Keoonik the Otter

A student in my TAFE class, Tim Phabmixay, is gifted with an artistic talent.  He was kind enough to draw some cartoon river otters for me.  He has allowed me to use them for developing some imagery for the Keoonik project.

I have resisted the urge to add advertising to this blog since it’s been up for a few reasons.  Pretty much the key one is that I frankly don’t get enough traffic.  Who reads this blog?  My friends (occasionally), potential employers, anyone who googles my name.  And I have no desire to piss these people off with a lot of ads for no return.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Today I did join Amazon’s affiliate program though.  Why?  Because I have recently finished an awesome book, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I wanted to share this experience with my friends.  I thought of writing a review, or atleast a “I recommend this!”.

So does a recommendation comprise advertising?  Or is it just content?  I could just post a pic of the cover, but why not link it to Amazon?  It a badly kept secret that I prefer to do my book shopping on Amazon, and I love my Kindle.

I don’t think I’ll be getting rich off this any time soon, and I will not pollute my blog with a ton of advertising, but I don’t think linking to some of my favourite products is so bad.  So maybe I have sold out a little, I hope the two or three of you whom read will forgive me.

Coming soon: The kshuntley.com book club.

Introduction Keoonik,a smart tour system.

Keoonik (cue-nick, if I have that right) is an Otter in Mi’kmaq (actually all wabanaki) mythology. Keoonik and Ableegumooch the Rabbit get into all sorts of trouble. I’d love to use Ableegumooch, but that’s a real mouthfull! I think people can handle keoonik.com better.

So why did I choose a character from Mi’kmaq legend? Well, it’s not so much something to do with the character himself (although I probably will learn more about Keoonik and Ableegumooch now), it’s more or less to honour the native peoples of Nova Scotia. Hopefully something good will come from it.

You might be wondering what will happen to the project.  Well, unlike my former teammates, I believe in the goals Cubiquitous aimed to achieve.  In due time, I will expand on the code I have written and launch, either as open source or as a product, an application similar to the one built for Cubiquitous.  This project has been dubbed “Project Shepard” until I can decide on a new name.

This might come as a shock or blow to my former teammates.  No hard feelings guys, but honestly, I was the only one working on the code.  There is no doubt in my mind as to who owns this intellectual property.

If you’d still like to argue the point that you own some of the remains of Cubiquitous, I’d like to remind you that in a partnership, you would have owned some of the debt too.  Since no one else reached for their wallets when costs arose…

And even to further my shame, it turns out that design that I always figured should be “big enough”, isn’t.  This room has wonderful new computers and monitors – wide monitors – 1600 x 1024 monitors.  Now I can’t recall how large I made my artwork, and why I’d fall a few pixels short of 1600 x 1024, but alas, I have.

Even more so than before, my site needs a massive facelift.

Before I do, can I just say Season 6 rocked! What a payoff!

What I loved:

• Richard’s story was awesome!
• So much insight into the island, it makes you realise that the whole Dharma Initiative was a red herring!
• It makes sense now why Christian was everywhere!

What disappointed me:

• No Nikki and Paolo in the alternate world – sure everyone hated them, but it would have been nice to have a Nikki & Paolo goodbye.
• No Walt answers – okay, I get it, the actor aged, but it would help to have a wrap up.
• No Mr. Eko, and very little Shannon and Boone alternate realities – Mr. Eko was a favourite of mine.
• Ben’s turn to the dark side again – oh Ben, I suppose it is your nature though. I was enjoying redeemed Ben though.
• Richard, are you dead? Say it’s not so!

Okay, here’s my prediction:

So, Jacob’s adversary is not able to leave the Island, he’s always wanted to, it’s his ultimate goal and he can’t go until all the candidates are dead by their own hands. I get that. But it was kind of implied that Jacob can’t leave either. But that contradicts Season Five where we see Jacob intervening in the candidates’ lives in the past. Plus Mikhail said Jacob recruited him. Now Mikhail is a liar (although if he said he was recruited in Canada we’d KNOW it was a lie), but let’s take him at face value. How do we reconcile these facts?

Well, there’s an alternate Jack, an alternate Locke, an alternate Kate, etc etc. What if there was an alternate Jacob? Not in the alternate world, but in the original world? I can’t really explain how there can be two Jacobs but there might be the one who can’t leave the Island, and another who is like Alternate Desmond, setting things in motion, subtly manipulating people to some goal only known to him. Maybe there’s a Jacob out there somewhere living the life we want for Desmond, with his wife, maybe on good terms with his brother.

Well, there you go, my last guess at LOST. Thank you J.J. Abrams, thank you ABC, a six year payoff, and a TV show that changed everything.

If you know me, you might know about my privacy assignment from last year at UOW that involved sock puppets.  It was a creative assignment that I really threw myself into, and I kind of like that it was whimsical.  Whimsical enough that I set my Twitter profile photo to be one of the puppets.

So I figured, since it’s become associated with me anyway, why not rewrite my theme to reflect this?

The current theme uses a plug in to WordPress called Sandbox that allows you to just design your theme with CSS.  Now, I know PHP but the thought of digging through the loop just bugs me.  I like that Sandbox just gives me a clean slate to work off of.  The theme itself is tinted blue, to reflect my mood & personality and every 4 hours, one of 6 different photos from a recent trip to Canada appears.  It was an experiment in Eric Meyer’s ComplexSpiral and using time to change a theme (useful for automatically adding the Christmas logo to your website).

But, I hate it.  It’s too much blue.  It’s ugly.  The files are too large (as I put it to my class recently – I’m moving bathtubs through the internet).  And people don’t get the ComplexSpiral.  They get it, but they don’t GET it.  They don’t notice it, they don’t realise how cool, how special, how different it is.

As someone put it to me awhile ago “Oh yeah, I can do that on MySpace”.  Well, no, YOU can’t.  You’re just selecting a theme.  You’re not doing anything.  It’s like if you directed a movie and showed me the movie and said “see?” and I said “Hey I can do that too!” and I put a movie in the DVD.  I’m not actually making the movie, ya know.

So, here’s my plan, base a theme on sock puppets.  Scan buttons, socks, felt, wool, and start assembling the pics into something cool.

Now just to find the time…

A follow-up to the Google Goggles story; Goggles from the desktop?  It also interesting to see when/if it will be exported to platforms like iPhone and Blackberry.