bitdepth

A few days in at the festival and I’m having a great time. This year I’m pacing myself a bit more and not going to as many parties but seeing more films in the first weekend. It’s always a great event with films and great people. If I count the short films my total is 30 so far this year.

The first week of school is done at the Nova Scotia Community College where I teach in the Screen Arts program. It is always a busy and exciting week with the incoming learners getting up to speed and the returning filmmakers who are beginning their final year. Luckily I’ve been teaching for a while now and it gives me the opportunity to build upon what I’ve done and improve things every year.
Last year we started back in the new Waterfront Campus in Dartmouth along with all of the challenges of a new building that hadn’t been filled with people yet. This year everything is pretty much up and running smoothly, so the focus is on teaching and learning much more than figuring out how to connect things and which classrooms are on what floor.
I really need to have a structure with things organized, so I was very happy to have the whole term organized with Basecamp. Each course that I teach is project and all of the assignments, exercises and quizzes are milestones. In my Google Calendar I subscribe all of my Basecamp projects, so the deadlines all show up on my calendar. Each of the evaluative tools are stored as Writeboards, which lets me revise them before I lay them out in Pages in an assignment template that I’ve created. For support material I usually will have some presentations in Keynote (and I try to make things as visual and not text-heavy as possible) along with handouts or pointers to web resources.
For each class I have lesson plan that I create in OmniOutliner Pro that keeps me on track as I have tendency to drift. But I usually have a detailed course outline that breaks down all of the major topics as well as any readings. I’ll print out the outline that keeps me on track and I keep the paper that I use organized in file folders (green for year 1, red for year 2, and purple for the class that has both year 1 and 2). Every year a new Moleskine pocket notebook is used for notes and a pocket agenda (that is red) is a paper backup for my schedule (which I copy in to it from my Google Calendar).
With the systems that I have in place now it keeps me focussed on teaching and less on figuring out what I need to do. By having a solid support structure it opens the possibilities of improvisation as even if I get completely lost, there is an underlying structure and flow to the term that I can always fall back on. It’s fun to teach after you have everything in place.

I thought that I had things figured out with my mobile phone data plan to make sure that my Twitter updates weren’t costing me any extra money. With the short code for Canada it’s very easy to send updates, so I signed up for the unlimited outgoing text messages with Aliant (which is now Bell). I had noticed some 15 cent charges on my phone bill for “TXT Services 2″, which seemed to correspond with Twitter updates.

After a few minutes on the phone I started some detective work with the customer service representative and we determined that the “TXT Services 2″ were indeed my Twitter updates. So I asked why I was being charged for them and it turns out that the short code is considered a service, which is why there is the charge. The whole reason I had unlimited text messages was to avoid being charged like that, and then I found out that there isn’t a plan that includes short codes as “unlimited” text messages actually mean messages from phone to phone. The representative helpfully explained that if I updated on a web site that there wouldn’t be a charge, but that defeats the whole purpose of mobile updates.

I do have unlimited web browsing, which means that I can use the Gmail mobile app on my Motorola ROKR and go to web sites as much as I want, so that’s the workaround. But with applications that are downloaded that aren’t from my mobile provider’s site, I have to approve each connection, so every time I refresh my inbox, open or send an email I have to approve the connection, which is a bit of a pain. Twitter’s mobile version works beautifully, but on my phone the built-in browser isn’t great, but I did find that the new Opera Mini works very well and even has an option to rotate the screen. It’s no iPhone or iPod Touch, but it’s the best mobile web experience that I can get now.

It would be great if somewhere there was a simple explanation of what you can do with various mobile phone plans and what it would cost. It’s frustrating to know that I could spend hours and hours in the mobile browser for a flat monthly fee, but every time I use SMS to send or receive updates there is a 15 cent charge. The complexity of the plans and options is confusing for everyone and far too much time is spent trying to figure out what works and with all of the unexpected charges I can understand why most people in Canada still only talk using their mobile phones.

I’m very glad that I have a perfect record so far with Sappyfest and the third year was the best yet for the indie music festival in Sackville, New Brunswick. This year I took fewer photos (but I have a Sappyfest 2008 set) and didn’t blog, but I was able to post short updates as things happened through my Twitter feed. Using my tweets I was able to reconstruct what I saw two weeks ago, since with a lineup of about 60 bands over three days, it’s easy to forget stuff. The rough statistics for me from Sappyfest 2008 are 27 bands, 4 readings, 3 films, and 1 dance performance.
What distinguishes Sappyfest is that it’s a more organic DIY hand-crafted festival. The performers are carefully chosen based on the Sappy Records folks (Julie Doiron, Jon Claytor, and Paul Henderson) having met and admired them. That provides a very friendly and casual atmosphere and at any time the audience is filled with people who will take the stage. The bands aren’t just there to play their songs and leave, but to see the other bands as well. The musicians wait in line like everyone else for food and beer, and there are lots of smiles and laughter all around.
Continue reading “Sappyfest Year 3″ →

Thanks to Carolyn for pointing out the very lovely visualization tool Wordle from Jonathan Feinberg. It allows you to either paste words or use a del.icio.us username to generate a rather beautiful visualization of the words and their frequency. The image with this post is the collection of my del.icio.us tags, so you can see what I bookmark most frequently. I love being able to see things in different ways like this.