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Without further adieu, here is my Final video project for SA104.

I started out wanting to do something close to this, emphasizing connections between people, and even got all the shots I wanted to. But something else entirely came out in the editing, and the only thing I can think of is that current events for me began creeping in to my head during the editing process. Strange and very, very interesting to me.

Look at the three works you produced in SA104 and other work you did for school this semester.  Does anything emerge that ties the work in SA104 to work you did in another class?  This could be themes, formal elements or any other thing that you can perceive.  It doesn’t matter if it is perceptible to everyone as long as it’s perceptible to you and you can talk about it.  Tell us about these connections.

What I can say about the work I've done in this class is that it is very conceptual, which is great. I consider myself a conceptual creative and I feel like I've been able to put out projects that really show a bit of myself in them. Probably the biggest thing I've been able to accomplish is working with some new media (for me) - paints in SA102 (Studio Art) and video in this class with the final project.

Paints had always held a stigma for me as a creative. I was able to overcome this stigma and at least gain a grudging respect for the medium and a very small amount of ability in working with it. I'd always been a dry media guy - pencils, crayons, pastels, charcoal, things like that. I feel comfortable with those media and can use them with varying degrees of facility. At least, I can make marks with them that look like what I want them to look like. Paint, on the other hand, eluded me. It could be because I started with watercolors and aimed too high. It could be the person trying to get me to use watercolors was good at painting with them, but not good at instructing others in how to use them. I don't know, but the stigma remained until I took SA102 concurrent with this class, and had no choice but to try painting again. While I'm not 100% able to paint what I see in my head to perfection, it sure is nice to not feel such trepidation when picking up a paintbrush.

Video was something I simply had never really played with outside of some simple little iMovie things I did for fun. Video has hardware requirements that can be expensive to overcome if you aren't that in to it, but since I got a DSLR that has HD video capability, I've been meaning to make some videos with it. And I'm really glad I got the chance in this class - I didn't just use the DSLR as a video camera, I composed the shots, I made them look exactly the way I wanted them to, and I even had a bit of a story that I wanted to tell. It all came together for this project, and I learned (in some small way) the edit process to boot, which yielded some very interesting and unexpected results. More to come on that, with the actual post.

Imagine how personal technologies might change in the next 10 years.  Be specific and descriptive in your answer.

As a tech/gadget guy, and a huge sci-fi nerd, I am always playing this game. What's coming next? My take is that cell phones and tablets are going to get so powerful they essentially replace desktop computers. Also I foresee something I'll call a "distributed computer" coming to rise. Back in the early 2000s when I saw people walking around with the first iPods I had a vision of a wearable computer that was connected by white cords, much the same as the headphones are for iProducts now. People were wearing glasses (Google Glasses anyone?). I have to laugh because I didn't forsee the white cords' replacement being Bluetooth. Now you don't even have to plug these things in, they're all connected wirelessly. I figured the glasses would be the display, and the cell phone would be the computer and Web access point.

So let's update that technological daydream now: I see wearable computers, all connected to the Web as well as every one of your friends and followers. Data is crazy-cheap by today's standards (or even "free", subsidized by government) so people can share not just words but full movies with people in real-time. 

Every second of your life is recorded, cross-referenced, and uploaded in real-time to a personal "Lifecloud" in whatever the highest 3D resolution we have in 10 years, along with details of your state of mind and emotions at the time the images are recorded thanks to biorhythm chips in the glasses. 

I think there may be a small segment of society that may adopt some of these technologies in an even more personal way - they will have surgeries done to implant a third "eye" to record their lives. They won't have to take a cell phone off to recharge it - the computer is in their head. They'd still have to wear a pair of glasses to get the display because I'm not sure that ocular implants would be available for use yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were close by 2024.

There will also be a segment of society that will reject these advances. I don't even think of them as "Luddites", more just as people who like their privacy. They'll maybe use their glasses and phones because they'll have to (for work, or perhaps just to "keep up with the Joneses"), but they don't really want to have them. I would guess these people would be ridiculed despite the idea that they just want to have the option of remaining anonymous.

The vast majority of people in-between these two extremes will get along just fine with this new technology, embracing it to varying degrees.

So, this one came together better than my last post! I knew I had to add more to it to make it a "Real Thing" - so here it is, at long last. I felt a bit rushed on it, and that was nobody's fault but mine (cue Led Zeppelin).

For my information, I had to get my data under control. The NHL at any given time has approximately 750 players on contract per season. And I wanted to contrast a full decade's worth of players! So I had to narrow it down a bit. I decided to go with stars from those seasons - specifically, I used the First and Second All-Star team rosters to help - twelve of the best players in the league per season.

I used an excellent hockey data/stat site called http://www.hockey-reference.com to accumulate the data on both the All Star rosters as well as the individual players' sizes.

I decided to use Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man as a humorous diagram for the players' size. I gave them a drop shadow to make them pop off the ice textured background and kind of make them look like pucks. 

The data does not lie: NHL players from the 2000s were taller and bulkier than their 1970s brethren. They likely look even larger than my conclusion suggests due to the very large protective pads modern players wear.

(sidebar: I was going to use Gary Bettman's face in place of the modern NHL shield but thought that may have gone a little too far.)

[ crickets ] 

I have had the worst time coming up with the idea, let alone the data for this project. I am going to get a sketch up, but the fact is, I have only just recently come up with a workable idea and graphic that is cohesive and, yes, something I can datamine fairly quickly. 

So, my new infographic is going to be based on one of my loves: Hockey.

I am going to contrast the size difference in players from the 1970s to today's NHLers, based on the sizes of All Star teams. (there is no way to get data on ALL of the players so I had to limit my search to something I could find. This was it.)

So, without further adieu... The visual portion of the exercise. I will be adding some other smaller figures plus the stats...

After thinking about it a lot, I have decided to change my infographic idea from what it was going to be (list of hockey jerseys and the players' nationalities) to something a bit more varied. Possibly controversial depending on how I parse the facts. My new topic is (drumroll please): Wars by country, 1900-2000 (or modern day? Not sure yet).  My data will come from a few places, but a good start appears to be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1900–44

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1945–89

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1990–2002

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_2003-current

1: Types of hockey jerseys I have (NHL, minors, juniors, replicas...)

2: Topics of comics I have (superhero, etc)

3: Death toll of recent comic book movies (with possible breakdown of types of death)

Question:  The act of publicly sharing works in progress and ideas that are not resolved, like you do in blog form – how might that influence the way a culture or society functions?  Think about both the positive and negative.

I think it could influence things in society hugely! We've seen things taken out of context influence people both positively and negatively, intentionally or not.