be ninmah

Or, more accurately, http://ninmah.be

Ninmah Meets World is moving! Well, has moved, although there are still some boxes lying around and I haven’t got the curtains hung yet. From here on out I will be blogging at the new location, so please update your links and feeds (http://ninmah.be/feed). Drop by, I’ll pull up a box for you.

The look’s not finished yet and I have not yet begun to play with widgety things, but the words are there. All it needs now is you!

hot metal love

I happened across this lovely example of blacksmithing as art (courtesy of Make). The movie is about seven minutes long but it’s a very entertaining seven minutes, especially if you are into shaping hot metal. Now to check eBay for one of those water cutters…

Giddo

I am remembering my grandfather, Giddo Mike. My mother’s father. A wiry man, maybe an inch taller than I am, gentle (to me), gruff and indestructible. He loved gardening and golf. He raised a family in Belize, and then he and my grandmother moved to Orlando when the children were grown.

When I was little he built me a bicycle out of parts and I rode it for years, until I outgrew it. He would pick mangoes and starfruit from his trees for me and my sister. My memories of him are a mix of my own stories and the stories of my parents; my dad, for instance, tells how Giddo didn’t approve of him and stopped speaking to my mother after they were married. Then one day there was a knock on their door, and when they opened it, Giddo stood there with a full bag of groceries in each arm. I was just passing by, he said, and Dad laughs, remembering. It’s a four-hour drive from Orlando to Tallahassee, where we were living, Dad says. I was just passing by.

David met Giddo in 2002, in Belize at my cousin’s wedding. My two-year-old son toddled up to Giddo Mike, craned his neck way back, and said, You’re a really tall man, thereby securing himself in his great-grandfather’s good graces forever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone grin so big as Giddo did just then. He took David’s hand and they walked around looking at turtles in the fountain and little blue crabs along the driveway.

My indestructible Giddo passed away peacefully yesterday morning at the age of 88.

As-salamu alaykum, Giddo.

Twitter’s AWOL

It started last night.

I hit “reload” to find out what everyone was doing just before I quit for the night.

Nothing.

Blank white page, little spinny Firefox icon. No updates. No avatars. Okay, I thought. I can cope with this. It’s late, and I can just check in the morning. No problem.

Except I can’t. It’s STILL DOWN. I can’t say good morning to the Twitter world. I can’t find out how the class went for @BryanAlexander in San Francisco last night. I don’t know whether @blamb and @cogdog got their morning coffee. How was @mburtis‘s birthday? Is @mapetite still sick? I DON’T KNOW.

Which raises a question for me: why does it matter so much? Obviously Twitter gives me something that, when it’s not there, I miss. I feel unconnected, uninformed, unaware, and, yes, lonely, out here in the California satellite office of the NMC. I know you are all still out there, doing things. Maybe some of you can actually get to Twitter; I got a direct message from @mapetite this morning (it went to my phone), and http://istwitterdown.com gives me a resounding NO (linktribution to CogDog, thank goodness for IM). Great, so now I fear that everyone is happily twittering along without me. This is worse than being the last kid picked for the basketball team.

Twitter, where are you? Come back!

Five Things, or Late to the Party But Hey There’s Still Beer

Like Howard Rheingold, I am hooked on Twitter. I don’t update a lot, but I like to see what folks are doing (I think of it as my virtual hallway of colleagues) and I like to be helpful and answer people’s questions. The links that come across there are also usually worth following, which is how I discovered that over a year ago, Alan Levine (the inimitable CogDog) tapped me for Five Things.

[Dear Reader: If you don’t care how it happened but just want to know my five things, please skip down to the numbered list below. Otherwise, read on.] It happened thus: Brian Lamb twittered a Churchill quote and a link to his Five Things (written almost as long ago as Alan’s tap; as you will see, this is sort of a theme here), so I went to check it out. I’m glad I did, too, as now I know to bring my bulletproof vest to places where Brian is likely to be. In the post, Brian lamented that most folks had already been tapped ages ago (true, and a problem I shall face shortly). He also thoughtfully provided the link to Alan’s Five Things, in which Gardner C. and Bryan A. were already snagged, in a comment. Of course I followed the link, because CogDog’s Five Things were bound to be interesting (and again I was not disappointed). Imagine my surprise to find that down at the bottom of that post, I too had been tapped. Thing #0, therefore, is that I can be a little slow on the uptake. There, threw that one in for free. Five Things:

1. I can draw a mean Bill the Cat.
2. One of my early jobs was as a secretary. I sucked. Oh, I was so unbelievably bad at it that I can’t even tell you how awful I was. I hung on for six months through sheer bloody-mindedness and then I quit.
3. While it’s commonly known that I have a background in art, not many people know that one of the media I like to work with is metal. I prefer oxy-acet to arc welding… there is something alive about the flame that I don’t get from the sparks. Unfortunately I don’t have the equipment at the moment so it’s been way too long since I’ve had the opportunity to wield a flaming 6000-degree F (3000 C) torch.
4. In the spring of 1992 I spent a semester as a Peace Corps Intern in Libreville, Gabon. The internship program doesn’t exist any more, or didn’t last time I checked (mine was the second-to-last group. I don’t think this was my fault, but you never know). Twice a year, six interns were selected to go to various Peace Corps countries to do things like organize the central office library or, in my case, to set up and maintain their computer network. Yes, I hooked up an AppleTalk network, in Africa, and taught people how to use FoxBase, in French. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and I loved every minute (except for the 48 hours when I had malaria; that I could do without). I learned to drink beer there, so I am naturally suspicious of any beer that you can see through.
5. I performed double trapeeze, Spanish web and shoot-thru (balancing ladder) in the circus when I was in college (sorry, no pix, don’t ask). My undergraduate alma mater, Florida State University, has a collegiate circus, and I performed in the homeshows. They take the circus on the road in the summer, but summer is such a lovely, pleasant season in Tallahassee that I always remained at home. Oh wait, no it’s not. I stayed home because I was broke and taking summer classes.

My turn to tap: as has been noted elsewhere, many have already been tapped. I couldn’t find a Five Things post from Gardner C., so I hereby tap him again. I further tap Vidya A., Martha B., Nancy W., and Fleep T. Go get ’em, girls (and Gardner)!

I gather, from reading the Five Things posts of people I respect, that there’s sort of a feeling that this kind of thing is done in spite of our better judgement, and preserving the meme is frowned upon a little bit. I’m delighted that I could bring it back over a year after decent people thought it was over.

Thpthpthpthpthpthpthp.

dragon pumpkin

My pumpkin this year features a Chinese dragon. As I was carving it I got some ideas for how to do it better next time (naturally) so I might do a similar one next year, but with more detail.

Bandelier video

The short story video I created about our visit to Bandelier is up on YouTube. The astute observer will notice that I left out the bit where I sprained my ankle.

IFVP 2007 rocked my world

I have just returned from the IFVP 2007 Annual Conference (International Forum of Visual Practitioners) — the theme this year was Growing Visual Language. Wow! is all I can say. And more wow! (and I don’t mean the online game, for once, either, although naturally it did come up once or twice in conversation during the conference.)

A few of the highlights for me were Kristina Woolsey’s keynote on Pagespace and Screentime, in which she talked about how we can move back and forth between analog and dynamic modes of expression, using technology to make mediamaking easier; the chili cookoff — as an icebreaker, it rocked, and man was that some good chili; seeing all the different styles of visual notetaking as charts bloomed into color by the hour on every wall; Carl Moore’s $39 challenge; and the Bandelier National Monument visit, injury notwithstanding. But the absolute best take-away was, for me, the new friends I made and the renewed connections with old friends. What a wonderful community!

On Saturday I spoke about digital natives and visual practice. I’m not, by Marc Prensky’s definition, strictly a digital native (yes I am too old), but if you think of digital natives as inhabiting a certain technological landscape or country, I can safely say that I’ve lived there since I was twelve and that counts. I do have an accent, most noticeably when I send text messages (I will keep using whole words), but I can speak the language. So I showed people around the place and handed out tourist visas. Alan, I swiped your 50 tools list and turned the visual practitioners loose on it. Thanks for letting me piggyback on months of your hard work :-)

Because of my sprained ankle I got to give my presentation seated on a kind of tall, wrought-iron throne with one leg propped up, and I think it really enhanced the experience for me. I think that once I am famous and have my own road crew I will demand a throne for each of my speaking engagements. There’s a lot to be said for the free-range, wandering-presenter model of speaking, which is good because it will be a cold day in hell before I have my own road crew, but in the meantime I will remember the glory of this particular setup and forget the sprained-ankle thing.

You can find pictures of the conference on Flickr, and I will post my little 90-second story about Bandelier as soon as I work out how to compress it to something webworthy.

why is it so hard to write your own bio?

I’m at it again: updating the bio. I know I do a lot of work. I know a lot of it is interesting and exciting and fun (to me, anyway). So why the heck is it so hard to write it down? Even armed with tips from my colleague Jared Bendis, whose bio-writing skills awe and inspire, I’m still struggling to put into words what it is I actually do.

The occasion of the update is partly that I got a shiny new title: Vice President, NMC Services. Yup, that’s Ms. Veep to you. Although as my co-worker Alan notes, the family is having fun with the change. I got a celebratory clink of wine glasses, and then after that it was all teasing all the time. So that’s how a vice president fixes salad. I would have thought the avocadoes would be more neatly chopped. That looks more like a director’s salad to me… and so on.

Well, back to the bio. Out of curiosity, what do you all think I do?

still don’t get Twitter? try this

If you are one of those people who still don’t grok Twitter (and there are many, so don’t feel even a little bit bad about it), this may help explain it to you. Load the page, sit back in your chair, and just watch for a minute or two.

If you DO get Twitter, you should still look at the page because it will blow your mind. Plus, you might find someone you know…