Here’s a widget made from the video of my fail whale sculpture. My friend Amy rendered it for me – thanks so much, Amy.
Here is the code you can use to put it on your website. You can change the height and width to size it how you wish, but it is designed to be fairly narrow for sidebars:
<div><iframe src="http://spiritsdancing.com/failwhale/whaget.htm" width="185" height="225" frameborder="0" name="whaget"></iframe></div>
My little kinetic sculpture of the lovely Twitter Fail Whale, based on the image by Yiying Lu that is used when twitter.com is over-capacity. The image is called ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’. I’ve wanted to make this since I first saw the image some weeks ago.
This is a short video of it in action, complete with twittering birds!
More photos here. (Update: fail whale widget here)
I remain optimistic and supportive of Twitter in the long term, because I think the real-time courier service rationale that was the founding impetus of the service constitutes a new branch off Doc Searls’ live web, and makes our online interactions a quantum step closer to Allen Searl’s original vision of ‘a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time’. Twitter’s track facility, presently down but still promised, provides the real-time search of people and and what they are talking about right now.
Maybe the progression of branching-off goes a little like this:
static web > live web > real time web
google > blogosphere > twittosphere
our property > our history in time > our real-time conversation
search by sending out bots> search by listening for pings > search by tracking people and words in real time
It may be that Twitter’s primacy will be usurped by some other real-time service that gets up ahead of them in the race; I hope not. But many great progressive ideas start off serendipitously or in fun without their full implications or potential being known, and in those circumstances it’s silly in hindsight to say the founders ought to have seen further, planned better and acted quicker than they did.
On Monday a friend showed us a few sites around Perth. This was a decorative metal plate in the aerial walkway at King’s Park that took my fancy. I wished I had paper and a crayon so that I could have done a rubbing of it! A lot of the paths around the Park were a rusty colour, and apparently it’s because the bore water that is used to water the grass and plants is so rich in iron it stains everything rust. The park has great views of the city of Perth.
Students from the Edith Cowan University Contemporary Performers Group, lead by Deborah Hunt entertained the lunchtime crowds in James Place, Perth, yesterday, as part of the UNIMA Worl Puppetry Festival. These made my day! By chance there was a busker playing, and they worked their activities in around what he was playing.
More photos in my Flickr photoset.
My attendence at Unima 2008 is supported by the ACT Government
Over Easter I finally got to do some updating of my whole site. There is still some fiddling around the edges to do, but I’m happy that my work portfolio is now up to date and will be easier to manage in future, and that all the old bad links have been stripped out of the other static pages.
I did somehow stuff up my Monkey See Monkey Do blog, and had to start up a new installation of WP for it, so I guess I’ve lost what little google juice it had. So if you are searching for things like how to slice a banana inside its skin, make tea towel chooks and jumping handkerchief mice, or whistle through your hands, it’s here, or you can use the nifty new navigation tabs at the top of the page.
Of course, I’m wondering about the making of the 90 kilogram hippo suit, with the head cast apparently made from a real hippopotamus, and finished in fibreglass! But the whole story, with pictures, is pure laughter. (Don’t miss the video) Favourite quote:
He got close enough to them but they passed by him on the opposite side to the one on which he was waving his sweat stick.
What exactly was he was going to do with his sweat stick, tickle under their arms perhaps? And can’t you imagine the advertising for (lets hope synthetic) wild hippo sweat sunblock? And will we find some baggage handlers careering around in the hippo suit one day? :)
At the Chinese Gardens in Sydney.
Laura tells how six million were deprived at the Jane Austen and Comedy Conference in Melbourne! Germiane Greer gave the introductory lecture.
