The Thing, Version 2.0

Here is the newest update on "The Thing" for Halloween 2007. I am pretty excited about how he is coming along. The microcontroller program that controls his movements is a little unnatural right now, but that will just take a little bit of time messing around with the code and maybe changing up the way his ankles work. This has been a lot of hard work so far! Enjoy!

Photograph Critique

I love photography. Might I say it again: I love photography. If you look on the right-hand side of my blog you will see a few of my favorite pictures from photo.net (great website). For this assignment, I used Creative Commons' search feature to find an image of interest on Flickr, and I ended up with this:
















I found this image, titled "Soft Moon/4" by "lorZ" very interesting for several reasons. When I first encountered the image, my reaction was "What the heck is that?" This piqued my interest, and hence I spent a while looking at the image. Any photograph that can hold my attention for more than a few seconds is worth it's digital weight in my book.

For me, this is a very sensual photograph. The bed is a "sacred" place for many people, and the way this photograph is framed evokes the need to see/experience more. The viewer wants to know what is on the bed, in the bed, and what has happened there. Why is this place worthy of such recognition? Why have the sheets been stripped leaving the bed bare? Anyhow, great image!

Digital Storytelling

Surprisingly, I had a very difficult time coming up with a topic for this assignment. The hardest part of this exercise was thinking of something pertinent to my content area that could be presented in a classroom setting. At first I was totally enthusiastic about doing a presentation on my study abroad experience, but I didn't feel that would meet project requirements. I started thinking about some of the experiences that I have had in my life with digital storytelling presentations when I realized that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is a great example of a 2 hour digital story! I have always been passionate about climate change, and so I thought it would be great to do my story on that subject. What follows is my preliminary outline for my digital story:

Halloween Excitement

So, for the last four years there has been a big part of my life missing. Back in high school the beginning of October was always met with the smell of sawdust and the racket of hammers. For five years in a row a group of my closest friends and I built a haunted house every Halloween. Well, college snuffed that out pretty quick, but now it is back with vengeance! This year we will be building an 8 foot monster that will raise up and scare all the kiddos while holding out the candy and making spooky sounds. Here is a sweet prototype without all the glitz and glamor of the final project. Enjoy: