There seems to be something of an obsession with business bags in Japan. Visit any department store on a weekend and find fresh college graduates ready to enter their first jobs or working people spending a good portion of their days off carefully inspecting the seemingly endless array of available shoulder bags, totes and briefcases. Finding the right bag depends on one’s personal approach to both work and style.
http://www.japaninc.com/mgz_august_2008_business-bag-fashion
Experimental or avant-garde film is set to take centre-stage at the Film Archive: This is Experimental: A festival of experimental film and film makers. The event, organised by Film Archive Exhibitions manager Mark Williams, will be an exciting three days of screenings, talks and a workshop presented by and featuring local and international guests. This includes Guy Sherwin, one of the pre-eminent British film artists of the last 40 years; the films of Len Lye, New Zealand’s most internationally successful film maker, and Michael Nicholson, who will be presenting his homage to the abstract expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky.
14 – 16 August
Some free, some ticketed sessions, check on website:
http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/content/view/62/2/
OZCHI is Australia and New Zealand’s leading forum for work in all areas of human-computer interaction. As the annual conference for the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA), OZCHI attracts an international community of researchers and practitioners with a wide range of interests, including usability, information architecture, interaction design, human factors and ergonomics, human-computer interaction, information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, design, social sciences and management. The long and short papers accepted in the conference will be included in the proceedings of the ACM Digital Library. Our conference theme is “Designing for Habitat & Habitus”. This theme encompasses the role of technology in supporting and enhancing our relationships with, and within, the settings we inhabit and designing interactions that can sustain affective and diverse cultural and environmental dimensions of life-experiences.
Early Bird Registration ends: 17th October
Workshops, Tutorials & Doctoral Consortium: 8th and 9th December
Papers, Demos, Panel: 10th to 12th December.
James Cook University’s Tropical campus.
8 -12 December
http://www.ozchi.org/mediawiki/index.php/OZCHI_2008
Busan Biennale 2008 comprises three parts, including the Contemporary Art Exhibition, the Sea Art Festival, and the Busan Sculpture Project. Under the theme ‘Expenditure’, these three different exhibitions manifest each of their characteristics. The Contemporary Art Exhibition is being held at the Busan Museum of Modern Art and the Busan Yachting Center, showing art works by 92 artists from 22 different countries with the theme ‘EXPENDITURE – as it is always and already excessive’. The Sea Art Festival is the unique art event that undertakes to feature Busan. 78 artists from 27 countries comprehend the theme ‘Voyage without boundaries’ with the help of the natural setting of Busan. The Busan Sculpture Project attempts to expand the scope of public art, under the theme ‘Avant Garden’. It will exhibit the works of 20 artists from 10 nations at the APEC Naru Park.
September 6 – November 15
bbiennale@paran.com
http://www.busanbiennale.org
Every time I get invited to a new microblogging service, I cringe. Because once I try it (which, of course, I will; I can’t help myself) and develop even a small network of people on it, I can’t really leave. I don’t want to be rude to people I’ve started to communicate with. And then I get mad.
Kwippy, the latest Twitter-alike
The latest sites to earn my wrath: Kwippy, Identi.ca, and Plurk. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these services. They all have good features. Identi.ca is an open-source Twitter competitor; Kwippy integrates nicely with IM networks and has no character limit; Plurk has a neat timeline view and an addictive “karma” points system.
But, to my dismay, I have friends on each service (not so many on Kwippy, since it’s the newest), not to mention last year’s Twitter-alikes, Pownce and Jaiku. And there is just no way a person can participate in a half-dozen microblog services and do any of them justice, especially if he or she uses the services’ sites alone. We’ve been here before, with IM networks (and we’ve seen solutions, like Trillian and Meebo). For microblogs, there are emerging solutions for people who want to participate on multiple services. Here are the solutions, but after this list I’ll tell you why they don’t work:
Rafe’s solutions … and why they don’t work
