Dave has had a lot to say about the press, inaccurate and incomplete reporting and how some reporters have acted at his and others recently decisions to decline interview requests. I’m not in Dave or Jason‘s league as far as being in demand for interviews, but do them occasionally in regards to Hawaiian music, language and technology as it pertains to the language and our programs. As with Dave and Jason, I have had a wide range of experience from having my thoughts concisely and accurately reported, to having them completely misrepresented. Wired Magazine did a feature on some of…
No Joy In Mudville
And Hilo certainly is mudville these days. We’ve enjoyed [sarcasm alert] probably the wettest period of the past 5 or 6 years. I actually enjoy the rain, except that it makes it most difficult to mow the lawn or get anything accomplished outside the house. It also makes my wife miserable. My father, who lives in Kihei on Maui (one of the driest spots in the state) actually has a device next to his bed that generates a rain sound which helps him get to sleep. I know the feeling, the pitter-patter of rain on our metal roof is hypnotic…
Second Life One Life Too Many
Thanks to Scott and Conn I jumped into Second Life this week, and in some ways I’m glad I don’t have broadband at home or I’d never get anything done there. I get a few minutes in before and after work, but it certainly could be a time sucker. If you ever run into Keola Prospero, just say “Hi!”, “Aloha!” or “Dia dhuit!”. I got my piece of First Land, but need to pretty it up before inviting anyone over. I did figure out how to use the Media Player, and linked to a video of Kenneth Makuak?ne I recorded…
Edge Case Becomes Edge Cast
I really admire Conn Ó Muíneacháin and the work that he has done for many reasons, not the least of which being such a strong advocate for the Irish language without approaching it from an academic or theoretical perspective. He simply does what he does in such a way that everyone knows this is simply the way manner in which he goes about his life. I was very much following his lead when I converted my Nahenahe.net podcasts to be exclusively in the Hawaiian language last year. Language blogs and language podcasts shouldn’t just be about the language but in…
Net Visionary Awards
Conn and Bernie have both been nominated in the Net Visionary Awards run by the Irish Internet Association. Like they used to say in Chicago, “Vote early and vote often.” Just kidding, one vote per voter.
Ground-Breaking New Radio Show To Teach Internet “As Gaeilge”
Radio listeners across Ireland will join internet users worldwide next Monday, as they tune in to the first episode of a new series focusing on the social aspects of the internet. It’s the first time an Irish radio series has been devoted exclusively to the phenomenon of “online social networking”, of which the best known example in recent months has been Bebo. What’s more: all 59 episodes of the show will be in Irish. The programme is called An Líonra Sóisialta, which translates to The Social Network. It will broadcast a 12 minute episode each day for 12 weeks. So…
iTunesU class sailing smoothly… for the most part
I have written previously about the University of Hawai‘i system’s participation in the iTunes U program. It allows faculty to create course materials as either podcasts or vidcasts, and make them available through a special area of the iTunes Music Store. I am doing so with my class, The History and Development of Hawaiian Music. At the beginning of the semester we were required to send our course materials to staff at the university’s Information and Technology Services (ITS) staff in order to have materials posted. A few weeks ago they gave us the capability to do it ourselves, as…
HyperDither! Graphics as only HyperCard could do them, until now
In the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or “Error-diffusion” filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop). HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the Atkinson dithering filter. The autor of HyperDither emailed Bill Atkinson in January,…
The Last Day Of Summer
I know the official end of summer is a month away, but to me, the Sunday before our fall semester starts is the true indicator that the summer has come to an end. This year is also the first that all schools in the state of Hawai‘i follow a unified calendar, so our daughter, along with all public school students throughout the state, started classes three weeks ago. Perhaps I’ll have to move it back yet again and reduce the summer to about seven weeks. I’m only teaching one class this semester, unless something changes and I need to take…
Discovering del.icio.us
Mahalo to Bernie Goldbach for opening my eyes to the joy of del.icio.us. Of course I had heard about it but only recently seriously looked into it and realized how valuable it can be in organizing my online life. You can view my del.icio.us bookmarks here, or if you have a Del.icio.us account, add me to your network. Since I also use NetNewsWire for reading through my 100 or so blog and news feeds, I started thinking about creating an AppleScript to automate posting to del.icio.us from NNW. Someone had already written it. Personally I would like it to be…