Blue 2.0 Slacker Catchup Time

Alright, I'm not motivated to start any other big projects right now so I'm going to see how many Blue 2.0 activities I can get through in an hour or so.

I've had a flickr account for a while and you may have already seen my happy hour pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94418552@N00/sets/72157603953660545/

I have tried some strictly free photo sharing sites and I must say that I prefer flickr to anything else I've tried so far. I do find it a little non-intuitive to figure out how to bring up my photo sets and share them. I had to click around for a few minutes before I a set link to my Blue 2.0 photos.

Since I'm not really happy with the quality of my microphone and I didn't have anything interesting to talk about, I'm just going to talk about my favorite podcast. It is the podcast for the NPR show, This American Life. They always have the most intriguing stories about weird people and places and they always manage to look at their stories in a slightly off-kilter manner. I am now totally addicting to the program and have to listen to it every week, even if they're just playing reruns. Luckily, they do have their whole audio archive online so I can slowly make my way through many of their early shows that I didn't catch the first time around. Oh yeah, and did I mention that they're doing this crazy live show that will be broadcast to movie theaters all over the country? It's an odd thing to do, but I think I have no choice but to check it out, especially since This American Life will be playing at two theaters in Lexington. Well, I had to plug the show. Does this make me a non-profit shill?

OK, this brings me to the YouTube portion of weeks 9 & 10. Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked at work for me, but I did just watch this the other day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6hNj1uOkY

It was actually linked from Neil Gaiman's blog where he mentioned that there is a sharper version of the video here:

http://www.andrewthomashuang.com/MOV_Doll_Face.htm

I think it's a really nicely done little animation/movie/whatever you want to call it. It does hit you over the head a bit with the message that you can destroy yourself attempting to achieve the beauty portrayed in the media. However, the mechanical motions of the jack-in-the-box robot and the way it interacts with the human face are really quite striking. I'm going to have to go back to Andrew Huang's site to see what else he has done.

Ha! Who says the time estimates for these activities are too low? I just completed the activities for weeks 9 & 10 in less than a half hour! Well, it helps that I already had a flickr account and some familiarity with podcasts and YouTube, I suppose.

Oh well, on to weeks 11 & 12 in my next post!