I’ve just come across a site about remixing with three superb videos. They are interesting and entertaining, and don’t end when they appear to be concluding, as you can see from the screenshot below.

It looks like it's over, but notice how much time is left

I strongly recommend http://mediaatbrooks.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/open-content-and-is-everything-a-remix/ and here’s the first video:

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

So I was answering an email from a friend who was describing how lovely and warm it was in Arizona when I decided I wanted to show her what it was like here in Oakville, just outside of Toronto. But I was writing on my laptop and the photo was on my smart phone. I thought of grabbing my smart phone and putting the photo into Dropbox and then opening Dropbox on my laptop and adding the photo from there. But that seemed like work. Then I had an idea that I wanted to try.

I saved what I had already written to my friend as a draft on my laptop. Then I grabbed my smart phone, opened gMail, went to my draft folder, opened the draft, and clicked on “Attach”. Added my photo showing today’s weather here -

Somehow that seemed easier.

And besides, it was fun discovering how I could move from device to device in gMail!

A Poem – At Midlife I See by joanvinallcox

Courage at eighty is different from at twenty
But both ages carry their future constantly -
A fearsome thrust into an unmapped wilderness.

A fearsome thrust carrying life forward blindly
At eighty requires enough love to endure
Despite loss, and endure because of loss to come,
And endure because of the sweetness still here, if
Courage persists. And, despite (because?) the compass pointing
Through the wilderness to the edge of the map,
Tells a tale seen over and over about endings, despite this,
To work through today knowing
too much, and not enough, about tomorrow.

To carry your future at twenty is to seek
The wilderness because it must be mapped
And shaped. There are roads to clear and homes
To build, and no one has given you a plan
For your wilderness, (just the one they didn’t use in theirs).
So you thrust forward, knowing too little and enough,
Building blindly wherever you find a clearing, lifting
The log of your childhood so it bridges your fears,
Confident that it might not collapse on you.

Courage at eighty is different from at twenty
But both ages carry their future constantly -
A fearsome thrust into an unmapped wilderness.

Joan Vinall-Cox, October 25, 2002

I spent 12 days trying to get my iTunes store to work, with increasing urgency after I received an iPad 2. I got emails and even a phone call from Apple Support and from iTunes Support, and then more emails. I tried everything the support pages and the Apple and iTunes support people suggested, which was mainly a repeat of what the support pages said. I changed my password so many times I’m having trouble remembering what one I ended up with.

Then, talking to a friend about my iTunes account problem, I learned that you can have the same authorized iTunes account on only 5 devices. What?!?!? I’d never heard anything about authorizing an iTunes account, not in all the time I was asking for help because I couldn’t log into the iTunes store, and not ever before.

I came home and opened iTunes on my laptop. I mostly use iTunes for storing my own music and accessing free podcasts, and in over a year, and with a previous laptop, I’d never encountered a problem doing that in my, I thought, own account. But there were two authorizing  choices under Store, and guess what? Once I clicked on Authorize This Computer, my Apple ID and password worked and I could access my account, and set up my iPad.

Now don’t you think that should have taken fewer than 12 days and information from another user? Maybe even be added to the problem-solving pages online and on the Support people’s lists of what to check out!

I think that was a ridiculous waste of my time, not to mention the Support peoples’.

  Christmas After Bereavement by joanvinallcox

In Which I Trace the Shift From Text as Meaning to Context-Dominated Text

Inspired by Vandendorpe’s From Papyrus to Hypertext

In this video, a Studio Post Productions Demo Reel - http://studiopost.com/videproductions/ - I found on YouTube, you can see a number of examples of text being used as image. This is a radically new use of text, one that has only come out of the artistic closet and into more widespread use since the development of the Web. It is also one that could only come into existence during a modern, highly-literate, technological time.

The printing press, followed by generations of almost universal literacy, has given most people of the modern Western world a relationship with text that is beyond intuitive into tacit. We’ve done the 10,000 hours of practice Malcolm Gladwell wrote about; we read fluently. We decode words before we even notice that we’ve made meaning from these visual symbols that represent words.

Our modern, technological culture has had centuries of interaction with text in book format. We have reverenced books, initially because they were mostly holy scriptures, and then, in the Age of Enlightenment, because they were containers of wisdom and knowledge and beauty and a tool for preserving knowledge and art. Books were made up of text doing important cultural ‘work’. And they were a source of pleasure and prestige.

In books, a larger size of print indicated a title, an indicator of what the next bit of text was about; it helped set the context for readers so they knew the beginning point of the thought, and context was absolutely central. To follow the thread of thought, you have to know where the thread is coming from, where it originates, thus the importance of the larger-sized text that was the title.

In the late Nineteenth Century, books,but especially magazines and newspapers began to contain images, drawings and later photographs. In the early Twentieth Century, the reading audience became more sensitive to the context provided by design and layout, especially as displayed and developed in magazines. Also, with the development of movies, the use of text to orient watchers existed in titles, and before sound was introduced, to establish and maintain context in the silent movies.

Both text and image were accessed visually and thus the relationship between text and image was strengthening, but it wasn’t until mid Twentieth Century that a profound shift occurred. Image had been provided to readers in order to illustrate what text “said”. With the development of more sophisticated technology and more image-focussed readers, both obvious from the very popular Life magazine, text increasingly became a commentary on image.

With the advent of the computer as a writing tool, the word “font” became know outside of publishing circles, and knowledge about the contextual impact of font and layout design began spreading. (For a very accessible introduction, see Robin Williams’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book.) At the same time, television commercials were providing textual components in increasingly creative ways, and chunks of text began to be treated as visual entities. The computer made the variations increasingly possible.

With words or short phrases being flown into the frame, expanded, altered, and backed by music and sound effects, the context for the word(s) the viewer had automatically decoded became, not other words, or a textual train of thought, but the the effects of movement, colour and size variations, and sound.

When text is image, its denotative aspect, its dictionary meaning, is reduced, and its connotative meanings, the feelings associated with the word, become dominated by the way it is displayed visually and its aural setting. When text is image, it means what it looks and sounds like.

Advent  Meditation

Midwinter is a time of darkness, a time when the light lessens and disappears, a time when we mix hope and fear. The worldly powers compel many, but not every detail of our lives. We can, as this Christian story asserts, face our lives with faith, with belief that out of our struggles, meaning will emerge.

From Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/necosky/2145261355/

This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” – Matthew 2:15

by  Joan Vinall-Cox

It was a dark time -
Mary had wanted to be glad
Joseph had chosen her
but that strange dream …

and old Elizabeth, swollen  with  child,
calling her blessed, saying a
Child was growing in her
too, yet she’d never…
except in that strange dream;

and she had swollen
and Joseph,
angry and sad and puzzled,
had planned to hide
her disgrace, but he dreamed
too,
and married her but slept
apart
and would not look at her.

It was a dark time.

It was a dark time -
the rulers had decided
to count them all where
their ancestors had lived
so Joseph and Mary must walk

for days, weeks, and her so
large and tired, and both so
puzzled and hopeful and fearful.
Could the Holy One really have  chosen
them?

Still they must walk,
as the rulers
demanded, in the cold,
in the darkening time, they must
walk into Bethlehem, this ancient
town, filled with others obeying
the rulers who wanted to count  them and did not care
about walking, or a room for a
young woman with her time
pressing on her,
with the Holy One’s Gift demanding
His time on earth,
and no room for this family

It was a dark time.

There was light at His birth -
light in Mary’s eyes and
light in Joseph’s smile and
light flowing out, pulsing out
around the wondrous Child

light that brought the amazed
shepherds,
and star light that
brought the Wise Ones from
afar to worship
Him

and light that the eyes in
the dark could see, whispering to
a man with too much power
that he was nothing
beside such Light,

and the Holy One sent another
dream to guard the Light, to
hide it in a foreign land

and Mary and Joseph fled
into Egypt, carrying the Light
away from the darkness of
Herod’s massacre of babies.

It was a dark time.

It was a dark time -
waiting in a foreign land,
watching Him grow, and learning
patience and trust, waiting

for a new dream, yearning for
home

and then

out of the dark time,
the dream came.

So while I had my HTC loaner, I was careful not to bond with it. I noticed the way it offered suggestions of what I might be typing that I could click on, and liked that. And the way it had the non-letters available above the letters and I could chose to hold the key and then click on the symbol or number I wanted, without leaving the keyboard – that was nice. But I didn’t add a SD card and so couldn’t take pictures or add apps and I did that quite deliberately. I was loyal to my S2.

When I got my S2 back, I was worried about not liking it as much as the HTC loaner, but, no problem. My S2 felt sleek and fast and at home in my hand. I took some pictures; I downloaded some of the apps that were no longer there. I used my Kindle app to read one of my ebooks. All was well (and will continue to be, fingers-crossed).

So then it was time to return my loaner. So I read the instructions -

Once again I found myself in confusion. There was a bill of lading – and I’m not familiar with them and there were no specific instructions. I figured out that I was supposed to put the sticky address somewhere on the bag they sent me, but not what to do with the three other sticky labels. And the bag was Purolator this time, not Canada Post. And I could see the “Customer’s Copy” for the second page of the 3 page bill of lading so I kept that, but what was supposed to happen with the first page? I left it attached to the package.

As instructed by the instruction sheet (see above) I planned to drop the package in a mailbox. My husband said that it didn’t look right and he volunteered to take the package to the Post Office. There he was told that they couldn’t take it and he should take it to the Purolator office, so he did. But there was no information on the change from Canada Post to Purolator, and, in fact there was almost no information on what they had done with my phone, just this -

They replaced the PBA because it had no power and they said there were minor scratches – so minor I couldn’t see them. And what a PBA is, I don’t know – two pages of Google kept telling me it was a bowling app! And Google couldn’t tell me what “Repair Code: 313″ meant, though I expect the people inside the company who did the repairs probably knew what it meant.

So I’m cautiously optimistic about my repaired Galaxy S2, but as far as I’m concerned, Samsung’s customer service leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to Apple’s service.

The delivery man woke us up at 8:05 with my loaner from Samsung. It’s an HTC Legend (I think). I spent a couple of hours making sure I’d saved everything I wanted from my S2, and reading the instructions on how to set up the HTC. I don’t know where I learned about taking out batteries and SIM cards; just heard people talking about them, I guess. I fiddled around with taking off the back of the S2 and looking for places to try to lever out the SIM card; the battery I’d already figured out. As per the instructions from both the Customer Service person I talked to on the phone, and the sheet of instructions that came with the loaner, I kept everything but the phone itself. I put it in the bubble wrap package and read the instructions about the loading bill.

Ever noticed that instructions are often generic? I kept looking for the shaded red boxes I was supposed to do something with but couldn’t see them anywhere. I had the package with me when I went to the dentist, planning on walking to the Post Office after for help, but the office woman had a very similar package with label on her desk, so I asked her. Turns out there were no shaded red boxes on my label, but there were on another different kind of label. I hate generic instructions that don’t actually match what they’re printed on. They confuse me.

So I followed the tutorial on the HTC, and the information on the website and got my loaner phone set up so I can phone and get email on it. I can message too, but the Twitter thing won’t accept what I know is really my user name and password. (I tried them on my laptop and they work, but not on the HTC.) I also spent a long time trying to figure out if I had an SD card. I googled and asked people, but no one knew enough to help me out, and the Forums were filled with experts who didn’t explain to people with only basic information, like me.

I think I figured out that the S2 doesn’t need an SD card because it has a lot of memory. I certainly couldn’t find one on my S2. I can’t take pictures or open files on my HTC loaner because it has no SD card. Oh, well. All I really have to have is a working phone, and email. I can survive without a camera, my Kindle app, my music, my Twitter, and my Google+. I do have Facebook, but find it too small and strange to navigate through.

So my HTC is being charged right now and my beautiful S2 is in the mail on it’s way to Markham and the Android warehouse, and will be back in a couple of weeks.