There are several sites that can generate the bar codes. I used KAYWA to generate this one, but others include ActivePrint and Codeatron. There's lots of information available, much that points to possibilities. A post in the Mobile Learning blog seems to have a good intro with scenarios for uses in education.

Could we put up barcode signs that point to our digital presence? Could we use them to point to extended schedule information for rooms at conferences? Could they be used together with SecondLife to create a first life/second life educational journey, game or contest?

I just use my phone to make phone calls, but I hear other people actually use them for other stuff. Go figure!

Perhaps I should mention, I hate watching and reading about sports.

Instead of working for Sports Illustrated, I work for a technology group, but still need to keep my tools sharp. That involves things I think are exciting because they're in my field, but it also involves things that aren't so exciting that are in the job's field. That would be things like twitter, for instance. I do it so I understand it. I try to understand the mentality of people who claim to be "addicted" to it. Immersion is important.

The real reason for this post, though, isn't to tell other writers and designers that they need to immerse themselves; though if they hear that, it wouldn't be a bad thing. The reason is to hash out a question of degree. How much does any support person need to fit in to a work environment where only limited aspects of their skills are used? What if fitting the mold hampers the very qualities in an employee for which they were hired?

Again, let me explain using a job with Sports Illustrated. This time, I'm hired as a creative writer to do human interest pieces. I seem to have a special insight into how some wives feel about football season and I attract readers. As I push my knowledge, as I interact with players and fans, developing as a sports writer, I grow in the eyes of my employer. I go to training camps, games, even tour equipment factories. Slowly, though, my readership changes. The wives are gone and editors are seeing me as an up-and-coming sports columnist.

But I suck as a sports writer. As I become more and more like my employer, the joy in what I do is gone, the career path is totally foriegn, and my portfolio is filled with stuff that I don't have the heart to continue doing.

That's what I mean by degree. Now back to the technology group.

I've seen excellent graphics people move on. I've watched talented media people make lateral moves. I've sat sadly by as gifted writers find more satisfying jobs. In an ACM paper titled Computers for artists who work alone Barbara Meier quotes David McCaulay, the author of How Things Work after his experience working with 40 people to produce a CD version of his book. He had no desire to work that way again, and said that "what I really like is to draw in my studio at home." He says exactly how I feel. And from experience with others who I would call kindred spirits, exactly how they feel too. Yet our group is pushing community.

Over the years external pressures have led me to try to gather kindred spirits into regular community meet-ups. After some initial words of shared hope and vision, it always falls apart. It's not how any of us works, how we think, how we get ideas, get jazzed, or reflect. And it's never been the way we generate quality work. Into this category of kindred spirits I'd also place certain types of creative programers who do their best work as solo acts. We see the collective, are happy to let it exist, but have never wanted a part in it. Is it worth another attempt or can we accept that not everyone thrives in a community environment even though they contribute?

When it starts to feel like a mandated collective environment, things can get very ugly for those involved. What's the expectancy? Can it be the same across a diverse organization?

That is all old stuff, though. The information that I include in recent "illustrations" has the purpose of conveying specific facts and ideas to students. Learning the material is an obvious prerequisite for real success, and often guides many of my design choices. Occasionally, as with this example, there's already imagery available that for some reason can't be used. I was shown this image of cell mitosis and asked to recreate it so it could be used in our online course. The circular presentation of the information appears to be standard across the sources that we looked at. I kept it, and to reinforce the cyclical nature of the process overlapped the arrows. To reinforce the idea that cells appear to be static during 75% of this process and actually split during 25% of the process, I included images of the cell. Orientation was changed to facilitate label reading and colors were brought into line with others used in the course. Interesting stuff even without the pastels and Provence.

I'm curious if we could be contributing successful images to the wikipedia. An image of a cell cycle exists in the wikipedia, for instance, but it's possible that this one may be useful as well. Could it be uploaded, given a creative commons license, and attributed to ets at Penn State? Instead of struggling to maintain resource libraries and repositories of our own, we could add our authority to the public knowledge base.

Incidentally, these are two of the pertinent blogs that I try to follow:

InfographicsNews

Always interesting, information and opinion with noteworthy examples of the presentation of information .

information aesthetics

A blog about data visualization and communication. Great examples on a regular basis.

The video speaks strongly for itself.

If, through some miracle of space-time, we could watch a video of Aristotle at the Lyceum... would we chuckle? When did educators first start going out of their way to accommodate the hedonistic wants of youth? I can't help seeing this as a historical marker of some sort that tags the beginning of the end. Hindsight being 20/20, it's easy to sit in judgement. My mind is seriously reeling at the implications. What is our contemporary parallel?

All that goodness! A blog link took me to the first of four parts, and I went through the rest of the series by changing the number in the URL. I wanted to post the experience to delicious and figured it might be good to find a reasonable URL to post. I wasn't keen on posting the one I first hit: Part 1 of 4 I didn't see any other links handy, but part way down the page was a link that said, "For more episodes of Designing Minds, click here." So for the benefit of my network follower, I clicked.

Nothing happened. And nothing happened. And nothing happened some more. I continued with some other things, then got the increasingly familiar spinning lozenge, followed by iTunes opening. Designing Minds is a series. The other episodes are available on iTunes. Needless to say, I changed the "1" in the URL to a "2", then a "3" and "4" to view the piece. The interactions between the students, their explanations of thought processes, the shots of their work are all fascinating not only from an illustration/design perspective, but from a learning/design perspective, too.

I mentioned before how much I hate iTunesU. Let me take a moment to also mention how much I hate being surprised by the launch of an inefficient, standardless proprietary browser with absolutely no potential for human interaction. I really really hate that too. So, I don't have any way to say "go here" on iTunes and check this out. Or rather, I don't know the secret proprietary way to send somebody to specific content in itunes. Is there a twitter keystroke that will send someone right to it?

Please. Use YouTube. Use GoogleVideo. Use MotionBox. Just about anything else. With Pandora, you don't even need iTunes for music. Let that thing die.

A long while back I got on the design swoosh bandwagon and came up with a "re-imagining" of the Penn State shield that I could use for unofficial purposes. I never used it; but not for the obvious reason that it was bad and inappropriate. The article about logos being the same points to my dilemma. All the work tweaking the Bezier curves to get them just right, so they matched that image in my mind's eye... and the image in my mind's eye was from the soap my family had been using for years and years and years.

So, now I've got this next idea- wow, is it innovative!

What I saw in Second Life was a visual medium that I knew nothing about and never had call to understand. If Penn State would ever build or just use this sort of space, it would be important for graphic designers to understand the format issues, the scaling issues, how they both effect load and processing time. It would be important for instructional designers to know how people communicate and travel about; what their expectations are and how they interpret things. There's no other test ground. For non-technical designers of any type, to learn and experiment you can either wait for someone to create an OpenCroquet environment or ProtoSphere world, or you can experiment in a virtual environment that pre-exists. Uber geeks scoff, but I see Second Life as that learning ground.

Payback for me (I bought my subscription with winnings from woot photoshop contests) is learning about the TARGA format and the differences between an image format that supports transparency and a format that supports an alpha channel. I had posted a video about Removing Fringe in SL Images but till now, it was just a help in Second Life. Now, I'm creating a few secondary images that will hopefully be of use in a game. That environment requires images in the targa format, and the implementation requires that I create alpha channels that produce exactly what I want when rendered by the game engine. The only way this non technical Mac guy can test those images is by taking them into Second Life and applyng them as textures.

It works great. Second Life renders the alpha exactly the same way that the game will- and I have complete access. I just have to wait till the sun comes up to see the damned things.

So for a comparison, I did this on the Modbook. Same spot, but I had more time. Lots more. First I went to Irvings and sat working on a small animation in Pencil. Next I left the modbook in sleep mode and walked up to Old Main, where I sat to make this sketch. After a good ninety minutes to two hours, I was warned that I was starting to run on reserve power. I had about 8% battery life remaining when I got back to the office. I'd had the screen at full brightness, was pushing Photoshop with some complex brushes and multiple layers, and had a browser going in the background so I could post to Twitter- but I forgot about the browser completely.

Incidentally, you can see that I've had about zero artistic growth in a year; but the technology is moving forward with leaps and bounds. When I did finally return to the office after very focused Modbook use, there were several moments where my hands didn't adapt quite quickly enough to the standard keyboard and slightly fatter, more substantial pen. Besides feeling strange, I went to hit a key on the keyboard with my pen tip.

• Today I tried using the Macbook simply as a computer, without making use of its obvious special features. I downloaded an MP3 lecture and tried to listen to it as I worked. There is no stand with the modbook; nothing to make the screen vertical. The screen is horizontal and therefore vulnerable to enviromental disasters like crumbs and spills. I guess the more typical laptop has its keyboard in a horizontal tray while the screen is upright.

• I downloaded and installed a small open source animation package called Pencil. It's very simple, but quite effective, and using the Modbook with it seemed very natural and was completely absorbing.

• While working in Pencil, I noticed that dropdown menus are a problem. With a drop down, it's possible that if an item has a cascade, you might not see the little arrow behind your hand and pen. The cascade itself, if you access it, is completely covered by a right handed user's hand.

• I have to say again, the modbook desktop is small. 1280X800 pixels. I normally work with a desktop that's spans two 21" Cinema displays. That means I'm accustomed to spreading out over 3840X1200 pixels. Working with Pencil- an application in which I'm doing more than just illustration, I'm extremely pinched. As a grab and go drawing tool, I love the modbook as much as the red spiral bound Aquabee books that I used to use. There's a strong "artist-tool" connection. For more involved projects, though, I need either more space or a new set of desktop space management skills. I can't imagine it as a primary machine; though conceivably I could have the monitors, tablet and keyboard at the office (or a 21" Cintiq!) and just plug in for InDesign or web work.

I've collected the Modbook posts and arranged them linearly on my personal site. Post titles are linked back to the blog post to hopefully facilitate comments and questions. This will be my last "Modbook" post, and I will gather the information, images and insights into a single more polished html doc. Hopefully a print stylesheet will let anyone print or save as PDF with good results.

The unit touches on other theories of creation that differ from the Darwinian view. I drew a series of nine cartoons illustrating the theories that would be covered. The three posted here are representations of Theistic Creationism, Intelligent Design, and one of the many fringe views- number three, the Raelian view. I tried to make them understandable at this small size, but they do enlarge if you click them. I'm not sure that we'll do that in the lessons.

My job was to first understand the theories, then come up with a lighthearted illustration that didn't offend folks that may hold the particular beliefs. Very simply put, Theistic Creationism, the first of these three, holds that God created evolution and takes an active role in the ongoing process. Intelligent Design goes a bit farther in explaining the science in God's work. The final cartoon shows aliens, often mistaken for gods, visiting an early Earth where they intentionally or accidentally brought about the beginnings of life.

So now I have twenty cartoons on the same theme. I'm thinking it might make an interesting 40 page children's picture book with a cartoon on one page and short bit of witty educational text on the facing page. The text might be a problem. One of the more difficult tasks that I needed to perform was not offending people. It really goes against my natural tendencies. I'm not sure how much longer I can continue being so sweet.

I've been listening to a series of UC Berkeley lectures in iTunes. It's InfoSys296A-2 Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives. It's interesting to me because I see having an informed, enlightened perspective on information sciences to be part of my job. I'm not naturally inclined to seek this stuff out. There is a little pleasure, though; especially, like going to a trade school instead of a university, when you find immediate tie ins to how you earn a living. The lecture currently sparking inner discussion is Wikipedia as an Open Source Project. You can probably locate it on iTunes with this much info, but those rascally UC Berkeley folks also have the same course on that other internet.

I love it. So I guess that's a lot of pleasure. A few minutes in, Mitch Kapor (Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at University of California, Berkeley) reads the Jimmy Wales quote,

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

I get it. It and waves of images of implications. What would be the impact on a University? What would we lose? What would we gain? What would it be like having learning as a lifelong pastime for anyone who wants it? What sort of rationale would develop in academe that would try to maintain the political and fiscal status quo without mentioning them? Lock down the resources without sharing them? Would it be possible for a University to use such a system? What value could they add? What would the problems be?

Shouldn't someone be exploring this?

I'm going to go draw.

Lots of things banged together today. A colleague wrote and asked if I'd read McLuhan's the medium is the Massage. I had, years ago; and knew it as I spoke of it- the medium is the message. I know that isn't spelled like the title is, but that's what they meant and what they talk about. The whole "massage" thing, as I recall, was a misprint. It was the sixties, after all. McLuhan and Fiore came up with a providential back-story to explain it.

And it turns out that the medium—a book—is the message here. They're fairly permanent, long lived, hard to change and update, live in locked away spaces, and you have to adapt your story to what and how they've communicated. How archaic.

Before I was married, I lived in town across from Schlow Library. A good morning to me was walking across the street and rambling from book to book, finding one thing and following it to another. Illustration jobs forced me to find more current information, and I had to go read in a book store, but libraries were still fun. I still enjoy it, but it takes so long. And sometimes, people actually remove the books, take them home for their own use, and leave me with a dead link.

I love books. The way they feel, the way they look. You don't plug them in or change their batteries. but damn it, when what you want is the information, books can be like gum on a sidewalk. And how do you know if they're wrong? There's no versioning... are you allowed to make corrections in the margins? How about if you use pencil? I bet I could even add illustrations if I was allowed.

I sent a note
to Mage Software to ask if they have any
documentation on inkBookFirst, you can drag a multi-paged PDF file onto an open inkBook and it will open pagenated across as many inkBook pages. The text isn't text, however- it comes in as a large graphic. It looks pretty good, and you can mark it up in inkBook then "Print to PDF". You can't open a pdf using the "open" command from within inkBook, nor can you drop a PDF on the inkBook icon to open it. inkBook needs to be open and the PDF is dragged onto a page.

I noticed that the pages all pagenate correctly, but the document might not be aligned to the inkBook pages the way you want. After my first attempt I realized that I needed to drag the PDF pageover a good bit to make sure the top and right side weren't clipped. Dragging one page only adjusted that page-not the entire document. I had to adjust each page separately. The PDF that's rendered does retain inkBook marks in their correct color and location, which was very nice.

Second, I had noticed that inkBook doesn't convert my handwritten notes to text in any of the modes that I tried. That seemed unusual, since it claimed to use Apple's inkwell technology. This morning I found that inkBook actually does convert handwritten notes to text- it just keeps the handwritten record while storing the text "meaning" in the background. This could be very useful in cases where the text needs to retain it's character for meaning. To see how inkBook has done with its conversion, you hold down the space bar. InkBook displays what it thinks you wrote directly over your notation. When you export your document as TXT- it is converted to plain text with none of your drawings. Exporting as RTF saves a folder with a text document and images as separate TIFF files.

When you create a drawing that you want to keep as an object, the entire piece needs to be selected and "joined". In an effort to understand your marks, inkBook keeps the strokes used to create an image as separate objects. To export them as one image instead of many individual images of separate strokes, the "Join" command is under "Ink" in the menu bar.

Page navigation is difficult in inkBook. I can easily page forward but have yet to discover how to page back. Navigation is made easier by a "tab" feature that lets you add a tab to a page so that any page is accessed by navigation tabs that remain on the right hand edge of the book.

UPDATE:I received the User Guide for inkBook v.1.2.0 from Mage Software. It'll be a big help. Their support also suggested that I give the beta version for v2 a try- I am and it looks pretty good. My first effort was the paragraph in this image, which was rendered as this text on export: "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS To BE 5 ELF EVIDENT 7 TH AT ALL mew ARE CREATED EQUAL j Tr|AT Tr|M ARE EN DOWED B4 THEIR CREATOR WITA CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS 1 nfAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY / AND AN ALMOST FANATICAL DEVOTION TO THE POPE. "

I've started maintaining this text as one long page on my personal site. It may be easier to read in that way, but for comments and discussion, you have to come here. Sorry.

• There is a learning curve for both Ink (Mac software) and inkBook (third party software). In inkBook, editing drawings is difficult- the eraser often moves objects or deletes entire sections. It's difficult being precise. The drawing board smooths strokes, occasionally changing them (shifting, merging, connecting, extending) in ways that I don't intend. I've found very little documentation for inkBook, though Ink has a fair help window.

• Ink is far more consistent and predictable for quick sketches than inkBook. The text recognition feature, which I prefer not to use, is actually good, too. Editing the converted text is beyond my abilities. There are a number of "gestures" that you draw to accomplish things like "copy" "paste" or "delete" and the gestures need to be done relatively accurately. For notes, I prefer leaving the hand written characters.

• I've noticed that with both Ink and inkBook open, I frequently get erratic behavior from the pen and keyboard: the tip won't activate keys but the eraser end will. Or I'll notice that yellow stickies are opening under the keyboard and the text that I'm typing gets odd characters. Perhaps the new version of inkBook will remedy all of that. It might even be the keyboard's quirks. In all fairness I have to add that, even though I'm generally infallible, the behavior could be user error.

• I have to get some outsider input into modbook's notetaking power. As a drawing and painting tool, however- using Photoshop or even Painter, Canvas, or Flash- I can recommend the modbook highly.

The Modbook is exactly the same size as a Macbook with a closed lid. Macbook bags and covers will fit. The ports are the same, too; and there's a cd/dvd slot in the opposite end.

This is a document open in Photoshop. The taper and texture of the stroke is obvious. Note, too, that the keyboard sits ontop of the Photoshop interface and allows the user to access keyed shortcuts without Photoshop losing focus.

The keyboard sits ontop of a Word document, as does the Ink window. inkBook can lose focus, however. This image shows a quick doodle into the Ink window that was then "Sent" to the open Word doc.

But who is right doesn't matter. If correct color ruins the experience, what good is it? Tough decision; but times are changing- and I think this situation will slowly improve. I turned mine on and lived to post this entry.

If you have Firefox 3 and want to turn on color management, this is how I did it:

1. Open Firefox 3.
2. In the address bar, enter about:config When you hit "enter," you'll be shown an idiot box warning you away. Click the button that says, "I'll be careful, honest!"
3. At the top of the page that loads is a text field labeled "Filter". In that field enter color_management (or you can scroll down to the correct line...)
4. You want the line gfx.color_management.enabled
5. Double click that line of text. "Default" becomes user set and "false" becomes true
6. Quit Firefox. When you re-launch, color management is enabled.

This is documented several places: Brad Carlile Photo Blog and the dria.org blog to mention two.

ADDITIONAL: There's good information about color management in browsers at Gary Ballard's personal website. Under "Why is Color Management Important", there's a great before and after image. Remarkable way to drive this home.