Observations from the Window 1.9

You may or may not have noticed but I am never satisfied. It shows when I'm seriously paint because as I have said before I can lock myself away for days until I look at what I'm painting and decide it's finished. I am constantly tweaking the code of this blog in ways you will never see and probably wouldn't see if I told you what I did. I play with embed codes down to the pixel so they are centered, something that can be frustrating because I realize it is all going to look different on a comp with resolution settings that aren't the same as mine. More than once I have changed the whole design only to change it back before ever posting it.

Lately I've been seriously toying with the idea of changing over to a complete dynamic view template. Serious to the point of learning some of the code. One thing holding me back is that there are some things I can't do with a dynamic view that I can with this one. Another problem is everything in this blog is fitted to this template, some of which I wrote myself, so if I change over videos, photos, and other embeds could be totally out of whack, out of whack being a highly technical term for totally messed up. One option is posting dual blogs for a period of time and than gradually phasing out this one. That also has a downside because even with links between the two a new blog is just that, a new blog, with all the problems of a new blog.

My geek side is pretty much just mulling this over in print but you can take it as a warning if you want to. If one day everything looks weird, if it looks like my geek side has suddenly and totally lost it, I have no problem with you letting me know.

I've never had much use for Pinterest, I have enough photo sites with Flickr and Tumblr, but I like the idea of saving what I find online to look at later without making a mess of my browser. I just ran into a newer site called Clipboard that I like. With a browser attachment you can save not just photos but entire web pages or just parts of them to Clipboard. It's CEO and founder Gary Flake says Pinterest is about expressing an aspiration but Clipboard is about getting things done, one of the reasons that the site's default setting is private. As there website says "the Internet is more than two decades old, doesn't it seem strange that the typical way to save something online is to put it into an email or a document?" If you're an online pack rat like me it's a site you might want to check it out.

Did you know the TSA has a job described as a Behavior Detection Specialist? Maybe the Mayans were right after all.

Sunday Observations 12.9

I'm going to start with a quick warning. The Eagles won a football game today, the Mayan apocalypse is upon us.

For possibly the first time in my life I have three biographies started. Now I've often had three books started but never three bios, I hope I don't get anything mixed up. I guess that isn't possible with these three books; Ted Kennedy's True Compass, Keith Richards's Life, and Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Not sure if it's a sign of the times or what but at the moment one of the more popular quotes on my tumblrs is this from Charles Bukowski, "My soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world."

I don't want to be totally depressing on a Sunday evening but this week I saw a good article in Forbes about sex trafficking which it says is now a $32 billion a year industry worldwide. I'm not going to get into it, the article isn't long if you want to read it, but I wanted to share this line. It's one of those things that is so obviously true but evidently isn't seen that way in this country. "Legally, they cannot consent to sex with an adult, so the use of the term “child prostitution” in the media is misleading. In any other context, this would be considered statutory rape."

A few days ago I said that there was a lot going on in the art world this week but I have yet to finish that post. One of the major things was the ribbon cutting at the new Louvre-Lens museum which will officially open later this week. The museum will contain over 300 works from the Louvre. The other thing was the Art Basel show in Miami. A funny geek thing happened this morning that relates to the Miami show. I was reading a Le Monde article about it and hit the tweet button which than said it was posted. It hadn't so I tried again with the same result. Turned out something in the french name of the culture section was telling twitter it was a direct message so it wouldn't send it.

Finally Ash's line of the week, "If you are going to call yourself a painter you really need to paint."

Truth.

Sunday Observations 12.2

I had a busy day and never got around to my Sunday observations but watching the Eagles game I just saw something I had to share. First the Eagles are terrible but are beating the Cowboys at halftime which is reason enough to watch. Any year that they beat the Cowboys isn't a total loss. Still my highlight of the game is going to be this Lenovo Yoga commercial. Not only is it a hot ad for obvious reasons, the jacket, but it has a directors cut. Really, a TV commercial with a directors cut. Soon it will be a full length short on blu-ray.

link

While I'm in geek mode I should also mention iTunes again. For some reason I have been having problems with iTunes for a few months now. It's been slow to load and a total memory whore. Normally I don't update it as fast as I do other things because the updates don't usually concern me but this morning I updated to a totally new version (11) as soon as I got the notice. If you are having any problems with iTunes you should too. It's sleeker and has some new features but more importantly it took care of all the problems I was having.

Observations from the Gallery 11.26

I love my Kindle even though I'm using it for something I hadn't really planned on using it for, reading. I have a button attached to Google Chrome that with a click will send any article I can read online to my Kindle, "Send To Kindle for Chrome". With the HD no glare screen it's much better to read on than my laptop and oh so much easier on the eyes than phone reading. Totally worth the investment and worth waiting for the HD models to arrive.

The following paragraph is just a minor geek vent. Somebody recently accused me of setting my tumblrs to private. For the record no I haven't made them private and no it's not something I ever really considered. What would be the sense of having them if I didn't want anybody to see them? Also the links to are right there on this blog's sidebar so I ask again, what would be the sense of making them private? Honestly if this blog got as many hits as my tumblrs I would be a rich girl. But enough about that.

Something else I have found so very interesting is how many people have discovered VPN (virtual private network) software since the whole Petraeus email mess. Suddenly everybody wants to be anonymous and they don't think other people realize that their emails aren't originating in Russia. To be fair I should say that I have been using one program or another for years but it's funny seeing the pizza delivery guy using one. I'm thinking maybe I should just give up art and go into the security business or maybe, even better, art security.

This short geek post is actually a bit of history in the making. This is my first blog post written and posted entirely by Kindle. Technology is a wonderful thing, until it's not.

Observations from the Window 10.14

A rare geek post here, maybe a bit of geek vent, actually it's an explanation of sorts. If you look here often you know I like to post videos. Lately you may have noticed that the videos, or some of them, have an ugly title bar on top that really gets in the way on smaller frames like my blog. Well let me tell you it has nothing to do with me or my coding the fault is all YouTube's.

About a year ago YouTube released a new embed code replacing the long used flash code with a new HTML5 friendly one. Since than you have had a choice between embed codes, there was a small check box if you wanted the older flash based code. Now it seems that on new videos, some possibly all, the flash version is no longer an option. The look and play of the new player is just as good as the flash version was, the problem lies in the code as it's much shorter and as of now I have no clue how to tweek it.

The new version is viewable on more devices, I just don't like the look of the bar. With the old code I would insert a small line that deleted the info bar and some of the controls so it didn't look so busy. I never went so far as to delete the YouTube logo even though I could if I wanted. Maybe I wont be so polite with the new player.

As of now YouTube says it isn't planning on actually disabling the old player, they just will no longer support it. Than again one morning I may wake up and all my embedded videos are gone.

Something to keep in mind if you blog and use embedded videos.

10/15 update - Something I forgot to mention about the new embed code that probably annoys me more than anything else. Once you insert the code you can't get rid of the viewer even in HTML mode. It is still there over top of the code itself so really what you have to do is write your entire post than insert the embed code last which can be one big pain.

Inspired by Irene

A friend of mine sent me this video. I just think this is totally cute and think we will prob see her on the Weather Channel one day soon. Remember I told you first.


Link

Observations 8.12

Nothing here other than my geek side testing the embedding of movie trailers from Yahoo Movies. I don't quite understand why photos go out in the email but embedded videos do not.

While I'm here I think I'll add that as always I have a thing for Anne Hathaway and I wish they would have called me to play Dexter in this. In my opinion it would have made for a much more interesting movie, although it may have lost that PG13 rating. "One Day" is adapted for the screen by David Nicholls from his bestselling novel of the same name.

update - Short answer is no it doesn't email, I really didn't think it would. It's probably because a photo is really a link but an embedded video has characteristics more like a file. Vimeo videos have a link in the email, Yahoo and Youtube don't.

Observations from the Window 7.9

I had been saying how I thought I needed to re-charge somehow and last weekend seems to have helped some but may have had one unintended consequence. I have always been a morning person, I should say a dawn person. I love the sunrise so much more than sunset, the light and color being totally different as the sun pushes into the sky. If you ever look at my flickr you will find that most of the few color photos in it were taken at the shore at dawn. I just love the solitary feeling of sunrise and I always found it to be my artistic time of day. Maybe not literally but mentally in that I think better, clearer, and come up with better ideas.

Since I moved to the Village I've gotten away from the dawn more and more. Maybe it's the influence of the VQs or maybe just it's being so much busier than I once was but most days I find myself staying up later and sleeping later than I had before. That changed a little this past week when I found myself awake, totally awake, at 4AM and loved every minute of it. One day I even had coffee on the roof as the sun came up. I'm not sure if it's a temporary change or I'm reverting to a previous life, as always time will tell.

As much as I can be a tech-geek I love books, real paper books and magazines. I like to hold them in my hands and feel the paper while I read. I like big glossy photo magazines printed on coated paper. That being said I want a Kindle and I want it bad, well I want the Kindle to play with but I want the app for my netbook. I think I need to do some Amazon shopping. One book I want to check out is Power: Portraits of World Leaders by Platon (Photographer) with the text by New Yorker editor David Remnick. It is the portraits of 150 world leaders shot over a year at the United Nations. Platon is staff photographer for the New Yorker, and recipient of the World Press Photo Award and National Magazine Photo Portfolio Award.

A couple days ago a new shaved ice stand opened just a couple blocks from the gallery. It gets all its fruit from the Greenmarket at Union Square and it's so damn good but I can't figure out why anybody pays $3 for frozen flavored water when the dude at the corner is still selling it for a buck. Maybe buying it from temporary wooden stand makes it better than buying from a vendor with a cart. I'm thinking I might have to open an alcoholic shaved ice stand. I'll just use flavored vodka instead of juice.

And so it goes.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 4.22

The internet gods truly are annoyed with me. Once again I was consigned to internet purgatory for sins real or imagined. I’m not sure what office of Verizon decides that point, I’m not even sure what side of the world the office is on. After yet another long phone conversation I’m beginning to think I have the answer to the last part.

It's not the modem, not the wiring, or my comps, and I don't buy the theory that rats are chewing on my wires because I feed the rats regularly to avoid just such an occurrence. I even stretched a 50' wire down the hall and plugged into Verizon directly only to find it was just as weak at the source. So I am out of theories of my own and I'm open to any opinions but I did accomplish one thing today. After threatening that my next call was going to be to Time Warner I was told a technician would be out sometime this weekend to check any of their equipment in the area. Sometimes it does pay to be a bitch.

Speaking of bitches; In an update to my last geek post I want to say that, contrary to a minor rumor on Twitter, Madonna and I are not at all close. Funny thing about Madonna and I though, our birthdays are the 15th and the 16th of August so I guess karmically speaking we are a lot closer than I thought.

Game 5 of the Flyers playoff series against the Sabres is about an hour away so I just have to forget my internet ills for now. After game 4 ended in a major fight this should just be awesome.

midnight update - The Flyers fell to the Sabres 4-3 in overtime and now find themselves facing elemination Sunday. This series goes a long way towards explaining why I love sports the way I do. Not that I enjoy watching my fav team lose but anything can happen. The thing is last year the Flyers made the playoffs on the last day of the season after a late season surge and they ended up making a run all the way to the Stanley Cup finals. This year they dominated the NHL for most of the year only to tire near the end and slip to second deed in the east. Still things still looked good going into the playoffs until they ran into Ryan Miller who is playing goal as well as the position can be played. Two of the Flyers' three losses in this series have been 1-0 shutouts and that is something that has never happened before in their storied history. You just never know.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 4.19

Yesterday was just a day of uber-geekness that was followed by a night of sports overload. These are just some random thoughts I typed on my netbook but I never got around to connecting.

I had a geek meltdown when I awoke to find I had internet loading speeds equivalent to a wretched dial-up connection. As my empire began to crumble around me I spent an hour on the phone with a friendly enough gentleman who finally informed me what I already knew, my modem was probably shot. He said in would send me a new one that should arrive in approximately six business days. Now I know the call center was in India but I didn’t know Verizon shipped their products from there. The one thing that did irritate a bit was when the automated system had an Indian accent, jesus I yell at them as it is. "Sorry I didn’t understand, sorry I didn’t understand." I just wanted to say I don’t effing understand you either but all I would have gotten back was "sorry I don’t understand!"

In one of my ultimate geek confessions I admitted to a friend that I owned possibly a dozen Madonna CDs. Previous to this it had been a very well kept secret but that no longer seems to be the case. To make it all the more pathetic I latter ripped all the CDs and now have a huge Madonna playlist on iTunes.

A Philadelphia Inquirer sports writer declared last night basketbockey night because the Flyers, Phillies, and Sixers were all playing at the same time. The Flyers won their playoff game against the Buffalo Sabres and now lead the series 2 games to 1. The Sabres have never won a series after falling behind 2 games to 1, this will be their 13th attempt. The Phillies lost in extra innings and the Sixers were totally crushed by LeBitch James and the Miami Heat in their playoff game.

After a bad outing in game two, a win in which he was replaced early, the Flyers didn’t even dress rookie goalie Sergei Bobrovsky. I know the powers that run the Flyers are reading so I just want to say that I think it was a totally bad move. Goalies in any sport a flaky to start with, witness my brother, so it was a bad enough move not to start him. This was only magnified by not letting him backup Brian Bouchet. Time will tell what it does to his confidence. 

I really just wanted one of those mellow spring baths I wrote about.

Madonna - American Pie

Observations from the Window 2.8

Over the past weekend I went through one royal funk I think brought on by the fact that I have never in my life been so tired of a winter before. I was telling a friend how drained I was feeling and didn't know why but I think that is the answer. I never got like this in the mountains but than this winter seems so damn special, or maybe a better word is grueling. Plus in the mountains I had hockey and skiing and here I just have slush, never ending grey slush to go along with my collection of now grey boots.

I was also in a bit of a photographic funk, to the point that I reshot a job because I didn’t like the way it turned out the first time. I always said part of the reason I like photography is the instant gratification aspect of it. I can take so many shots in so little time and even if I only like one it's almost instantaneous and costs next to nothing. On the other hand the cost of a painting has been known to come in at days without sleep, a case of Corona, a bottle of tequila, and a carton of cigarettes. All that is not exactly instantaneous or cheap in today's economy.

Ash has a theory of her own on this one. It being that I am spending too much time on the shots I am doing, stressing over them, and making them not so instantaneous. Or as she so succinctly puts it I'm using too much of my 'limited' brain power on them. My secret theory on her theory is that she wants me to start painting so she can sell my paintings. That and she has a not so secret desire to open a gallery of her own and needs a captive artist with a larger body of work.

After a couple of relatively warm, if not exactly spring like, days I seem to have snapped out of the funk for now. Hopefully I stay out of it but one never knows with me.

For the record that little virus my comps had a couple days ago totally sucked. I did manage to get rid of it but it seems to have affected Firefox in some way, slowing it down to the point I want to scream. I started using Google Chrome more and now I’m thinking the ‘Google” virus was unleashed by Google to get people to use Chrome. I have been tweaking the Firefox code and it seems to be working better but it may be too late, I like Chrome and its black skin.

And so it goes ….

30 Seconds To Mars - Closer To The Edge

Observations from the Window 2.3

One of those bad days you would like to forget. A day when my virtual empire once again went into a virus induced meltdown. After six hours of wracking my brain, and all but pulling my black hair out by the roots, I think I finally have it cured but it's been enough to make me turn to the geek darkside. Yes I'm talking about switching to those Apple products. Supposedly they don’t get viruses because it isn’t worth the time it takes to write them because there just aren’t that many machines compared to Windows run ones. You get much more bang with windows powered machines. And the gods know the aholes that write these things want all the bang they can get for their trouble.

Till I was finished I had run more malware cleaners than I knew existed. I finally found that what I had was something relatively new and called the 'Google Redirect Virus' which most virus and malware programs don’t catch because it doesn’t leave trace files but worms its way into the computers settings than disappears. All I know is that it sucks big time, very big time. What it does is give you fake search results and than redirects you to websites that contain more viruses and trojans. I finally found a tiny free program made by Kaspersky called TDSSKiller that got rid of it in five minutes. But by than it had spread to two of my comps and threatened to give me something I have never had before, short hair. But all is well for now, until the next time.

Before the meltdown I had started writing about the protests in Egypt but I didn’t get very far. All I had written was this before the meltdown began.

"And why aren't you tweeting more Richard Engle? Anderson Cooper got beat up yesterday so he is quiet too. Don't give me that cell phones are out, just get a BlackBerry like the protesters have. A little bit of geek speak related to Egypt; it seems BlackBerrys are on different servers than the rest of the internet. Servers the government seems unable to find."

I feel stupid reading that because I now see at least forty reporters were beaten today and a big march is planned for the morning Egyptian time, or about three hours from now. Egyptian state television began broadcasting just pictures of flowers and it seems Friday will be a historic day, one way or another.

One prays for change yet dreads the cost.

Observations from the Coffee Shop 1.30

Revolution by social networking, the very idea intrigues my inner geek side. What I mean is people using Twitter and Facebook to organize and overthrow a corrupt government, or attempt to do so. I'm not going to pretend to understand it but some random observations ....

I first remember seeing it in the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. This was highlighted by the Green Facebook page and its 56 youtube videos including the sad death of Nedā on June 20, 2009. The video was uploaded two days later and now has well over one million views. The Green Revolution also included possibly the first ever use of DoS attacks in protests of any kind as opposition supporters attacked government sites and exchanged attack tools on Twitter and Facebook.

Earlier this month saw the Jasmine Revolution topple the President of Tunisia and force him to flee the country quickly followed by this week’s unrest in Egypt. What makes the latter interesting is the government's total shutdown of the internet. Tunisia had cut off certain websites and Iran slowed it to the point it was almost unusable but nobody, not even China, has ever attempted a complete shutdown before. Twitter and Facebook went down on Tuesday (1/25) and in the early morning hours of Friday the entire web was shutdown followed by Egypt's cell phone networks.

In Iran opposition leaders, the middle class, and especially women seemed to grasp there new power but also saw the writing on the wall and choose to fight another day. In Tunisia the Twitter revolution was wildly successful and the president was forced to flee the county. In Egypt it's too early to tell but one has to wonder how long a modern country with modern business can operate in the world without the internet.

"Why in the most vibrant democracy in the world, where engagement and knowledge of the world is probably the most important, why it's not available is one of these things that would take a PhD scholar to understand," said Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English on why the free network is not available in the United States.

In some interesting side notes China has blocked the word 'Egypt' from all its search engines and I have to ask; has NBC News's Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel become the new Anderson Cooper?

update - After I posted this I saw the following in the Washington Post. "Liz Sly reports from Baghdad: "Activists on Twitter are furiously tweeting the dates of the next putative uprisings: Sudan on Jan. 30, Yemen on Feb. 3, Syria on Feb. 5 and Algeria on Feb. 12. 'Arab Revolution Timetable,' say the tweets hurtling among the region's new generation of cyberspace revolutionaries."

update 2/2 - Al Jazeera reported "Social media used in bid to mobilise Syrians for rallies demanding freedom, human rights and the end to emergency law." Supposedly this coming weekend.

Observations from the Roof 7.24

I’m sitting on the roof enjoying the light show on a Saturday night. To the one side an almost full moon big and bright, to the other side one hell of a lightning storm off over the ocean. But I’ll tell you what, this is just wrong, its 90 degrees and it’s almost 11 at night. The vqs seem to like it but I’m feeling a bit like the wicked vq of the west, I’m effing melting here. But the beer is ice cold and the limes are fresh, some things are always good.

I think it’s finally time I made a confession. I should have told you this long ago but I didn’t do it. Underneath this tall, dark, arrogant, artsie, antisocial dyke skin lurks another heart. Contrary to the image and reputation I have carefully crafted over the years, at times I am a total geek. There I said it, I admit it, and I feel so much better now.

I have two flickr sites, plurk, twitter, youtube, tumblr, and the blog. I have so many site accounts that one password would unlock the world for you, and no not just porn. I has mad computer skilzs that make a comp sing like Pavarotti singing Turandot to packed house. I love Lisbeth Salander not for her sexy tats but because she can make her comp sing too. Actually I want to take Lisbeth home to make my comp sing but that’s another story. I have a first life, a second life, and I'm sure a third lurks in the back of my brain even sluttier than the first two. And as further proof I'm writing this on a Saturday night.

I’m only telling you this because the heat and Corona are getting to me so don’t go spreading it around. After all I do have a reputation to protect.

But now I must go because the vqs are dragging me out for a night of training. See you all for breakfast. Black attire is required.

Black Veil Brides - Knives and Pens