In the meantime you might want to book me at your next event doing visuals or if you have a development project up you think I might be interested in feel free to contact me.

“Its an uncomfortably long hiphop mix! …after 2005, I thought, there’s just not a lot of good hip hop, but this mix is four years in the making and there’s a lot of great stuff in here. I searched for the least misogynistic tracks, but couldn’t resist putting in a few just for their innovative beats.” says CPI (aka Caitlyn Pascal). 

Read the full article: http://dharmaarts.ca/2008_fall/cpi.html?l1

City Hearts Aimed Skyward 
(in four parts):

1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Visit CPI’s website:
http://thetastates.com/ 

I can’t remember when I first met James though I first saw his art hung on walls at Volcanic parties, seemingly the only divergent events on the island.

Taken from a recent interview in the Royal Gazette (a local paper in Bermuda):

A man who prefers his story to begin in the here and now, Mr. Cooper eschews delving into details of personal history, and the route which led to his present successes. Instead, he says: “What everyone should know is that I am fairly obsessed with a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson about creativity and education.

“It is on ted.com and I forward it to everyone I can because I think it is such an interesting and relevant point of view. Robinson quotes Picasso (see above), by which he means there is no formula to learn to be creative, but rather the challenge is to remain open to your own ideas, and to try and second-guess yourself as little as possible. So that is what is going on right now with my art.”

For those of you who are interested in seeing more of his work, check out this mini interview on the San Francisco-based art website Fecal Face.

I’m thankful that this is possible, though seeing as we’re very dependant on Windows there have been some growing pains in terms of adapting my new Hackintosh to this environment.  Here is a list of some of the bridges I needed to cross:

1. VMWare Fusion : Its the first time I use this software and well I’m delighted to be using it.  I can easily setup new testing PCs by simply creating a new VMWare instances.
2. Automount Maker : This tool accomplishes the very simple task of connecting me to a Windows share on a domain.  For some reason this method seemed to work better than using the mount -t smb shell command or the mount volume AppleScript snippet.  At some point I plan on trying to use MacFuse w/ smbnetFS.
3. Informix : IBM’s website is hella confusing (or maybe its just me).  I can find support documents without too much difficulty though when trying to locate the related (necessary) files to download there are no direct links to them.  As a result you have to browse through hoops of ambiguous terms a few times before finding the relevant file(s).  In this case I was searching for the Informix Client SDK 3.50 for OS X.  I was able to locate IDS 11.5 Developer Edition, which I hope contains the CSDK that I’m searching for (it was still downloading when I left this evening).

As well I’m probably going to get an Apple keyboard, I’ve quickly discovered that using a PC keyboard while using OS X, then switching back and forth within VMWare Fusion, can be kind of annoying.

Overall, I’m happy to have a Mac at work.

To start you off, here’s an excerpt 

In the developed world, mobile phones are completely ubiquitous: only toddlers, the very oldest seniors, and technophobes have resisted their allure. Parents give their children mobiles with global satellite tracking features, so they can search the web to find out where their kids are – and snoop into where they’ve been. Adults use mobile telephones to smooth the frictions of social life: in the age of the mobile, one can phone ahead. No one is late anymore, just delayed. Your productive business life can follow you anywhere – into bed, on vacation, even into the middle of an argument. We enjoy – and suffer through – a life of seamless connectivity.

This is new, and it is very important.

Since the initial dot-com boom, social and mobile networks have become increasingly more prevalent at quite a rapid pace.  Mark’s book proposal (and ideas in general) are anthropological of a nearing possible and almost present future.

If this interests you, check out his (modest) proposal :
http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=50

So we have a network share via the F:\ where we store all our pdf documents. When a user visits a company profile in the web application, they get a list of links to files pertaining to that company. Those links look something like this:

<a href=”F:\documents\id2304\20080403_comp_info.pdf” target=”_blank”>20080403_comp_info.pdf</a>

Though today I discovered that there’s an issue when there’s a hash sign in the filename, like so:

<a href=”F:\documents\id2304\example_#_file.pdf” target=”_blank”>example_#_file.pdf</a>

Different browsers respond differently when I click on the link, though none of them will render the url properly. On the other hand I can copy the link and paste it in the Start / Run command and it works fine.

Anyone else come across this before?

On a similar note the bicycle I ordered should be either arriving today or sometime next week.  More on that when I get it, pretty stoked.  It’ll be a big step up from the bicycle I ride these days.

The first film of the evening was entitled Soweto Strings.  It covered the story of the many youth participating in the Buskaid Soweto String Project.  Soweto is defined as an urban area (read slums) of Johannesburg in South Africa.  Though thanks to the help of Rosemary Nalden, a renowned violinist from London, England, she has brought hope for the people who live there.  As for the film, it documents the struggle of each of the students and their strong desire to learn these instruments for which are all string (hence the name of the film).  From what we see Rosemary is unscrupulous in her methods, she states that she is not teaching to simply help keep them off the streets, she is teaching them so they can aim as high as they can.

For a more complete review, check out The joie de vivre of Soweto’s young musicians by Tristan Jakob-Hoff from Guardian Unlimited.

The second film of the evening was Democracy in Dakar.  It was produced by Nomadic Wax and Sol Productions, the hip hop labels of Senegal.  They wanted to share the story of the music they produced and its political influence amongst the youth in Senegal (in particular to its last two elections).

Ben Herson, the director of the film, was in attendance that evening. After the movie there was a Q&A session in which he explored topics pertaining to the current state of affairs in Senegal in politics, the direction of the music, and its fragile stability.  He referred to a man, who’s name I can not pronounce let alone remember at the moment, that was like the Senegalese version of Ghandi.  As well as being politically involved was also a poet and in this way had also influenced much of the hip hop scene in Senegal today.

Anyways I highly recommend checking both these films out.