RT: Password Length

If you have a password that is so long that you sometimes lose your place and have to start over, the password may be too long or too complex.

Birth In The Internet Age

About 7 minutes ago my step sister gave birth to a baby. The interesting thing about this is that with the empowerment of a BlackBerry, all of her friends and family have been kept in the loop on the events of the day since about 4am, when she happily announced that contractions suck, but epidurals rock. Since that initial announcement (which somehow I was awake for), there have been regular updates on dilation progress and other interesting facts as she progressed. It is interesting that she is in Massachusetts and I am NC, but yet, I still feel a little involved. Anyway, its pretty cool to have a nephew.


Jackson Xavier Stuart

Titling Photographic Works

One of the most difficult things I have found is giving titles to photographic work. When I upload to Flickr I tend to do it all as a batch in a rather unpolished kind of way. I don’t tag and I don’t title. It’s just there, for the taking. Some of my photographs I have tried to title, but keep coming up blank or with things that are just way too simple and without meaning, such as “Small Red Flower” or “Water on Leaf”. Its just not something I am good at yet. In titling most work, the most important thing is to find a unique feature and go with it, but it is hard to make a succinct title describing the effect of light on a subject and to embody the subtle details of the camera grain with the shadows, or any other type of unique feature. Not titling work does work for me, but whenever I have to have a title, such as in Flickr, and I simply leave the file name, it just seems to lazy of me. I suppose I must find a way to break through this non-naming phase and allow myself to apply labels to my work.

Difficulty In Taking a Family Portrait

I believe portrait photography to be the hardest form of photography there is, now imagine applying that principle to 21 people, plus one dog. First of all, in this situation, I find that the more legs a subject has, the more cooperative they are. There are many things to consider when taking a portrait, the least of which is whether or not the subjects have their eyes open. The first is, do all of the subjects know that they are being lined up for a photograph? Sometimes this information is helpful to them, as it may encourage them to face the camera. Next, once the subjects have identified the direction of the camera, do they know that they are not actually in front of a firing squad, check this, as it may comfort some of the subjects. There are some subjects that may only be in the picture as a result of someone else’s encouragement, these people tend to hide. Another issue occurs when you don’t have a set of bleachers nearby to stack everyone neatly, so that there are no tall people and short people. In a group of strangers I understand not knowing your height relationship to everyone, but in this case, everyone has known everyone for quite some time, so why is it there are still short people in the back and relatively tall people in the middle? It is just very difficult to get 21 people together to do one activity, even if you only need them to be cooperative for 1/250th of a second.

Did I mention this photograph was taken at the encouragement of my aunt (the lady hiding behind the baby with the volcano of hair)?

The problems with this portrait are:

  • 3 people wearing sunglasses
  • 2 children looking away
  • 1 guy looking like a statue (in 5 attempts to take the shot, he didn’t move once)
  • 1 women barely visible
  • 1 photography who doesn’t hide his remote shutter release very well

Inconvenient All-in-one Distance Education Platforms

I am beginning to hate Blackboard for many things. First of all, most courses are based on these things called “due dates”, which I can only assume were never used before distance education, since Blackboard doesn’t seem to support them. Nowhere on an assignment in Blackboard is there a listing of a due date, or any other information about when an assignment is to be submitted. Also, on this same line, there is no central calendar in Blackboard to state when assignments are due, all of that has to be added by an instructor to a manually updated page. Not very effective. The second complaint against it is that there is not a uniform way to complete something. Some instructors have things to be posted to discussion boards, other instructors use the actual assignment tool and have assignments be submitted along side the instructional documents, or my favorite way, by using the digital drop box, which basically is just uploading the assignment to the Blackboard server, which also emails it to the instructor.

Perhaps the worst trait about Blackboard in Distance Education is that instructors don’t really know how to use it. Some instructors never take the time to set up assignments; they just want everything e-mailed to them. That really pisses me off because e-mail is not that traceable, and if an assignment gets lost in transit, there is no proof that it was sent originally, and in general instructors do not usually respond when they have received an assignment.

I am having such a hard time staying on top of my 6 courses this semester because instructors have all set up their courses differently. Some have assignments under “assignments” and yet others have assignments under “course documents”. I do not really remember which course is set up how, and it is hard to remember which course gives me 2 hours for a quiz and which one gives me just over a minute per question. It is all much more complicated than it should be. I can only imagine how people who do not have the resource of GITI manage to keep up with their assignments, it just seems like it would be hard. I don’t know quite how to do what it is I want to do, but I need to somehow give GITI the ability to accept information about class policies and integrate it into some type of workflow system for handling academics.

Family Social Networking Awkwardness

I really don’t like that my family has started venturing to the realm of the Internet. It was more than ok with they found their way to Amazon.com to spend $1000s per year on books and other crap they don’t really need, and it was even ok when they began e-mailing me (once they figured out that the Internet is more than an electronic Walmart), I can deal with that. Now, we have reached the next phase. I decided to unhide myself on Facebook for a few weeks, just let myself be searchable instead of being stealth. I thought if there was anyone wanting to find me that didn’t know my e-mail address, it would make that easier. A few days into this whole being not hidden thing I get a notification that a cousin that I really don’t like would like to add me as a friend on Facebook, that one was simple enough, I just ignore the request. Now, my favorite aunt has decided to join the world of Facebook, and has requested to add me. This places me in a position where I really do not know the proper course of action. I like my family fine for the most part, but they have a tendency to ask questions about things and be overly nosey. If I let one of them in, then the rest will want in and as I was recently informed, my immediate family is now to a count of about 25 people (and apparently at least one more pending). There is info in there that would just be a little too much for my family to deal with, especially with things like this blog, and we all know how lovingly I have spoken of my family over the years in this blog. I guess this goes back to the old billboard metaphor, “Don’t post anything on the Interwebs that you wouldn’t want on a billboard”. Well, I don’t follow that too well, but usually I am bright enough to keep that type of shit under a different alias, but as of late I have been less interested in aliases, as they merely complicate things. I really don’t know why I have such a problem with my family, I guess I just feel like they don’t understand me, and giving them this level of access would only make things worse.

RT: Frustration of the Imagination

It is really annoying when you try to think of something new and realize that you can’t conceive anything outside of what has been created before and then you feel certain that there is nothing new an interesting in the world, only to have the rational components of self to tell you that there must be something that has not yet been conceived, and then the frustration sets in.

Bug Bothers

I am trying to figure out what this particular creature is. There was a group of about 10 or so on a grape leaf in the yard. They do not fly, swarm or even move particularly quickly. When in confinement, they do not look for a way out, they become really still, but once out, they tend to wander around aimlessly. They act a bit like ladybug beetles, but are a little bigger and have a more armored shell. They have 6 legs, 2 antennae, and 2 visible eyes. The body is black, but the thorax “panel”(?) is red with three large black markings and several smaller black markings around the edge at the midpoint. The underside is bright red.