We are thinking people

This is a close-up of a fabulous t-shirt given to me by friends at SHU. The back, which I may blog another day has some great quotations (including the 'we are thinking people' one, which is now inscribed in local folklore!). And those of you who know about my concern for PC hygiene will be pleased to learn that I have, at last, solved the dirty screen problem with this.

i pod therefore i am

These are nifty new mini ipod cradles, part of the expanding array of add-ons. I've already noted the ipod vegan recipe book, add to this the ipod text-message scrapbook - clearly there's a universe of market niches out there. For the techies there's how to make a shuffle RAID and from the Mac development people an introduction to podcasting. But on a more day to day level, the snap-on ibeam flashlight and laser pointer look good (and don't ilike the new prefix - ifix?).

(gender) At the leading edge ...

Gear Live'€™s augmented reality software is impressive - they blend real and 3-D video images - check the video link at the bottom of this page. But watching this content you can'€™t help thinking about how they let the boys lose in the toy shop. OK, so there's a rose in the first demo, but watch how quickly this turns into a weapon. Then we have cars (plenty of them), a helicopter, tanks... this is a demo, a sales pitch, so maybe the faceless hotel audience is significant - are they into hand-to-hand fighting and military hardware? Or are they just wannabe boyracers? So then, how different is this (see picture), courtesy of William Gibson? Pimp my ride! All I can say is '€˜boys will be boys'€™.

Footloose

Curiosity took me here - one of the most attractive blog designs I've come across. Anyway, I went through, looking for the origin of the (rather naff) blog survey, arriving here. At first these people all sound like harmless Christians, until doubt sets in. I do a reality check with DJFood, looks interesting but the site's down, stumble on another music-thing and then discover Krazydad - his mosaics are so cool.

Till we have faces

Here, I choose my face for the Ranmoor gig (Trois Tetes would need a special deal here). Fortunately, I was recognisable. I could, of course, find out more about myself with Face Analyzer, although as this blogger humorously illustrates, it's not always too reliable. 'Till we have faces' is a C.S. Lewis myth, now cunningly re-cycled by San Diego emo-punks Noise Ratchet. Here's the lyrics. Off now to look into face transplants!

Accidents and mistakes
I'm so impressed by this guy who texts in his sleep, he must be well on the way to becoming a seamlessly-blended cyborg! If he is accidentally sending text messages, what is it like to be accidently reading text messages, like these (or was it planned?). Elsewhere, I notice that we can form 'accidental online communities' by linking i-messaging to our frequently-visited blogs (!). Thank goodness for good management advice on how to avoid accidents/mistakes in emailing. I think I just broke every rule in the book in half an hour. Good.

Watch the hack!

This is a modified cashpoint (ATM) on the London tube. A portable cardreader, attached to the machine, clones your personal ID (see below). As you are copied, your hard-earned cash is syphoned away from your account. Trois Tetes thinks a mirror may be handy for checking your identity (how many faces will he see 1,3 or more) but I'd rather play safe.

Watch your back!

As the identity meme mutates through the blogosphere with this on image and identity, and this on self-reflection, Trois Tetes worries about identity theft. The photograph here shows the standard Barclays cashpoint (ATM) on the London tube. Check that nobody sees you pump in your PIN,when you get your cash, because you are a number, after all.

Digitising Dunhuang
I was fortunate to catch an excellent broadcast on the Dunhuang caves today. Having admired the world's oldest known printed book in the British Library's Silk Road exhibition last year, I've become fascinated with the the work of the International Dunhuang Project. Basically, a rich archeological hoard (mostly textual) was found and plundered by Aurel Stein at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others, of various nationalities followed and by the 1920s material was dispersed around the globe. Dedicated scholars working across international boundaries are slowly cataloguing and digitising the material. It's been suggested that no-one has ever seen all the material together, but soon you will be able to see it all (virtually), even though it is dispersed, thanks to new technology. You will be able to do a virtual visit, actually entering the cave, eventually, but there are a few sticking points around intellectual property to negotiate first.

Drab blog
There's so much good use of visual image out there, that I sometimes feel that my short (mainly verbal) blog looks drab! I enjoy looking at photos from round the world like these, and really loved this concept of a visual travelogue - although it took a bit of time to load up. There's also a blog that comes out of a ESRC project on personal photography on the web. Images aside, my favourite hit of the day is Enrique Quintero's vegan recipes for the ipod - now that's what I call lifestyle!

Virtual booksigning
I'm sure I'll never be called upon to do heavy-duty booksigning, so the idea of doing it 'virtually' is only of academic interest. It's interesting, however, to know that we already have the technology. So, whilst I'm a great admirer of Margaret Atwood (I loved Oryx and Crake), her new idea, may not be that original. Interestingly Grockwel (January 22nd) is quite angry and wonders why bloggers are not up in arms. This one is...but for me, it's only of academic interest.

A little Sunday hybridity
Take a little bit of Austin Powers, a little bit of Michael Jackson, quite a lot of Elvis Presley with a sprinkling of Top of the Pops (circa 1967), mix it, stick it in the cultural oven and 'hey presto! ' you get THIS!

Where lies your text?

Reading Paul Auster's beautiful-crafted descriptions of facial expression in silent movies (The Book of Illusions) set me thinking about the face as text. It's a Bardic theme (see this title and "your face is a book") and there's loads written about the importance of the face in studies of human communication. But that's face2face in meatspace. Online it's different; not very many faces on our blogs. Maybe that's changing.

Early mark-making
I often think of the landscape as a palimpsest. We are surrounded by evidence of human tool use and mark-making across space and time. Near 'here' there are those mysterious cup-and-ring rock carvings (on Gardom's Edge), but they also stretch across the country and are found in America and Australia too. Other markings include clear representational work like this ibex.

Reading the article it's interesting that a contribution from the 1940s is graffiti (does that make the ibex 'art' or just older graffiti?) It's probably the everyday marking of a place, like those beautiful handprints in France. But what on earth do we make of a prehistoric painting of a policeman with a gun?

Multimodally yours,
A new blog is born. A blog that will chart progress on the new UKLA/QCA project. It's simply titled Multimodality. Meanwhile other projects continue (Blogtrax) and old ones go public. Find me here (in issue 3), for an example of the latter. Adding it all up, it's been a busy time, maybe some retail therapy's called for...perhaps in the form of this elegant USB drive, who knows?

More than this...

This is the outcome of a fruitful UKLA/QCA project on multimodal texts. A follow-up of this work begins with a meeting in London tomorrow convened by Eve Bearne. We hope to keep interested parties up to date, by opening a new blog. Watch this space for further details! (You can download More than Words here.)

Photos and footprints

Here's Lynda Graham in dialogue at the Hidden Literacies conference. (Who is that hidden just behind her? A spectral form?) A photograph, Susan Sontag tells us, "is a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be...a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." A footprint? Nay, lad, that's Barnsley Teachers Centre!

Literacies hidden

Here's Gez Walker from the Showroom Cinema at the UKLA Hidden Literacies conference in Barnsley yesterday. There was a lot of excitement around young children making movies (so that's good), but not so much on graffiti. Ah, well! But here's the UK's new graffiti shop, and here's William Gibson photoblogging graffiti on a doorway in Brick Lane (scroll down to January 20). Anyway, what am I rambling on about, most graffiti isn't hidden, is it?

The web makes me not alone?
OK, so let's start with the remix: here (click on the pic), and then the original/published (?) here, by Justin Hall. So does this have the feeling of the real, the hyper-real or reality TV? I'm not sure any more. Here's Jill Walker talking about it. Is she for real? This is what Jill's reading and we assume that Jill has feelings, too. Actually, I thought I was watching theatre but if, as Justin says, after publishing his life online for so long, people 'don't trust me any more', what then? Well don't trust me, this is just a remix of stories. I walk backwards covering the footprints I left.

Bling Bling - phone ring

This is lovely and really is the logical extension to personalising your phone with nail polish (not that I ever did). Of course, when you change your phone, it may become a collector's item. These designs are unlikely to; but then this is a collector's item. Need a used copy?