Packard Jennings - Culture Jammer Check out the work of Bay Area artist Packard Jennings. If you use adbusters stuff in your rhetoric class, Jennings' site is for you. Works include "Fallen Rapper PEZ Prototypes" (make sure to check out his correspondence with the PEZ) and proposals for the American Battle Monuments Commission in Arlington, VA (Dick Cheney as Hercules fighting the Hydra). My favorite is "A Day in the Mall," a work that involved placing pamphlets in various department store products for the benefit of unsuspecting consumers.
Packard Jennings' Website  ¶ 9:03 PM 0 Comments

  Mopac Media Break-in I know that some folks in the CWRL are having students produce video projects this semester. Although this post doesn't deal directly with the use of video in the CWRL, I thought it was worth calling to the attention of anyone here at UT who is interested in student video production. Kevin Triplett of Mopac Media is a great asset for student filmmakers. In addition to providing affordable equipment rentals, Kevin has assembled one of the greatest link lists on the internet for aspiring videographers. Info follows:

Kevin Triplett of Mopac Media, a great friend to Austin independent film and video producers, had his business broken into last week. Mopac Media provides affordable video and sound equipment rentals to local productions, including special rates for student filmmakers. Kevin is an asset to our community and one of the kindest and most helpful men you'll ever meet.

I'm posting this notice from his website in order to get the word out about his losses. Among the stolen goods was a camera damaged in the fire at the Guadalupe Arts Complex that Kevin was helping to repair. Kevin also lost hours of selects and edits for his documentary, Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah, a project 8 years in the making.


Mopac Media - Break-In Feb 22, 2005

Mopac Media was broken into early Tuesday morning. We still think the east side of Austin is a swell place to live but we'll obviously be a little more security conscious from now on. At fault was the french-window back door which has now been replaced with a solid door. (BIG THANKS go out to Mike Nicholson and Alan Ray!) We'll be adding other security items quickly (I fell behind on that little detail due to my workload).
Here's a list of equipment stolen:
Canon XL2serial number: 332880101167
Canon XL1sserial number: 042270000472
Canon XL1s (belongs to Picture Box Productions, partially disassembled, I was repairing damage from their recent fire) serial number: 042260000120
Macintosh G4 (dual 1.25GHz, 750 GB internal storage on four drives) serial number: XB3030NMN1X
Dell 1900FP (19") LCD monitor serial number: MX-09J367-47605-32K-AP7J (I'll post serial numbers on this page very soon) The Macintosh G4 is the most precious item to me -- it contained my 8-years-in-the-making-opus documentary, BLAZE FOLEY: DUCT TAPE MESSIAH, about legendary Austin singer-songwriter Blaze Foley who died in 1989 while defending an elderly friend. Equipment I can replace, the work on this machine I can't easily replace. Fortunately, the master tapes are fine but I had many hours of selects and edits on the hard drives, which had no back up. (Hard drives are now cheap enough to afford a backup set, I just hadn't gotten around to it, or $$ to buy the back up drives.)
Anyone finding and returning any of the above equipment will receive $500 equipment rental credit at Mopac Media and one very happy, friendly person (me) to help you with your production or post-production needs. Thanks for checking into this and please forward a link to this page to anyone in the area (or state even) that might come across used video or computer equipment.
Thanks!!Kevin TriplettOwner, Mopac Media(512) 478 - 1812  ¶ 5:28 PM 0 Comments

  CWRL Blog Aggregator I've put together a CWRL meta-blog using a free "news aggregator" service provided by bloglines.com. The service allows you to monitor and read the content of weblogs and other online information sources through their syndication feeds from a centralized site. I've used it to assemble an index of weblogs published by students and instructors in CWRL classrooms this semester. By clicking on a title from the "blogroll" on the left side of the page, you can browse all the comments published on that particular blog. Most, you'll notice, are published by students in Jenny Edbauer's RHE 309L class - "The Writing Process." What's the point of all this? I'm not sure yet. I'll be using it Friday to introduce my students to weblogs and writing communities. Although I haven't thought through the details, I imagine a CWRL metablog--perhaps one developed in Drupal, which I haven't yet learned how to use--might be useful for putting the "forum" back in the RHE 306 First-Year Forum by replacing the standard DRC online forum that appears to now be officially off life support after years of disuse. More generally, a metablog fed by a number of CWRL instructor and student blogs could potentially foster discussion and interaction between 306 classes. I'm sure there are other applications as well. If nothing else, a metablog can provide us with window into the variety of writing being produced in CWRL classrooms, even on a daily basis.http://www.bloglines.com/blog/BrianCondrey  ¶ 11:07 AM 0 Comments

  Video Blogger I've published a video blog using a tutorial by Svein Høier and Jon Hoem of Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Their article can be found here. They provide a few different options for tweaking the post function in your Blogger template in order to embed video in your weblog. It appears that there are a number of different ways to put video on a weblog, but what's so neat about their solution is that you simply enter a filename from a movie file on your server into the link upload space, and unlike other embedded video solutions for Blogger, you don't have to change your template or create a new blog every time you want to post fresh content.
I'm still encountering some problems with layout and functionality, but it looks like it's going to work. I believe there's at least a couple applications for it in the CWRL right now. I know that at least a few instructors have scheduled video projects for their students this semester. The video weblog is a simple, elegant solution for online video publishing, one that would allow students to integrate and neatly present video, written text, and web design elements of a unit project. The second application I have in mind comes from an idea brought up by Jacquie Thomas in Tom Nelson's cohort group. Jackie was discussing the idea of the CWRL creating a online rhetoric resource file that would include image files instructors could draw upon to discuss visual rhetoric. Given the server space, this project could also include moving image files and resources. I've personally downloaded and stored on gibson and slatin video files of commercials, public service ads, and propaganda films that have passed into the public domain. Thousands of these files can be found at the Prelinger Archives (archive.org) and the Library of Congress.
Anyway, I've posted the code from my Blogger video blog here for anyone interested. If you'd like some help with setting one up, please drop me a line.  ¶ 2:26 AM 1 Comments