Monday, April 16

 

 

I woke up to find the weather changed. Everything felt colder and rain fell in a continuous drizzle. I pulled the covers tight around me before committing myself to getting up.

I left home with my hood up and an umbrella in my hand. My trousers felt damp by the time I reached the bus stop.

I spent the morning making a javascript-powered carousel for this afternoon’s class. I borrowed the javascript for the final version but kept my own html and css. The javascript simply controlled the actions of the next and previous buttons.

Liisa passed through an we attempted to check in to tomorrow’s flight. Liisa had forgotten her passport details and couldn’t get it to work. By the time she told me this I had switched from 5D to 9D and checked in.

Teaching started at 12:15 and stopped at 14:00; the odd timing an attempt to fit the session into available time today to allow me to spend Thursday in Dublin. I took them through the carousel-building exercise, making it step by step, and introducing the javascript that powers it at the very end. Everyone kept up.

We finished the exercise in half the time I had expected, and at the end somone said, “It isn’t responsive’. Well spotted, I thought. “Let’s make it responsive”, I said, wondering how (or if) I could do it as I spoke.

Less than thirty minutes later three students had different working solutions. I did too, but two of the students had approaches that differed considerably from mine. Twenty minutes later everyone had a responsive carousel and understood how it worked.

I meanwhile had used up the material I had expected to last today and tomorrow. I left elated but worried; an unusual combination.

At 14:50 I arrived at Stoa for a Job’d meeting. I had missed the last one, Irma had said nothing about it, and I did not lnow what to expect.

Laura and Nathalie have done extraordinarily good work. At the last meeting they initiated an hour-long conversation about the style and typeface of the apostrophe that goes inside Job’d, the brand name they invented. Since the last meeting they continued to work on this, and so we decided between the final ten options. Number Ten (which differed fron number five in its kerning and letter spacing) won.

I asked a question about the typeface and they explained that they had heavily but subtly customised the letters that formed the logo in Illustrator. I felt utterly proud of the level of detail they have put into this; especially when they then produced a colour palette and explained the research and thinking that had gone into it.

At the end of the meeting Irma felt moved to congratulate them on the standard of their work.

We drive home chatting and at 17:00 I skype Scott Cunningham for our fortnightly Peirce session. This time we map out a plan of action. Scott talks about the shennanigans that happened at Yale after Peirce’s death and which resulted in his carefully arranged papers and notes ending up on a study floor, shuffled, damaged and missing or “borrowed”. I talked about the difference in my mind between simulation and replication; the difference between a diagram or map and a simulation; and the limits to simulation. We agreed that a simulation might piggyback on a user’s prior experience in such a way that a racing driver’s experience of a Formula 1 simulator might differ radically from mine.

I take a screenshot while Scott avails himself of his morning Dr Pepper but I miss by a second or two and he appears in the resulting photograph slightly blurred, in a potentially interesting way, given the subject matter of the conversation, with no caffeine-infused soft drink in hand.