Watch fullscreen for best viewing experience.

Read on for information about the video.

The assignment was to create a visual, time-based narrative using only typographic elements from a particular font. I used a few other fonts in mine, but their use was contextual and approved.

We were shown some examples of previous years’ work. Of those, the following three caught my eye and served as inspiration whilst creating my piece:

• Courier by Eric Carlsen
• Didot by Jasper Turcotte (originally from here)
• Papyrus by Peter Rimkunas

My roommate, Jeremy, Latin and History double major that he is, helped me flesh out the concept with historical background, and of course he provided the translations for the introduction.

The video was created in Adobe After Effects, a program I had never used until taking this class. To learn the program, I took a weekend and created this video.

Our lectures from this class last year were recorded, and are available for free through iTunes U.

If I’ve left anything out, please feel free to add it in the comments on this post.

About Me

• My site
• UMaine New Media Department: Lots of interesting projects come out of New Media, and they’re flexible enough that they can accommodate interesting projects like iPhone development.
• ASAP Media Services: My job on campus. I learned most of what I know about programming working on real projects here.
• Channel 6 Video: Our class got local news coverage. Check out the video!

iPhone Development Resources

• Apple iPhone Development Site: Your first and best resource for documentation and tools for iPhone development.
• iPhone Developer University Program: Professors can sign up and grant students access to development tools.
• CS 193P (iTunes link): iPhone Application Programming—a course at Stanford University. The lectures are available for free on iTunes, and the course materials and sample files are available at the above link.
• Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK: an excellent book to get you started working with the iPhone Software Development Kit. Some knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming required.

If you want to cut to the chase, check out the article and video here.

This semester, my Information Design class collaborated with a graduate journalism class called “The Future of News.” They were trying to figure out what all of this New Media stuff means for the role of journalism in the modern world. Specifically, they were interested in what role citizen journalism might play, and whether it could take over from “real” journalism.

Through discussions with the grad students and our own research, my class decided that, at present, the best way to think of citizen journalism is that people are taking a more active process in the generation and moderation of news content. Newspapers won’t disappear tomorrow, and may never, but citizens are finding their way in to fill valuable gaps in news gathering.

With the Future of News class, my New Media peers and I conceived of a system in which citizens can submit news stories and collaborate on breaking coverage of localized events. We based the model largely on the coverage of the Hudson River plane crash, where the first reports from the scene came in over Twitter. We figured that, with the ubiquity of video and GPS in mobile phones, people could post short packets of information that would be grouped together by geographical location.

To that end, my New Media class began construction of a prototype system, independent from the journalism students. We split into three groups:

• Database and Backend – A place to store data about users and stories. Also handled all the manipulation of submitted data (sorting, searching, etc).
• Facebook Application – Facebook is the most popular social networking service, so we decided to leverage its user base to generate, browse, and share news content.
• Mobile Devices – Users can submit geotagged stories from anywhere at any time. The iPhone is the most promising, and we’re all biased New Media douchebags, so we decided to use it.

I was on the Mobile Devices team. The main reason that I decided to take this class is that I knew I would be able to learn iPhone development, something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now. However, there are no professors here who know anything about iPhone development, and only one or two students have even looked at Apple’s development tools, so it was up to me and my team to learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch in six weeks on our own and actually build something. This book was an invaluable resource, by the way. The application ended up being 1080 lines of Objective-C. I did most of the coding, with a partner helping pointing out when I did stupid things because I was too tired to be coding.

As you can see from the video above, we managed to pull it off. The app you see there is a very rough prototype, and it probably won’t continue beyond the end of school, but I can now use what I’ve learned about iPhone development to work on a few ideas that I have for some applications, one of which is particular to island life.

Bonus: Fire Juggling part II

I juggled my fyrefli FyreBalls with some friends on Saturday evening in Old Town. Here are the pictures (also directly on Flickr):

Every year, New Media professor Mike Scott (also my boss at ASAP Media Services) takes an intrepid group of students to the Alaska Folk Festival in Juneau. We leave this Friday, April 10th. During our 12-day stay, we’ll be filming, editing, and posting short documentary pieces and interviews on our new site, www.MaineObservers.com.

I’ll also be posting blog posts and still photos of my own, daily if I can, here and on Flickr, and I’ll be tweeting incessantly.

A few weeks ago, some of the Alaskans from the festival came to visit. They had an amazing jam session at Mike Scott’s house, and we streamed it live on the Internet to Alaskans who were four hours less tired than we were. The next day, they performed at a local bar under the name Ray-Jen Cajun. We brought a few cameras that night to practice filming a common environment of the festival. I took 1400 pictures that night, and I’ve posted 14 of them (1% for those keeping track) here for you to see. The one at the beginning of the post was published in black and white in the school paper.

I’m going to have to try to bring that 1% up a little. When I’m shooting stills, I plan to focus on taking fewer shots and being more thoughtful about each composition. I also need to remember to stay out of people’s way.

Stay tuned, because there will be a lot more coming. I’ll try to fill you in on some of the gear we’re bringing and the kinds of documentary we’re making.

You may remember that, right at the beginning of my freshman year, I bought two new hard drives. Along with the 200 GB drive in my laptop, that gave me 360 GB of “online” (usable) storage plus 1TB for backup. Well, I’m happy to report that I have completely used the 360 GB available to me, and the backup drive is nearly full with backups and a few other things. It’s time to expand.

Instead of going for another medium-size drive, I decided to go all-out and get a new backup drive. I went with the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA internal drive. Along with it, I got a Macally G-S350SUAB FireWire 400/800, USB 2.0, and eSATA enclosure to turn the new drive into an external drive.

After I had set up the drive, I had to clone the contents of the old backup drive to the new one. This amounted to about 850 GB of data. The cloning process took seven hours over a daisy-chained FireWire 800 connection. I had hoped that I could then start using the drive, but no dice. As soon as it finished cloning, it had to verify the cloned data, a process that took an additional four hours. After that, I had to delete the old backup files off the old backup drive, a process that took overnight to finish.

Now that that’s over with, the new drive will be strictly for backup, and I now have a full terabyte of empty space to put more stuff on. As George Carlin would say, “you’ve got more gigabytes than you’ve got stuff! You’ve gotta get more stuff!“

Oh, and the best thing about this setup was the price. I spent over $250 a year and a half ago for a 1TB drive, and that was actually two 500 GB drives in one box so it’s loud and heavy. The new 1.5 TB drive was $129 on Amazon, plus about $80 for the case that has FireWire 800. That’s about $50 less for half again as much storage and twice the convenience. Tomorrow it will probably be half that price.

Here are some photos I took while I was putting the drive in its case. You can also see these shots up on flickr.

I had planned to get this post up sooner, but I had to process the photos first, and to do that I had to clear off space on my computer to store them, and to do that I had to offload stuff to the external drives, and to do that I had to wait for the clone to finish. *whew!*

For Christmahanakwanzika, my amazing(ly nerdy) girlfriend Cheryl gave me a set of FyreFli fire juggling balls. These unique kevlar and wire balls can be juggled safely (well, to a point; it is still fire) without gloves due to their heat-dissipating design and the fact that fire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Since I was in the Boston area this past weekend anyway (I apparently have Spring Break when no one else does), we decided to go to the MIT weekly juggling meetup and give the ol’ FyreBalls a burn. In the photo set below (best viewed full screen), you’ll also see Jacob Sharpe, a Circus Smirkus alumnus who can keep four diabolos going consistently, and Stephanie Tanzella, a fellow UMaine juggler and poi spinner who lives in the area. They, and many other bystanders, were eager to try my new toys. Lest you worry, I told all the kids there to only try it at their friends’ houses, so their own property value is assured.

You can also see the shots directly on Flickr.

In the same issue, Jeremy had an op-ed on language published. It could be seen as another caricature of me.

Jeremy was also quoted in an article about Facebook. His quote is another caricature of me, so there were three in this issue of the Maine Campus. That’s even better than this issue!

This is a scene from the Honeymooners episode The $99,000 Answer. I made the video to go with the audio from the clip. I won’t embed it here, because you can see it in full HD resolution at YouTube here. Enjoy.

I know I haven’t exactly been writing a lot lately. I’ll just add here that I’m taking 6 classes (20 credits) and haven’t exactly had a lot of time. I’ll see if I can get a few more posts in soon.

Edit: sorry about the malformed YouTube URL. It’s working now.