Jordan Neel

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Week 5

Update #5

Monday

I made the decision to start going to bed at 1:30 am and waking up at 9:30 am instead of my normal 2:00 to 10:00 am schedule I've been on for the last few weeks. This decision was made because I have been rushing in the morning to get out the door and to my class and usually end up a few minutes late. I'd like to be able to arrive 5 minutes early and not out of breath like I've been, so this was the first day I tried it. 

We continued working on our Twitter Bot in class and my partner and I decided to use the sentence "because my coffee was too cold I heated it in the microwave" as our original foundation. We used Cheap Bots, Done Quick! which works using Tracery. Tracery is a generative grammar specified as a JSON string. If that didn't make sense, you're where I was before this class. We essentially created a Mad Libs sentence for the bot to randomly generate sentences to tweet out. 

  1. Basically, You type your origin sentence 
    • "Because my coffee was too cold I heated it in the microwave"
  2. Then you break the sentence apart into different parts of speech and give the computer a variety of words to pick from
    • "cold" could be replaced with words such as "hot", "weak", "rich", or even "promiscuous"
  3. You do that for as many of the words that you want in your initial sentence
    • We had it set up so that the bot had four different "blank" spaces that it could fill in with our word banks
  4. You can add alternative sentences as well, but we opted to stick with our one
  5. You give your bot a set interval to tweet, and then you hit tweet
    • Our bot was set to tweet every 10 minutes
  6. Each tweet will be put together using the various words you "taught" your bot 
  7. You now have a working Twitter Bot

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, our Twitter bot has been temporarily restricted and we no longer can log into the account without using a phone number. This is probably due to Twitter cracking down hard on Twitter bots and purging their systems of them in large waves. Our bot was able to tweet 62 times before it was flagged. If we had put more time into creating multiple sentences, I bet it would've taken longer for Twitter to shut us down. 

The Senior Community Assistants had our bi-weekly meeting with our Community Directors after lunch, and we were able to get a lot done in the hour which is always a good feeling. I brought up a video project I will be working on for the remainder of the year that essentially will serve as an informational video series on how to do the various tasks that are expected as a Community Assistant. This will include things like:

  • How to plan and execute a good program
  • How to handle various duty situations
  • How to do a duty walk
  • And many more

Following the meeting, I biked over to another meeting I had with my friend Caleb who I am working with on an Honors Contract for our Media Installations class. An Honors Contract is basically an agreement you make with a professor that says I will do *insert extra work* in exchange for receiving honors credits for a class that is otherwise not an honors course. Caleb built a Max7 patch that when hooked up to a webcam, and a DSLR, can take a picture and then upload it straight to Instagram. Let me explain what the vision is.

  1. A person will walk down the hall and then notice our installation.
  2. They figure out that a camera is tracking their face and that they can control a ball on a screen
  3. They move that ball into the center ring and then notice a countdown timer
  4. As the timer counts down from 5, the participant is wondering what will happen when the counter hits 0
  5. All of a sudden, they see a flash, and they hear the shutter of a camera go off
  6. Next thing they know they see that their photo was just taken, and is now uploaded to an Instagram account

I'll be helping set up the installation and get the lighting right so these photos turn out really high quality and the hope is that we will have an Instagram account filled with the random people that happen across the piece. It'll be something that you can follow and will essentially be this automated Instagram photo booth.

Tuesday

It was a good day

Wednesday

Today was an interesting day. It was spent: 

  1. In class, talking about the theories behind cartoons and comic books
  2. Calling auto shops to try and make an appointment to get my oil changed
  3. Making changes to our spring break plans because I couldn't get my car in before Monday. 
  4. Getting a haircut
  5. Going on a bike ride and taking pictures
  6. Going a walk and taking pictures
  7. Editing those pictures
  8. Listening to a bunch of podcasts throughout all of this, notably:
    • TED Radio Hour's Confronting Stigma. Fair warning, I cried multiple times during the podcast. These were two of the people's whose talks and interviews resonated with me. 
      • Johann Hari talked about where we get our ideas about addictions and the way we treat people with addictions. In his TED talk, Hari talks about the 20% of american troops using "loads" of heroin, and how when they came back, "95% of them just stopped." What we think we know about people with addictions is not only wrong, but it kills people. Instead of taking people and putting them in a system that isolates them, he argues that we should take all of that money and invest it in getting that person connected to their community. He said something that was extremely powerful: "the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection."
      • Nikki Webber Allen shared her story and her experiences with the stigma surrounding depression and anxiety. When her nephew died by suicide after fighting his own depression and anxiety, she set out to open up the conversations surrounding mental illness. She finishes her TED talk with this, "life is beautiful. Sometimes it's messy and it's always unpredictable, but it will all be okay when you have your support system to help you through it. I hope that if your burden gets to heavy you'll ask for a hand too." 

Thursday

So at midnight I was doing homework and when I finished the first thing I was working on I checked my email before moving onto the  next assignment. That's when I saw it. 

An email.

From Google. 

Okay, actually I'm just going to stop here. This deserves a blog entry all by itself. And besides Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was essentially the start of my Spring break and that weekend deserves it's own post as well.

 

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