The InkWells

The newest version of Opera is running loose in the world.  Excited?  You should be:

Some of the most interesting features and ones which I constantly take advantage of I will mention briefly here.

Opera allows you to sync your bookmarks between any number of computers (across platforms) and with Web access instantly through their Opera Link feature.  This sync tool also syncronizes a number of other browser features as well.

Opera has a flexible and powerful built-in notes feature (which can be synqued).  You can copy portions of Web pages directly into a note and mail your notes later.

The layout and look of Opera are completely manipulable.  My arrangement of panels, toolbars, and buttons have little resemblance to what came out of the box.  I don’t use skins usually, but if you are into that sort of thing Opera makes it very easy.  Through this you can make the browser look and perform in ways that are most comfortable to you and the way that you work.

Opera employs mouse gestures.  When I tell folks about mouse gestures they are often rather cool to the idea.  Until they try them.  Once they understand how mouse gestures work, they have no desire to turn away from them.  Mouse gestures are so infectious you will yearn for your file browsers and other applications to use them.

Opera has been using tabbed browsing for nearly ten years.  Others may act like they invented it (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer) but even Opera didn’t invent them.  They’ve merely employed them in the best manner.  If you accidentally close tabs (or even entire windows) you can reopen them using the trash can located to the right of all your tabs.  And navigating between tabs is extremely simple, with thumbnail views of each tab upon mouse-over.  You can even move your tabs around, arrange them in any order you’d like—you can even create new windows from tabs or move tabs between windows.  (It doesn’t have tab specific crashing, but give it time.)

It’s ad-blocking, image blocking, and site-specific preferences are unparalleled—and they are all available by a simple right-click on a Web page.

And Opera can do all of this out of the box with a smaller memory footprint than its competitors.  It also wins test after test in the browser wars.  Lifehacker loves Opera.

There are many others but I wanted to give out some of my favorites.

Make the switch now.  You won’t regret it.

Magnitudes of Insignificance

This photograph (0872) was shot on the hill over at Gasworks Park near Fremont on 2 June 2007.

Magnitudes of Insignificance

Very slight levels and contrast adjustments.  Nothing else done in the digital realm.

(Originally posted 2007 06 09.)

La rebelión de las masas

This photograph (1084) was shot on the sidewalk about a block from my house on 8 June 2007.

La rebelión de las masas

Take a good look.  You’ll see some ants.  What is difficult to parse is that all that you see is ants.  All of that maroonish brown is ant upon ant.  And they are tiny ants.  Probably the size of the ball within a ball point pen.  Writhing.

(Originally posted 2007 06 10.)

Scherzo Scappatellato

This unmanipulated luxagraphic photo (8721) was shot in Discovery Park (where else?) on 8 May 2007.

Scherzo Scappatellato

Running through the trees, as usual.

(Originally posted 2007 06 12.)

Arrested Development

This unmanipulated luxagraphic photo (6980) was shot on 22 April 2007 over in Discovery Park.

Arrested Development

(Originally posted 2007 06 13.)

For more information about my luxagraphic style of photography, please read my Luxagraphia Manifesto.

This unmanipulated luxagraphic photo (3684) was taken from the top floor of the Majestic Bay Theater here in Ballard on 7 January 2007.

I Ask You Again...

The blue and the red regions are from neon-style tubes. The thin blue lines are from hanging fiber optic lights. The various yellowish lights are different kinds of incandescent lights from across the street.

I look forward to your questions, comments, and criticisms.

(Originally posted 2007 01 08.)

For more information about my luxagraphic style of photography, please read my Luxagraphia Manifesto.

I have recently downloaded and installed Open Office for my Windows XP machine.

The installation was smooth and simple.

The only application I have tested to any extent is Writer (their answer to MS Word).

Each application  includes a PDF’er.  It’s output is clean and functional.

I can see no reason why the vast majority of consumers would not find full benefit and enjoyment from this office suite.  I was able to create my current resume (using an old .doc Word file) and then save that into a .doc, a .pdf, and the open format .odt (among many others).  It opens fast and is intuitive to use.

If using an office suite is part of your lifestyle/business there may be some very particular feature which you may innitially miss, but I would recommend taking it for a spin to see if it won’t satisfy all of your needs in this software area.  It does mine.

(Ubuntu, the OS to which I am switching, comes with essentially a version of the same suite.)

If time were sufficiently granular then we could view the process of seeing an object as we now view the process of building a house. One day the work begins and many days later the work is ended. If someone asks when it was built a unit as large as a year, years sometimes, is given.

I walked into the dining room from upstairs. As I walked into the room I absorbed a new piece of knowledge. My entire studio time had been for naught. For forty-six minutes I labored under the delusion that I was recording all the music I was playing. I was filled with inspiration and after glee at my conquest of new improvisational territories. Only to relize in truest hindsight that I had just walked past an unconnected RCA cable.

Excellent.

Back to the wood shed.

People often ask me “James, how can we possibly solve the transportation problem in the midsts of the great energy crisis we are facing?”.  I am asked this question due to the first of two ubiquitous misconceptions which exist about me, namely that somehow I am the secret ruler of all things human. The other misconception, that I am psychic, I have no intention of dispelling. In stark contrast I intend to exploit this to my greatest advantage whenever and wherever possible. I know what you’re thinking.

Though I do work my best toward expelling this myth of supreme leadership by demonstrating my impotence and even incompetence in matters involving humanity and society, I have actually through a careful system of reflection come to the ultimate solution to the transportation problem.

My solution will provide employment for a class of citizen as yet underutilized in our modern society:  the He-Man. Bulked up beyond recognition by chemical means, too animated for the serene life of large equipment operation, floating on the winds of chance like gargantuan gypsies, each muscle group a topographical metaphor for life in a cage and the yearning for freedom—these competitors in strongest man competitions, these members of wrestling federations, will become the socially elevated denizens of the new tomorrow. They are to be a vital element within the system and they will be revered for the role they shall play in delivering humanity from our crisis.

The nib of the crisis is that we are relying upon fuels to move humans from one location to another.  In former eras we used human or animal power to move our phat butts about.  This change was all well and good so long as these fuels were abundant and cheap.  Pump them out of the ground and drive away.  The earth made them and so the labor cost was surprisingly low.

Now we are running out of these cheap fuels.  Not even fourth world children will work that cheap.  Transportation is in jeopardy.  We cannot let it sink alongside electric lighting and the Internet.  Something must be done and I have the solution.

First we build a number of stations which will be manned and operated by the he-men mentioned above.  Next individual transportation equipment will be reduced from SUV’s and sports sedans to two essential and personal garments.

In total there are three pieces of techology, each of which has seen practical use as of this writing.

At each station there will be found catapults and trebuchet.  The he-men will be on hand to wind the levers in preperation for lift-off.  Each passanger will have a special parachute and a secret squirrel flying suit.  A passenger gets comfortable in the prepared lever and is launched into flight in the direction of the next station (in the case of a long range trip) or in the direction of their destination (in the case of a local trip).

The flying suits are used to extend natural flying time associated with spring loaded technologies, while the parachutes will be used to guide the traveller into the landing arena.  Chutes may be exchanged at stations for a fee to avoid delays in re-packing chutes.  For those travellers preferring to re-pack their own parachutes, a re-packing area will be provided near the snack areas.

Travellers travelling with children or pets are encouraged to arrive early to accomodate the additional procedures necessary in this new modern age.

Terrorists are encouraged to set their explosives to detonate near the top of the initial parabolic curve so as to maximize the entertainment value for any citizens in the vicinity.

Cross-oceanic voyages will be possible by using the soon-to-be defunct oil drilling platforms as stations across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and other larger bodies of water.

As you can see, this system contains all the elements necessary to ensure its success and widespread acceptance.

Obligatory Open Challenge:

There are a lot of crazy people in this world.  Seems like I already know most of them.  Now I’m calling out to the ones I don’t know.  Let’s set this up.  Let’s build a catapult or a trebuchet and launch one of you madder-than-a-hatter extreme sports junkies into the clear blue.  Fame, fortune, your name in tights.

We can’t likely win the world record for longest human powered flight, but I think we will be setting a record for something.  The question is: how far can we fling/fly/land a person using this method?

Looking forward to your comments.

Nominate your favorite madman.

I have been advocating the introduction into English parlance a new phrase.  I think you will find this phrase useful in many situations and that it will grow fruitfully.  I am proud to bring this phrase for the first time to the Internet:

Why, that’s as dumb as W!

There can be many variations upon this basic theme and I encourage you all to explore the possibilities.  This will open new worlds to your discovery.

So there is no confusion surrounding the usage of this new phrase, let’s take a look at how it might be used.  Let’s say your little brother walks into the room and announces he is going to marry the girl next door.  You might respond, “That’s as dumb as W!  Your nine; she’s ten; it’ll never work.”

Alternatively, your friend may come up to you and claim that Clapton is a better guitar player than Hendrix.  You can cooly reply, “Sometimes you’re dumber than W!  Hendrix unleashed the electric guitar.  Clapton merely played it.”

Apparently in conjuction with my efforts, Oliver Stone has made a new movie.  I can hardly wait.

This unmanipulated photograh (2092) was shot on 20 June 2007.

Mists and Shadows

More blue neon tubes shot luxagraphically.  So much fun I just can’t stop myself.  (Like I’d want to.)

Thanks for your indulgence.

(Originally posted 2007 09 19.)

For more information about my luxagraphic style of photography, please read my Luxagraphia Manifesto.

Since the inception of the Internet many great things have to come to us dancing humans.  It has been a great boon for humanity—intellectually, informationally, pseudo-sexually.

One unintended consequence though has been the unleashing of a host of language butchers.

Mail became e-mail and though will never see anyone with the slightest grasp of the English language say “the postal carrier brought me three mails today” somehow even the brightest among us will whip out “I got e-mails from my mom and my brother today”.  E-mails sounds like something naughty.  Where are these e-males coming from and do they also have e-females?

I do occasionally chuckle during my chat conversations.  When I wish to indicate to my interlocutor that I have been moved to spontaneous giggles I use the old stand-by “hahaha” or some deviation therefrom.  I am loath to type some such abominable abbreviation such as smomnilsfh—spitting milk out my nose I’m laughing so fucking hard.  Perhaps this is because I can touch type.  Perhaps not.

And what’s the deal with using two periods in a row? I had a friend explain to me that when he did it he wanted less of a pause than an ellipse (three consecutive periods). I asked him how long the pause of an ellipse was. He had no answer. Use an ellipse or a period.

I admit that I had these bad attitudes concerning spoken English long before the Internet showed up.  I reflect with fondness on once hearing my friend say that something or other was across from some other something and my asking him whether he spelled that acrost or a-crossed.  Yet this pronunciation lives on.

As does pronouncing of height as though it contained a second h—heighth.  So when I hear a native English speaker criticizing some immigrant struggling with English as a second or even third language, I shake my head in awe.  “When you have yours in order, then we’ll talk,” I chide them.

Which nicely brings us to one of the most pervasive butcherings to date.  There is a certain alleged Internet provider who will remain nameless—but who is easily identified by the copious discarded CD’s offering hour upon free hour of alleged Internet service—this filth monger thrust upon our beloved Earth a phrase vile and now disastrously ubiquitous: you’ve got mail.  Have got?  What is the sense of this misconjugated compound verb?  You have mail.  You’ve got cancer?  You have cancer.  Let us drop forever the superfluous verb.  Though I feel obligated to point out that “You have gotten better” is kosher.  Still, prefer something like “you’re feeling better” or “your health has really improved”.

Just to be on the fair side, I feel obligated to offer some useful advice for anyone who might be attempting to improve their English.  These are a couple of tricks I have found worth keeping in mind so as to look slightly smarter than I actually am.

How to Outsmart a Chimp

Let us take a look at a common mistake and reveal a simple solution to getting it right.  Lay v lie is a trouble.  It is especially compounded by the curious reality that the past participle of one happens to be the infinitive of the other.  No matter (and don’t worry about what that actually means).

The trick is to merely to remember this simple phrase: “now I lay me down to sleep”. The important part is “lay me” (verb —> object). This relationship reveals all you need to know to choose lay or lie. When you want to place something down you lay that something down. I lay my body down. I will lay the blanket down. If no thing is being lain, then you choose lie. I lie down. I was lying down. I will lie down. (Down is a direction and not a thing).

Now the tricky bit is that I lie now and I lay earlier. Confusing? Sorry. Not my fault. This is true whenever there is no helping verb. So, I was lying down. I lay down earlier. I was laying down when you called. In the end though you can probably avoid any of the more confusing conjugations by using other verbs.

Initially I was slow to parse this guideline and was constantly failing in speech.  Writing is a slower paced process and I was more able to work out the correct usage.

Merriam-Webster has a great little blurb on this distinction and its history at the bottom of its definition for lay.

Computer terms got you up in arms?  I Bit (B) two bytes (b).  I MegaBit (MB) two megabytes (mb).  No need to confuse these two confusing terms any longer.

And just for fun, let’s talk about the usage of shim v shimmy.  I just made this one up, so be gentle: “Shims within the groove make me shimmy.”

Ok, take it for what it’s worth.  I’m going to bed.

Oh, brother.  Is there no limit to stupidity?  I mean, is the emptiness of mind quantifiable into the negative?

Let’s be clear about this, I’ve had pets: cats, dogs (almost typed gods, hehe), fish, amphibians, &c.  But at some point one should consider drawing a line.  For instance, it’s not ok to put a sweater on a dog.  They are embarrassed enough having to be seen with humans and being told they can’t hump everything they happen across.

Another example is keeping dangerous wild animals as pets, especially if your plan is to surgically enfeeble them in an effort to increase your own safety.  I think the general rule here is that if you are afraid of what the animal will do to you it is not a good pet animal.

Be careful out there; it’s a dangerous world if you have half a brain.