Wiki pet photo & more

I finally got round to taking a photo of the rest of my tribal stuff. I should have waited for the sun to go behind a cloud- too many shadows, but it looks better if you click on the photo to see the enlargement.
A favorite is the fork/backscratcher in the back row. Its carved faces manage to be both funny & serene. My other fave is the siamese cat. It had an old handwritten label that said "voodun" which made me wonder if its former life was on an alter in Haiti. When I scratched that off, underneath was a label that says "carved from genuine kiln dried monkey pod". What on earth is a mokey pod? I'll have to google it!

While I'm on the topic of photos, here's a link to my staff wiki pet photo

Second Life & Library 2.0

I read some pages about 2nd life linked from the 23Things Task 22 site. Mostly about using it as a library youth outreach tool. When I followed a link for "SimTeach: Universities and private islands in Second Life" I found that The Australian Film TV & Radio School has its own island called Esperance. They run Machinima screenings and festivals of virtual films. I’ve been to some sessions of the Machinima festival shown at ACMI and I think some of their shorts have screened in the MIAF animation festival. Even if its cheaper to look at stuff on Esperance island, I think its too many hoops to jump through. Its easier to just roll up and see stuff on the big screen. Better with an audience too!

Did some reading on Library 2.0 as well. I can see the benefits for both the library and the user. But do library users want to spend more time interacting with their library, even if its via sexed up technology? I think they’ll need to see big payoffs/bribes to get motivated (ipods, grocery vouchers?).

Youtube

Friday night I went to ACMI's screening of The American Astronaught (think dancing space cowboys with a bit of Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon thrown in). I first saw it at MIFF and haven't been able find it on DVD. I thought I'd show my support and see it again to get audience numbers up. It was a sell out session. Seems word has spread!

To kill time waiting for ACMI's screening I saw Cloverfield at MelbCentral. The audience was comparing it to Godzilla??? Not even close! I would have been more impressed if I hadn't already seen The Host. They nicked the creature & half the action, spliced it with 9/11 re-enactments, then sprinkled it with bad teen actors. It didn't have the wit, political bite & heart of the Korean film. It also didn't have my 2 favorite actors Byeon Hie-bong (even better in The Host than Memories of Murder) & Bae Doo-na (I loved her as the gormless Korean exchange student in Linda, Linda).
Here's a Host trailer I found on Youtube after I got bored searching for Library clips www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCsBMwK40hw. Youtube's easy to search but creating an account & exporting clips is a painful process.

del.icio.us & podcasts

I created a del.icio.us account today http://del.icio.us/Doodle_bug
I also made a del.icio.us search for retro and followed the trail to a bookmark on 70's TV shows. Its a great idea to have your bookmarks follow you around - now I just have to find time to add them all.

The first favorite site I bookmarked was Josh Agle www.shag.com I first saw his work in Outre gallery in Elizabeth St. He designs retro stuff thats like 50's cigarette advertising.



He's also heavily influenced by Tiki culture. I'm a fan of Tiki's too. Here's my collection, I've thrown in a few retro 70's carved madonna's too!
Perhaps I should add a photo of my old Balinese wall plaques?





Shag's designs look like this plate I found at the Salvos. It reminds me of seeing Tezuka's anime 1001 Nights at the Kino cinema. It had the same 60's playboy graphics. It also had a pink tinge because the film stock was old and brittle. Halfway through they managed to set fire to the film!
A few years later there was a more successful screening of 1001 Nights at ACMI to tie in with the Tezuka exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria. I found some podcasts Philip Brophy made for the exhibition at: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/podcasts/namedSets/3/playlist.html?genSetId=5

Google Books

I made surprising discoveries in google books. I thought they just scanned copyright free classics but I found Janet Evanovich books, the whole Kerry Greenwood Phryne Fisher series and best of all "One For Sorrow" the 1st in the John the Eunuch series. Its a mystery set in C6th Byzantium. I have the 4th book & couldn't find the rest before they went out of print. Dont think I could stare at a screen to read the whole thing-I still prefer paperbacks.

Google maps

Turns out I'd been seeing google maps for a while without realising it. They keep popping up as links when I look for shops in Sydney. Google maps seems to combine yellow pages & whereis, so you use just 1 tool to easily look up places when you don’t know their exact address.
Have to say that I prefer whereis.com.au when I already have the exact address of where I'm going.
For info of exactly where a business is on a street yellowpages.com.au maps are clearer.
I like GoogleMaps satellite maps better & searched for my favorite needlework store.

MySpace & Facebook

I've created MySpace and Facebook accounts. Found some familiar faces in the Swinnie part of Facebook. MySpace looks like it would take lots of time to customise and would duplicate things I've already set up in Blogger like RSS feeds. The search facility is a bit of a blunt instrument, it would be good if it ranked sites in order of relevance (like how often your searchword is tagged in a page)

I made a search in MySpace for El Santo because I'm a fan of 1950's, 60's & 70's masked mexican wrester films - Des Mangan used to show them on SBS and got me hooked. Since then ACMI at Fed Square have shown a couple, but mostly I find DVDs 2nd hand at Dixons. I've gathered a library of over half a dozen. Here's the cover of one of the DVDs I have at home.

The 1st page of MySpace results were rubbish, I changed to searching MySpaceBlogs and had better luck. I found this neat page www.myspace.com/bluedemon1922 dedicated to Blue Demon who teamed up with El Santo & also made solo films. Its a popular site, 857 friends! There's cinema lobby cards, posters & film clips with funky music.

RSS Feeds

Set up a google feed reader today and added a subscription to DIGG Videos to it. It will be a handy way to find out which clips everyone's buzzing about. I also added feeds from Soviet Poster A Day and Shibuya 109 which I decided to also display in Widgets on my blog. Getting the Widget onto my blog took ages. Making the Widgets was easy and they loaded into Google Reader no probs getting them into blogger was harder. I was clicking on Get Blog list and getting an XML error but eventually I found if I clicked on the Layout Widget button it worked straight away.

Forgot to mention that I've commented on other folks blogs. I remember leaving comments on the blogs of Fiona's 23 Things & Tokyo Trash Baby, there could be others I cant remember. It's fun guessing who everyone is.

Image Generators - Bollywood Subtitles

Had a look at some image generator sites over the weekend.
I haven't spotted one I like yet but I found this groovy site that lets you replace the subtitles of old Bollywood film clips.
Found one with one of my favorite actors - Amitabh Bachchan and added my own subtitles.
Click on the link below
www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/play_uk.php?id=1865819

Library Thing thoughts

Had a look at Library Thing today & added a book. It would be a lifetimes work to add all my books - their maximum upload limits definitely couldn't cope. It doesn’t really grab me because my friends already share the same taste in books as me. Virtual folks commenting on my taste or lack thereof doesn't appeal. Now if it was a catalogue of my DVD collection or fav movies, that would be a different story ...

another op shop find! - Japanese pig creamer

Flickr & Korean pose dolls

This weekend I took some photos to add to my new flickr page. I've loaded photos of my Bradley doll collection. A couple I've had since I was little but the rest are op shop finds from around Melbourne & Sydney. I've created a photo set and uploaded it to the Bradley Dolls flickr group I joined last week. Find it by searching flickr groups for Bradley Dolls or just go to my flickr page www.flickr.com/photos/doodle_bug/

Eureka!

Looks like its ok now. My posts wouldn't show up using explorer and firefox would crash if I even loaded the www.blogger.com site. Now I've downloaded the latest firefox update and everythings working!

23 things

trying out a few things