freeing up time

i guess the only time i have to blog these days is when i'm out of town... when i get a break from the grahamstown work. eat. sleep. work cycle. so, i'm living it up in jozi with the hana team until saturday. we're producing a daily paper for a creative commons conference called commons-sense (clever heh?). the official launch was last night at the rosebank hotel - and we were there (naturally). larry lessig (or professor lawrence lessig as some academic-types refer to him) was there too, and the whole event had a nice atmosphere (guess everyone was excited by the fact that ccSA was officially launched then as well). if you haven't heard of creative commons or if you have and don't really know what they're doing - go check out their website... pretty awesome stuff. 340ml played after the speeches but the life of a designer dictated that i had to go back to our hotel (which, coincidentally, was across the road). apparently, everyone else got pissed and had fun. who knows? me, i watched the uefa champions league final. which - i suppose - is not an altogether bad thing.the new media lab from rhodes are also here (vince, colin and the fourth years). they're producing a 99% live site which is really pushing new trends in journalism/story-telling to the limit (especially considering we're in south africa). check it out. you know you want to.
our 8-pager came out this morning. we're running on an adapted micro-publishing model. 200 copies of the paper in a magazine (a4) format. the pdfs will be on the web this weekend and what i'm currently working on is converting these to rich media pdfs (hopefully as rich as possible). i'll be pooling the content that we've produced together with what the new media lab have produced and at the end of it all i should be able to have a pdf available for download that is embedded with video, audio, extra pics and lots of hyperlinks (lots and lots).
i've been wanting to blog on quite a few things lately and now, i don't actually know so much.
term 2 has basically been a cycle of work work work. drink drink drink. party party party. (the last two occuring on wednesday, friday and saturday nights - and one or two during the week on assorted monday/tuesday/thursday nights).
i have two new puppies (well, in actual fact my parents have puppies). we've got one little white yapping jumping thing (staffie/foxy-type dog) and a lumpy puffy little brown boerboel puppy (who's own mom weighed over 80kg) - will post pics soon. my dad's pressuring me to come home, using the puppies as bait :) crazy man.
fest's going to be a goodie. gonna be over-worked and underpaid, but production on cue is actually quite fun.
other than that, i've got some other projects up my sleeve - had a few ideas over the past month or two, so i'm trying to build those into more concrete plans. some are online ideas and i'm convinced one or two of them will be quite big if i find the time to dedicate to them... more on this soon (i hope!).

what made my day today: i'm in joburg - come on!!!

now listening to: a horrible aircon sound and lots of people typing (i'm in a computer lab at wits)