The nice folks at the National Film Board asked me to post this notice that voting is open on the In Vivo web animation contest. There are five finalists and the winner will be sent to Aichi, Japan for Expo 2005.
As well, by voting you become eligible to win one of five mp3 players the NFB is giving away, so head on over to the In Vivo website to check out the animations, and possibly win something.
The work is quite nice, and it’s good to see the NFB continuing to cultivate Canadian animation.
If you’re into this kind of thing (taking surveys for the sheer procrastinatory goodness of it all, or to peer curiously at the questions and wonder about the questions they are asking and what they are going to do with the data), and have a weblog, check out this weblog survey by the venerable MIT.
I’ve added a couple of new links just under the picture of my face there on the right, pointing to other places on the web where I’m amalgamating information about myself that any good stalker would be interested in. For example, after letting my account sit dormant for a year, I have finally started using Flickr, so check out my Flickr page. It will surely become more interesting once I have settled in the UK and everything is new to me and therefore a Kodak moment. (A note about Kodak: what the hell are you doing?!? You’ve stopped manufacturing slide projectors, black and white photo paper, and Kodachrome Super 8? What’s next?)
I’ve also started using this thing called Audioscrobbler, which posts everything I play on iTunes to my Audioscrobbler page. It makes me think once again about the effect that publicizing these small quotidian gestures might have – for example, now that the link to my Audioscrobbler page is there, and therefore there exists a possibility that someone might click on it and look at it, I might be a little more careful about listening to Sarah McLachlan all day, because I want to seem super cool in my musical taste. You can be assured that what’s there is stuff I actually like to listen to, though in a while a more honest picture will begin to emerge, since I’ll forget the little scrobbler application is publicizing this info so that anyone who cares can see it. What drew me to Audioscrobbler was the “recommendations” it makes – based on what you play, it will recommend other artists that you might find interesting. It reminds me of my experience with Amazon. After purchasing a single book on Amazon, on my next visit to the site they cannily recommended several books and CDs to me that actually matched my taste, to my horror. (I’m so predictable!) Based on this demoralizing though interesting summation of my interests by Amazon, I thought I’d see what Audioscrobbler recommended in terms of music. So far, no revelations. I already know about and sometimes listen to the recommended bands. But perhaps in time a hidden gem may be revealed.
For the first time in years, I filed and painted my fingernails. This was a sort of pleasant, mindless activity. At first I was also pleased by the results. My father used to say, if you want to know something about a person, you observe how they take care of their nails and their shoes. His nails were always neatly trimmed and shoes highly polished (which probably became automatic after being a cop for a while – they have to polish their boots/shoes). If you looked beyond my dashing American Apparel outfit or Coupe Bizarre coif and checked my nails and shoes recently, you might think I really don’t give a damn about my outward appearance. So yesterday I bought new shoes and some nail polish.
I’m good with most kinds of technology: web technology (I installed my own blog, OK!), Apple technology (that’s an easy one), circuit board technology (to an extent), cooking technology (cooking is mostly chemistry), and other sorts of blah-blah everyday technology. But nail polish technology turned me into a bit of a bumbler. Base coat, polish, top coat – I got the sequence right. But I suppose I don’t know enough about the chemical composition of nail products (perhaps all I need is a chart with curing times) to know how long I’m supposed to wait in between, when it’s acceptable to use my hands normally again, etc. As a result, this morning my lovely pink nails have a bunch of little bubbles on them, probably due to not waiting long enough between polish and top coat.
Sigh. If there’s one technology I thought I’d surely be able to master, it would be one that I picked up at Jean Coutu (Quebec chain of drugstores, for you non-Quebec residents).