Relief

The feeling of joy once i handed in my final assignments on friday was a beautiful thing. Then even better, got Ninja Assassin off ebay and watched it with pizza. And it was GOOOOD! I understand why it didnt get released in the movies now. So brutal. Limbs everywhere haha. So now i have a weeks break. Ill probably get bored in 2 days but gotta make some coin by working so i can buy a mac.

Rationale Production Project A

This assignment was a very interesting one in the end. So running through it again I chose to make a site which presented different bands. I only chose four bands being Protest the Hero, Avenged Sevenfold, Maximum the Hormone and Bullet for my Valentine as I didn’t want there to be an excess of bands which made everything get really repetitive. I chose these bands because they are my favourite and i have general knowledge on them. My aim was to give the viewer a taste of the band using relevant material without having to navigate their way through many different links. At first I was going to make an image gallery but I thought that only tells so much about a band. So then I decided to add a biography and try to include videos.
I chose to produce this exhibition through the means of HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) and CSS) Cascading Style Sheet. This was done through many different tags e.g. < h1 >, < body >, < div="class" > and combined with the appropriate structure of a linked style sheet, they worked together to structure, position and colour my pages to my desire. I saw it as being more flexible to handle once I figured out how to do it. I understood how CSS was a big part in styling fonts colours and other effects and that div tags are extremely useful to single out certain parts on a page and if it’s repeated on others use the same tag to shorten the amount of work that needs to be done.
I chose this process because it was relevant with most of the lecture content at the time. So I thought I should try and put what I learnt to use. I also wanted to challenge myself because I could only come up with ideas that would look good if I used the HTML process. After finishing the task I achieved my self satisfaction and am happy with my result.

While beginning to create my exhibition I browsed the internet for sites that had done similar to what I was planning. The best site I found was www.lastfm.com, which is a massive music related website. It has got bands, biographies, albums, songs, events, galleries etc... Basically a goldmine for information on musicians. It has news on music events all around the world and caters many genres and styles of music. It also has a huge list of bands that shows what bands they are similar to and if they are currently on tour or not. It also takes the music you have been listening to on your computer or iPod and uses that information to find other things and bands your may be interested in. Quite an impressive sight in my opinion.

After analysing lastfm I thought about what conventions I should follow or should I create something that would be more appropriate with the amount of information I am sharing. I only chose to present four bands, not all the bands of the world. In the instructions on our task it said 'consider how your subject can be made best available to the viewer'. I took this statement mostly to heart and decided to make my site as appealing to the eye as I could make it whilst being straightforward and very easy to navigate. As my exhibition was only small in the grand scheme of what official websites have created, I decided lay out the page with all the content on it instead of creating more links in a sidebar such as photo gallery, videos, events, tracks, news, groups etc.

For the layout of the pages I planned them in a certain way. The main page has four titles of each band as the main links to their respected pages and surrounded on the edges images of the bands. I decided the title was to be ‘Metal Zone’ because each of the bands can be classified in the metal genre. I linked a wallpaper as my background that looked the most metal and still let the text be readable.
In each of the band pages I gave a band picture like most sites and lastfm does at the top and beside I stated the band members. Then I wrote a brief biography next to the main image and under that a few more images. I chose this approach instead of a full page as a gallery to make it more to the point and to keep the viewer interested. Under the pictures I listed the bands achievements and albums. Also to finish the page I added two music videos. In putting all this in one page I balanced it all so there was not too much of one medium. There was not too much writing or too many pictures or too many videos. So it was what I wanted. A taste of the band in text, image and video format. At the very bottom I made links linking back to the main page or alternatively directly to the other band pages.

As I was thinking about networking between sites I decided to add on each band page a link to their actual official band page as well as MySpace page. This is in case people become interested and want to search the band more thoroughly. Doing this now gives the viewer access to find out all the things I couldn’t put up on my site like news and upcoming gigs. I also added my own blog as a link as it is another thing created by me and is relevant as it discusses my progress in making the exhibition.

I see my exhibition as different to others because I wanted to keep a uncomplicated and attractive approach. I thought about what was necessary and what was not. If my page was much larger and I had lots of contents and more bands I would change many things to make it more accessible to that by side bars but for this it was not needed. If I created separate pages for only a few pictures it would have looked incomplete and bland. Mine is different because it has a more personal feel and approach but in no way claiming superiority over other bands.

Feelin' good

HTML assignment = defeated. Quite possible that was the most time consuming assignment ive ever done. I have like a miniscule amount to polish off otherwise im done. After careful consideration i have decided im NOT going into the web design field of work, not that it was my intention anyways. I like being sane to a certain degree. Basically i chose 4 bands. Protest the Hero, Bullet for my Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold and Maximum The Hormone and made a biography/exhibition on each one. Im quite pleased with my result. Probably not as happy as this kid, but almost haha.
Ah what to do now though now im finished....hmm... oh maybe the other 3 assignments that the university kindly made due all next week that i havent started because this one took a millenium. Should be ok though if i stick to it.

We had no lecture for any of our classes last week. So good. AND no lecture for Network media for the next 2 week! Woot!!!
This weeks lec was probably the easiest one up to date to understand. We learnt some things about the world and the web.
Apparantly humans are good at at recognising patterns. Like clothing, structure and music to name a few (wish my drummer could recognise the pattern in his own drum beats so they would at least maintain some sort of flow and musical sense....bahahaha jokes jokes). Perhaps he is not human....but im sure a computer is programmed to have precise timing...hmmm...dilemma. What is he? or it? am i safe?...probably not if he reads this. MOVING ON!
ummm..patterns! Patterns emerge over time. (perhaps my drummer has a chance then hahaha more jokes, but usually the song is over by then so thats just no help).
Anyways we leant that the interesting differences of how internet and the physical world have their limitations and not. Like a computer can hold a massive amount of information, such as novels, ad send it with ease across the globe. Where a human can only lift a certain amount of books before some sort of injury. although the internet cant pass a book across a room. That would be teleportation, and that would be cool. But not yet. GET ONTO THAT SCIENTISTS!!!! But a human can throw the book across the room (at a pace we desire). How convienient we humans are.
So Michael told us how the 'book' was cutting edge technology back in the day. And peope back during scroll and stone tablet days would probably have sold their camels and children for this spine bound artefact....well thats what i imagined anyway.

Erm, apart from patterns we learn about conventions. So basically ways people have done things. Like build buildings, write books, write drum beats......hahaha i should stop. So some conventions are worth following to keep things working. However if you are confident your new way will work and is better, go for it.
So we learnt about Ontology - the study of what there is eg; time, space, what is concievable.......thrilling. For those who are willing to study that...you and me are probably not on the same page. Taxonomy - process of working things out and how things relate to each other. And we talked about Heirarchy and Categories about how over time processes to making things change. Using tags to make things easier for users to find stuff on the web. The Yahoo directory is a good example of categorised tags to make life easier. We learnt about MACHINE TAGS which organises things in a certain order. namespace:predicate=value. The example Michael gave was Lastfm:event=613510, which i found coincidental because i searched lastfm HEAPS for my assignment. Omg i seem to have writen an absolute wad of info. Im stopping.
So i cant really wait for next week to be done and all my assignments handed in. I have been wanting to rewatch The Lord of the Rings again haha but just had no time.

SUCCESS!!!

Ah victory is a wonderful thing. After my 6 hour stuggle against the formidable opponent HTML teamed up with CSS, I finally won. It was the last time i was going to click 'save' and 'refresh' before giving up for another day and going to bed. I clicked refresh and colour appeared on my online exhibition assignment!!!! i almost ran around my block even though it was about after midnight and i had to contain my excitement/relief because everyone else was sleeping.
Whilst listening to Protest the Hero (these guys are freakin amazing) for a good while my band exhibition is powering along. I can see me finishing this task much earlier than i once thought!

Please HTML. Go easy on me

Another week at uni and another lecture.

This one seemed like Michael powered through it with a massive amount of information that was really hard to take all of it in.

We did a bit more on CSS and looked at a 'div' tag.
Div tags are used to identify a certain amount of content that your want to change later. We also looked at div #ID's and div .Classes which work the same way however the ID's are unique but the classes can be used for many parts in the HTML.
Another thing we learn is about Javascript. This feature can be kinda cool as it allows you to incorporate things like popout menus and things that move!! Im still a bit hazy on everythingg about it but it would be kinda cool to have stuff like that in my online exhibition assignment.

We also learnt in the lecture a bit about API which stands for Application Processing Interface. Basically its used by programs to initiate a sharing funtion. This allows other programs to use information that is being shared of another program like pictures from Flickr.
Michael gave us an example of this...
WOLFENFLICKR 3D!!!!
It takes photos from your flickr account and scatters them through the game as the paintings on the walls.

Well im finally going to start my assignment. After a long time in the tutorial looking at the screen going "..........hmm.....ah!....no.......hmmm......sigh" i had a talk to Sharon our teacher about why my HTML was not working until we sorted it out and how I could create my exhibition. I've decided that I'm going to make somewhat of a music exhibition of some of the bands I like and stuff about them. I can see exactly what I want it to look like but doing the HTML for it is seeming quite overwhelming right now and could take soooo damn long. Doesn't matter. Lets work hard.

I just want to see it!

Ninja Assassin...all that does is sound good right? I had already determined it as a candidate for my favourite action/martial arts movie up there with Jet Li in 'Fearless' and Tony Jaa in 'The Protector' (what a brutal movie!!!).
In November I saw that Ninja Assassin had been planned to be released and this thrilled me to bits.
Hoyts punked me. It came out overseas. They left a poster in the passage where you go into each cinema, taunting me. So after a while I looked it up to see when they would release it here. The Hoyts website had it in the coming soon section to be released on the 4th of March....which is today....PUNKED AGAIN! And its not even mentioned anymore! Hoyts. You are a bastard. I dont like you.