Over the summer period, I helped develop a one-day course for teaching people Wordpress. Today I ran the first course I’ve done by myself (having had far superior teachers to hide behind in my previous sessions).
They’ve all been graciously hosted by Newcastle’s Polytechnic, and I’ll be posting up links to their excellent websites as soon as possible… or they could leave them in the comments! Hint hint!
So; remember this?
Turns out I almost broke my knee over the summer. I was a few degrees off snapping the bone, but I managed to bounce at the right point and ended up with a very long recuperation period. I’ve got a bunch of physio exercises that I need to do every day, which take somewhere around an hour.
The unexpected part of it - for me - was that I kept thinking I was going to be completely recovered the next day/week/month, and it’s only been recently that I’ve had to accept that I’m going to be having a weird-feeling knee for the conceivable future. And what’s brought that on is the cold season, because it turns out my recuperated knee is a ‘weathervane’ (as one of my friends put it) in that it reacts pretty dang well to a change in the temperature.
So; remember this?
At this point (five days in?), some strange radiating hatred for the written word fills my body and I no longer wish to type, or be part of civilisation. Let’s descend into stygian depths and hit things with bone cudgels made from the thighs of our ancestors rather than pretend that todays academia is based on a modern-day version of Confuscian ideals.
Well, I got my funding from the AHRC and that meant that I could go back to university. I’m studying the Digital Media Mres at Newcastle Universities Culture Lab. This is a huge change for me, and it means I’ve got a really burstingly busy year.
So far, my own assesment of my integration with academia would be ‘not great’. Having been as self-reliant as possible for the past few years, the fact that there is now a big organisation in town I can tap for help is something I have yet to adjust to. Moreover, as my first deadline looms, I’ve yet to adjust to the idea of no longer being a free agent and actually having to, y’know, do stuff.
(Some of this attitude I blame on my previous alma mater, which was not very testing in an academic sense, but it’s also got to be said that this is the first course where I don’t just grok the material straight off. Which is interesting, but actually having to do work is something I’m not accustomed to.)
And so, between the studying and the exercising, I find myself slowly becoming a busy person, where parts of my day are filled up. I can no longer sit and ponder the day away as I used to, but instead I have to plug away at projects which require a static, final end product, and I’m adjusting. Slowly.
Next time I get the chance to write an entry, I’ll tell you how those adjustments are working out in a practical sense. Or, if you are interested, you can jump over to my new, professional, website, at http://unnamedlaboratory.org/
I often seem to myself like some sort of internet-appliance-made-flesh. And this month, we have the phone bill to prove it, with a massive overcharge for 47gb of ‘excess internet usage’. Thanks, BT! I love you too!
However, after my last post I managed to climb out of my stained office chair, throw on some clothes, and accompany Paul Grimmer on a video shoot. Paul was awarded a Triparks residency earlier this year, and he has been shooting high-definition video across Northumbria. He offered me the chance to go with him this week, and I got really excited and said yes without really thinking what it would mean.
What did it mean? Well, getting in a car, driving a while, getting out of the car, looking confused for a bit, getting back in and driving to a hill and then carrying a bad-ass tripod for a bit. Of course, that was just what I did; Paul, being a seasoned pro, carried the camera.
Paul was looking to take panoramic shots of the area, and we didn’t manage to get many before the rain rolled in.
While he shot the hills, I was looking at the countryside. On a bike, this is the sort of area I guess you don’t see, and I would like to go back there sometime. Even in the downpour that followed, the landscape was quite fun.
As an aside, I must point out that my recent injuries left me confined to a few small rooms for the best part of two months. This means that while a lot of my friends are complaining about this seasons horrible weather, I’m just happy to be outside.
Eventually, the rain got the better of us, and I convinced Paul to go back to the car for the thermos of hot coffee I’d brought with me. But not before mugging for one last shot - check out that water saturated look!
I’d like to thank Paul for letting me accompany him out to the country for the day, and if you want to follow his progress on the Triparks residency, check out the blog hes doing with fellow artist Bridget Kennedy here.
I’ve written a two-page long description of a street in my hometown. Here is the start:
In summer, the street becomes a long, dusty trial of your patience. Wide and loud with traffic at one end, narrow and stuffed with closed shops at the other, it’s middle section goes on for the longest period with nothing interesting to say about it. But this is the street that feels the most like the experience of the town.
If you want to read the rest of it, click here to download the text. The image above can be downloaded from Flickr, and was generated using a website that… I can’t remember. If you know what that site is, can you let me know? Thanks!
Note: I wrote this with a giant stinking cold, and I seem to have left it slightly unfinished. For better reviews of Mashed, see the links at the bottom of the post.
As promised, here is my review-cum-grizzle at Mashed08. This is prompted by the excellent Guardian piece here which you should go and read, as it’s not at all as self-interested as what I’m about to write.
Firstly, I don’t live in London. Perhaps the only reason I was interested in going to Mashed was the fact that I could get there for free, via one of the buses that they put on. However, the bus was an epic endurance ride that managed to brake myself, Brian and Alistair for the duration of the weekend, turning us into shallow stumbling wrecks.
The point of the weekend was to actually make something cool with technology, and while I was unable to do that I kind of see how it works. You see, most people who work with IT are phenomenally bright, and their salaried job only covers a small part of what they can do. Events like Mashed allow them to use their other skills to create fun things - which the BBC where hoping would be ‘fun things that have some relation to BBC products’.
There was talk that there should have been a lot more people at the event - at one point, I heard that 400 people hadn’t turned up. I don’t think this can be a fault of the event management team, as attending did involve sacrificing your weekend. Those that did turn up where fully laden with free gifts, up to and including the BBC beanbags that formed the bulk of the furniture at the event.
This makes a huge difference from art conferences that I’ve been to, where you might get a free coffee if you are lucky. Mashed not only had free coffee, but also free food all weekend, making it a world apart from any conference that I had attended before.
Perhaps that’s the rub for me; art is seen as such a peripheral activity that it receives no investment, and yet it is constantly surrounding us. There is obviously huge amounts of money in the combination of broadcasting and IT that Mashed represents, and yet it could be described as a much more selective interest.
(Brian’s short blog-post on Mashed can be seen here)
(Further update: Alistair’s post on Mashed can be seen here)
See that, above? That’s something I’ve wanted to do for years.
If you understand Processing, the programming language that pretty much foremost amongst the art/coding subset, you usually have a pretty good grasp of mathematics. Personally, despite my grade B at GCSE, I’m pretty shakey. That’s why it took me at least two years to be able to draw a bunch of dots in a circle, using Processing.
I am happy I’ve done it though; it means that I’m no longer banging my head against it as a problem that is beyond me. One more thing I can cross of my list of things that I want to do with Processing.
I’ve written in more depth about the mathematics behind the program, and posted a video of it in action, at my vimeo page. If you’d like to find out about what it’s about, read that. I’ve also uploaded the source code and the program itself as a stand-alone application for Windows, OS X and Linux, and you can download that below.
draw_a_circle2 (source files and apps)
UPDATE: The Vimeo page seems to have completely failed me (again) and so I’ve put a version up on Flickr using their new video function. If it doesn’t embed in the RSS feed, check out my photo page over there.
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combinant_dots, originally uploaded by Pete Hindle.
I was curious as to how the ‘gallery’ function worked, after seeing Brenda’s beautiful collection of images called ‘Fence‘. Most of these images are of the time that myself and the other people from the Waygood’s Radio Club.
For a long time, I had a website under the alias petehindle.textdriven.com, which suited me fine. I love the written word, and I like to do a lot of things with computers that really rely on having a firm grip on the power of the written word. Hence, I felt, having the word ‘textdriven’ really let other people know that I was going to be writing.
But I know that some people are not as word-oriented as I am. Topsy, for instance, really functions as a visual person, and I have to wonder if perhaps I should include more of my cameraphone wanderings within my blog-posts.
I’m in the studio, with Brian, most days now. Above, you can see a picture that reflects our usage of the studio.
(Yes, I mean Brian working hard and me goofing off