Ever wanted to hear George W. rap? While now you can thanks to this fantastic cover of “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five featuring carefully selected and organized sound bytes spoken by W. himself. The clip provides some insightful and timely commentary, but most importantly it is great for a laugh and worth a listen just to hear Bush channel LL Cool J and sing “something like a phenomenon”. Thanks to the Toronto Star’s Anti-Hit List for October 15 for the link.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
I’m writing this post from the blogging interface of Flock, a new Mozilla-based web browser which integrates social software technologies like blogging, RSS, Flickr and del.icio.us right into the browser interface. Not only can you write blog posts directly from the browser, but you can use the browser to post and view your del.icio.us bookmarks as well as read your RSS feeds. Although you can do some of these things in Firefox using Bookmarklets and their RSS subscription feature, the added features and seamless integration that Flock provides makes these technologies that much easier to use.
Originally published October 21, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The MEdTech Bookmark Manager is a tool which allows users to store bookmarks online, tag them, and share them with others. Not only are bookmarks stored in one easy to access place, but this application allows users to rate and comment on bookmarks, as well as choose to keep them private or share them with others. The bookmark manager was especially designed for medical students and faculty at Queen’s and contains several features not found in traditional social bookmarking applications, such as a thumbnail screen shot of the page you are bookmarking and the ability to rate your bookmarks and share these ratings with others.
The bookmark manager is accessible to all staff and faculty of the School of Medicine that have a MEdTech account. To begin using, simply log on to the MEdTech Bookmark Manager and begin adding bookmarks. For more information on how to import existing bookmarks from your browser and how to customize the bookmark manager visit the About page.
Originally published October 18, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Every so often I come across of a piece of art that challenges my most fundamental beliefs. The most recent piece to do so is Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy by Martin Arnold, an experimental film which remixes several clips from the clean-cut 1940s Andy Hardy series staring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Arnold painstakingly takes the frames, speeds them up, slows them down and repeats them turning a wholesome movie about family values film into an erotic Oedipal musical. The effect is quite shocking - it absolutely blew my mind that that an innocent hug between mother and son could be transformed into an erotic embrace by simply changing the speed and frequency of frames, while still maintaining the general structure and narrative order. The level of manipulation, although laboriously intensive from the artists point of view, was relatively low yet the effect of this manipulation was staggering in that it changed the accepted and widely endorsed meaning and message of the piece. Arnold states that “the cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented”, and believes that as an artist he is merely bringing forth what is actually, and unconsciously, latent within the piece. I’m not sure that I totally agree with him, and as with any type of Freudian analysis it is equally hard to credit or discredit such an interpretation. Whether it is there or not seems irrelevant - what scares me the most is that it can be made to appear as though it is there.
Unfortunately, the full film can only been seen in screenings and exhibits, but there is a short clip available on the artists web site. This clip isn’t one of the best from the film, however it does provide a feel for the technique used. For a more in-depth description and analysis of the film, check out this insightful review by Michael Zryd.
The MEdTech Academic Journal Directory is now live and is a listing of academic journals concerned with the use of technology in medical education. There over 40 journals listed by subject from educational technology to medical informatics and each journal is described in terms of thier target audience and topic areas.
Originally published October 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
A collection of my doodles, similar to the one seen in the header above, is now online in Dan Zen’s Gallery 2010. Thanks to Dan for hosting the doodles as well as a bunch of other artwork by some fantastic artists from the Hamilton area. A different piece from each artist is displayed every day, so be sure to check back often.
Miksang, which means means “good eye” in Tibetian, is style of meditative photography which encourages contemplative perception of the surrounding environment. Due to its inherently subjective nature, miksang is hard to define, but for me it is about capturing the shapes, textures, and patterns that I see all around me precisely when I am not looking.
I first heard about miksang from Chandrasutra after viewing her Recycled Miksang gallery, and was suprised to find that I had been practicing this style of photography for quite some time without even knowing it. For more examples of miksang, you can see my Miksang Set on Flickr as well as an entire Flickr group devoted to the practice.