Nothing to report because I watched this video
and all the headlines seemed terribly ridiculous and petty afterwards.
However, I do recommend this post if you have an interest in letting a living award-winning author know your opinion on the reselling and lending of ebooks and audiobooks.
Reconstructing Richard III's Face So glad they did this! The portraits existent are so flat and characterless. There's a good description of digital facial construction and its limitations.
Indian women robbed of their uteruses by money grubbing doctors ... and the government does nothing. Many women now convinced they cannot recover from illness without a hysterectomy.
Wow! Saturday blew by and I didn't even notice that I had not posted a sky. Yesterday I decided, in a fit of rebellion, to not post one. I thought about posting "This sky left intentionally blank." and then didn't. I guess I wasn't that original (even if he did post after I had the idea – but who can prove that? And I don't care anyway. Really. It's just that I was all thrilled about my creativity until I read his tweet. Now I'll just have to find something else to be thrilled about).
Still working on trying to get WordPress to do what I know it can do. Or, rather, to get my head to understand plugins. If that fails, then to get head to understand coding. Ack!
Obviously I'm not a coder. I am putting in this time so that I can reap the rewards of hard labor by being able to easily upload and add new content for the foreseeable future. I'm going down the list of WordPress gallery plugins hoping for one that will work as a portfolio viewer.
I click on a link in the list to a page about the gallery plugin hoping to see first and foremost to see a demo of the plugin and then maybe some explanatory text. What mostly happens is I end up on a page full of text with links to stuff I don't understand like alpha and beta versions, open coding sources, and, oh, incidentally, here's link to the actual plug in itself. Most frustrating was a plugin site that linked to screenshots of the plugin demo sites. After much digging I did discover links to the actual sites, most of which are obsolete.
The best bet so far is Grand Flash Album Gallery which offers this happy little 14 minute video to show you how easy it is to use. GRAND FlAGallery WordPress plugin tutorial from pasyuk on Vimeo.
Am I the only one who's first interest is NOT in what the latest news is from the developer?
Current Fads Listening.Marketing Mentor Podcast and Genius Mixes (Brit-Pop & Rock Mix: based on U2, Coldplay, Radiohead and others); hungry birds Watching.Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) Activity. keeping warm Gadget. WordPress News Source. Google News Reading.The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein; The Designer's Guide to Marketing and Pricing - Ilise Benun and Peleg Top; Story - Robert McKee Writing. marketing plan
Yes, it did. Now I only post semi-serious items for public consumption. If I want a personal opinion or to share things that are close to my heart, I post them on my Facebook page. Well, so maybe killing is a harsh word. It has definitely sucked a lot of life out of this blog. Maybe it will come back to life when I find more public topics to inflict you with or maybe I'll stop being so lazy and coming up with lame excuses like this one. Oh, wait! It's not an excuse!
That little gingerbread guy from Shrek (the movie) has more profiles than live, real celebrities. The astounding thing to me is how many of the gingerbread guy's profiles are in Spanish. Homer Simpson is the number one celeb today with 1,923,846 fans putting Michael Phelps in second place. I am now a fan of Boo (Monsters Inc.) and Sid (Ice Age), among others. Did you know that 151,017 people with profiles on Facebook are fans of "Guy Who Threw His Shoe at Bush"? I love it!
Woo hoo! Happy Dance! I gave up on Verizon and adopted Clearwire. And guess what? Clearwire really works! And it's faster than Verizon! and it's cheaper! Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!
Is that great dialogue or what? Oh? It's a monologue? Why do I care? I have joined in for the annual madness known as Script Frenzy. This year I will be writing a screenplay even though I had a choice of TV script, stage play and screenplay. I am now the proud author of 1.5 screenplays. Which is great? Right? Wish me luck.
Here's a nifty widget from Apple that shows you my iTunes favorites. It seems to be a list of the music I play or have played at least once using iTunes on my machine. Some of the names in small type don't look familiar to me, but I have a lot of tunes. The big, bold names are really the ones I play most often so if you want to know what I like, check those names. I thought I played U2 more often than the size of its name shows, but I realize now that I play them a lot in the car, and that's not reflected in this widget.
Downside? I had to partially break my privacy with the iTunes Store to do this. I had to agree to let Apple access my account but just for this widget. I don't know. I feel a bit squidgey about that but, obviously, not too much to not do it. Anyway, this is a trial. If it works then I'll be making this a regular feature. Let me me know if it makes my page way too long to load.
I'll be testing it myself this weekend when I shut down my machine. We'll see how it works then.
Yes. ABC.com has paid some lucky hobbyist programmer to recreate something that already exists: a movie player plug in. Why not just stick with Quicktime which works beautifully on loads of platforms and has for years. YEARS! Where have they been? The new improved player is much like the new improved mail service at work: worse! The "improved player" has worse playback quality than the "old" one. The main result I see of the "improved" player is bigger commercials and a direct link to the developer's blog. Oh yeah. That's why I watch TV shows, so I can read developer blogs. NOT! I also see hampered interactivity (pausing the show restarts the commercial!!!) and time lost to installing this piece of crap which leaves the potential that I may not come back. And I won't.
I watch shows on abc.com because I like them and it's real convenient for me, especially for shows like "Men In Trees" which comes on late at night. And what episodes are currently available on the site (labled as 6/28/07)? Only the pilot!!! What happened to six months of episodes?
If you really want to see some innovative web programming, check out the iTunes/iPod site. And you if you want high resolution video playback with solid performance, try Quicktime.
I'm just too nice and I'm not into guns and quite possibly I should shoot first and ask questions later. And, come to think of it, I have absolutely no zombie experience what so ever.
The New Apple Mac OS X - Leopard. You must watch the fabulous tour and see the new Finder with stacks, Quick Look, Spaces, totally unbelievable Mail and outrageous iChat backgrounds. But my very favorite: Time Machine. Never lose a file again – ever! And find it easily, too. The only drawback: you need an external drive. No problem. I have one. I'm ready.
The New Improved iPhone. The darn thing isn't even released yet and already they've improved it! This tour shows you YouTube. I may throw my computer away, or at least my laptop. If I had one.
The Pantone home page flash highlighting 56 new spot colors. It's super "touch" sensitive. I don't know how they did it. It's not just a pattern, it's an algorithm. A new home page is not on the same order of magnitude as the Apple stuff, but even little improvements need to be celebrated. I love the whole Pantone site. It's very smart.
MirrorMask (2005) makes me wonder where I've been my whole life and why I wasn't first in line at the theater when this came out. The marketers stupdily missed my demographic completely. Fire the marketers! This is the most innovative movie to come out in this or any century. The story, the plot, the sets, the effects – it's all highly creative and like nothing else anywhere. I don't like horror and don't read Neal Gaiman but there's something in his collaboration with Dave McKean that catalyzes an entirely new reality. One which I not only wish to live in, but to die for and invest in. I may need a 3-day cooling off period.
I guess what's really going on is others knocking themselves out for me. It's so endearing. Ah, yes. I have put the "Queen" in alien drifter.
I woke up this morning from a dream about not getting a flight. I kept looking at my watch as I waited in the airport lounge and kept looking and then suddenly realized it was nearly six and not nearly five. I then went to the ticket counter and told the flight attendant, "I missed my flight." She said, "You sure did, Elaine." and began typing things on a keyboard while she looked at a monitor and smiled. I realized it could all be fixed, that my return fight was still good, if I could just remember where I had put my ticket. Possibly in a locker with my suitcase. I knew that any minute now she was going to ask for it. Had I left it in the car? No, I remembered having it in the airport. Fortunately I woke up.
I've had a lot of dreams like that lately; about losing things. Strange. Usually my dreams are lovely or adventurous. Oh well.
I see Perceval Press has added some fancy flash to the site. Makes it hard to read the news links but it almost fits in a screen now. Also, they've finally posted a list of upcoming books. The sale is still on! Hurry on over. You only have until Sunday.
I was interviewed by Style Weekly today about my participation in Script Frenzy. Nothing like a little attention to get me back on track. Yet here I am assiduously not writing my script. Normal, I think.
The posts are down to a few sentences arbitrarily chopped off (as opposed to meaningfully). Links to The Times Select are way down and instead of politics we're getting more and more culture. I'm not opposed to culture but I did like the political selections because they highlighted unique and compelling opinions. I'm also missing the interstitial quotes that helped me to understand the context of the links. And the poems. I know, I know! I said they were too much and they were but the occasional poem was quite lovely. Especially the one by JRR Tolkein that I think was a Gandalf piece but I couldn't find it in LTR (perhaps its in the new book?).
Have I missed a memo? Is VM just super busy? I hope it's that and not something dreadful.
I know in my past life I was scared of comments, and they still sway me a bit, but please! Comment! There are at least 30 visitors every day. Leave a trace, will you? puh-ah-leeeezze ...
I am stunned and awed by the Columbia University (interactive digital) Scriptorium. Often a fancy name will cover a bunch of junk, but this site is totally amazing. Here are high resolution images of ancient manuscripts that once were hidden away in dark vaults never to be seen by ordinary people. The originals are so delicate that they spend their time in climate controlled rooms in sealed boxes. Only curators and serious researchers are allowed to see them. Hardly anyone gets to touch them. A great waste of a resource. But now, through the magic of the internet, anyone can see these items up close. Maybe I'm easy to amaze but I get chills getting up close to medieval pages (even if they are just images).
If you like free learning, then try the Columbia University interactive tools (where I found the Scriptorium). Take a virtual tour of the Alhambra or New York Church of St. John the Divine. There are tons of other fabulous learning experiences that once used to cost too much money all for free. And with no registration or other tracking crap. Play on!
