... coz VOX did not provide me with a good user experience. read 'why' by typing in VOX into the search field on my new site which can be found at http://isiria.wordpress.com/ and also http://isiria.livejournal.com.
... unless all you do is more or less just typing using the VOX interface and being happy with whatever image limitations VOX sets you.
The last post on the underground arts and music venue SYDNEY took me hours to compile because
- copying and posting can introduce fonts other than the standard Ariel 10pt; because you can't change the font type in VOX nor fine-tune font sizes (only a choice of larger and smaller is possible), you're stuck with what you've copied
- display results are surprisingly unpredictable: my copied text was displayed partially in the standard font and font colour and partially in very small and black, which made it almost unreadable on the dark-coloured template background
- you could get around these problems if VOX would offer html editing - but it doesn't
- images I copied could not be posted in their original size or in an alignment different from 'left', which left me with images too small to be read properly at a layout location I did not want
- even worse: repeatedly in several posts now I was not able to post images and text together the first time around; after the text was created, VOX did not accept image uploads; instead I had to publish the text first, and then go back into it by using the editing function to insert the images stored on my computer (which was no problem then)
All in all: a messy, cumbersome, time-consuming process.
I started another blog on LiveJournal and writing posts there was easier - to a degree. Typing text provided no problem, including the copying of sections. If problems like the above would occur in LiveJournal, you could use the html editor, a function that of course has lots of other advantages.
While creating textual content was easy, image editing is a pain. LiveJournal does not provide an image manager, so you either have to do some mathematical calculations on your image size and transfer them to the html editor (that's a guess though - I haven't tried that yet) or you have to rely on fixed image sizes that you'll need to enter by editing and inserting specific image url's during the image upload process. awkward procedure!
Another image related problem: I have not found a way yet to get into stylesheets to give my images a space of a few pixels around them to separate them from the surrounding text; right now text and image are glued together, which is unpleasing to my eye. Unfortunately, CSS access is limited to a few editing changes, and adding a buffer zone around images does not seem to be part of it. There is one way to change your stylesheets though: write them from scratch yourself ... right!
So it looks like, Wordpress is the best blogging software after all. While I had problems with embedding video code and while it was a bit of an overkill for my skill level, at least I was able to manipulate a lot in terms of template layout as well as posted content. So it looks like me returning to it - this time though by using wordpress.com as a host. Hopefully that will stop my grievances and enable to focus me again on what I would really like to do: blogging ;).
According to the (sydney) magazine, "almost three yeas ago a bunch of locals took over a run-down shop front and living space in Surry Hills and turned it into a creative hothouse called SYDNEY. Upstairs, the creative foursome work on their projects - graphic design, illustration, painting and culture jamming - while downstairs is open to the public." Here are examples of some of the previous headliners as well as ongoing events ...
SYDNEY, Big
Fag Press, Squat Space, NUCA,
and MICKIE QUICK present:
A Slideshow/Artist Talk on the Street
Art Workers (SAW) and their Land and Globalization poster campaign.
SAW's founding member, Claude Moller, is in Sydney promoting SAW, and he will be on-hand to talk about the group, their international poster project, and state of street art in America.
Established in the U.S. in 2OOl, SAW is a global network of artists who use graphic art to support social change. SAW makes and distributes posters internationally to publicize the work of local grassroots activism. The group relies on street art to take back cities and towns from the businessmen, cops, and politicians who define public space for their own benefit. Since 2001, SAW projects have talked about prisons, the mass media, and utopian ideas for the future.
SAW's latest campaign, Land and Globalization, looks at how corporate
globalization has affected our world, how it has impacted the land, and how
people are fighting back. This series includes 25 posters representing
artists from 10 different countries and over 20 different cities. These
posters illustrate specific struggles in countries like Brazil and the United States, and they also tackle
international issues around poverty and gentrification. Along with a
strong critique of imperialism, the posters show how communities throughout the
world are resisting corporate power for a more just and
sustainable world.
An evening with persistent friends:
'Twilight Of The
Cockroaches' - a special end-of-summer screening of the classic 1987 Japanese
hybrid-film
(animated cockroaches interacting with live-action actors).
at SYDNEY, 302 Cleveland St, Surry Hills (the
homeland of cockroaches)
"The plot is a staple of children's classics from BAMBI to WATERSHIP DOWN: cute, little anthropomorphic animal creatures band together for survival when they are threatened by oafish humans. There is a difference, though. In this case, it is quite forgivable to root for a "sad" ending. As the title implies, the cute little creatures this time around are cockroaches, those greedy, scurrying little insects who foul your food and infest your kitchen. They carry diseases. They have made many a city apartment uninhabitable. And they're the heroes? Go figure."
But this is anime at the highest level of storytelling. A hedonistic cockroach utopia becomes cockroach hell as an analogy about Japan's position relation with The United States: once holocaust victims of the latters military might, now living it up in boomtime decadence, but what if the US were to turn into an enemy again?
Be forewarned: after you watch it, you might not want to swat or spray that roach in your kitchen quite so fast again.
This will screen with a couple of roach related shorts from You Tube, and later after a break if people feel like the first film was too sad we may screen ‘Joe’s Apartment’, which is a "marvellous piece of goofiness". Joe comes from Iowa to New York and, being short of money, wants to find an apartment with very low rent. His quest is successful, but he must share the residence with some 50,000 cockroaches. The insects turn out to be Joe's best friends.
THIS TIME: Films & Re-Enactments from London and Sydney
The Teaching & Learning Cinema invites you to "THIS TIME", a film screening that follows along from a residency that Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham have been doing in the majestic Track 12 at Performance Space’s new home at Carriageworks.
"We’ll roll projector on some of the expanded cinema re-enactments we’ve been working on in the residency and some film prints we brought in for our research. The prints come from the National Film & Video Lending Service in Canberra and from the Lux, the artist’s film archive in London ( why doesn’t Australia have one of these?).
Marvel at the stamina of those who were there for the 24 hours of the ‘Long Film for Ambient Light’ (March 16-17, The Performance Space) when Lucas and Louise show their time lapse video (where one hour becomes one minute) and invite those who were there during the event to share their “mental residues”.
For details of other films/re-enactments to be viewed see the Teaching & Learning Cinema's website.
ATTENTION!!! THE NEXT INTENSE NEST IS AT SYDNEY!!!
Intense Nest #5
XNO BBQX (album launch)
ABSOLUTEN CALFEUTRAIL
JUSTICE YELDHAM
Intense Nest is a monthly showcase of some of Australia's most diverse, confronting and weird music acts...This month we celebrate the album launch of the noisy guitar and drum improvisationalists, XNOBBQX, also performing is Melbourne's ABSOLUTEN CALFEUTRAIL (from True Radical Miracle and Whitehorse), and lastly Lucas Abela takes to the stage as JUSTICE YELDHAM, the amazing glass playing act not to be missed!
Intense Nest is the name of a project that aims to support Australia's experimental, weird, punk, underground music scene by organising music and performance events, and if all goes to plan, eventually releasing music by some of these artists.
DORKBOT-SYD
Two super presentations this month! And a show+tell.
1. Stephen Jones will be demonstrating and talking about a number of video synthesizers that he built between 1978 and 1986 (see pictured below for one). Stephen used these synths when performing live with Australian electronic group Severed Heads and in other projects.
2. Nick Wishart will be presenting CeLL,
a MIDI controlled pneumatic orchestra he has
created in collaboration with Miles van Dorssen. They will be opening up CeLL
to new composers via a new software interface that can receive compositions by
email, play and record the composition then send that recording to the
composer.
www.cell.org.au
For the uninitiated: DORKBOT is "PEOPLE DOING STRANGE THINGS WITH ELECTRICITY"
Dorbot brings people
together from different fields who are interested in doing strange things with
electricity; be you artist, engineer, musician, electrician, software
developer, hermit, whatever. Regular meetings pose as an opportunity for public
discussion, peer review and exploration of ideas, experiments and finished
works and also to solidify and invite growth, encouragement and collaboration
in a
community of curious people."
Be there and be square!
and finally:
JIMMY SING'S IMPORTS & RECORD STAND
Jimmy Sing's is Australia's premiere distro point for the latest and greatest in jump-up bass musics!
BAILE FUNK, BALTIMORE CLUB, DANCEHALL & REGGAE, REGGAETON, CRUNK, HYPHY, UK GRIME, AFROBEAT, SALSA, PSYCHE GARAGE and more...on vinyl and CD!
Part time local DJ, part time store owner and full time hustler, Jimmy Sing runs Jimmy Sing's Imports - the record store that provides most of Sydney's DJ's with the newest most innovative shit. He spins and sells reggae, afrobeat and newer genres such as dirty south and British grime. Every couple of weeks, the racks are cleared and the space is taken over by DJs.
What's popular right now Baltimore club (a rough blend of hip-hop and house) and baile funk (a frantic Brazilian strain of funk with 'nasty' lyrics in Portuguese).
JIMMY SING'S RECORD STAND has regular trading hours from the SYDNEY shopfront.
WEDNESDAY 6 - 9pm
THURSDAY 6 - 9pm
SATURDAY 12 - 6pm
OR BY APPOINTMENT
Slowly staring to catch up again with life ... and starting with some older news: according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia had its hottest January on record, in line with a pattern that has seen the country's average temperature rise over the past five decades under the impact of global warming.
With the exception of eastern Queensland and north-eastern NSW, where La Nina related wet weather brought the figures one or two degrees below the average, and Sydney (and adjacent coastal areas) where the same weather pattern kept daytime January temperature right on average at 25.9 degrees (but where night-time temperatures were almost two degrees up at 20.3 degrees), the rest of the country sweltered.
The average temperature across the country rose 1.3 degrees last month, but large areas, especially in the Pilbara in Western Australia and in Central Australia, recorded temperatures three to four degrees above average.
"We just continue to get a stream of these records being broken," said Dr Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, who has analysed Australia's rising temperature going back almost 60 years.
"The general pattern is one of warming. We have now warmed up by a degree since 1950. The effects of global warming have been felt across Australia as a whole. And the pattern of warming across Australia is very consistent with the pattern we've seen across the globe."
Apart from Sydney and the and other coastal areas, he rest of NSW was not so fortunate. Temperatures in the south and west climbed two degrees higher than average. Pooncarie, a town west of Griffith, recorded the state's highest temperature, 44.5 degrees - which is better than Onslow in WA with almost 50 degrees (and let's not forget s.th. that a lot of people don't realise: these temperatures are measured in the shade).
But it's not just the heat - large areas of Australia (apart from the tropics and the La Nina affected East Coast) didn't get much rain either, which for example led to the horrific bushfires so far in WA or Tasmania. All in all: an omen for the challenges this continent will face over the decades at least.
Maurizio Cattelan is sometimes seen as controversial, and I guess these two images give an idea on why. Nevertheless, I like them (especially the one of the pope being bombed by a meteorite).
Gregory Colbert, who calls animals “nature’s living masterpieces,” captures
extraordinary moments of contact between man and nature. Ashes and Snow
is the shared memory of distant lands, peoples, and animals. None of the images
have been digitally collaged or superimposed. They record what the artist
himself saw through the lens of his camera. These mixed media photographic works
marry umber and sepia tones in a distinctive encaustic process on handmade Japanese paper. The artworks,
each approximately 3.5 by 2.5 meters (11.5 x 8.25 feet), are mounted without
explanatory text so as to encourage an open-ended interaction with the images.
Ashes and Snow is not a documentary film. The films are poetic narratives
that depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or
present. The overall effect is an experience of wonder and contemplation,
serenity, and hope.
The title Ashes and Snow suggests beauty and renewal, while also referring to the literary component of the exhibition—a fictional account of a man who, over the course of a yearlong journey, composes 365 letters to his wife. The source of the title is revealed in the 365th letter. Colbert’s photographs and films loosely reference the traveler’s encounters and experiences described in the letters, fragments of which comprise the narration in the films. Ashes and Snow: A Novel in Letters was first published in 2004.
Gregory Colbert originally conceived the idea for a sustainable traveling museum in 1999. He envisioned a sustainable structure that could easily be assembled in ports of call around the world, providing an ephemeral environment for Ashes and Snow on its global journey. The public debut of Ashes and Snow took place in 2002 at the Arsenale in Venice. Built in 1104, this monumental space inspired the architectural concepts of the Nomadic Museum, which debuted in New York in 2005. The first of its kind, the Zócalo Nomadic Museum, designed by Colombian architect Simón Vélez, is composed largely of recyclable and reusable materials - including shipping containers and bamboo - demonstrating sustainable practices and an innovative approach.
Like other elements of Ashes and Snow, the museum is an on-going project that will transform in each location to adapt to its environment and the evolving artistic content of the exhibition itself. Colbert will continue to collaborate with innovative architects to integrate the most recent advances in sustainable architecture and give new expression to the museum as it travels.
To date, more than a million and a half people have visited Ashes and Snow. The exhibition will travel indefinitely to ports of call around the world.
The current exhibition, which consists of more than 50 large-scale photographic artworks, a 60-minute feature film will and two short film haikus be on display at the Zócalo Nomadic Museum in Mexico City, from December 15, 2007 through April 27, 2008.
Source: Wikipedia
This is an older article from Wired which I only fund today via Boing Boing: "You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's Super Bowl Sunday and you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial and have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics, [spam servers] and your ex-boyfriend can listen in."
(click here to go to interactive version of above image which allows text enlargement)
In the early 1900’s, diamonds were discovered in the desert area just outside Lüderitz in what is now Namibia (and was then the German colony South West Africa). Sometimes these diamonds lay fully exposed on top of the sand. This caused a diamond rush from all over the world and the once desolated lonely desert was engulfed with the influx of fortune seekers.
Out of this desert grew the elegant town of Kolmanskop, which included facilities like a casino, theatre, skittle alley, butchery, bakery, soda water and lemonade plant, swimming pool and a hospital with the first x-ray machine in the Southern Hemisphere. Some 700 families lived in the town, including about 300 German adults, 40 children and 800 Owambo contract workers.
Each morning the ice – vendor came down the streets, which were even then smothered with sand, to deliver the daily ration of ice blocks and cold drinks to each household. Wages were good and virtually everything was free, including company houses, milk deliveries and other fringe benefits. Large metal screens around the gardens and corners of the houses helped to keep the sand at bay and a sand-clearing squad cleared the streets every day.
Shortly after the drop in diamond sales after the First World War and the discovery of richer deposits further south at Oranjemund, the beginning of the end started. So within 40 years the town was born, flourished and then died. One day Kolmanskop’s sand-clearing squad failed to turn up, the ice-man stayed away, the school bell rang no more. During the 1950's the town was deserted and the dunes began to reclaim what was always theirs.
Soon the metal screens collapsed and the pretty gardens and tidy streets were buried under the sand. Doors and windows creaked on their hinges, cracked window panes stared sightlessly across the desert. A new ghost town had been born.
A couple of old buildings are still standing and some interiors like the theatre is still in very good condition, but the rest are crumbling ruins demolished from grandeur to ghost houses. One can explore the whole area within the fences and it creates the perfect set up for good photographic opportunities.
It is important to buy special permits before visiting the town. Permits can be bought from the travel agency next to Pension Zum Sperrgebiet in Lüderitz. The area is still mined and it is part of the ‘Sperrgebiet’ (Restricted Area). Visitors who apply for a permit must prove that they have no criminal record.
Tourists must provide their own transport from the town. To get to Kolmanskop, drive east on the B4 from Lüderitz for some 10 km and turn south on a well sign posted road. English and German tours are conducted from Monday to Saturday at 9h30 and 14h00.
The other ghost town in the Namib Desert is Elizabeth Bay, but tourists are not allowed to visit it.
Information thanks to Encounter South Africa; image thanks to Fogonazos.
(Jan. 27, 2008) Amazon.com today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international
rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where
every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device,
including the PC, Mac, iPod, Zune, Zen, iPhone,
RAZR, and BlackBerry. Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer
customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as
over 33,000 independent labels. Launched on Amazon.com in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers
Earth's Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads,
which now includes over 3.3 million songs from more than 270,000
artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store
is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights
management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 kbps to deliver high
audio quality. Most songs available on Amazon MP3 are priced from 89 cents to 99
cents, with more than 1 million of the over 3.3 million songs priced
at 89 cents. The top 100 bestselling songs are 89 cents, unless marked
otherwise. Most albums are priced from $5.99 to $9.99. The top 100
bestselling albums are $8.99 or less, unless marked otherwise. Buying
and downloading MP3s from Amazon MP3 is easy. Customers can purchase
downloads using Amazon 1-Click shopping, and with the Amazon MP3
Downloader, seamlessly add their MP3s to their libraries.
It also provides quick and simple previews for plain text files, such as txt, ini, log, bak, etc.. As a bonus feature InfoTag Magic displays various properties (target file name, location, working directory, arguments) for windows shortcuts and version information (file and product version numbers, product name and description, internal name and copyright) for executable files, such as exe, dll and ocx.
InfoTag Magic requires Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003 or Windows 95/NT with Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) and Windows Desktop Update installed.
To download InfoTag Magic click here.
Just to clarify a bit, the original Nomadic Museum was designed by Shigeru Ban, and it's strange that the wiki... read more
on Ashes and Snow