Category: Wottever

Oh the Tweet Pain

Nice, I have a plug-in that collects my tweets. But I don’t want my blog cluttered with stale tweets — that archive is only for my own reference — so I install a plug-in that keeps that category out of sight. Then a WP upgrade breaks something, and the twitflood pours out.

Owoo.

I try another plug-in. Doesn’t work. I tried another way, but that fizzled too. Final kluge: pack the crap out of here and delete. I have it, you don’t have to put up with it. But it’s going to be a weekly chore now. Feh. I’ll figure out/find something.

Wha’s Happenin’?

I know, I’m a lousy blogger.

Wottever.

The bad news:

Cops are on my back about yard maintenance. It got a bit shaggy after several years of ill-health caused mostly by lack of vitamins — caused by lack of money, caused by lack of job, etc. Also, there were various artifacts left by my grandfather, etc. etc.. So now that I’m halfway back on my feet, the city wants to knock me down again.

My extraordinary efforts to clean up have been seen as doing nothing. IMO I didn’t work on the front enough first. Fuck it, enough about that.

The good news:

SilentBob and I are enjoying a perpetually extended honeymoon. With drive space such as I would never have dreamed about back in 2001, I indulge my every whim, and my dear Bobster takes it all in stride. This poor computer now bears the burden of six installed operating systems and one virtual. My curiosity knows no bounds, and I am (almost) fearless.

We are into all sorts of graphics, sound, and video foolings-around.

On top of that mess, a laptop has joined the working crew. BitChunker, an “experienced” IBM Thinkpad, only has three OSes; Windows XP, Backtrack, and Slax. Bitsy’s job is info support for making house-calls, and wireless testing. The hard drive is a little weenie, no room for a lot of fun.

Oh, you thought this blog was supposed to be about writing and artsy stuff?

Well…I’m nine chapters into one novel, four into another, and A Drum Is Empty is suffering One. More. Edit.

Really-truly, the longer you leave work sitting, the more you see that can be trimmed and modified.

Another ongoing distraction is the Firebird Project. A friend who has been wanting to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet suite has roped me in. We are planning a presentation and discussion that will include a video of the ballet, a Powerpoint about the ballet and the legend, and a video using my music with fire photos and fractals. Part of the idea is to contrast the beginning of modern music with music and art of the computer age. Epic, daunting, but nearly two months to go yet.

fire demon

Miscellaneous:

I’m on a roll in Twitter. Clumps of followers. It’s not The Ahts, it’s the techness. And teh lolz. Only a third or so of recent new followers have been @-holes. I shitlist the @-holes, of course.

Hmm, I wonder what sort of spam this post will attract 🙂

Fractal Sturgeons

The living sturgeons that gave their name to the bay that divides the Door county peninsula — and the city that straddles it — have been nearly wiped out by overfishing and pollution. But their ghosts now haunt the summer streets.

Ten years ago the first “Sturgeons Around the Bay” brought out interesting variations on the fishy form by local artists. This year they are back. I took a walk a couple of days ago and found two within a few blocks of my home. Both of them made me think of my large accumulation of fractal images. So I went digging into the seven years or so of Fractal Explorer archives for matching pics. Some of the collection is on CDs, but I found enough of what I was looking for on my current hard drive.

Gilda, by Emily Baker
Gilda, by Emily Baker

Soul-mate fractal
Soul-mate fractal
Menagerie of Mandalas, by Margaret Lucas
Menagerie of Mandalas, by Margaret Lucas

The mandala-like fractal forms that I dug up are a little disappointing in these small images. You really have to see the whole array of mind-boggling patterns of which they are a part. But then you would end up sitting at your computer, diving into fractals for hours, like I do.

The point is, I suppose, that art does not originate in our thpughts. It is, in some way, mathematically hard-coded in our cells. Everything is fractal.

Fireworks

When all the weapons are silent
———————————

What will the Glorious Fourth be like
when all the weapons are silent?
Will fireworks mimic the shrieks of the dying,
the hiss and bubble of burning flesh?
Will a rocket fly moaning into the sky
to break with a dying gasp?

Ladies and germs, allow me to present the new flag
of the United States of Perpetual Warfare:
green for oozing pus, black for charred bone,
red and yellow for bloody vomit.

One perfect stone

I live on a peninsula carved out of solid stone by glaciers, long ago. Stone has been quarried extensively in this area for building. Once there were many stone masons here; they are a rare breed now. Knowing one gives me interesting opportunities for exercising my cinematographomania.

It was raining off and on, but I took my chances and though I got a bit damp and cold, I managed to capture some real “rockin'” action. This is a small sample that I threw together. I’m saving the “building the pyramids” scenes, in which they maneuver the big ones, for later. This is a low-quality video too; the original is better.

The flagstones are up to 6 feet wide, and only a few inches thick. They are laid on fine gravel. Fitting them together and making the entire surface level requires an enormous amount of strength, patience, and care. This is true craftsmanship. Art is nothing without it.

We’re not in canvas any more

Still obsessed with video. I’ve collected enough software to sink the hd of my first computer several times over. SilentBob bears it all uncomplainingly. Edit, convert, edit, save; my bitty movies are piling up. The duds get deleted — I DO sometimes get rid of useless things. Sometimes.

brickgeek3

The third edit of Brick Geek, an opportunistic documentary starring a bricklaying friend, is my best work so far. Though far from a masterpiece, it has some good moments. I worked hard to get the timing right. A lot of work for a mite short of four minutes of final product :).

I would upload it, but the star is out of town and I don’t want to be rude. Meanwhile, a nice, if sloppy, flower and music vid is up on Youtube: A Walk in the Garden. You can’t smell the roses. 🙁

Update on an earlier post — I see by my site log that I’m not the only one who had a problem with MSE’s mpminisigstub.exe (and Comodo firewall). I still don’t know why the unpleasantness ended, which program gave in first. Doesn’t matter much. I fired MSE a couple of weeks ago because it did the unforgivable again. It rudely and peremptorily snatched harmless files away from me, with no hope of recovery unless I have them on a backup CD. Nothing does that to me and gets away with it.

I still recommend it for know-nothing users; it will protect them from even the stuffed tigers, so no harm is done. I just isn’t suitable for ornery old granny-hackers who refuse to run as admin.

The Return of Spring

It’s an established fact around here. Actually it’s fading rapidly into summer.. I gathered a few of my accumulated photos and a piece of music that I cobbled up several years ago — and recently edited — to make another practice video. It’s not too bad.

YouTube link

It’s been some time since I went into Obsession Mode with ModPlug Tracker and cranked out dozens of odd bits of music. I’m getting musical again, so watch out. My favorite piece, Kansas Nights, is high on my video to-do list.

Lost or…what?

It was a day.

The worst of it is not knowing what happened. I remember starting out on the walk back home, I know what direction I was headed. I had thought I could get through that maze of streets. Even if I had to cut through a back yard or two, it should have been possible to make a shortcut to where I was going.

The maze turned out to be more impenetrable than I remembered. There were also dogs. I had to backtrack.

Then things get weird. I was again walking in the right direction, but I was a couple of blocks on the wrong side of a street that I should never have crossed and don’t remember crossing. I know that street. It is the one I should have gone down instead of trying to angle away from it toward my destination. It has several times as much traffic as the side streets that balked me; I always have to wait to cross it. There are familiar landmarks everywhere; I do not remember passing them. There are no streets in the right places. How did I get that far off?

The longest and worst stretch of the walk was still ahead of me. When I finally got to the top of the hill, my home and my workplace were equally distant. I figured if I went home first, it would be too long before I felt like walking that one extra block. So I took the shortest route to JAK’s Place and revved up a computer to do the newsletter mailing labels. I went home a couple of hours later, after planting some sick looking cucumbers.

Several hours and a short nap later, I’m still wondering where I was. I’ve been looking at maps, crawling over it with google Earth. It’s imposible. But it happened.

I think I have watched too many episodes of The United States of Tara in too short a time.

Green Twitterz and Spam (LOL)

Holy moly, the spam count has risen lately. I have a shneaking suspicion that it has to do with integrating my blog with Facef^ck and Twitter. ‘Sall right, Akismet sorts it out beautifully.

The really sad part is that there haven’t been any funny random-phrase posts. They can be so much fun! Lines like “I shouldn’t be surprizing so hard at that” give me a case of the tickles. Yeah, I’m easily amused.

Whatever the minor consequences — including loss of time — I’ve been enjoying Twitter. It keeps me more on top of a lot of news and a bit more in touch with more people.

In the garden now:

Forget-me-nots