Start spreading the news…

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I’m going to New York on Saturday (9/21), just for the afternoon, via MICA’s bimonthly Baltimore-New York student bus. (Just $26 round trip!) Stated goals: visit the Met, and maybe see Lia. Anyone else want to meet up?

Voicestream Changed?

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Whoa, whoa! When did Voicestream become T-Mobile all of a sudden?!

I use a prepaid phone reloaded every other month with $50 of pay-as-you-go minutes, to spare myself the troubles of a billed subscription, and my phone service has gone uninterrupted this whole time. I only found out about the switch today, through Dean’s entry about T-Mobile customer service.

Hmmm, well, my SMS form still works, and I’ve been able to log into AIM. Still, maybe I should upgrade to a subscription when this last prepaid card expires. Their website doesn’t even mention prepaid services anymore, as far as I can tell.

Update: Okay, I just talked to customer service, and they say nothing’s changed for my service other than the name of the company. Yay.

Mobile Blog in Da House

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<? if (filemtime("mobile/mobile.html") > filemtime("blog.php")) include "mobile/mobile.html"; ?>

And with that line of code in my template, the mobile blog is back, publishing the day’s posts to the main blog file whenever I text an entry from my phone. The if-filemtime-include combination means that mobile entries disappear after I post a MT entry, but that’s okay with me.

Art Car

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Baltimore “art car,” decorated with shells, bottles, an accordion, and other “found” objects.

Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP.

Defying Hyperreality

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Lest you think all we do in Digital Arts is sit around in paint-splattered coveralls fiddling with our G4’s: my response paper to two chapters of Silvio Gaggi’s From Text to Hypertext, in which I raise a defiant fist to the poststructural utopias of new media philosophers.

Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of the postmodern hyperreality figure strongly in our studies of new media, and I’m mildly skeptical of his vision of an utterly ubiquitous open network within which all our paradigms will be permanently changed. My bias towards the need for an objective absolutism comes out in my response, probably owing to my core belief in an Absolute upon which my

Weltanschauung is founded.

Basically I’m saying The Matrix won’t happen. So uh, yeah, there.