My Phone
I’m going to have a little moan on here because I’m so annoyed! My nice pretty pink phone a Nokia 7390 got wet and stopped working so Vodafone sent it off to be fixed, but because of the water damage it couldn’t be fixed and Vodafone don’t stock the phone anymore. So I had to swap the phone like for like (basically have to pick another phone which is closest to that one) I had a choice of 4 phones a Nokia N73, Samsung U700, Sony Ericisson K800 or K810 or whatever it’s called and they were all ugly and horrible. I wanted to a Nokia as I don’t like Sony’s and I didn’t want a Samsung again so I picked the Nokia N73 but I hate it! It’s ugly the buttons are all over the place, there is no memory card so the phone has hardly any memory I can fit 2 songs and 2 messages on at one time (so I have to buy a memory card to put any more) and I can’t set my own songs as my alarm…the worst part is I have an 18 month contract only had the phone I wanted for 6 months and now have this crap phone for a year! 
3D final piece
I finally got round to uploading my video to YouTube so I can post the final movie on my blog as no one has seen it (unless they went to the viewing on Tuesday). Enjoy! And the last advert
Last deadline
My last deadline for this term has come and gone yay! It was the second part of the HCI essay which I have to say was very hard to write! A lot harder to write than the first part of the essay. I suppose it’s because with this essay it was more theory based on methodologies rather than the actual system. As Ollie pointed out to me last night the first essay you could be a bit more creative and think about the design of the system you were using, whereas this one is slightly bit boring as it’s theory and just writing about the process the designer would go through. A lot of it was covered in the HCI lectures which is helpful but still a bit tedious to have to go through all of them to find the right information and then interpret that to fit in with the idea for the system I was writing about. I eventually finished at 3.15 this morning, and surprisingly I was able to get over 2000 words, considering I was stuck around 1500 I was shocked lol. Although it wasn’t until I printed it out did I realise there was a little bit I could have included which I hadn’t :S but no need to worry I handed it in and that’s the main thing to think about. I know I could have added it in and printed out that page but the printer was running out of black ink and it used a lot as it included a picture…but this is a flaw on my part because I was too tired and come to think about it I should have really included it…just hope I don’t loose too many marks because of it. Now I can sit back and relax for a day or two over the holiday and fit in doing my online portfolio.
Essay Part 2
So the deadline for the second part of the HCI essay is due in early Friday morning so it’s about time I start writing it.
It’s proving a lot more difficult to do than I first thought, and harder to write than the first part of the essay…which sucks for me because I’ve only got one day to write it. But then I suppose it serves me right for being too preoccupied with other assignments and work.
Gonna be another couple of late nights for me.
XML
With Vlad’s deadline coming upon us quickly it was time for me and Claudia to turn our attention to our Killer App. The Killer App that we decided to make is a B&B locator, which uses GPS on your phone to pin-point your location and find available B&B’s in the area. If your phone doesn’t have GPS there is another way you can use this Killer App, you use a map of Great Britain, click on the county and it goes to another page zooming in for you to select your location to find B&B’s that way. The easiest part was the flash interface which is simple flash and action script so didn’t take Claudia too long to do, then we worked on the XML the normal xml file wasn’t hard to write either…the tags are pretty simple as you make them up. It was putting it into Flash to display was the problem. We spent all yesterday afternoon trying to figure it out, we tried using Vlad’s code and just changing it to fit in with your application and the XML still wouldn’t display. We had to leave to go to Soft221 and we asked a couple of people in there if they had sorted it out yet, and we got some hints, giving me something to work on when I got home. The hints worked these were to add .text after the name of the text boxes in the code, and the XML displayed, after trying a couple of things. My next challenge was getting the next buttons to work, so when it’s pressed the code will work through the different child nodes in the XML file and display them…but nothing I seemed to do worked, I used his code (had to get my head around it first) and that didn’t work. This morning I managed to get it working, so that everything in the xml file was displayed when the next or previous button was pressed. The next step is handing it over to Claudia to do the rest of the interface and adding a bit of action script to link all the pages together, but I think we can get it done tonight for tomorrow and have the rest of the day to concentrate on John Forde’s essay.
Rough Abstract
As you can probably tell from my previous entries I’ve changed my idea for the essay a couple of times, mainly because of the confusion with the brief.
I have to write an abstract for my essay which is a bit difficult to do as the actual idea for my essay hasn’t come about just yet.
So here is just roughly why I want to do sound hence the title.
From examples shown in Dan Livingstones session got me thinking how sound can change how someone thinks about something.
One example he showed us was Matrix Room which is the same track being played but from different areas of the room you’ll hear a different sound, which sort of something that interests me.
There does seem to be some books/websites about this topic and whether it’s considered art if it’s contemporary art or more like dadaism.
I’ll also look to see if sound art also known as sound installation links to more traditionalart methods/practises and compare their time-lines and people’s views.
Like I said before this is just a rough guide, considering that I haven’t put this idea to Joaisa yet or know if she’ll like it. But it’s better than not having anything.
Another abstract would be for my essay if I were to do it on Software art, basically look into it all beginning and when it started to be classed as “art” and also how others view it and whether the general concensus is if it is art or just code.
Again another idea I need to post to Joasia.
Still Confused
Just remembered I have to write an abstract of my essay for the practical tomorrow, which is a bit difficult to do as I still have no clue what to do my essay on.
As the portal is coming up with errors and won’t let me log on I can’t look at the brief again to get a better understanding of the question I need to answer for the essay.
Which is probably why I’ll write my essay on Software art and whether or not it actually is art or digital art and what makes coding or a programme software art rather than just code.
So I’ll have to look for more references and more books to write my essay…but as I figure I haven’t got a sound practise idea to write my abstract on or a software art idea for that matter.
I know that others haven’t got an abstract either because they too are confused about the brief and how we can answer the question so at least I know it’s not just me.
Sound Art
Following the advice of Joasia last week I went back to the Sound Practise idea, so tonight I’ve been looking for some sites for some inspiration or just an idea I could use for my essay.
Here are the links I’ve found.
www.digitalartsource.com
www.soundartuk.com
These are the ones I’ve found so far, but that’s mainly because I don’t know what to look for in google or what type of sound practise I want to use as my inspiration.
There are a couple of books that I have found these include
Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories
Background Noise: A History of Sound Art
These I’m going to look to see if they have them in the Uni library before buying them (which I may or may not do)
I have one more practical with Joasia tomorrow and I’m going to see if she’s got any references or any ideas of how I could do my essay. I’ll also tell her that Dan Livingstone practical isn’t up on the portal and see if she can put them up.
I’m still a bit lost on how I can go about using Sound Practise as Art, as so far I’m not too sure which area I would look into, or how to find anything about Sound as art or any particular practise.
Confused
In today’s practical I spoke to Joaisa of my new idea looking into Movie’s…she did like it but more of an idea for the project next term and but she doesn’t feel that it’ll answer the Essay question.
Which means I have to think a bit more about what area of “digital art” I want to write about…so first I need to get a proper definition of Digital Art, I have a rough idea of what it could include but it’s got to be something that will answe the question we’ve been given.
She did suggest I do sound practise, but as I’ve said before (I think) I don’t know which area I want to look at, and not really sure if that would still answer the question.
This leads me to my last newest idea and that’s Software Art, as it was a topic of one of the dome sessions this term.
However I have to disagree with Software being art, which is another way I can write my essay as a disagreement and why I feel so.
I do have to do some research though and find out what exactly is considered “software” art…and I hope someone else isn’t doing it…but could always do it too it’s not like we’re going to have the same essay.
Presentation
We had our presentation for Hugo’s module this morning/afternoon. But before that Keepsake had another meeting.
The final meeting was to run through the presentation a couple of times, test the DVD and update the site to make sure everything was working fine and worked smoothly.
This included running through the DVD and it’s menus to make Ollie familier with it, the site while timing it to check we were in the limit.
It wasn’t long till the time of our presentation was up, we were all nervous as we obviously wanted it all to go smoothly and run correctly.
We did encouter a couple of problems though, Ollie went to connect his laptop to the projector and it wouldn’t work…which was just our luck!
Luckily I had my computer so we plugged mine in which worked, however it wouldn’t connect to the internet which was another problem was we needed it to show our site.
This meant we had to keep switching between the computer in the room and mine (this did just involve pressing a button) which thinking about it afterwards probably worked out better because the DVD was already running full screen when Ollie switched over to it.
The presentation went great…we managed to run the DVD and the website from two different computers perfectly and we had plenty of time to show the clip on the DVD also.
We also got good feedback from other groups which is always a good thing, hopefully we’ll get the results from Hugo either next week at the end of the term or the beggining of next term
