Geecologist — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:40:06 +0000

Jim O’Rourke, O’Rourke, O’Rourke. He’s been a member of Sonic Youth, Gastr Del Sol and Loose Fur. He’s recorded with or produced John Fahey, Fennesz, Flying Saucer Attack, Jennifer Newsom, The Red Krayola, and made soundtracks for Werner Herzog. He’s like a Steve Albini for people who like a bit of avant-jazz mixed in with their steady diet of hardcore and Burt Bacharach.

I like him.
Jim, you’re alright.

Here’s an extract from his recent album The Visitor, possibly not the best solo album he’s made, but only because of the stiff competition.

Semantic web for ecampaigners

The Geecologist — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:25:09 +0000

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web, also known as Web 3.0, comes from Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the Web as a platform to facilitate simple exchange of data. A simple way to understand what it is and what it might mean for us as e-campaigners is to compare it to the W3C standards for XHTML and CSS.

Basically it is an agreed set of shared standards to make the content of the web understandable and accessible to computers/machines. In this way, it’s similar to how we create meta data to define keywords and descriptions of our websites.

There are a number of flavours of the semantic web already being put into practice, so it is important that we all continue to monitor and discuss progress of the various types so we’re well situated to influence their development.

Lets look at an example to make this less abstract.
The ‘flavour’ I’m most familiar with is Microformats.

So here’s a practical example of an event you want to post on your site:

The July Digital Charities meetup will be on 7th July from
4 -
6pm at
UNICEF
(More on Digital Charities site)

If it was microformatted so it could be read by aggregation tools, it would look like this – additional code in italics:

class="vevent">
The class="summary">July Digital Charities meetup will be on 7th July from
4 -
6</abbr>pm at
class="location">UNICEF
(class="url">More on Digital Charities site)

Of course, both would display as:

The July Digital Charities meetup will be on 7th July from 4 – 6pm at UNICEF (More on Digital Charities site)

The second version however would allow you to automatically enter that event into your calendar with just a couple of clicks. Currently you need to install a microformat reader plugin to do this (see below), and certain plugins support only some microformats inevitably, but there have been strong indications that future iterations of Firefox & Internet Explorer will include native support for microformats, so users won’t have to download additional plugins, or know how this extra functionality works.

Here are some of the Firefox microformat plugins:

Operator – Handles most microformats
Google Maps for Microformats – Reads microformatted ‘geo’ codes, then finds the location on Google Maps
Tails Export – Reads events (hcalendar), business cards (vcard) and locations (geo), but the information display is pretty awful

Microformats just happened to be my introduction to semantic web, so the easiest to use to explain the principles. If Rolf were writing this, you’d have got some beautiful examples of RDF semantic code by now, but I don’t want to add another layer to what is supposed to be an introduction to the concepts. If you’re interested there’s plenty to find Googling microformats and RDF, and this Semantic Focus article might help to compare the two.

What are the implications for ecampaigning?

I’m glad you asked.

Imagine it’s a few years in the future, and you’re passionate about a specific issue, region, or just have a free weekend coming up and want to take part in a bit of activism. You go to your browser which now has a semantic web aggregator built into it by default, and simply choose the appropriate parameters and you’ve got all the information, and links to, our web campaigns on the issue / region you’re interested in instantly. This is going to change the environment we’re working in fairly significantly. Obviously, there is still going to be an audience for the supporter journeys we currently develop, but we need to be aware of, and tailoring our content for this next step on web.

Better still, imagine you’re a journalist / potential donor / decision-maker keen to know which organisations are working on certain issues, or in certain areas of the globe. Similarly our semantic information will be instantly presented to these audiences if they choose to use the available tools.

Next steps

As Rolf was explaining at ECF10 for the semantic web to work, everyone needs to be using the same syntax for adding this additional meaning to sites. Collectively we are probably the largest group of webbies with a vested interest in ensuring a shared syntax that works well for our campaigns. If we don’t engage with the process at this stage, we are liable to be having to bend another agreed syntactic set for our purposes. The syntax that would be appropriate for news or selling products is not going to fit with how we want to present our campaigns, events and donor opportunities. I suggest we initiate discussions on our required parameters now, before all the agreements are made and there isn’t so much flexibility.

Who’s with me?!

Resources

Tim Berners-Lee explaining the semantic web as Linked Data in his Ted Talk
The W3C page about RDF
Semanticweb.org page on RDF
Microformats.org a central resource
The Semantic Focus site
The Semantic Web Interest Group also on W3C

David Pajo – Where Eagles Dare

The Geecologist — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:10:00 +0000

Absolutely beautiful cover of The Misfits by David Pajo. If you haven’t heard of him, you should really go to his website now and show him some love!

David Pajo came to fame with the legendary Slint, and has since been putting out music with a number of bands, and great solo material under a series of monikers including Pajo, Papa M, M, and Aerial M.

“We walk the streets at night, we go where eagles dare…”

In case the original has slipped your memory:

Beck Record Club – Need You Tonight

The Geecologist — Thu, 20 May 2010 09:23:13 +0000

Yep, it was a popular record. Think I had INXS‘s Kick on tape, format betraying age as ever. Anyway, Beck does it again with his Record Club with great vocals this time from Annie Clark (St Vincent) and Angus Andrew (Liars). Brilliant!

Fup

The Geecologist — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:41:35 +0000

The differences in temperament carried over into style. Tiny enjoyed the open, linear purity of checkers. Grandaddy favored games with hole cards, where your strength was in your secrets and you flew into the eye of chaos riding your ghost. Tiny started work at dawn. Grandaddy stirred at the crack of noon. Tiny didn’t mind doing the dishes. Grandaddy cooked – a skill forced upon him by Tiny’s adoption, and one which he came to strangely enjoy – but he only cooked dinner as that was the only meal he ate, breakfast skipped in sleep, lunch a cup of coffee and a shot of Ol’ Death Whisper. Tiny drank a little, usually just a swallow before bed to hold bakc the dreams; Grandaddy drank a lot, often a pint a day, to keep the dreams moving.

Zach Hill joins Boredoms

The Geecologist — Fri, 14 May 2010 09:59:52 +0000

…only on stage though (not permanently) for the purposes of this blinding Boadrum set at Matt Groening’s ATP. They were fantastic when I saw them, and it looks like they’re getting better!

Have to love how smoothly Zach Hill’s (Hella) platform moves in. I guess that’s as close as you can get to walking through the audience when you’re the drummer…

The Geecologist

Now, Voyager

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La Bonne Chanson

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Catch 22

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Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor

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Semantic web for ecampaigners

What is the Semantic Web?

What are the implications for ecampaigning?

Next steps

Resources

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David Pajo – Where Eagles Dare

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Beck Record Club – Need You Tonight

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Fup

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Zach Hill joins Boredoms

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