I've had an interesting idea for music collaborations. There are some online storage services emerging that essentially give you a new hard drive (e.g. I: or I drive) that is actually saved to your account on the internet.

     

Hiya

 

Looks like elgg 1.0 is out....

(elgg 0.9 is the platform that the current Jammunity site is built on)

There seems to be a post on upgrading in the elgg forum:

http://classic.elgg.org/mod/vanillaforum/vanilla/comments.php?DiscussionID=2011

It seems to me that there are plusses and minusses to changing platforms (apparently 1.0 is hugely different):

One plus is that we'd be kinda future proofing with new features. Also, if we decide to switch late (ie. after we are fully up and running with members) we MAY lose all old posts. 

The minus is that the new platform probably does not support all the old plugins. So we would have to make do with all the basic features (which, in the first instance, seem pretty good) until new/upgraded plugins become available. Also, since its new, we dont know all the bugs that may be in there.....

Of course, another minus is the workload involved in the upgrade  

Any thoughts? 

Yo yo yo

Now, surely somebody can think up of a cooler name than 'general chat' for the ..er, general chat community. How bout:

The Mad Hatter's Party (or 'General Chat')   - maybe too nutty

or

The Gathering of Nomadic Whispers (or 'General Chat')   - maybe too mystical and serious sounding

It kinda sux with the "(or 'General Chat')" bit, but maybe it will make it easier for newbies to know whats happening... Other suggestions?

PS - General Chat's scope is exactly that, ranging from profound to ape-shit-insane to meaningless topics of discussion 

Stargate Atlantis needs our help! Sign the petition!

I’m such a fan of Stargate Atlantis. I watch it religiously and I know all the scenes! It’s in my system and I just can’t imagine life without this show on TV. Have you heard? MGM has already announced that they are going to end the show after their 5th season. Why? It’s probably the best sci-fi show on TV to date! Why cancel a show that has a very solid audience that watches it religiously the same as I do?

Obviously, the producers know how popular Stargate Atlantis is and thought that it’s just too good for TV and should be made into a movie. Great! Who wouldn’t want to watch a movie version of their favorite sci-fi TV series? But why would they cancel the show just to pave the way for its movie series? There’s too much here and the purpose is not to benefit the fans but so they could fatten their pockets even more! Come on now! Why hurt us after we supported your show? It is just not fair!

I am so happy to see many fans who decided to start a petition. It’s a great idea! It’s time for us to save our favorite TV show. Let us save Atlantis! It’s our time to be a part of the show’s story. Now is our time to save Atlantis, Of course it’s not like we have to pack our bags and train to be one of these futuristic scientists but it’s time for us to unite and save the show! These petitions are calling for all the Stargate Atlantis fans and supporters to sign their names so our voices would be heard by SGA’s executive producers. It’s not fair! We have to show them that what they plan on doing is really not fair!

Friday nights would no longer be fun. I usually prepare myself after dinner and find a comfortable place in front of the TV in anticipation of this show. I look forward to Friday nights all the time! Without SGA, what’s there to look forward to? It’s sad… tragic! Looking forward for the next movie is like waiting for your birthday each year!

I’m just one of the many disappointed fans of SGA. These executive producers should reconsider. Should we boycott and show them our disappointment? But then we’d be missing more of their awesome shows. We should all support the circulating of the online petition asking for these executive producers to change their mind and start thinking about the 6th season. The 5th season of Stargate Atlantis is a lot better than the previous seasons and we are expecting for the 6th. It can’t just end here. It’s just too good to end.

SciFi will have nothing to boast about after their station won’t have Stargate Atlantis for their audience. Come on now, what’s left to watch in that channel after SGA?

Would it have been different if they have used a different channel to show Stargate Atlantis? SG1 was a great show and it was canceled prematurely as well. I was a die-hard fanatic of SG1 also and I was so disappointed when they announced that my favorite show on TV was about to say it’s goodbye. I was sad but I thank God for Stargate Atlantis. At least, SG1 had 10 seasons so I was able to enjoy watching it for years! Stargate Atlantis only had 5 episodes and it’s even better than SG1 but why only 5 episodes? Can the executive producers answer this question for us?

Why the sudden death for our favorite sci-fi shows? They can cancel all those other boring shows on Sci-Fi if they want to, but why cancel the most popular one? It doesn’t really make sense to me. I will miss the characters whom I already grown to love. What will happen to them after this? Will they be on the movie version of Stargate Atlantis? I hope so. But, still that’s just not right. They deserve to be on Air every Friday! I am not saying that they don’t deserve to be on the silver screen. Heck, I’d die to watch the movie version of SGA but I just can’t stand the fact that they are canceling the show.

I’m sure many would agree that there’s not much on TV right now that is worth watching. I don’t watch TV on most days except for the news and some sports shows but that’s just about it. No new shows interest me that much anymore except for Stargate Atlantis. I’m a sucker for sci-fi shows but I am very choosy as well. Sci-fi shows can be really boring when the storyline is boring. SGA has an awesome storyline that caught me right from the first time I watched it. I even have DVDs of the shows so I could watch them over and over again. I’m a die hard fan and I am here, asking all of you die hard SGA fans out there, to support the online petition. Please, please, let’s support our favorite show.

I’m done voicing out my opinion but I’m still not through with my disappointment and I will continue to fight for my favorite show. Its one great show that we just have to keep on air. Whether or not we’d be successful, at least we can say that we did our part in keeping it on air. If the executive producers won’t listen to our plight, I bet it’s time for us to start looking for other shows that may interest us and just wait for the movie series then. It’s unfair and disappointing but I will never say never. I will sign as many online petitions and start a petition asking my fellow fans to support our loved team of scientists led by Major John Sheppard.

You gave us a great show SCI-Fi, please don’t just take it away from us. It will break many hearts and will disappoint even more. Hope you’ll make the right decision and keep the show on air!

And no, it is not fake, the the making of will attest:

 

The official site is http://walkmanproject.com/ which has the add and the making of (if they dissappear from youtube). Interestingly, the official website is also encouraging everyone to contribute their own tracks, mix up other people's tracks and rate other people's mixes...

This site discusses the benefits of Drupal. Drupal's extensibility and more active developer community beats Elgg in some instances. However, drupal is a more generic CMS (content management system), and so is harder to customise to social networking needs yourself. However, DrupalEd is a freely available customisation of Drupal that "does blog, podcast, wiki, social bookmark, assignment, social networking, e-portfolio, and calendar right out of the box". And being open source and modular, you can add or remove modules you don't want (assignment in our case).

Worth considering. There may even be other social networking customisations out there. 

From The Guardian, UK:

Walter Lewin is not your average Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. He teaches introductory physics with a difference: electric charge is demonstrated by beating a student with cat fur, he rides a fire-extinguisher propelled tricycle across the lecture hall to show how a rocket lifts off. ....

....Each lecture, complete with stunts (others have included making himself into a pendulum and firing golf balls at a stuffed monkey in a bulletproof vest) takes about 25 hours to prepare....

The lecture videos can be downloaded! Check them out at the MIT site.

 

... that makes them so incredibly cool?

 

A few days ago, a dolphin helped rescue two stranded whales in NZ. Check out the BBC report.

I think my favourite dolphin story is still this one. Trippy!

 

One morning, while driving past Kaikoura, NZ, some years ago, i had the good fortune of seeing a huge number of  dolphins out for a breakfast hunt. There must have been more than a hundred out there. It remains one of the coolest things i've ever seen.....

 

For a long time, I thought that Stevie Wonder was a pretty good musician........

.......silly silly me...... the Man is a Golden God!

First time i saw this video, I was completely stunned. I didnt even know he could play the drums. He does some things in this vid that I think would make many a musician cry, and he doesnt even look like he's breaking a sweat!

This video actually made me go out and get a hold of his music and have a proper listen. I am now convinced that Stevie Wonder is one of those rare musicians whose genius is unclassifiable, trancending instruments and genres. Maybe I'll check out his latest album sometime soon....

Ok, it was about a month ago, but in case you missed it...

YouTube recently had an interesting collaboration with CBS for the Grammys. They put out an open call for string and brass musicians to audition by posting YouTube videos. The top 15 performed on stage with the Foo Fighters on their song 'Pretender'.

What I found most interesting was that even a month later, YouTube did not have the actual performance avilable to view. It felt like watching the teaser of a great movie that was never released. Googling any term including 'mygrammymoment' was hopeless - you only got the 'official' YouTube site (bear in mind YouTube is now owned by Google). I finaly figured out by Googling 'grammy awards 2008 foo fighters' I could find the actual performance from a less official source.

I'm not entirely sure what I feel about all of this. Its an interesting concept, combining the music, broadcast, and internet industries, but I felt the performance only used the winners fo about the last minute of the song as a flashy finale - it didn't quite do them justice. But I guess that is what the YouTube component was for.