This blog is a focussed experiment. I wanted to test my ability to publish and produce a taut multi-media blog on something. I attended TAM7 in July. It struck me as the perfect 4-day crash course. The "course" didn't go as well as I hoped, but I learned a lot. I'm continuting to update as I have the opportunity to - eventually I'll have covered the entirety of my experience at the conference.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

NEW T-SHIRT - Entropy Wants You Dead!

Okay, so while I'm screwing around playing with new ideas...

About once a week a new idea for a funny and smart skeptical slogan hits me.

I often think that I'd like a T-shirt with whatever the slogan of the day is, and maybe someone else would like them too.

I've never done anything about it... until now. So I guess this is as good a place as any to get into some crass mercantilism. Maybe I'll find a more appropriate outlet for it someday.

So here's my first shirt - with a slogan that's been amusing me for months now:



I'll post more here as time goes on and I have time to choose more favourite ideas and design applicable shirts... or maybe mugs.

I should have done this sooner - then I could wear my new shirt at TAM! Actually that was my original intention - to make a number of 'skeptical' shirts - one to wear each day at TAM... but I was too lazy and/or slow to get it off the ground in time.

And of course... here is the requisite link to my CafePress store: Genius Ass

After a few bumps...

That was an un-necessary nightmare.

So after more than a half day of struggling with trying to bend Wordpress to my will, I am back here on blogger. I could probably spend a lot of time detailing the absurdity of how ineffective Wordpress was for my uses, and much of it could probably be summed up with the notion 'stick with what you know.' Given those options I'll take the latter.

So here I am on Blogger and generally happy with the initial look and set-up of things. I've posted a series of test-posts for each media I want to be able to use, and once happy with their format, layout and process I deleted the tests too - they were dreadfully un-interesting... which perhaps is a self-triggered cue I should heed right now.

Suffice to say, I'm set-up (there will no doubt be tweaking to come, but ultimately function is more important than beauty at the moment) and ready to go. From here on out, it's all 'real' content.

A Platform for Experimentation

In ten days time I'll be leaving Vancouver for Vegas to attend TAM7 - a.k.a. The Amazing Meeting.

Over the past few years, like many people, I have accumulated a metric fuck-ton of media devices. Well... perhaps 'fuck-ton' is an exaggeration. The fact is that I can carry everything relatively comfortably in a small backpack. In theory I could operate as a one man crew to do a variety of low-rent multi-media diarizing (is that a word?) on you name it.

I have yet to try this for a couple of reasons. For starters I've been busy as heck producing a feature film, The Beast of Bottomless Lake, but that is another story... although it DOES intersect a bit. But at least as important is the fact that previously I've really only considered the possibility of doing such a thing in the abstract.

Anyhow, I figure that my trip to TAM is an excellent opportunity to test out the capabilities. I've also never tried blogging with wordpress, so I'll add that to the mix. (EDIT June 30th, 14:02 - Yeah well... that part didn't last. All of 16 hours later I'm back on Blogger and WAY happier. What the hell is the big deal with Wordpress? Embedding video was a pain and audio was a complete disaster. Even exporting back here seemed deliberately troublesome. Ridiculous.)

So, we'll see how this goes. I expect that I'll fall crazy behind and spend weeks 'catching up'. But it is my intention to post a schwack-load of pictures, audio and video as well as my own musings from the TAM weekend.

It's going to be pretty exhausting I expect, but it'll be fun too, and hopefully when all is said and done it'll be an interesting resource (or at least a fun read) for someone other than myself. Who knows, maybe before I'm done I'll have decided to give this blog a lifespan that extends far beyond the time it takes to tell the tale of TAM7.