Monday, September 21, 2009

Django Reinhardt

I have decided to implement a new blogging work flow. I will blog at night, save a draft, and then edit and post in the morning.

The mornings are my most productive time of the day, so I would rather spend that time working on projects than blogging.
I am slowly adjusting back to NYC. The good thing about jetlag for me, is that it gives me super human abilities to not sleep (for the period of jet lag). I generally need a lot of sleep, so I sort of enjoy this phase.

At the moment I am attempting to coordinate with the folks at UNICEF malawi to check on the server and figure out why it is down. There is a UNICEF holiday, so I may be forced to wait until later. Stanley is presenting the project in 7 days, so I would also like to add some bells and whistles to the UI. However, the UI is rather slick as it is and generates oohs and ahhs - so perhaps I should not over design. I am just taking the lead from Stanley on this.

This morning I was engaged in some housekeeping. I moved all the social software development and ICT/humanitarian type work under a separate Chang Projects - so I was involved in a site redesign and branding exercise. (My husband - the design guru diametrik , gave me some excellent feedback - solicited). I may eventually further break off the ICT to its own entity, but I am going to give that time.

I have a list of projects that I have been putting off while working in Malawi, so I am excited to start working on those again.
This morning I built the django framework for my twitter application - blacklisttweet. Blacklisttweet (blt) lets twitter users track and block spam twitter accounts. I have a NLP (natural language processing) algorithm that I came up with a few months ago, and I hope to program that tonight, along with a simple view. Maybe tomorrows blog post will contain a link!

I also need to move this software over to a media temple account with its own server, so I can install crazy software like csound. (That is for my next twitter project).

This weekend marks the 5th annual Robot Parade. Really it is the 3rd parade - we took a 2 year hiatus. Cindym Paul and I will have a robot work day this week. I am composing a song about the singularity - inspired by Laurie Andersen's Big Science record. Lian likes the chorus which goes something like:

I am a sine wave
I am a sine wave
The singularity
The singularity

It may not sound like much, but the melody is very satisfying - and follows a sign wave. I am recording my own voice (and synth) and manipulating in pd (pure data).

I also started start work on my radical narrative/documentary/mashup - Joelle, Naomi, Alyssa, Meredith Barcelona. A recutting of barcelona vacation footage with a narrative ala the kid stays in the picture. I am starting to log the tapes now - which include 20 minutes of bird love in Gaudi's park.

At 12 I have a 13bit lunch with Paul. We have some interviews this week for our next documentary on Water and Geopolitical power. I am thinking we should call the documentary Water/Power but that might be too cheesy. I am looking forward to getting back to the water research. We are going to also continue editing the current feature, which we hope to finish before January.

I also have some ETF research/reading to do. I want to expand my e-trading option strategy for ETFs. Right now it only exists for american style stock options.

Lian told me all the tea I started drinking in Malawi has stained my teeth - going to the dentist friday to beautify.

No comments:

Post a Comment