Well, sort of. But as of today I decided to act like a grown-up and give WordPress my money to make this lovely blog eponymous (or something like that). That is, no longer will it be known as bartdoesart.wordpress.com but now it will go by the much more glamorous and professional bartdoesart.com. Adjust your cyberworld orbits accordingly.
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Next semester I have some free space in my schedule that I need to fill up with Fine Arts credits if I want to get my Arts Technology Certificate this year. I felt rather clever this semester for designing my own 4-credit class in Processing, which I taught myself (although I am not the teacher of record). I decided to do a similar thing next semester, where I will work on the most logical extension of the Processing class: Arduino, the physical world analogue of Processing. There's a tiny little book on it called Getting Started with Arduino (now in its second edition):
I think I'll just go through it from start to finish. That shouldn't take long, although it will take some supplies, so I've already ordered the complete set of materials from Maker Shed. (I think I'll get to know these guys awfully well.)
However, that book will be quick. As a way of making a full course, I'm considering trying to go through Tom Igoe's charming but substantial book Making Things Talk (also in its second edition), which also serves as great introduction to the field of physical computing:
I'm still trying to figure out exactly how much of that book I would be able to do (and how much it would cost!). But in a happy turn of events, I just came across a blog called Doing the Projects in Making Things Talk, where the author chronicles his journey through the first edition fo the book:
Anyhow, this should be an excellent guide. I'll have to read through it before I undertake my own adventure.
And, finally, I think that I'm going to send out an invitation to see if there are any other students who would like to join me in this "class" (or in another one I'm planning on using Max/MSP, but more on that another time). It would be nice to have company, wouldn't it?
Just in case somebody's reading this blog and has also taken a look at an earlier version, yes, the entries are coming in all temporally out of whack. I'm finally getting this blog thing all together and I'm filling in the gaps from the rest of the semester. As such, the blog entries that describe each assignment or step in my renewed educational plan are being posted to when those events occurred, not when I wrote them. Hope that doesn't makes things too confusing. Or, as Basil Exposition said to Austin Powers concerning time travel in The Spy Who Shagged Me, "Try not to think to hard about it...." [Turning to face the camera] "That goes for you, too!"
FYI, I thought I'd mention that I have another blog that I'm working on but this one is purely professional. It's called Data-Literacy.com and it's designed to provide information and resources on — you'll never believe it! — data literacy, or the ability to understand and work with data. (For a little more information on what data literacy is, you can also see a blog post on Wired.com entitled "Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data" or an excellent report on the related field of data science from the O'Reilly Radar.) Anyhow, as I'm trying to be professional and authoritative, here's a screenshot of my very clean and orderly web page:
Anyhow, it should be fun in its own little way (if you're in to that sort of thing, you know).
It's the first day of school for my 26th full year of formal education. Whee! My first class is FA3000: Design for the Net 1, taught by Martin Novak. (I'm going to see a lot of Martin this year.) One of the things that we're going to spend a lot of time on this semester is in creating a couple of web pages, which will be set up on the Fine Arts server for the semester. One will be a personal web page; that is, a page about us. The other will be on something else. Rather conveniently, I recently bought two domains: BartonPoulson.com and DataLiteracy.Info. I haven't done anything with either one yet, so this class will give me an ideal opportunity to work on them. Very nice.
I was also scheduled to take FA3400: Digital Visual Effects later today with Rosi Hayes, but it looks like I'll need to skip that course so I can work on some other things that came up (specifically, the opportunity to create a new course for lynda.com and the possibility of working with CIDAT).
Update: I have a draft version of BartonPoulson.com that is temporarily housed on the Fine Arts server here at the U of U. Also, while I still own the domain DataLiteracy.Info, I also purchased Data-Literacy.com for another WordPress blog; I'm actually making posts on that site.