Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Assignment: Here is my first Ds106 assignment for section 2, the State of Net. To be honest, I was so into other works that I haven’t touch or even look at the DS106 assignment for several days, so I was kind of excited to play around editing pictures again. However, the assignment I choose didn’t required any editation or anything. I’ve chosen to go for the Visualize That Quote from the Visual Assignments.

Submitted by John Johnston, this assignment tell us to:

illustrate/explain the quote in pictures with the least number of pictures required
you can drag to re-order, click pic to swap, x remove pic, – hide pic leave word.

Although, he provided a link to look at quotes, I decided to use Brainy Quotes as I have been using from the beggining of this course and I feel more confident with it.

Process: Very simple process, I had in my mind to use Steve Job a well recognized pioneer, Steve Jobs. Therefore, right away, I looked for a simple and short quote that don’t have much letters such as ‘a’ ‘or’ ‘is’. So I found the perfect quote,

STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH

Then, with Flickr , I started to look for pictures that matchs each words. Most of the previous assignments images were found on Google Image , s this was my first time to look pictures from Flickr and took my a little bit to get to know the service. I had some problems with saving images from Flickr, some I did figured out how to save it, but some pictures unfortunetely couldn’t save it so I looked for others that actually I could save. Then, using FotoFlexer I create a frame for each picture and that’s it :D !

Story: Personally, this quote has become one of my favorites. I couldn’t find any official information about what message Steve Jobs tried to tell people by mentioning it. But this quote was mentioned at the end of his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. I read the whole speech from an article provided by Stanford University’News. An in the lest paragraph, I found that “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” was a farewell message from the Whole Earth Catalog. The Whole Earth Catalog, also known as the “Bible of Steve Jobs”, was published twice a your between 1968-1972, (also, occasionally from 1972-1998). with independent and countercultural that aimed to provide education and access, through a listing of resources and tools within a critical and ecological future of Earth and humanity. After mentioning the quote, Steve Jobs ended his speech by saying : And I have always wished that for myself. ANd now, as you graduate to begin a new, I wish that for you. 

My interpretation of this quote is as follow :

Always remain hungry for what you really want, meaning that keep wanting stuffs and become a fool in order to achieve what you want meaning that never think that you know enough.

So, what is your interpretation?

Ovid’s Cyberspace

Now that I’m finally posting these, they’re getting addictive. This the the VisualAssignments324, in which we are instructed to take a famous quotation and  enhance  by superimposing it on an appropriate image. I got my image from this guy’s flickr, took it into paint and added the text (I’m getting faster! But not ready to face Gimp again yet…) I hope it illustrates the quote and modernizes it for the concept of our cyber-class.

Visualizing Words!

Found another interesting ds106 assignment(thank god! before its too late!)

The assignment is to:

‘illustrate/explain the quote in pictures with the least number of pictures required’

And it has a catchy name too… ‘Visualize that Quote’

The instructions were simple! I used flickr commons to get the picture. I found the quote at a website called  brainyquote although they suggested another site. I am pretty sure I could make slight changes as such.

The quote I chose was:

“Life well spent is long.”

By: Leonardo da Vinci

And how I used the little creativity I had to make this:

LIFE

Part Of: Powerhouse Museum Collection

WELL  

Photographed by:Lee, Russell,, 1903-1988, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

 SPENT

Cornell University Collection of Political Americana, Cornell University Library

(IS) LONG

Wardwell, Anne, Keene


Process: The steps here are quite simply.

  1. Downloaded the pictures from flickr.
  2. Uploaded each one of them.
  3. Typed the relevant parts of the quote next to each picture.
  4. Changed the font of the typed words red and also change the format to headline1.
Now the Story:
I wanted to choose a quote from someone famous so anyone who reads it can sort of understand it! I hate not knowing the person whose names written under a quote. Leonardo Da Vinci! I am pretty sure everyone knows him. A genius! This particular quote was also apt to be expressed by pictures(they dont have millions of ‘a’,’the’,’of’ in it)
A short post at last! :)

? Learning at some schools is like drinking from a firehose.

I’m already blown away by the amazing programming chops being show by Cogdog and now John Johnston who created this awesome Flickr Quote Visualization Tool that allows you to grab random images, remove the extra stuff, and visualize a quote in as few as possible. This was my first go at it and it’s a ton of fun, not the least of which because everything loads almost instantaneously.

Dull Women/Immaculate Homes (Flickr Visualized Quotes)

(click image for full size)

This is the infectious handoff nature of ds106 that I love the most. While never really becoming the kind of musician who can truly “jam”, in a way we are doing this with ideas.

After posting the contorted how tos for my language tool, John Johnston commented on his own experimentation where we hooked together two web services in a new mashed up way. He pulled random quotes from the I <3 Quotes api and linking each word to a flickr search on each word (see John’s first test).

My suggestion was to make it so rather than present the results for each word, to display one word at random, with the idea to try and see how few images it might take to visualize the quote, even making it like Spell With Flickr where you can click anyone to get a new random image.

In about 24 hours he did so! Try it yourself at http://johnjohnston.info/tests/quote2.html and now it is an official ds106 assignment Visualize That Quote (tag=VisualAssignments312).

It is a work in progress, but John even added the ability to shuffle the picture order. My first attempt was:

(click for full size image)

My suggestions for more tweaking by John are:

  • See if it can skip unnecessary words like “a”, “the”, “of”
  • Be able to return a word if we accidentally click it closed
  • Tweak the css for thr “attribution” link at bottom (sometimes overlaps the license text)
  • Make it so when you hide the titlebars, it also hides the text of the words and the quote, to make it a true guessing game.

Of course none of this is necessary to make the assignment doable- that part is in exploring ways to represent words via photos.

For my first example, the photos for “dull” were not very litteral; they were more descriptive. And “immaculate” let to a lot of religious images. It is so random, so cool

ds106: I love this place

Visualize That Quote

Webpages gets random quote from
http://iheartquotes.com/api
and set of flickr photos to match words

illustrate/explain the quote in pictures with the least number of pictures required

you can drag to re-order, click pic to swap, x remove pic, – hide pic leave word.

http://johnjohnston.info/tests/quote2.html