My topic for the hypertext essay

I have decided that I will be doing my hypertext on spandex, I will be arguing in the positive for spandex, I feel I need more materials in order to work exactly what the argument will be and the supporting facts but I think I am going to go with the idea Jason came up with in class to post the esssay around the web in different context and media forms creating a trail of essay. Some of my ideas for the actual argument are as follows:

-all future clothing should be made of spandex
-spandex is the best material ever created
-everyone should be required to wear spandex clothing
-spandex is just better

let me know what you think or any other suggestions would be lovely.

Cheers! -Alex

Creating "Bathroom Graffiti"

One of the problems I had in developing this project was going from idea to screen. I felt that I had more ideas than I had capability to create them with the software and publish them to the web. This was quite a frustrating problem and I felt that everything I was able to do took atleast 5 times as long to do as it would if I knew the software. One of the problems with this is, I knew that I would be graded along side people who knew the software we were working with and next to theirs, mine might seem as if I spent about 5 minutes on the thing when it actually took me quite a while. Also, I learned the value of gathered material in this project, realizing that it takes a lot of patience and time to find all of the material you need to create a web-based interactive creation. This made me think of art as much as a lifestyle as a major or career. I also found that flash had a lot more capabilities in creating exciting interactive pieces while it was also more technical and difficult to figure out, and with the different versions some of the tutorials I read would leave me stranded because the menus had changed from their version to the trial version I had and I did not know where to find what I needed to find. Also, taking the html or flash documents off of websites and trying to manipulate them to fit into my interactive project was a lot more difficult than it looked at first, that lead me to a lot of dead-ends as well. In the end I felt mostly disappointed, I had a lot of ideas that surpassed my skills, I felt a lot like someone just learning a language, or perhaps how a child feels when they are just learning to speak, they may have all of these elaborate ideas or things they want to express with very few words to work with, a trapped feeling to a point.

Inherent interactive places

Upon reading this suggestion for a blog the first thing that popped into my head was a vending machine, I think vending machine interactions are some of the most interesting interactions that take place in a public realm. Sure it seems simplistic but if you have ever sat and watched the stories unwravel between people and vending machines, it can be quite comical and sometimes insightful. Take for instance, just yesterday I was on a 10 minute break during a long class, one of the most crowded times at the vending machine I am pretty sure, and I walk into a scene that was quite uncomfortable to be honest. There were two guys there, one of them with his arms wrapped around the vending machine shaking and wrestling with it, the other kicking the front of it and giving instruction to the shaker, and of course, there was the bag of chips stuck at the top of the machine outside of the coils, but it was not coming down, and on the side of the vending machine, feeling just as awkward as I was I think, was another guy waiting to use the devil machine as was I. So we faced a sort of strange interaction, one with these guys, once they stopped shaking the machine, and another with the machine, should we choose the type of chips he chose to get his down and possibly get our own stuck in the same way he did? Or should we ignore his blatant struggle and choose something else to be on the safe side. In the end, neither of us chose the type of chips he had chosen, and he and his friend wondered back to class chipless. From this I have decided that people and vending machines in general have the most dysfunctional relationship to one another of all modern technology. Isn't there a better way?