Digital haiku #8
The digital haiku contest over at Vidfest wraps up on March 11, and in the minds of all clear-headed, right-thinking persons I am trouncing Mark and Robert. To whit:

Haiku #8 03.05.05
paying attention
to your semantic markup
makes good business sense
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 7:42 AM 0 comments   

 
48 hours of creativity\\\\\\\\\\insanity
If someone, say that weird guy in your Thursday afternoon class, insisted on staying awake for 48 hours to complete a project, any sane person would keep their distance. Somehow that hasn't happened in my particular circumstances. Not only have I pledged (i.e. parted with cash to pay the entry fee) to get this project done, but seven of my new best friends are enabling me and each other to do the same. That's right, eight of those Thursday afternoon weirdos together in a room for 48 hours, all bent on winning the 2nd annual New Media Slam.

Fortunately, for those of you who like to slow down to get a good look at car accident victims, our progess will be logged and blogged here at Hamster Salad and over there at The Standard by Mark and Robert.

Stay tuned the weekend of March 18-20 to:
• marvel at our creative flow
• be astounded by our synchronized teamwork
• wonder at our stamina
• envy our prowess
• see Mark in his bunny slippers
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 7:37 AM 1 comments   

 
Digital haiku #7
I know it looks like I'm doing nothing but compose digital haiku these days. I hope that the nice folks at Vidfest are noticing.

Haiku #7 03.04.05
two things that don't go:
digital card reader and
my cat's fluffy tail
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 6:56 AM 0 comments   

 
Digital haiku #6
Well, put out good food and the ants show up at the picnic. Looks like Robert of Raincity Studios is trying to get in on the Nintendo DS getting action. I squash him with my self-promotional haiku! Ha!

Haiku #6 03.03.05
embarking dot com
forward slash hamster salad
dot html
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 12:06 AM 0 comments   

 
Digital haiku #5
Haiku #5 03.02.05
XHTML
and CSS rock my world
oh, and you too dear

You can see my haiku oeuvre to date at Vidfest.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 6:38 AM 0 comments   

 
Digital haiku #4
Apparently whining is quite productive as almost immediately after I complained about not being able to post my most recent poem, the problem went away. Vidfest is back. I'll have to whine more often.

Haiku #4 03.01.05
when you build a site
accessibility counts
don't shut people out
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 12:36 AM 0 comments   

 
Where's vidfest? Where's my haiku!?!?!?
Mark and I must have used up all the internet that the Vidfest blog is allowed, cause it just ain't there anymore.

You'll have to wait for the next installment, in which I once again trounce Mark's haiku stylings and re-assert my dominance as the alpha-haiku-er.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 12:06 AM 0 comments   

 
Making games
I spent the afternoon in very good company. About a hundred of my bestest new friends got together to listen to what some of the women of Radical Entertainment had to say about working in the the game industry. The Women in Electronic Entertainment Panel Discussion was sponsored by Women in Leadership and focused on career development and life/work balances.

Danielle Michael, Vice President Business Development, moderated the panel, which was made up of Kirsten Forbes (Producer), Andrea Malloni (Talent Manager), Senta Jakobsen (Game Project Manager), and Sarah Meagher (Lead Environment Artist).

Panelists fielded questions about the stepping stones to their success, how they balanced work and life, what challenges they had faced in a male-dominated industry, who their mentors are, and some tips or tricks they had for people trying to break into the field.

Some notable points:
• don't disregard the importance of a classical education, including excellent communication skills
• showcase anything you've done that shows an ability to plan and deliver over the long term
• while at this time there are not many women in the industry (about 20 of Radical's 300 employees), there is a lot of opportunity for them and that is only going to increase
• the gaming industry has a lock on the young male demographic and is now in hot pursuit of the women, so they will need women to design and produce those new games
• everybody works hard, but you are not encouraged to do nothing but work; make sure you take time out for physical fitness, pleasure reading, and especially family.

Regrettably, none of the panelists shared their mentors' phone numbers with us.

After the panel discussion, there was time for individual questions and networking around the delicious and expansive spread of food. I had a particularly pleasant discussion with Senta about how a background in competitive sports helps shape a certain kind of personality that is suited to the kind of work she does and I aspire to.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 11:44 PM 0 comments   

 
Digital haiku #3
In which Mark and I go to war
Mark Yuasa of The Standard has taken an introspective, meditative poetic form and turned it into a competition. Oh wait, the whole purpose of slinging haiku in the first place was to win the Nintendo DS from the nice people at Vidfest. Which I will.

Haiku #3 02.28.05
i got an email
promising to make me rich
what?! you got one too?
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 8:39 AM 0 comments   

 
But can I eat it?
Some people have suggested to me that Hamster Salad seems a tad, well, arbitrary for a blog title. I don't see that myself, but I don't mind giving you an exegesis of the name if it helps us reach clarity.

My husband and I used to live in Japan; we were there for a long time. Experts in cross-cultural issues will tell you that adaptation to a new culture follows a fairly predictable path of highs and lows. You are totally head-over-heels, I-can't-believe-I'm-so-lucky, isn't-that-an-adorably-odd-way-of-doing-things in love with the experience for the first three to six months before tail spinning into a grumpy disbelief that one's new love could possibly behave like such a moron.

That's when a lot of people pack up and leave. It's the right choice for many of them, but if you stick with it, you come to realize that you were projecting your own angst at losing some measure of control onto your innocent adopted homeland.

We stayed. And stayed and stayed. The cycles of high and low eventually flattened somewhat to a gentle wave--nothing more serious than we would have experienced had we never left Canada. I missed the variety of, well, everything, but especially the grocery stores in Canada. The incompetency of the banking system would get me just as riled in either country. And Japan had the edge on public transit, that's for darn sure.

Adjusting to the (new!) English language
Being in Japan as a career language teacher (i.e. not one of the ones just dropping in from backpacking around southeast Asia and in need of a six-month infusion of yen) and a self-professed Grammar Grump, I found that the cavalier treatment of my home and native language by the Japanese tongue accentuated my down periods. I'll go into this in more detail in an upcoming Grump, but for now let's just say that I taught myself to appreciate the poetry in the syntactical and semantic errors I was hearing and reading.

"Ten minutes by fast foot." How can you not smile at that? "I left you a massage." Oh, goody--so much better than a boring old message! "The stuff in the office are very nice." It's wonderful when the staff don't tell you to stuff it.

One of my husband's writing students presented him with a delightful description of her best friend. He had asked her to practice certain writing techniques in a descriptive paragraph, among them imagery, and similes in particular. She reported back that her friend "ate like a hamster." This gave us pause as we imagined said friend perched on her haunches with a carrot stuffed (staffed?) into one cheek pouch as she shoveled in whatever else she could get her little paws on.

The writer was, of course, trying to present an image of her friend eating rapidly and with intensity. We have since adopted the expression to describe any event that is performed with a noticeable level of focus or drive. "She studies like a hamster." "Our cats are sleeping like hamsters." "It's raining like a hamster."

But what about the salad?!
If you've googled "hamster salad" (what? am I the only one who's done that?) you've seen that it comes in two main types: that made of vegetable matter designed for hamsters, and that made primarily of animal product designed of hamsters. The title of my blog comes from neither of these, and I just want to say here and now that I was shocked, shocked, to discover that hamsters are, in fact, raised for food in some places. (Maybe I should live in one of those places for longer than six months so that I get over it.)

Where my Hamster Salad comes from is the name of a dish that I created out of my own head (um, imagination) and which we ate frequently (and with vigour!) while in Japan. Hamster salad starts life as a regular green salad (leaf lettuce, not head lettuce), which then gets super-charged by the addition of: roasted pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes (the ones in oil), avocado, chickpeas, red, yellow, and/or orange pepper, red onion, more avocado if you've got it, fresh basil (cilantro would be great, but just try to find it in Japan), sometimes raisins or finely chopped apple, grated carrots, and a generous amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar as dressing.

It salads like a hamster. And this blogs like a hamster.

So now it all makes sense, right?
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 5:13 PM 0 comments