sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

My attention was drawn today to this amazing thread on "How to delete your Yahoo! account," in which the poster offers a very simple explanation of, surprise, how to delete your yahoo account.

Amazingly, it is followed by 232 comments (so far), the majority of which are mindless requests for him to delete arbitrary yahoo accounts. An example:

I want to delete my account,but I dont know how,?can you please delete my account cause i wanna change it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ppppppppllllllllsssssssssssssssssss……

Aaah, a non-DrupalCon post at last.

I'm typically pretty hard on ESPN.com, for their editorial policies, membership levels, and other philosophical issues, but here's something a little more pragmatic: ESPN sucks at photoshop.

Exhibit A: "But it looks so real!"

I know I should be past the point where this surprises me, but I am absolutely appalled by CNN.com.

Here's what they have "above the fold" right now:

• Lawyer: Clemens upset about steroid report (plus three other Mitchell Report links)
• Michael Vick to judge: 'I am not the beast'
• E-mails hint at astronaut love triangle
• Police: LSU students die in home invasion
• Ticker: Clinton discusses her apology to Obama
• Cop finds 3 bodies in SUV
• WPLG: 2 women, 2 kids found dead

The following video is my final project for my visual research methods course. I'll post more about it later on, once I've had time to finish the rest of my finals, and unwind for a few weeks, but I wanted to post it right away because, well, I'm really proud of it. Despite all of the animation work I did as an undergrad, and despite all of the design work I've done over the past few years, this was actually my first editing project, so I'm very pleased that it turned out as well as it did.

So here it is...

On NewsHour this week, following the delivery of the bill proposing $124 billion for the military -- contingent upon a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq -- Jim Lehrer spoke with Senators Patty Murray (D), Washington, and Kay Hutchinson (R), Texas.

Probably the most uninteresting thing I wrote during my first semester at Georgetown was a short review of the Green Party's national website (www.GP.org). The assignment was pretty basic, and so the result was fairly bland... a blow by blow critique of the website, based on a set of criteria provided by the professor.

For my Intro to CCT midterm last semester, I wrote a paper titled "Podcasting and the Public Interest: Children's Programming on the Internet," which was a very feable attempt to discuss podcasting in terms of the historical debate over broadcast television and the public interest. It was possibly the worst paper I've ever written, so I wasn't horribly surprised that I was asked to rewrite it.

The final project for my "Intro to CCT" class was basically a glorified vocabulary test. We were encouraged to be innovative and creative in our approach to the project, even to have a little fun, but there was a great deal of grumbling outside of class. I was probably among the loudest grumblers.

However, once I came up with a topic, I completely nailed it, and the end result may be the coolest academic products I've produced.

For my class on Media & Political Engagement, during the first semester of my masters program, I wrote a very short paper called "The Internet News Effect?," which was an exploration of the effect of online news sources on political cynicism. This was partially a response to the article "The Daily Show Effect" (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006), which attributed cynicism among viewers of The Daily Show to the show itself.

The very first paper I wrote in graduate school was really just a writing test. It was assigned in the required introductory course for the CCT program, and was really just a hook for the faculty to identify which students might need to be referred to campus writing resources. Anyway, the assignment was just to discuss, in one page, a potential problem in contemporary media systems.