In my mind they just gave me a comedy special...

Someone recently told me that I need to write more on the blog. I suppose they have a point. I went from averaging 2-3 posts per week to less than a quarter. That has been quite a slump.

In that regard, I perused though some of my old columns and came across one published 10/6/05 in The Spartan Daily, our college paper. (Note that picture isn't me... not sure how that got in there.)

The form of the column is my attempt at three-dot journalism. Take it for what it is and I hope you enjoy it.

And if you're wondering what the headline means, it's the third installment in my, "In my mind..." series.

Lucid dreams of an insomniac, day 3 ... With apologies to Herb Caen, Hunter S. Thompson and Jackie Gleason ... Now away we go ... Tom DeLay is the fungus that grows between the cracks ... yes he messed up ... big time ... but more so because he shares a similar surname with me ... my last name is pronounced the same way ... all this bad press isn't helping the cause ... hence, Tom DeLay is the fungus that grows between the cracks ... Note to self: Call George W. Bush for a job ... I'm just as qualified as Harriet Miers ... How did that decision go? "Mr. President, we need your nominee." "Um OK ... um, Miers are you doing anything? Good, put down the darts and go with him." ... I can hang out too ... oh, but that's right, he thinks I'm an evildoer ... you tell the guy you're not Christian and it's all downhill ... Now a warning - if you see a briefcase at City Hall for goodness sakes, don't touch it ... you could set off a political firestorm ... You ever get in bed and realize you need to use the bathroom? ... Do you go or figure you'll make it to the morning? ... I'm sure I'll make it ... We should send a shuttle full of proctologists to Mars ... then they could boldly go where no man wants to go while boldly going where no man has gone before ... I think I'd like to be in medical school on the day they pick specialties ... then I could give the gynecologists the look of shame ... perverts ... I'm going to start a fencing club ... if anyone has some nails and boards come see me ... I tried to start a procrastinators club ... but no one showed up ... at least that's what I heard ... Sometimes I like to leave myself a message at home ... I don't have a joke, I'm just very sad ... call me ... please ... Golf is the only sport with slaves ... I like to imagine an uprising with one caddy parting the red bunker ... If breakfast is the most important meal why is it always so early in the morning? ... I think men and woman want the same thing ... the difference is men are always looking and women always think they've found it ... Sometimes I lie awake wondering if the Earth could get so overpopulated we would run out of oxygen ... I should buy some trees tomorrow ... I'm thinking of becoming a fortune teller ... when I read the patrons their bank statement I could write down their account numbers ... I asked a guy if he had change for a dollar for the bus yesterday ... he told me to get a new haircut and lose some weight ... then he took my dollar ... I walked home ... People use the word literally wrong all the time ... if I hear one more person misuse it, I'll shove a dictionary down their throat ... literally ... I think it's wrong to call people straight ... it implies that gay people are crooked ... If a gay person tells you to "get bent" is that a come on? ... Why is it when a photographer receives a gift it's always a picture frame or album ... why never film? ... I tried to run on a sentence a few times ... but I kept falling off the "S" ... not a sturdy letter ... We're journalist's but we don't keep journals ... a conundrum ... An apple does not keep the doctor away ... if anything, it makes them come closer and get chatty ... which is fine, but sometimes they're holding a needle and they forget which way it's pointed ... "Doc you might want to point that away - nurse it happened again." ... damn apples ... You know you're getting old when the music on the radio starts to suck ... actually, scratch that, you know music sucks when artists like the Simpson sisters and System of a Down are on the airwaves ... I think the president is so homophobic because of his name ... but he might be overcompensating with Dick Cheney ... People like to ask me what I am ... after I tell them I'm forced to interrupt ... I don't care that your grandmother is half Cherokee ... Why is the word abbreviation so long? ... I once asked my dad, "Do you Yahoo!" ... he slapped me ... old people don't understand technology ... Deja vu is weird ... sometimes I feel like I've been somewhere or said something before and it scares me ... Deja vu is weird ... ahhhhh ... I think "The Truman Show" was made to mock me ... I know you're watching ... perverts ... I like food fast, but I don't like fast food ... City Hall isn't being very neighborly ... trying to push SJSU students out of the city's Fourth Street Garage ... naughty naughty ... the dark of government ... in what other career can you pass a law to guarantee yourself a parking space ... The Sharks are back ... I was never one for hockey ... too many rules I couldn't wrap my brain around ... but going to just one game changes all that ... I'm sure downtown businesses are happy to see them back ... Go Sharks ... What's with the nine-tenths in gas prices ... is that really fooling anyone ... my Shell station attendant doesn't seem to have an opinion ... One day I want to turn in 100 coupons so I can get my penny ... I've never seen any of the John Hughes movies ... if they're so great why aren't any of the actors still working ... Am I generation X or Y ... Tofurky makes no sense ... why would vegetarians want food that tastes like meat ... For that matter how can they ever be sure what meat tastes like ... this celery is great but it'd be better if it taste like bacon ... umm ... bay-con ... I noticed cooking shows are as popular as ever but nobody cooks anymore ... Why do sleeping pills list drowsiness as a side effect ... I should hope so ... Lastly to Diana, I'm sorry ... I'm a bit older and I've seen a few more things and there are two things I've learned ... One: If you expect the worst you're often pleasantly surprised ... Two: If you and your buddies go barhopping and you end up the designated driver, don't take your own car ... well, good night and good luck.

Shaminder Dulai is a Spartan Daily photo editor. "Random Words" appears every other Friday.

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The emerging photograpahy of multimedia

On April 13, NPPA at SJSU will feature San Jose State University alumnus and San Jose Mercury News staff photographer Dai Sugano as part of the speaker series.

If you’re a photojournalist, an art photographer, or a J-School student interested in multimedia journalism, you should check it out.

Recently, Sugano has been adding audio and video from assignments to produce multimedia presentations, placing him on the cutting edge.

Sugano's achievements include: 2004 Finalist for Pulitzer Prize Feature Photography, 2001 College Photographer of the Year (CPOY) and 2000, 2001 Student Photographer of the Year (SFBAPPA).

SJSU NPPA is proud to present our latest in the guest speaker series, Dai Sugano.

When: 6 p.m. Thursday, April 13
Where: Dwight Bentel Hall (Journalism Building) Room 209B
RSVP: none
Cost: none

Hope to see you there.

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Web 2.0 they call it... looks like a slideshow to me

Recently I was interested in placing slideshows on the blog to show off photo stories and other projects (I shyed away from the idea of a photoblog, choosing rather to keep everything in one place).

I ran across Lightbox JS, but it required hosting the code somewhere, and I was in no position to do this.

As I kept looking about, I read an article on Ryan Sholin's blog about new internet toys and was directed toward Slideroll. A device of the so called Web 2.0 future (whatever that marketing fluff may be).

As an experiment I decided to play with Slideroll and created the below. The program is very simple and clean and it works with Flickr which makes it very simple. I didn't try it with any of the other hosting services out there, but I imagine it should work just as well, however I doubt just as easily.

Without further ado, here's Series One of the Cutout saga. (Collect them all!)

Slideroll has a lot of the simple editing controls, including simple panning and push and pull movements to add some flash. It throws in variable intervals for each image and transitional fades to round it out. Where it utterly fails is in the sound department. It allows you to select some pre-loaded sound samples, but they all sound like the concoctions of a Chinese back alley bootleg of a Wham! and Talking Heads mash up... and who wants sytho-crap to begin with?

I was excited to see the option to add sound, however it fails by not allowing you to upload your own music. I supposed copyright concerns kept the simple feature out, but a simple TOS agreement would have taken care of that. Maybe in the future, but for now, this is a very annoying limitation. I've always said half of the presentation is the audio, Slideroll misses half the point.

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