I was without oxygen, and equally without beer. It was only a matter of time until it was all over. No doubt they would find me, sprawled amidst the rock and snow, feed cap semaphoring over the miles, flickering yellow and off, yellow and off.
If not for the backwash of the snowboarders' leavings, I would be dead toady, there is little doubt of that.
Dannysoar has a wild-n-wooly batch of aerial oddities for your persual. I called it out on the mighty MeFi.
Telegraph | News | Mighty Zeppelin returns to skies over London (Telegraph of 06-21)
A sight that once brought fear to the hearts of our grandparents and great-grandparents, a mighty Zeppelin, followed the route of the Thames into central London yesterday.
Zeppelin NT has a customer in the land of the rising sun. The vessel is scheduled to make a journey from Europe to Japan, apparently by air rather than shipping container. Gotta keep my eye on the ball, because it's shameful that I missed this bolus.
As we drove south on Chuckanut Drive, overlooking the waters that hold the San Juans, we came across this lovely militarian art car, lableled in stencil on the trunk "54 Buick Special P-40."
The car also featured what I'd have to describe as 'tail art,' and a front-facing fifty-caliber machine gun in the back seat, not clearly visible in my picture. Also not visible in my pix are the detailed additional rivets added to the skin of the car to make it look more like a vintage warbird.
Oddly, a year ago, on Chuckanut, I also photographed an extreme militarian conversion of a Porsche 911 4x4, this one without apparent armament, although shrunken heads were noted.
Commuter Trip Plan and Point to Point Schedule offer range-oriented bus-schedule planning tools for King County Metro which can be stored on a PDA. I don't know if these are new tools, or just ones that I missed, but they are a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, since they only output results, they are limited in utility if something goes awry while you are on the road. As far as I can tell, there is still no way to download entire route schedules for any individual route in a PDA-oriented format.
DejaMenu 1.1 for MacOS X, a utility that clones your OS X menu bar and makes it available via configurable key-combos at the current location of your mouse cursor. Via AxMe, and to which I must say w00t.
The New York Times > Movies > The Political 'Fahrenheit' Sets Record at Box Office, notes the NYT. The film is set to take first place in grosses this weekend, an amazing feat when one notes that the number of theaters involved, and consequently the number of possible screenings, is about a third of a large-scale Hollywood opening weekend.
As we came in from a weekend out of town last night, we crested the hill at 45th near the Ave. This is where Seattle's Neptune Theater is showing the film, and I uttered the ejaculation which titles this entry. It came upon seeing the line, a huge crowd that stretched around the block. I have certainly never seen such a thing before at the Neptune, which generally houses offbeat films rather than blockumentaries, as Fahrenheit appears set to be.
It will be especially interesting to see if in the coming week theater owners rush to add screens, something that I'm not calling - the weekend's rush could simply be the result of Move On's push to get people in the theaters this weekend.
I could be totally wrong, though. Daymented was getting a posse together for Friday, I know.
Other Seattle-area bloggers appear to be writing about it, too, though, so who knows.
Viv is in the living room watching TV. Ebert and Roeper are on, reviewing Fahrenheit 9/11. ABC News breaks in to report that the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq will occur on Monday, two days ahead of schedule. Then Ebert and Roeper return to discussing the movie.
I'm thinking that a) these things are not coincidentally linked and b) that's the short version of the news for the next week. Buckle up!
For years, I'd heard that there was once a real yellow submarine, beached and rotting somewhere in Puget Sound. It appears that the USS Menhaden [caution: speakers down!] was indeed a factual artifact, and even the description of her as "beaached" appears to have a basis in fact. I'd guess my recollection of this is based on news stories about the City of Everett scrapping the hulk of the Menhaden.
danelope strikes back, taking vengeance for both Danelope Week and Ken Goldstein of the Week Week.
Dan also notes that he hopes to instantiate a weekly beering of the pale and nerdly, a goal I can heartily get behind. I especially endorse the goal as a means to develop further diabolical plots and nefarious schemes devoted to the appreciation and appropriation of online identity.
It should be noted that while we waited anxiously for it, Dan made no embarassing social gaffes whatsoever. His drinking skills are clearly much improved, or perhaps it's the more-precious nature of beer.
I just returned from a beer-up at the Two Bells with Messrs. Harpel and Elope.
We had a pleasant evening in which I learned that "no one cares about my sandwich," notwithstanding the fact of my munching Crab Louie whilst my compadres consumed burgerfleisch. Kaycee Nicole was likened to A Rape in Cyberspace.
Tom regaled us with tales of his interesting, absent father, the key image of which is said progenitor presenting the preadolescent Tom with a bag of gold coins, and Dan reminded me of one of the reasons to avoid drinking gallons of instant ice tea.
On the way home, we noticed that half of the Sit-and-Spin is now the interesting-looking Hideaway, filled to the brim with the bicycle courier contingent. We actually walked Dan nearly all the way to the top of the Hill, and I was flabberghasted at the variety and quantity of activity in the streets we passed. My neighborhood is a hive of activity.
Manny's very nice site design has been swiped. Today, word comes that swiper became winner: image swapping is set to follow, and Manuel has used a word that includes only the two syllables 'tub' and 'girl' to describe the images he intends to use.
Me? I'm selling the tickets and the popcorn. When's the show start?
(Confidential to the Manster: swipee may very well be able to follow referers, in which case your prank may be in danger of exposure.)
Star Wars bit player, or performance artist?
Since Bill Kofmel doesn't want to be referred to by his name during his performance, an obvious alternative presents itself. I suppose the Futurama guy would work too.
[Courtesy of the ineffable Danellopy.]
The New York Times - Science - Cones, Curves, Shells, Towers: He Made Paper Jump to Life:
In contrast to traditional origami, where all folds are straight, Dr. Huffman developed structures based around curved folds, many calling to mind seedpods and seashells. It is as if paper has been imbued with life.
Curved folds have occasionally whispered into my ear of their charms, structural or otherwise. One wonders if Dr. Huffman left web traces amid the paperscraps.
Clearly, he did. Someone at SGI took note (very cool pictures of Huffman at work), and the ACM has a memorial page.
UCSC maintains a ghostly faculty listing as well as an archived news item on the professor's passing.
Interestingly, a page hosted at Rice takes a look at Huffman's role in developing early compression algorithms, something that, at least to my analgebraic mind, appears directly related to the paperfolding activity explored in the NYT piece.
Oh, for the plans of these structures!
If you examine popular media images of women using IT, which I did with some reservation during the final semester of my graduate studies, you will find an overrepresentation of relaxed-pose, sitting on the floor, gazing dreamily into the monitor, giggling, languidly stroking a single key on the laptop bullshit.
The pleased and amused me no end, and reminded me of one of the reasons I enjoy poupou's friendship so very much. Bring it!
Nader or Cobb, wonders Editor B. He is on his way to the Green convention. Appears he deems Ralph undesirable, for reasons of the man's poor tactical sense.
Ed. Beta threatens to blog the convention. I'm thinking, from up in my tower of dark terror, I will direct a warming beam of sun-lamp-like vigilance in his direction. Fellow perspicatores are invited. B. has a fine track record and if history serves as a guide he will be videotaping every gol-darned secont.
Stops - The Bus Schedule Database for Palm OS Handhelds may be a useful stopgap for the apparent lack of a Seattle-based resource publishing Metro schedules in a palm-readable format.
C'mon, Metro! You already do a great job with getting the data online. Give us some RSS or Atom or something that can get into an AvantGo channel, at least!
Grumble.
Jonh appears to have already written a scraper, but it's a personal tool and oriented to PDF.
QuickTrip may also be a bit less daunting to set up and use than Stops, I think.
Still, what I really need, I suppose, is a table-viewing application for my decrepit old Vx.
Dancing Bananas, with Ape, spotted by eclecticism's Michael Hanscom.
I pointed this out a few times early in the festival run, but I want to prompt Seattle-area readers or ex-locals to stroll through the amusing doings the various Tableteers got up to over at the Siffblog.
I still need to fix an IE display bug which centers everything, but on the whole I think the experiment worked out well. I think it would be interesting to see Tablet implement something like this as a regular part of their main site design.
A very interesting aspect of getting the blog, um, rolling for them was the relative lack of internet-oriented thinking my friends there have. I asked if they knew what the base traffic of the main site was. This proved to be data that had not ever been sought previously. While I think most of the folks on the Siffblog had a vague idea what a blog was, I don't believe that they had ever committed their own time to either reading or writing one on a regular basis.
As it happens, yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the blog, and I'm pleased with how it worked out. Never a high traffic site, it still enabled direct, personal writing about the experience of the festival per se.
A few other folks were blogging SIFF as well. Since SIFF draws a dedicated core of pass-holders who can be quite competitive about numbers of films seen, I think next year it would be a really great idea to set up a collaborative blog for passholders as well, possibly scraping film listings from the main SIFF site and allowing the pass holders to riff on that material.
Spatula vs. SIFF runs through June 9, and is (oddly) an audio blog. Being constitutionally averse to multimedia, the content will remain obscure to me for the nonce. But don't let me stop you!
Artdish did some blog-form previewing, but steers clear of lengthy personal reactions, alas.
Eric at Of Charm and Strange wrote up Sky Blue, Buddy, Open Water, The Five Obstructions, Doppelganger, Touch of Pink, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, and Torremolinos '73. He may have reviewd more, but it's time for me to move on.
MoviePie has a nice listing, with about 64 films reviewed - just eyeballing, I'd say that they rate films more or less as I did, although I have quibbles with a perfect score for Hero, which I predictably view as imperialist running dog propaganda, if beautiful (that's a mild joke there folks, and yes I do hope to write about it).
Cinecultist weighed in every now and then with dispatches from one Seattle Maggie, and last but not least, Mena and Me, at a not-long-for this-world radio.weblogs.com URL, took the time to drop some lines on SIFF as well.
In other news, I just shipped a review of SIFF Golden Space Needle Best Film winner Facing Windows - look for it in this Wednesday's Stranger. More than that I dassen't say. I did take the opportunity to interview director Ferzan Ozpetek when he was in town. It was my first-ever interview with a non-native English speaker. It included the services of a translator. I think it went well enough, but of course, I can imagine how to improve the experience next time. I don't have an assignment to use the material yet and thus will keep mum about what we discussed.
Attendees
- Jerry Kindall (kindall) of jerrykindall.com.
- Christine, who was there with
- Christian Beaudroux (christian) of Infliction.org.
- Vincent (vito90) of juxtapositions.
- Noah Malmstadt (mr_roboto) who lists no site on MeFi but was googled at ideotrope.
- Roman (Stoatfarm), who provides no personal site info on MeFi and lacked business cards.
- Tom Harpel (tomharpel) of Tandoku.com.
- Mike Whybark (mwhybark - me) of mike.whybark.com.
- Caitlin Burke (caitlinb) of Marmoset Media.
- and a non-MeFite, Jim Flanagan (jimfl) of Everything Burns.
No Shows
- mathowie, pleading family obligations.
- jessamyn, of whom a discussion was held in which apologies were made for the lack of cardboard standees representing her.
- Mars Saxman
- black8
- Dan Engler (Danelope ) of foreword.com, due to ill humour.
- filmgoerjuan, who did show in the IRC.
- Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, who was in Seattle in Wednesday and Thursday and consequently was included as a speculative no-show in discussions at the table.
Gadgets
- Photographic cell phones, two.
- Canon Rebel, one.
- Optio cameras, two.
- Twelve-inch Powerbook, one.
- Fourteen-inch iBook, one.
- Wifi-equipped PDA, one.
Objects
- Ace of Aces books, one set.
- Plush microbes, three.
- the flu
- the common cold
- heliobacter pylori (ulcer).
- Laptop bags, about four.
- Anti-globalization propaganda tee shirts, one.
- Full beards, one.
- Pairs of glasses, four.
Events and miscellany
- Beer-pitcher-pounding excited anti-torture rants in which an article from the Atlantic was cited, one.
- Long hair, male, none.
- Long hair, female, two.
- Interesting discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, one.
- Known posts concerning these events, one (non-recursively counted).
- Catch phrases, one.
- Live IRC at the table, one.
- Participants in IRC live at the table, several.
- Discovery that the Elysian is covered by a free wireless access point, one.
- Threats to engage in juggling, one.
- Laughing and jovial attendees, several.
- Pronounciation of “Danelope” as “Dan-ell-oh-pee,” several.
- Discussions of stoats and voles accompanied by dismissive mention of naked mole rats, one.
- Distribution of several non-corporate business cards, one.
- Analyses of the reasons people invest a great deal of time into their online personas, at least two.
- Personal beers consumed, four.
- Cigarettes smoked at the table, none.
- Anticipatory discussions of Farhenheit 9/11, one.
- 30-to-90 day uptime claims made for a Windows XP box, one.
- Detailed discussions of a distributed information service database architecture, one.
- Good time had by, all.
There once was a beloved large book
Into which verb-lovers would look
When stuck for a word
Obscure or absurd.
The OED's now due to be limerook.
jimfl, at Everything Burns, sez:
The Democrats are running a very nice Republican for president this year, and I hope you consider this alternative.
Which is a much nicer, wittier way of putting things than I was able to the other day. OTOH, characterizing Senator Kerry as a Republican with regard to his career record is possibly off the mark. But the underlying point - it's hard to distinguish policy differences between most professional US politicos, and it's disheartening - is valid.
A correspondent on the TidBITS-Talk list mentions Eudora Mailbox Cleaner as a possible migration aid to escape from the increasingly frustrating clutches of Eudora, my email software of many, many years. Migration of my daunting archives has been the primary obstacle to dropping Eudora in the past.
Of course, the whole gmail thing also offers a spinning spanner to my email plans.
Jeff and Samantha have been in Florida. Jeff has some pix to show for it.
This one shows what I thought I saw when I looked at his pix this morning.
MeFilteFish, at the Elysian, friday, 7pm.
I'm bringing my Ace of Aces books. One wonders how beer might affect the gaming.
In other news, I think I have a temporary dataprocessing system demoed at work that will greatly compress the pick-and-pack process for order fulfillment. In essence it allows the pick-and-packer to do a warehouse run in the morning to grab everything in the previous day's orders, and then to package them by priority and efficiency: multiple orders and special-handling orders first, followed by gangs of single-item orders grouped by the ordered item, which makes labeling and packing much simpler. Yesterday in about three hours of actual packing time I closed and shipped over fifty orders.
Sounds good, right?
Alas, it's all ricketied together in Excel and Word and relies on mail-merge features. next up is some intimate familiarity with Access. It's an intimacy I've had previously and the prospect of which makes me long for slow, easy-to-design-in FileMaker. A nice hefty reference book was already proving useful this afternoon as I left work.
I would like to note in my own defense that my baling-ware is intended purely as a temporary implementation, and part of the impetus in evolving it was to provide me with enough use-case material that I can develop early-stage design docs as an aid in evaluating third-party prospective solutions for our inventory and fulfillment management stuff.
When FM 7 launched, there was some noise about FM being something like a front-end for [insert fave open source DB here]. Is this in fact the case, FM is now a suite of bolt-on tools for [your database software here]? Cuz it should be, and that would be neat.
As I noted the other day, I'm helping get Mom up to speed on her new Powerbook, over the phone and, sadly, screenblind for the nonce. It's quite exhausting, something like playing chess while blindfolded with a novice chess player who may or may not understand the verbal conventions used to describe the chessboard but who probably knows the basic rules of the game.
It's fun, though, to spend so much time on such a minute series of tasks with someone you love. We're spending two to three hours on the phone or voice-and-video chatting every night. The most challenging part (aside from the blindfolded chess aspect) is unpacking my own assumptions about what a given verbal description of a user-interface gesture means.
Commenters on the previous entry noted a resistance to the idea of employing a conventionalized, consistent vocabulary to describe computer user-interface elements among older new users they'd worked with. Thankfully, that does not appear to be the case with my mom. Every day, she gets a bit more oriented, and is able to both recognize and use the new vocabulary.
One commenter, jbelkin, on the earlier entry noted that .Mac membership grants access to some Apple-produced training movies, which are described as the "How to Use Panther" movies.
If you have the inclination, signing up for .Mac lets you access the How to use Panther QT movies - they start from the beginning and they are as clear as day - there are about 80 movies and they start with MOUSING to ATTACHING A DIGITAL CAMERA and using iphoto. All the basics and some not-so-basics are covered.
I looked and looked, but could not find these. I did find the .Mac Learning Center, though: could these be the films referred to?
I gave my mom the assignment of working through the "Mac OS X Basics" presentations and will check in on her tomorrow to see how effective they are. Then, tomorrow night, I will take my dad through patching iChat to enable USB video sources.
Tonight, we used iChat video and voice quite painlessly for about two hours. For some reason, Mom's audio connection was unusually good, and I found myself continually glancing to the shelf where my speakers are located, involuntarily expecting to see her.
I had every intention of exploring issues in computer-human interaction that relate to the idea of an aging user this evening.
But I find that my 2.something hours of user education with my folks has wrung the little grey cells right out of me.
I am comforted that bilingual oldsters apparently do better, in the long run (MeFi). ¡Que bueno!
My parents just began an experiment. My dad bought my mom a Powerbook. She's had difficulty mastering Windows, probably due to inadequate education and training resources combined with the myriad of little frustrations that can accompany the user experience on that platform, and this has been compounded by my relative lack of experience in acting as helpdesk on Wintel.
I have long encouraged them to consider trying a Mac, and one of my primary arguments was that I would finally be able to provide reliable helpdesk support to them. This will help me to effectively gauge the level of user-experience versus education needed to bring them into a happy relationship with their computers.
This is the first of several blog entries I will be producing to document some of the written support I will provide them. The bulk of this entry concerns local and online resources for reference, help and user education.
One of my future entries will deal with the vagaries of disentangling a LAN to enable port-forwarded service mapping - all from the security and comfort of my office chair, on the opposite coast from the physical LAN itself. Current smart money is on the active presence of two competing DHCP routers in the LAN. That will be fun.
Mac Reference Books
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition
by David Pogue - Amazon link.
This is essential. If you only pick up one of these books, make it this one. Pogue nearly invented the modern user-oriented computer book, and has been writing in that vein, and about the Mac, for about twenty years.
The Little Mac Book: Panther Edition
by Robin Williams Amazon link.
This has been the long-standing standard introduction to Macs. It is written with the assumption that the user has no experience or knowledge of computers at all. Williams style is exemplary and inclusive, communicating the sense of affection and joy that so many of us on the Mac side experience with our machines. It should be noted that I have not seen this edition of the book.
Mac OS X Hints
by Rob Griffiths, David Pogue - Amazon link
This is a compendium of the public-contribution website linked above. All of us are smarter than one of us, and these hints are great. The website is the best single place to go when you have a specific question such as "How do I..." or "Can I..." or "Why does it..."
Rob's website is also a genuine phenomenon, and he deserves high praise for the way he took the tiger by the tail when it became apparent that he'd created the most crucial independent information web site for users of Mac OS X. The fact that this good fortune - both his and ours - resulted in publication may do something for those seeking proof of a just world.
Mac OS X for Windows Users: A Switchers' Guide
by David Coursey - Amazon link.
I am not directly familiar with this book, but Peachpit sets the standard for user-oriented Mac books, and it may therefore prove of value. Anyone actually had face time with this book?
Useful Websites
MacWorld
MacAddict
MacWorld and MacAddict are the two main US-market Mac-oriented magazines. MacWorld's website is much deeper than MacAddict's and includes hundreds of articles and reviews.
Mac OS X Hints
Mac OS Hints is the basis of the book suggested above.
MacFixit
MacFixIt is a long-standing, community driven website for Mac users to share knowledge. They have a tiered access policy, though.
Apple
Apple Discussions
Apple Support
Since my parents have Applecare, they are entitled to as much technical support as you'd like. Please note, however, that there is a difference between support and training, and issues which reflect a lack of training will probably produce a somewhat brusque response. By all means, do complain if that's the case.
Personally, I have found the discussions board (the second URL above) a much better source of help and information, particularly on issues of training. At the moment, the site is inaccessible from my computer, but that won't be the case forever. I often find myself looking here first for information.
Unfortunately they rotate the messages offline after only about three months, which is a real shame, but this is the online location where you will find the highest density of courteous and helpful Mac users in any area of need you might have.
Other Sites
I haven't linked to a raft of other sites such as TidBITS, Macintouch, The OReilly Mac Dev Center, and so forth, primarily because those are sites that are most helpful to experienced users. I will introduce my folks to them in time, but not yet - wading through the data at those locations might well prove overwhelming at this stage.
Connecting Wintels and Macs
Connecting Mac OS X to Windows PCs, by Wei-Meng Lee and Brian Jepson. 11/19/2002 article at O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center.
This article may be a little dated. I know that I myself am in need of a brush-up regarding wintel networking and this may be a helpful place to start.
The NYT has been running a series of flash ads for the Kerry kampaign that vie with the Keystone Kops in overall lack of professionalism, effectiveness, and attention to detail.
In lieu of my $50 donation to a kampaign that I regard as literally the last, best hope for representative democracy in America, I have bravely volunteered to correct the ads as seen and provide more effectively laid-out and written material.
Confidential to the Kerry kampaign: fire the idiots responsible for the flash-based garbage I am placing into operational order here, unless you want to lose the country, forever. You are not konducting the campaign as though it matters. Ergo, why the fuck should I vote for your man?
Please note, each ad links to the original URL given when it ran. Images used without permission and without compensation in the spirit of fair use and satire. Kopyright infringement not intended and hopefully avoided altogether.
EXHIBIT A
COMMENTARY
Khrist! I have no idea where to start. For one thing, it's conventional wisdom not to feature your adversary or marketplace kompetitor in ads, as this is thought to reinforce kompetitor brand awareness, however nonsensical that idea may be. The ad seen here nods at this idea by failing to present the full name of the Resident.
The conventional wisdom on this matter is also partially BS, as is the case with much ad-world ideology. Of course it's important to show and undermine your competitor, whether we're talking about a politician or toilet paper. I admit, sometimes, it's hard to tell them apart . Both are necessary discomforts which carry reams of crap to a dark place, and generally, the better packaged they are on the shelf, the easier we find it to visualize them helping to defend our national secrets. Despite decades of attempted change and educational marketing, we still apparently prefer the pulp-bleached, ultra-whitest products on the market. But keep that plunger handy!
Speaking of white, as in black-and-white, what is the deal with this image?
It's a completely obtuse way of pointing out that GWB has fucked shit up because of his inability to see anything in terms other than black-and-white. Black-and-white, get it? Me neither, at first.
By God, that is the problem with the Kerry kampaign in a nutshell. Klear-kut choices are what kampaigns are about, you fools, and by ameliorating the possibility that the electorate will see such a choice, you will lose the election.
Let's konsider the kopy, as well. "HELP MAKE GEORGE W. A ONE-TERMER."
It's so awful, I have to hear it again.
"HELP MAKE GEORGE W. A ONE-TERMER."
A what?
"A ONE-TERMER."
Oh, sure, I'm sure we've ALL used that term. When I was in school, at college, I counted down to my degree using the word "termer."
"Oh, I'm a three-termer! Coming right up on it, yes I am!"
Oh, wait a minute, no I didn't. Neither did anyone else!
It's either a made up word which is intended to convey the complex idea of a one-term presidency (three words, please note) in two words (to save our widdle haids the trouble) or it's a bit of insider jargon that effectively conveys the lack of kommunication between Kerry kampaign workers and the rest of the world. In either kase, it screams: klueless!
THE REPAIRED ITEM
COMMENTARY
In executing these improved implementations, I sought simply to reinterpret the ads as seen, keeping the basic idea and layout while replacing the spectacularly misguided images and copy that were factually approved by the klowns of the Kerry kampaign.
In this instance I used a widely-seen image of GWB taken at a fundraiser in 2002, and manipulated brightness levels in Photoshop to enhance the menacing cast of the President's expression. The manipulation is clearly more effective in creating a negative image and at the same time more subtle than the misguided black-and-white high-contrast image used in the real ad.
I also kept the "one term" idea and highlighted the very real danger of failing to unseat the man. This is it: we have one chance. I considered using another word that is colloquially used to mean "opportunity," but it has an unfortunate independent meaning involving firearms, and therefore it is wildly inappropriate. God knows the other side has more guns anyway.
EXHIBIT B
COMMENTARY
Blah-blah blah-blah-blah blah-blah blah-blah blah blah blah.
Raise your hand if you're sure, and then kind of grimace. Thank god for the in-kind contributions from the aluminum sulfate people, because for some reason, our small donations have fallen off drastically!
I could go on and on about the stupidity of this ad (is that really Kerry? I can't see his face! What does he look like again?), but then, I kount the words in the kopy, and perhaps we should simply move on.
THE REPAIRED ITEM
COMMENTARY
Now that is more like it. I found this picture via Google image search at a website affiliated with the Clemson University College Democrats, uncredited annd apparently scanned from a printed source. The Kerry kampaign must hire the unknown photog and require said shutterbug to produce images like this at a rate of twenty a day from now on. The only thing missing in the image as originally found was a halo.
Luckily, I can fix that.
Regarding the copy, I found this much more difficult to work out. It must combine the name of the candidate with an appeal to strength and the duty to help in the fewest possible words. I think my rewrite moves it in the right direction, even if it's a bit hackneyed. Suggestions and vicious public mockery - along the lines of this blog entry - are distinctly encouraged.
CONCLUSIONS
As I prepared this, both the GWB-BW ad and the painfully verbose underarm deodorant ad more or less stopped running, at least on my machine. Instead, the deodorant ad ran with somewhat simplified copy: "HELP ME TAKE BACK THE WHITE HOUSE" and incorporated the grey "$50" button, both good decisions, if it's still painfully obvious that the image is a bad selection for umpteen reasons.
But God help us, this is still painfully bad advertising from a kampaign that apparently fails to recognize either the gravity of the situation or the importance of kommunicating the drastic konsequences of failure.
Hey John: Do you or do you not believe that GWB is, in fact, the enemy of constiutional democracy? If you don't believe that, how will your administration seek to rectify the dangerous challenges to the constitutional order that have come about under Shrub? Be specific. If you accept his, er, adjustments to the rule of law, why the fuck should I vote for you?
Right.
So I actually started this entry about 24 hours ago, but miscellaneous things have interfered.
Thing one: The Day After Tomorrow, on which more presently.
Thing two: Chris and Sabrina - Chris has been visiting the lovely ms. poupou, and I have been doing my part to encourage Mr. Dent to take up his proverbial toothbrush and towel. I had brekkus witth 'em this morning and when last seen they were projected to become visitors to the new downtown building of the Seattle Public Library.
Thing three: my mom and dad just bought their first Mac, and I spent some portion of the afternoon helping with user education stuff.
Thing four: unsurprisingly, Matt Uhlman has been experiencing the same variety of ranterrific red-eye rage that plagued me last week. Thanks, Ronnie! Hope that's over with for now! Coffin killer - qu'est que c'est?
Thing five: Ken is supporting himself via the magic of poker, but refuses to identify himself as a "professional gambler" when attempting (or avoiding the attempt, really) to pick up chicks.
Thing six: John Kerry's extreme lack of clue. See the next entry.
Letter From New Orleans #13: Saint James Infirmary, dug up out de groun' and spread about in the public square (attn: nawlinzites).
Via the estimable devotee of his highness the Turkmenbashi, Languagehatbashi, via MeFi.
Remarkably, no titular mention of Lock Hospital occurs in the piece, but it's clear the author has encountered it.
Greg and I have worked on both songs. There's a possible third piece to consider, as well. The Lakes of the Poncho Train (Hey look! my old BKB site was numero uno in Google!) is clearly a song with ties to both the streets of Laredo and to the Crescent City.
Oh, and by the way: Ronald Reagan is still dead.
Ray Charles' career ignited only blocks from my home, on Jackson Street, I learn. Charles is the first singer who I recall making me aware of the value of phrasing.
". . . in Seattle, at that point, all of a sudden I had to become a man." —Ray Charles
The EMP has a link with (Windows Media, yuk) audio of Charles on his time here.
Sorry to hear him go.
Reagan, Reagan Youth still dead. Here's one way to remember them.
In other news, the beatings will continue until morale improves. Hey, if the President is exempt from the possibility of violating the miscellaneous conventions, laws - what have you - against torture, obviously there's been no violation!
The current administration's international and domestic policy is nothing less than an attempt to export the totality of Reagan's disastrous, immoral, and dangerous Central and South American policy to the globe and to import the best parts - e.g., those that involve the violation of constitutional and human rights - home to the U. S.
Chilean coup plotters and defenestrators, John "Death Squad" Negroponte, the "controlled" deployment of inhuman, antidemocratic methods for the exertion of power: our current troubled administration is naught but the logical extension of Reagan's foolish brutality. It's not the final logical extension, though. That will come when the election is suspended and democratic practice is shaped with the exact variety of careful pruning that that evil motherfucker Pinochet inflicted on his people, in an operation that undoubtedly took place with the connivance and cognizance of the Nixon administration at least.
I leave my conclusion as an exercise to the reader.
DrinkSparks.com, via OT.
From "Reactions:" boxes in various locations on the site:
"Natron loves Sparks and often calms his test anxiety by sipping three to four Sparks before, lets say, an astro-physics exam...""Hi, these things are great. My neighbor introduced me to Sparks - I give him sandwiches; he buys me a couple Sparks."
This is great marketing, if somewhat flabbergasting. OT assured me that the beverage is, in fact, used as a study aid by some. America's future is secure in their hands.
the "Lab" link includes an ingredients list.
Enterprise: in cardstock and LOOKING GOOD. Alas for my BAC this night for I itch to assemble it.
via the indispensible genius The Cartoonist.
Lizard Spit Drug Treats Type 2 Diabetes, notes WebMD. Type 2 only, which assuages paranoiac concerns on my part - that means only you multiplying adult-onset types are in line to become the zombie army of the Lizard King.
Another comforting point: lizard spit is not derived from pituitary glands.
Don't eat the leaves, saith MoFi of rhubarbinfo.com.
Mmmm. I usta et it by the bowl, strawberries need not apply. Mmmm.
Thanks, Mom.
Inkjet on multiple stock, an experimental approach. This concludes my insanity for the moment. While the tabletop press was most tempting, there is at least one guitar that has prior claim to my first $500 of mad money.
The United States Business Card Company
"Location:New York City Weekend Flea Markets (Indoor/Outdoor)
Saturday:
268 Mulberry St. (indoors, year round) between Houston & Prince St.
11:00am - 7:00pmSunday:
I.S. 44 Flea Market, 77th St. & Columbus Ave (indoors, cold weather & rain, April 1st- Nov 1st)"
This sounds most promising. Too bad it doesn't appear that others do this in the PNW.
From the FAQ:
Q. Well that's great, but your machine can't measure up to my laser printer. I've got state of the art pixels. What have you got?A.How many times have you called that 800 number and waited forever to deal with the malfunctioning of your printer? My Platen Press has few moving part, requires a little bit of oil now and then, and has never needed a service call. As for your state of the art pixels, they aren't as perfect as you think. Look at them up close and you can see that the little dots that make up your text gives it a greyish cast, Yuck! With foundry type, the ink is applied to solid metal, covering the entire surface of the implanted typeface within the press and then crushed into the paper leaving a sunken solid impression that you can actually feel with your fingers. No dots, no cloudiness, and a tactile feeling you can't ever get with your printer.
Q. Well, Ok Mr. Bigshot Letterpress man. But I've got premium paper like Strathmore and Cranes that I can run through my printer. You can't do that.
A. Yes I can, as well as printing even more! My platen press can print those difficult to print papers and card stocks such as breakfast cereal boxes, papyrus, cardboard, real wood, and that triple thick cardboard. Many commercial printers won't even touch those. A platen press is especially useful for these specialty papers such as those handmade papers with the deckled edges often used for wedding invitations (And I can make those for you too!).
I'm liking this. No rate citations on his site, alas, and no biz card samples, so I don't know about the inset or two-color.
Stern & Faye are in the Skagit Valley.
WoodWorks Press appears to specialize in poetry chapbooks and broadsides (and fine instruments). While a $45/year subscription will bring you a year's output, "including obscure party favors," I see no indication that Mr. Hunter takes on job type.
Hm, I wonder if ordering a rubber stamp with this design might be about as cost effective, for that matter. It certainly opens stocks for consideration.
I have also been operating on the untested assumption that it's a bad idea to use inkjet-printed cards, based on the solubility of the inks. It occurs to me that I should test this thesis, and so I will, forthwith.
It's time once again to engage in my quixotic quest for short-run personal business cards. I've used xeroxed cards in the past to meet this need. This time, the burgeoning development of direct-to-plate offset printing and the corresponding flowering of online quickprint with uploads or online layout tools led me to investigate color-based options as well.
Googling on the subject presents a nearly impenetrable thicket of search-engine optimization spam links, which mostly direct the user toward one of two online providers, VistaPrint and iPrint.com. VistaPrint offers an intriguing promo: 250 business cards "free," plus shipping. Naturally, the completed order is directed through a maze of upsells (faster shipping, remove the backside advertising) such that you're likelier to spend about $20 on the cards there than not. Having just received one such card from a new acquaintance, I can report that at least the backside advertising is not obtrusive or in poor taste - just a simple logo and line of small black type on the back of the card. Unfortunately, that makes the backside of the card more graphically effective, and in better taste, than the front of the card.
Additionally, the basic layouts that are available are less than optimal and certainly do not offer a satisfactory range of control over the design. For $20 one would expect to do better.
Selecting a 'premium' card order does open up the range of possible layouts somewhat but this is accomplished primarily by increasing the number of ill-advised photographic background choices available. The ability to work with type on the card remains very limited - one cannot move the type blocks around, change the size or color of the type either globally, line-by-line, or by block.
Noting this, I was happy to see that VistaPrint does offer direct uploading of card designs in standard graphic formats, including professional ones; but that functionality is only available under IE on Windows, so I'm not even going to spend more time looking into the option.
Pricing for premium cards on a run of $250 is $9.99 (plus the same shipping upsell), so in theory one should be able to execute a run for a total outlay of under $20 - only the failure to provide a Mac option turns me away from at least experimenting.
Looking elsewhere, the presence of VistaPrint's "free" run of 250 cards makes finding a provider who will even take an order for less than 500 cards somewhat challenging. iPrint.com offers what appears to be competitively priced cards in short runs with a much greater degree of flexibility over the card design - type lines and blocks can be resized, colored, and moved around on the page in increments as small as 1/64 of an inch. Unfortunately, it's difficult to determine if you've accurately aligned baselines in this manner.
Small, in-line graphics can be uploaded to include in the design and layout of the card as well - unfortunately, these graphics are limited to a bitmap format (such as a tiff or a jpeg) and to two colors or to grayscale. Multicolored images are converted to greyscale. The placed graphic, however, may be assigned a spot color, from a very limited sixteen color swatch book. No Pantone equivalents for the colors are specified, so it's a crapshoot.
Here is a jpeg of the design I'm working with currently, and here is a version of it I assembled in iPrint's online layout tool.
from Illustrator
from iPrint
While close, one may note that the 'MW' graphic (a design element I may drop or replace with something else, or nothing) is smaller on the iPrint version, and that one simply has to hope for the best in the matter of type treatment and color. The other point to consider is that while iPrint's online tools offer a high degree of flexibility, each layout change is executed as a form submission from your web browser - and the layout seen here is nothing like any of the layouts used as a starting point. I'd estimate that it took me about an hour and a half to get the online version of the card to the point seen here, while the Illustrator-based version probably took about 20 minutes or so to develop.
So, given that one of my goals in this experiment is 250 cards for under $20, what would the iPrint version run? iPrint's price list specifies $19.99 for 250 as a base, but invokes add-on charges such as $3.00 for a graphic, and another bump if more colors than black or used - so the base for this design on a run of 250 would be $27.99, before shipping or any taxes (probably not applicable in this instance).
Hm, thirty bones for a rough approximation of what I want? Bad choice.
A bit more digging yeilded Overnight Prints, which does offer a direct upload tool. The tool also evaluates the file uploaded and will provide semi-cryptic error information if your file is not appropriately configured. In this case, proper is an EPS with only spot colors. I find this an odd choice given that short run and on-demand printing is inherently dependent on four-color direct-to-plate printing. So how much would it run here?
A 250-card run is $29.95 plus shipping (calculated at the time the order is placed) - so $35 to $37 is a probable estimate. The next break above 250 is 1000 for a base cost of $39.95, which puts one back in the fifty-dollar range for a long run - exactly what I don't want. I am interested in the short runs for the specific purpose of indulging in the pleasure of redesigning the card at frequent intervals - and so I find myself aground, I think. In a couple of weeks I may experiment with the upload option at VistaPrint from a Windows computer.
In the meantime, I am beginning an assiduous search for an in-city letterpress. I think there's something highly interesting in the idea of Helvetica and seventeenth-century swash lettering meeting on the bed of a ninteenth-century press.
It seems that the School of Visual Concepts was offering letterpress classes in the winter of 2003, and it looks like they still are. $195 for a day's seminar, taught by one Amy Redmond? Hm, if I can get my 250 cards out of it - might be worth a look. I see, however, that I just missed that exact class: "Letterpress Business Card Workshop," $225, ran on May 15 and 16, darn it.
Once, there was an active letterpress shop, The Living Museum of Letterpress Printing, at 2017 2nd Ave downtown, but I believe it's now evaporated. I've already bemoaned the fact that one cannot order materials from the Williamsburg printshop online; I wonder, are there any manual presses that also conduct biz over the web? I recognize that cost may simply prove prohibitive if I choose to move in this direction, but the physical act of setting type - letters on a composing stick, or rubber stamps on a toy hand-cranked drum press - is the first thing that awakend my interest in visual creation.
eBay offers at least one tabletop press at the moment. As a child, I had a version of the Cub toy printing press. The version seen behind the eBay link is considerably older than mine - but the principle is the same. I had more or less completely forgotten about this toy until I started writing about it here.
The World of Ricky Gervais' The Office: Series 1 Trivia helps to tie some things together.
By some odd coincidence, my long-reserved copy of The Office came in on Friday, and Saturday was when we had time to watch it. What should be on Bravo in the ealry evening, just prior to our planned DVDathon?
Viv and I watched all of this back to back - somehow it's appropriate to my return to the world of the working, er, stiff. Sadly, the other wise admirable trivia guide to The Office series 1 fails to ID the obvious Demotivators poster outside David's office door visible in episode six. I don't think I'm linking to the correct poster, but it is a long-wise poster with a red main slogan.
On the other hand, Peter Gibbons is mentioned by name in episode six and cited in the trivia guide.
Just finished interviewing Frezan Ozpetek, a Turkish-Italian film director who is in town for SIFF for a couple of days. The SIFF press suite is in the W, more-or-less next to the new Seattle Public Library. In the large photo that is the most prominent element in the page that opens from the Library link in the prior sentence, I would be sitting just on the other side of the planter in the middle distance, partially occluding the "n" in the word "teens" that may be seen nearer the far wall.
Now, however, there is furniture.
I do have my camera with me but didn't tote a means of getting the pix from imaging device to computer. I did just take a pic of this open posting window.
The open-access wireless works just fine. I will wander around in here a bit after I catch up on email. There is an ever-changing cast of laptop users, and a steady flow of neck-craning gawkers, many wearing the trademark black of the architecture students' guild.
It should be noted that my chair is the exact same shade of tangerine as that of the old iBook that I am employing.
Flashes, booms reported over Western Washington [P-I].
Darn. For once in my life I'm not up on the roof at 3 am. The meteorite agency has GOT to do a better job of outreach. Perhaps, like the Peeskill meteorite, there will be video like this [direct link, ~1mb mpeg].
Mythology and Folklore of the Oak associates oaks with druidic and Gaelic pre-Roman culture, but does not investigate the revival of interest in that culture following the end of the Middle Ages. This Google cache describes a medieval painting in Cambridge which employs oak leaves and acorns as a decorative element.
This paper discusses the iconography of a section of Raphael's monumental painting The School of Athens, originally executed for the residences of the Pope. The link includes a citation that in the painting, the figure of Epicurus is wearing a garland of oak, although a different citation also quoted describes the garland as ivy.
Finally, this link includes a direct quote from Pliny the Elder's Natural History, "They select oak groves for the sake of that tree and will not perform any religious ceremony without its leaves. In fact the name ‘druid’ can even be derived from the word ‘oak’ if one employs a Greek etymology [drys, oak]."
Whatever the etymological relationship between the word druid and the fair dryads ensconced within the trees, it looks as though the symbolic etymology of the oak leaf as a badge of honor is factually pre-Roman, and continued to be used in Europe during the middle ages as well as the Renaissance.
