another year over

Well I’m glad that’s all over and I bet I’m not the only one, I don’t mean the course. It’s just the assessment, how many of us had a hard time sleeping the night before and nearly chewed our nails down to the knuckle? I know I did so did others from what I heard today but I think we all did well we may have things to do over the summer or to smarten things up but we did it and that’s what counts.

I have enjoyed working with all the different groups and I don’t think I would of come up with half of the ideas for my work if it hadn’t been for the help of the other members of the group and I look forward to working with the same students next year, so thanks for all your help even if you didn’t realise you where giving it THANKS!!

Day trip to the local A+E

Holiday started of well with me spending the first afternoon in the local A+E department with a 4 hour nose bleed and got to go back tomorrow so again haven’t been able to start any work but am looking forward to seeing what the others have done.

Ctrl+ Alt+ Shift part 1

I know I should have done this yesterday but I was too knackered when I got home so here I am struggling with WordPress. Being dyslexic I have found the word editor in WordPress hard to use and not very good when checking my poor spelling so I use word 2007 to type out my blog then copy the text over to my blog, I have since found that word 07 lets you type your blog straight from there. Has anybody have the answers on how to do this and any necessary settings that you need? I’ve looked on the forums about this but they didn’t seem to help and I would like to be able to use this option. I went to Uni with a few ideas on our groups plan for the Ctrl, Alt, Shift campaign brief and came home with a lot more. Andy had had several good ideas on the war part of the brief, one being a short movie showing the life of a child soldier, I had an idea to add to this if we made it as a short movie that kept running until the viewer pressed a button that took them to either a donate page or a page that explains what can be done to combat this. Latoya came in with what she had been working on which was looking at the degradation of women and had several interesting concepts. one of which was what is classed as a kit that could be used to mutilate the genitals of young 7 year old girls, that is carried out in several regions around the world. This practice touched something in me and I thought it would be a very good idea if we were to at least look at a campaign that would draw more attention to this barbaric act. I thought that if we took the idea of the kit to a new level where we use the concept of the paper doll dressing toy, where young girls have a flat paper doll and they cut out dresses to hang with the use of tabs onto their paper dolls. What I suggested was to print the kit onto a piece of card along with another card that would be made into box by the recipient and a leaflet explaining what the kit was about, anyone who received this kit could not be influenced into at least thinking about and maybe getting involved in the campaign to stop this tradition. Over the next week I will be working on this idea to see if I can produce a good enough design for this idea as it has pricked my interest and I will try to keep you updated on my progress.

Dissertation Proposal

I am no good at writing this blog I can never think of thing to say which is the same when it comes to write this proposal, I just don’t know what I’m going to write my dissertation on. I know its got to be on my subject area but that is such a big area and trying to narrow it down to a subject that not only satisfies the criteria, plenty of material to research and it is both interesting to write about cos whats the point of writing something that no one wants to read.

holidays

I don’t know about anyone else but thank god that is over and we have a chance to catch up at a bit more leisurely pace. i know I’ve still got things to do on my projects but at least i willn’t feel so pressured.

Data Collection

Dave gave me an good idea on what to do with the Data brief and how to best display the data i had found and this was to have a small animated flash clip of the different types of wheelchairs moving across the screen and ending up at the percentage mark of the type that were counted. there are a lot of ways in which this little exercise could be expanded, we could get in contact with shop-mobility and find out how the figure change on a daily bases or what percentage of the chairs are used by male and female clients. we could also use sensors on the chairs to see how often each chair is used and what kind of mileage they rack up in a given time, we could also check on the weight that the chair has to carry and see if this has a corresponding effect on the maintenance the chairs have to undergo. That could also be a sensitive topic as some of the users may object due to the thought they may get restricted because of their size but it would help the company make more informed decisions as to when these chairs needed overhauling.

Processing

I have been thinking of ways in which i can get the philharmonic brief more interactive, i have already decided that i want both light and movement in the way of water jets for this piece and i thought a good place to display it would be in the Albert Dock in Liverpool. The control would come from sensors placed around the dock to pick movement up and start the light show along with the music from the philharmonic, to do this i will be utilizing processing for the control aspect and the arduino or something to trigger the lights and water pumps to run. I know that i haven’t got time to build a full rig and  i don’t think i have the required skills to set it all up but i intend to build a small mockup of the unit and try to get processing to trigger the necessary outputs from Arduino.

the hardest thing i am finding at present is with remembering how to use action script it does not seem to matter how much liz Edwards shows me how to use the software when it comes to me using it at home i find i can’t remember what she told me. i spent several hours the other day trying to insurt a graphic to act as a button but each time i tried the stage would change and it didn’t matter what layer i was working on i just couldn’t get it to work in the end i ended up making the button by using the rectangle tool and drawing a button and converting it to a movie clip. it can be very dishearting when just a simple thing like this slows you down and it should be very simple but you just keep running into these small problems.

if there is one thing i get out of this course it will be to master this software and i don’t care how long it takes me but i will get there.

Monday 19 Jan 09

Last night just before going to sleep I came up with the idea of using a butler to walk on screen with a tray of Donato’s butties and saying “here’s your fresh Donato’s sandwich sir”. I was thinking this could be used in several ways; one could be as the logo for the product as it shows class and freshness.

 

Another idea was to have the rapper of sandwiches depicting one of four country scenes one for each of the fillings of the sandwiches, the background colours of the carton could also be in a colour that best fits the filling like blue for fish, green for vegetable, off white for chicken and a light brown for meat.

 

The thuird idea is a flash movie again with the intro of a butler with the butties then we zero in on the sandwich that has various icons scattered around it each depicting a process or item to do with the filling and how they are fresh and wholesome.  

an Answer for Graham Stringer MP

Some MP’s have no idea of what they are talking about; take Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Manchester, Blackley. I suffer quite badly from Dyslexia and it did not matter how much my teachers or my parents tried to help with my spelling and grammar I am still not able to string sentences together without loads of mistakes.

I have learnt to cope with this disability (and it is a disability) through the help of numerous special needs tutors and a computer. If this MP thinks that literacy is the coarse of so much crime wouldn’t it be better campaigning for more funding to help with the problem rather than taking the legs out from under the people that are working to help the sufferers?

There is no way in which this or any other MP could know what someone who suffers with Dyslexia has to go through on a daily bases, the humiliation and the frustration of not being able to communicate with others is degrading enough without an ill informed small minded person talking through their backside to put them down even more.