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…

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…

I seem to remember somewhere someone talking about a fix. Maybe I should have paid attention. Yeah….

Okay, don’t panic, I’m sure there’s a fix.