June 2006 – oz: the blog of glenda sims ( the goodwitch)

d.Construct 2006 – mashup with the best

Some conferences are just so delicious they make me drool. Take d.Construct 2006 coming up September 8th in Brighton. The speaker list includes:

Jeffrey Veen (Design Manager at Google) I swear he gives me goosebumps with his amazingly visionary brain.
Jeremy Keith (ClearLeft, author DOM Scripting: Web Design with Javascript and the Document Object Model and member of the Web Standards Project) As brilliant a speaker as he is at DOM scripting.
Derek Featherstone (Furtherahead and member of the Web Standards Project) An international web developer and speaker who loves to share his technical knowledge of HTML, CSS, DOM Scripting, Web 2.0 and Accessibility. Don’t forget to ask him about his bar tricks too!

What did you do today to make the world a better place?

I’m very inspired by my work. Most every day I have the opportunity to make the web a more universally accessible place and I revel in the deep meaning I find in creating a museum without walls. But today I was really struck by Sarah McLachlan’s World on Fire video that took the $148,270 it would have taken to make a fancy music video and spent every dime of it on helping people who are starving, sick, homeless and alone. (thanks to Andy Greer for sharing this with me)

Bonding with the Tate Modern

unadorned canvas with a slit cut down the middle at a slight angle

How is it that a museum can touch me so deeply? Perhaps it is because Iâ€™m still new to the adventure that contemporary art offers. Where an initial impression might be â€œDear Lord, what is that?â€ or perhaps a good hard laughâ€¦like when I approached Spatial Concept â€˜Waitingâ€™ by Lucio Fontana.

There’s no place like…

Just a quick note to say I’m headed to Europe for adventure, romance and museum technology. You just knew I couldn’t plan a vacation without a geek moment!

First stop…Belgium…

Captioning Art

I’m all about universal accessibility. I get a real jolt when I can break down barriers between people and information. But a collegue asked me a question today that has me perplexed.

How do I caption a work of art that is a video?