New KnowledgeBase

Campus Information Systems at NU has created a knowledgeBase of all kinds of technical support information.  It’s going to be available to faculty, staff, and students through the myNEU portal.  It’s developed from third party software called “Right Answers.” The Knowledgebase has some canned information about the commercial software we have at NU, like Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes, plus some additional customized help that’s been created by our local IS people, like how to change your myNEU password.  There isn’t much there for the library yet, but we can send our own help, like how to log in to NuCat, Endnote stuff, and so on, and they will add it to the knowledgebase.  We can also supply them with links to our existing help, and then we don’t have to update information in two places when it changes.  So if a user typed in “article alerts” they would either see some instructions or a link to our page where we have instructions already (or both).   IS is still tweaking it, look for an NU announcement when it’s ready to roll out to the campus.

SL Twitter Typewriter

I just came across a blog post describing a giant typewriter in Second Life that posts to Twitter. Make of it what you will, I thought it was amusing 🙂  Happy Friday!

Gossip Girl

Last night, for the first time, I watched the show Gossip Girl.  My roommate is a fan, and so I finally watched it with her.  Despite having a quite a few friends who are fans, I’ve held off watching, even as the hype has grown.  I remember reading about the (book) series several years ago and thinking it sounded horrible.  A series about debauched materialistic teenagers, without any moral characters-and it was a big hit? Yikes.  And so I internally groaned, when I read that it was being turned into a TV series.    I think that plays, TV shows, films, etc., as they include human actors, humanize certain plot lines-these events “really” happen to an actual person.  I think this is why filmed or visually represented violence can be so much more disturbing (and lasting in memory) compared to something you read about.  I thought that Gossip Girl was alright, but I don’t plan on becoming a regular viewer. My favorite character is ‘evil’ Chuck Bass, in part because of his clothes-extremely tight yellow jeans, a purple cardigan, with a teal and pink ascot; a bright red frock coat; an orange trench coat; in part because he seems so over the top, and because he’s played by a Brit! Have any of you read the books or watched the TV show?  What do you think?

Perfume: Story of A Murderer

In Emily’s vein of movies that are underrated: Perfume: Story of A Murderer, by Tom Tykwer, the director of Run Lola Run. The movie is about a throwaway-child-turned-perfumer who possesses a uniquely acute sense of smell. He becomes obsessed with smell and with the art of capturing scent. When he catches a whiff of the most ‘sublime beauty’ he can imagine and discovers it is the scent of a beautiful girl, he goes on a murder spree to create the greatest perfume the world will ever know, from – dun dun dun – essence of human! Okay, so it sounds really dumb, but it actually has some really interesting ideas. I would not call it just some murder mystery story or slasher or horror or anything like that. For one thing, Grenouille (the murderer) has no scent of his own – and this is from a man whose entire worldview is dominated by scent. Good grief, talk about existential crisis! Also, it’s just incredibly visually beautiful – fetishism is a largeish theme and the heightened color or focus on individual objects of the women (hair, lips, eyes) really mirrors that. It’s also very visceral – there are these just insane montages and sequences that function as allegories for scent (another interesting thing – scent as the main theme in cinema, a fundamentally scentless medium) that just make your stomach turn over, either with disgust or delight. That said, I’ve met few people who actually liked it and although I personally love it desperately, I can see why it can be annoying and unsettling. First of all, it is uncomfortably flip-floppy in the realm of realism. It’s shot in a way we are used to recognizing as being realistic. Then, throughout the movie, it sneakily throws in unrealistic or odd little seemingly-purely-symbolic little events and occurrences – not enough to make you shift your perception of the realism but enough to make you say ‘Wait, what..?’ Then you forget about them and the movie behaves for a while, until – BAM – the ending, which is basically out of unrealistic-creepo-metaphor-land. And before you have time to really come to terms with this betrayal of you by the movie, it’s over, and you had no closure, to time to grieve the loss of reason, no time to figure out what the heck was going on! But once you suspend that disbelief for a bit, there really is a lot there. I ended up buying the movie and the soundtrack, too.  Anyway, here’s the preview: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yAhMRHh9ZYg&feature=related

Stardust

Recently, (over Easter) I saw the movie Stardust. I had seen advertisements and read reviews of it this past summer, and had wanted to see it then, but didn’t end up having the chance to. I saw it with my whole family, and everyone really loved it. Diann had earlier written a post on Neil Gaiman, and he’s the author of the comic the movie is based upon. I’ve checked out the first volume of his Sandman series before, but couldn’t really get into it. I found Stardust to be a visually stunning movie, and to have a magical and sweet story at its core. I think it’s quite similar to The Princess Bride, but its humor is a bit more subtle. (Sorry Billy Crystal!) Stardust follows young English lad Tristan Thorn, as he attempts to recover a fallen star; a journey that takes him from the 19th century village of Wall, into the supernatural kingdom of Stormhold. That the star is not just a piece of molten rock, but a young woman is the first of many new discoveries for Tristan. The movie seemed both humorous and generous, in a way that you rarely see. As you can tell, I endorse it! It also made me wonder-what are other good movies that you think may have fallen through the cracks?