Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

I’m sitting at the Las Vegas airport, about to begin some 25 hours of travel. But before I go I wanted to present my favorite PowerPoint slide of all time, by my good friend Dina Liebowitz:

The Journey of Knowing Another

And with that, I’m off!

After a decade I finally got around to revamping my personal site. It’s got a new look and feel, new content, and even a new URL. Talk about getting a lot for your money!

In the process I decided to say goodbye to livejournal, so this will be the home for my (rarely updated) blog going forward. It may see a small burst of updates in the next couple months as I head off to South Africa again for more adventure. I fly over this Wednesday and will be there until May 2nd. I’m very excited!

My old site is still up for now, but I think that before too long the legacy of Binadopta will be no more. The good news is that I can then sell the domain for the cool million it’s worth.

Bug reports for this new site are encouraged. I’m using WordPress for the blog portion, and I’m sure I’ve made some errors in the custom theme. Let me know what they are.

Got an email from a guy in Germany earlier this week telling me that the videos I had posted on the Vendetta website no longer worked. A quick look at my records indicated I had originally put those videos up almost a decade ago. Wow. And those were the new versions — the original versions were posted in 1999 when online video was rare and anything you could find looked like it was filmed in a sandstorm.

Well the times they have a-changed, and I finally got around to cleaning up the Vendetta site to make use of 2005 era technology. Though I have had Vendetta on YouTube and Vimeo for a few years now, the website itself still featured the downloadable copies I had made back in the day.

Just think: when I put those up there was no YouTube. If you wanted to post a video online you had to host it yourself. And if it got too popular — which happened twice with Vendetta — your server would die.

I suppose cool little indie movies are pretty darn common these days, but I’m still proud of Vendetta 13 years later. What an awesome bunch of kids we were.

After a great month with wonderful people in Kansas, Florida, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, it was time to launch the much anticipated Sparkle Ponies album, “Crimes Against Humanity”. It’s been in the can since mid February, but I’ve been delaying things by being traveling around.

Here’s the final front cover and back cover. We had a great CD release party on the 4th, complete with beer, bbq, pool, and of course lots of beautiful girls. CD’s were complimentary at the party, but for the rest of you you’ll have to either track me down for one or buy it on iTunes when it is available — hopefully soon! I’ll post here when Apple gets around to putting it up.

This album is really the brain child of David Lavezzo, playing under the stage name FREEDOM. I am proud of what I brought to the project as Cinch Dastardly. I wouldn’t have thought of working on a surf rock album in a million years, so thanks Dave! It was a blast, and it sounds great.

I wonder if I should commit to another album of some sort next July 4th? We’ll see.

It’s afternoon now. The banks are closed and I’ve got only to pack and return a few odds and ends to Alan and Donna. Eric and I will drive up to Joburg tomorrow morning with Nathi. After we drop him off, we fly to Atlanta, and then part ways as he goes back to SF and I head to Las Vegas.

The past three weeks have been a whirlwind of fun and productivity. I am almost surely coming back next year, unless something comes up to stop me. I’ll try posting some summaries of the stuff we did, but for now I’ll just put up a link to a little educational game Eric and I made: South Africa Motor Tour. Give it a moment to start up from the black screen.

It’s a simple idea — just a way for kids can practice their lessons in a game format. The game is extensible, so teachers can add lessons. I’ve put in two “easy” lessons so you can see how it works. If you want to test your high school math and science feel free to try the other tests, but don’t be surprised if it’s harder than you remember.

In an attempt to give some replay value, each test has a specific destination, each with three pictures and three music clips. The game may seem pretty simplistic, but for the kids in rural areas here it goes over well. I was surprised by how much they seemed to enjoy playing it. The benefits of being without a Playstation, I suppose.

I have lots of ideas about how to improve the game, and I hope to add a significant amount of the actual curriculum, which I think is key to selling “learning games” to the teachers here. From what I’ve seen, I think it could be a very nice addition to the teaching process.

I feel like I could stay here another two months and find plenty more to do. The feeling that my skills can be so helpful here give me a sense of drive that I have a hard time capturing at home. I’ll try to hold on to that energy until I can get back here next year…

Okay, I was pretty impressed with myself for keeping up as long as I did, but now I must admit that I am 16 days behind in writing, and I only have 20 days left in Africa. That would mean to catch up and keep up I’d have to write almost double per day going forward. And I just can’t do that. I’ve got too many other things that must be done!

I suppose I could stop being so verbose, but if I’m going to write things down I want to give them the treatment they deserve. There were so many adventures in the past 16 days! An amazing trip through Lesotho, the start of my writing educational software, another amazing trip to Durban, and of course all imbued with the many quirks that make this place such an adventure.

Currently, I’m in Joburg, having just picked up my friend Eric who will be finishing out the next three weeks of my visit with me. I look forward to showing him around and getting his help on the projects I’ve started.

The main two projects are related to a high school way out in the country, past Nquthu, further than Donna and Alan have ventured with their Macs. The principal there managed to build a computer lab with the school’s own budget (as opposed to a education dept. grant), which is rare and impressive. It needs some work, though, and I want to get it in tip top shape. Then I want to put some custom educational software on there that relates very closely to the curriculum, and see if we can get the teachers using the lab regularly. It’s going to take all our efforts to pull it off, so I’m de-prioritizing the journal.

I have bullet points for each day still, and some pictures. I hope to post them at some point, though probably not until after I get back. Hope those of you who have read have enjoyed so far! I certainly have!