Saturday, July 25, 2009

I'm not understanding the line breaks in the last post. But I think
I'll leave them in.

Perhaps I will try to
always use line breaks where
they are not needed.

I like
the look.

Soup!

For ages, when I've been making notes to myself about this blog, I've
used the initials AIYP.

Recent upgrades have suddenly caused the spellchecker to replace that
perfectly good acronym with the word "soup.".

I've been looking at my to do list for the last fifteen minutes,
wondering why I have all these things that I need to add to soup.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Images

One of the things that I've found to fiddle about with is a photo filter that can fake a (to my eyes) reasonably decent approximation of an HDR Photograph.

As I am partially color blind, I am always having trouble with taking pictures of sights that I find aesthetically pleasing. I never know if what I see is really all that pleasing to others, much less how to actually take a photo that looks like what I am seeing.

So the little filter has taken this example of a picture that I was disappointed with after I took it, as I feel it didn't quite get the image that I was struck by in real life:



And turned it into this, which I think is closer to what I recall it looking like, even though the image has obviously been mucked about with:



Of course, to your eyes that might look incredibly grotesque. Life is strange like that.

Gizmotronic

DANCING WITH THE WIND!Image by Edward Dullard via Flickr

I have been busy on a couple of fronts, so posting has been light (if not completely non-existent).

Work has been busy. It's busy time anyway and the current ongoing fiscal woo-ha is not helping. On the bright side, I still have a job. Small mercies.

At home, we are in the process of breaking in a new dog. Slow going, but rewarding in its own way. There's something about having a dog sleeping nearby that helps me to focus on work. As I type, the dog is indeed right here, snoring away.

On a technical front, I have upgraded my bare-bone cell phone for a spiffy new smart-phone. Right now, I'm still ironing out the bangs and figuring out where the whistles are kept. Ultimately, one of my intentions for it is to help me streamline the blogging process. I am using it now. Blogging as a stylistic genre is one of immediacy and I'm measured enough without having to wait however many hours or days before I can get to the interface and start.

Onward!

(Prior to posting this, I have popped the text into Zemanta and it has decided that I would like to add the lovely image that is now appearing above. It also suggests that I add Wikipedia links to the terms "cell phone," "snoring," and "ironing." I think that's great.)

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Let's Plinth!

I am sort of facinated by the latest installation on the Fourth Plinth:
Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, different people will make the Plinth their own. If you’re selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like – to demonstrate, to perform, or simply to reflect. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you’re 16 or over and are living, or staying, in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment. Participants will be picked at random, chosen from the thousands who will enter, to represent the entire population of the UK. The rules are simple: you must stand on the plinth alone, for the whole hour; you can do whatever you want, provided it’s legal; and you can take anything with you that you can carry.
You can watch a live webcam from the One & Other site. As I started preparing this post it was 3:45 in the morning in London and the plinther was a woman dancing around dressed as a pigeon. Now it's a young man who looks like he might be sleeping.

My favorite that I've seen so far was a fellow who took the opportunity to pull out a sketch pad and start drawing the view.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

curious

Over the weekend, Twitter apparently deleted a ton of accounts, and are now in the process of reinstating them.  (I believe that they came up with a faulty method of trying to detect spam blogs).

I logged into twitter.com on Sunday and was greeted with the "This is a deleted account" page instead of my own.  I then logged out, closed the browser, and opened twitter again.

There I was.  My account was active.

I have no way of knowing if I was deleted and then reinstated or if it was just a momentary glitch.  For some reason, this has been haunting me.  I don't know why that is.


I understand and wish to continue

These last few months I have been kicking around the idea of starting back on the blogging train.  It hasn’t been much of an idea, but never...