The name is KA Flower...

...and I am now officially an MFA student. I never thought that I would ever get to this point in my life and honestly I don't think anyone is more surprised than myself. Really and truly.

I'm already spouting ideas for my thesis project, even though it's probably more than three years away. I think what I am looking for most to accomplish is creating art that I have always had in the back in my mind but perhaps not the skill set to accomplish it.

I'm currently building a reading list too. I gravitated away from reading for a while and now I want to jump back in. I'm thinking President Obama's memoir or re-reading She's Come Undone for some more ideas. But there is one that is still niggling at my brain.

Week Ten, Update 2

Finally!

Things are working, confirmed that we are pretty much putting it together this weekend.

The RSS feed is working on the website. Give me a day or two and it should be up and functioning :D

In the meantime...

Week Ten, Update 1

So, we meet again...

Connie got the programming finished! Life is excellent!

Pretty much, everything is getting compiled together this weekend and will be all set and ready to fly whenever the final is on Thursday or Friday.

Adrian and myself are customizing the website and currently I am attempting to figure out RSS/XML feeds in Actionscript. You talk about fun!

Anywho, good times a-rollin and summer is almost here.

Let's be happy :)

Week Nine

Oh woe...

Connie, at the time of publishing this blog, is attempting to contact a programmer who was helpful up until things became a little too complex. We're using some actionscript/flash to create the drag and drop feature that our map will contain.

Anna is stuck in L.A.

Krystle (me) is in the library. I went to speak with the cartographic librarian (fourth attempt) and they are in a meeting currently. Therefore, with limited time available, I asked their assistant for guidance. Naturally I learn that the majority of maps containing data are available online and would therefore be easier just to copy from online.

Adrian ended up attending class and was able to participate in the professor evaluations. Also working on maps and the like.

Week Eight

Crunch Time

Three weeks to go...

Currently we are still trying to figure out how drag and drop will work alongside the variables we'll be assigning. An issue that we have is that once you place down the variables, the variables will not move with the image. Essentially, we are trying to find a way for these things to move together to make it work with being able to turn on and off various layers.

Maps are still chugging along - I finally was able to access the College of San Mateo resources and found some more maps that we can use. An issue is that I have to translate the data from database format to visual format. That should be fun and will probably take the weekend to do. Connie and Adrian are still playing with the programming and looks like we might have it down and ready to go.

In the meantime, we're keeping our fingers crossed, although now the deadline has been extended to finals week - not sure if I'm happy about it or not, but at least we get more time to finish our project.

The Final Exam date is now June 15th at 11:30am (tentatively).

Week Seven

In which the proverbial fire is lit under the ass...

Jeff was ill, so we pretty much had it easy today - attempting to figure out how the heck we were going to do this stuff. He also got pretty irritated with our group - won't discuss it here, but suffice to say it made me angry to get chewed out for something that isn't my fault. I think Connie feels the same. Either way, we sent out a group email.

However now it is coming down to the wire. Who honestly knows what will happen? Connie and Adrian are still working on the code and getting that down pat. I am working on the maps - I have about fifteen done so far and another five that I think I can manage to do so far, but at least we have a base layer for our maps. Have no idea where Anna is or what she is doing.

So here we go...

Week Six

We put together a list of maps for the assignment, although we weren't sure what format we should be listing the information we acquired - meaning do we create these in PNG format and input them as a layer or source/scrape them from a separate XML file that will tell us where the information is supposed to go?

This is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be...