Academic Aesthetic Lite

I think I'm going to stop using Vox. 

Don't get me wrong, it's a great service and I'm going to continue to recommend it, particularly to my friends and coworkers who are maybe unsure about how easy blogging can be.  But spreading myself over 3 different sites (AcademicAesthetic.com and Teachers20.ning.com being the other two...) is a bit much, even though I did have a sort of system for what entries were posted to each.

So I'm going to try to focus more on Academic Aesthetic this school year.  Posts that would have been placed here will end up there, or in my del.icio.us account.  You can still catch me there, as I'm about to start posting/podcasting again.

(And no, this has nothing to do with the fact that World of Warcraft is taking up all of my free time.  I don't play it EVERY waking minute, after all... But if you're ever on the Trollbane server, say hi to Argi.)

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Wow1

I spent the last couple of days (mostly) offline, enjoying a break from the digital world for a while.  The same cannot be said for today, however.

Kelli bought me a copy of World of Warcraft for my 30th birthday.  It's everything they say it is, which means that I got absolutely nothing done after I installed it this morning.  (Unless of course you count getting my Night Elf Rogue up to level 9 as progress.)

Tomorrow doesn't look good, either.

Maybe Saturday.  We'll see.

My RSS Aggregator is just full of papercraft ideas thanks to a certain magazine, so if you don't mind I'm going to dump them all in here at once.  Ready?

Gardening:

• My wife likes  buying those little plastic trays to help seedlings grow, but perhaps this pot made out of newspaper would be a more eco-friendly way to do it.
• Of course I tend to kill any plant I touch.  Perhaps it would be better if I just made one of these papercraft models of houseplants instead.

• I like to snap pictures of exemplary student work, but if it's 3D I sometimes run into the problem of having a distracting background and/or difficult to control light sources.  Next time, I might just build a papercraft macro studio!  (They say it's an origami studio, but I was always told traditional origami has to start with 1 square paper.  This design doesn't have t o start with a square to work well.)

• My wallet that's made out of duct tape is holding up quite well, but when it's eventually worn out I might go with this simple paper wallet instead.  3 cuts and a bunch of folds is all you need!  (And it's not as sticky as a wallet made out of tape, either.)

• Do you remember back when Mario didn't have to go everywhere with a cast of about 50 of his closest friends?  Bring back the days of the first Super Mario Bros. game with these two papercraft models!  (World 1-1 & World 1-1 End)

Ever sit down in front of your computer to do something "artsy," only to stare blankly at the screen until you give up and go surf the web?

Why not surf to some sites that might actually help you?

My Mom's birthday is tomorrow.  She's already gotten a card from me, but if I had forgotten I most assuredly would have resorted to making my own.

Either that, or printing out one of these.  They're a long way from that Print Shop garbage I used to play around with.

For people who want to build things on their fridge but don't care for magnetic poetry, I give you this!

I'm not sure I would want to show my students how to burn things with a magnifying lens, but this set of instructions for how to engrave things with sunlight has me wondering what items I have that might just hold up against a few char marks.

Perhaps I should be more worried about what my wife would say.  ;)

RADIO TOWER

I have to say, I'm really enjoying the TMBG Clock Radio.

This has nothing to do with the fact that two of the first songs I heard were "Ponytail" and "Why did you grow a beard?"  No, really.

And the fact that you can change channels to hear different things is good, too, because "Turtle Songs of North America" can only be heard so many times in one day.

Photojojo has a neato article entitled Turn Your Photos into Gibberish — How to Convert Photos into ASCII Art.  (via Craft Magazine)

This sounds really cool, but when I tried it and downloaded the results, they included lines that say "CopyRight@photo2text.com" and "You are not allowed to remove the copyright text."

Wait a minute - it's my photo, so why are they now claiming the copyright?  Why can't I further edit a photo that was mine to begin with?

Perhaps this is just a big misunderstanding on my part, but I couldn't find any explanation on the web site about it.  Perhaps I should use the hidden link to "create [my own] personal search engine" and search for the explanation that way?  I think not.

Granted, they seem to be slapping a copyright onto a poor quality ASCII version of my image.  Who cares, right?

I care, because they didn't ask first. 

My point is I don't recall giving them permission to do that, and I wouldn't have tried their service had I known they would try a cheap trick like that.  I don't even recall seeing a TOS page for me to click through without reading, so they can't even use the excuse that YouTube has if they resell your original content without giving you a cut of the profits.  (They can do that, you know - it's in the YouTube TOS.)

Anyone have more information on this?  I would love to hear that I've just misinterpreted everything.