Ragu Spaghettisauce

There needs to be a better way to say these characters instead of "forward/back slash" in that every time I have to say it to someone, they get it wrong. So we break down to the point of describing the top and bottom, and the direction of the lean.

This first happened to me in 1995 when I would tutor the elderly on how to use a computer (Windows 95! weeee!).

But it still happens to me regularly with people who have been using computers for years, every day of their life.

Clearly they aren't going to learn with the current setup, so there is probably a better way. What that way is? Don't know - don't even really care - just would rather not have to constantly describe those fucking lines.

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TweetDeck on my Mac is awesome, I love it.
FireFox on my Mac is awesome, I love it.

Replace "Mac" in the above two lines with "Windows XP" and the ending descriptor changes to "fucking hate" instead of "love". (and uh... "awesome" with "awful")

Given the way they are written, it pretty much entirely points to the OS being at fault here - no real shocker to anyone, but worth noting.

I don't think we can trust that the moon has water on it.

After all, everyone knows that confessions induced via torture are likely not true.

The moon clearly is like FUCK, BOMBS?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! FINE, WATER - SURE - YEAH, I HAVE IT - HAD IT FOR YEARS. JESUS - STOP WITH THE FUCKING BOMBS ALREADY.

I thought Adobe had a pretty generous license in that you could install Photoshop (CS4 in this case) on your workstation, but also on your home laptop. As long as they were not both running at the same time, they were cool with that.

Did that change?

I have the full CS4 Photoshop (legit, paid for, etc) at home on my Mac. When I went to pay for it, I could have sworn it said "PC/Mac" - but then I looked at my serial in my email and it says "Mac" (so either it saw that I was on a Mac, or I am simply not recalling correctly).

I just tried to install it on a laptop (Windows) and when I put in the code, it shows a big red X. Presumably its way of telling me to go fuck myself.

Do you think this is because:
1) they no longer have the work/home thing in their license? (I don't have it in front of me to review)
2) it is because I bought only a Mac one and there is some difference between the two (other than the obvious)?
3) I suck at life.

Obviously regardless of the answer to the meta question, there is a base assumption of #3, I think.

I was an art major back in the day. I used to draw multiple times a day, for years on end. Then after graduating college, basically never drew again (or paint, sculpt, etc). Then recently I started to draw again, and saw that I was awful due to lack of practice. I had all of the theory there, so that wasn't an issue, and I knew what I should be doing - just rusty. As incentive for me to get better at it, I started scanning them and posting them on Flickr.

For the most part, I was just using images I saw off of the net. I read about 100 blogs in RSS feed I think, another 25 or so on Tumblr, and then occasionally spend time looking at things like ffffound.com (however many Fs it is). And then of course, also other images on Flickr.
I then keep a Google doc of images I want to draw, and then draw them in my sketchbook(s) with a ballpoint pen, and then scan/upload them, and try to get in writing what parts of it are not good (or in the rare case they are okay, point that out as well). Self crit I guess.

The problem with that, unless the image is well known (or rather, well known to me), I don't always know exactly where it came from.

Recently I drew something, and as it turns out, it was from Flickr and I did know where it came from (or at least at one time saw it in an account, as opposed to an external account) - but the drawing was so bad, I didn't think much of it and put it up without linking to it.

The guy then somehow saw my drawing, and decided I had stolen his work since I was not linking to his work, mine being a derivative work and all, and demanded I put up a link.

I was an art major, but while we covered technique and theory, they never went into any legal sides of things.
While on the surface, he was right - I drew from his image, and if there should be a reference there, then so be it - I put one in.

But what amuses me are two things:
1) the drawing is quite bad
2) I am not selling these, and even if I were, nobody wants them (see #1)

So I think to other artist areas where derivative works are used, and music sampling immediately comes to mind. If you use a length of a song (or at least one time this was the case, I haven't followed closely lately) less than N seconds, then you don't need to license the material (or reference who it was, etc).

Similarly, I was thinking that since my drawing was bad, what if you took that to the limits - what if I found this guy's image, had it in front of me the whole time I was drawing, and very clearly was looking back and forth at it and my image, and in my head was trying to draw that image... but then my drawing was actually a photorealistic representation of an orange (as opposed to his portrait of a girl).

These points amuse me, and due to said amusement, I suspect that he had little to no legal ground to stand on - but I put the link there anyway. And then wondered what sort of life he goes through, if he seeks out (seemingly in fear of never getting credit) people "stealing" his work.
HE may be more miserable than me if that's the case, which is saying a lot.

1) there was recently an article going around TEH INTERNETS about levitating a mouse using superconductivity, if I understood correctly. I can distinctly recall this being done (with a frog) when I was in 8th grade (around 20 years ago).
Why did it take 20 years to make the move from frog to mouse? Lower water content in the mouse?
Perhaps the fact that I'm only reading the snippets on blogs as opposed to the actual articles or even the actual study, is the reason for my confusion.

2) we currently have a Sumsung DVD-HD860 which is an upsampling DVD player. We bought it in 2006 for like $50.
There are two problems we've had since then - the first is that when it switches between layers (well, I'm assuming that is what it is doing) on a DVD, it will pause for sometimes up to a full minute - it makes for some hilariously long pauses in dialogue/movement, so it adds something to what you watch - the other is now absolutely unbearable (not in that it is getting worse, but that our patience is no longer capable of putting up with it), and that is that when you try to scroll through menus, it will loop through them endlessly - but only on some discs.
It makes me think that in the programming language for those menus, they are *supposed* to put some notation to go to the next thing, and then in that section, tell it to stop - but some newer stuff perhaps just assumes it should stop, and therefore people programming them get lazy and don't add the stop, and our setup is too dumb about it.
When it loops the menus, it makes it nearly impossible in some cases (like tonight) to actually get to the content unless by dumb luck, and usually at that point, you are watching in French, with Spanish subtitles, and the director's commentary is on, and all you are watching are the deleted scenes.
So for the first time this evening, we used the XBox 360 to watch a DVD.

On the good side, the controls are pretty snazzy, and it doesn't seem to do the menu fuckup.

Also on the good side, the picture quality is so fucking horrible on the XBox 360 with the same DVD compared to the upsampling player, that it makes me realize it actually was doing something worthwhile.

So now it comes down to:
1) buy new upsampling DVD player, which soon will be obsolete, so it is a matter of how long to that point, and does it not have the same headaches as this one - $50 (will avoid Samsung - Sony's player gets the highest rating on Amazon, although I usually like to avoid Sony due to only ever having problems with their products)
2) buy a Blu Ray player, as that seems to be where the future is headed at this point - $150
3) buy a new Sony PS 3 that is smaller, to get both a game console and Blue Ray in one - seems retarded given we have a perfectly fine (of course now it will break) XBox 360 that I rarely use as it is - $200-300ish (perhaps more, all I know is that it is still well above the cost of getting the basic Blu Ray player)

I don't really see the point of #3, so it really comes down to how long #1 will last us until we really "must" upgrade to Blue Ray I guess.

$150 doesn't exactly break the bank, but it is more a matter of personal sanity given that all I do tends to be shit.

I wish there were the equivalent of Windows Task Manager built inside of FireFox so that I could see what the fuck it is doing.

In theory the MS Process Explorer and equivalents should do that, but they basically say the FireFox kernel is raping my CPU, which doesn't really help.

I also wish I had a pony. A white one that I could feed apples and brush its hair. It would love me.

I've found the Garfield Sans Garfield comics hilarious from the start, but for some reason this one is particularly funny to me:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/post/119958209/original

Starting a project where I go on weekends, setup a white seamless on the street, and ask every person who walks by if I can take their picture.

This is also called "getting told 'no' a lot". Everyone is very suspicious of your motives. Were one in college and in any number of majors, you could very easily write a great thesis on this sort of thing.

Two that I liked:



Related to the above concept, but not necessarily those people there, you also get a lot of crazies depending on where you setup.

One guy wearing a fedora, women's sunglasses, skin tight shorts, a white sport coat, a striped polo shirt, with white socks pulled up and dress shoes came up and waved his cane towards a building near us and told us about a woman who worked there with "wonderful breasteses" and that we should be trying to get her photo.
Then he stomped his cane twice and walked on, leaving us to ponder what just happened.

I was there with a friend. We only had our cameras, the white seamless, some duct tape, and a small backpack that my friend carries his camera stuff in.

Another guy on crutches stopped short of us and asked "You guys sellin' shoes?"
We couldn't figure out why he would think that, but explained to him what we were doing.
He went on to tell us about some watches he had bought that had since broken, and I think maybe some batteries.
I am pretty sure he was trying to tell us that he was headed to a store to either try and get batteries, a new watch, or money back for the broken ones.
Later he wanted prints of his photos, but didn't have the internet and while he was perfectly happy to give us his number, we didn't want to get involved.
He told us that he would see us in heaven.

A Harvard professor was arrested in Cambridge recently. This made national news when the President (as in Obama) said the police acted "stupidly". Oh and apparently it matters that the professor is black. The arresting officer, white.

Obama has since come forward and said he regrets the furor his comments have made. (I absolutley love that, since he isn't saying he regrets his comments or having made them, only that he regrets us reacting to them... "I regret that when I punched you in your face, you bled.")

The Smoking Gun has the police report up (which is mostly amusing in that it says in bold capital letters on one page that it is not intended for public release).

I saw on the news as the press walked into the back yard of the arresting officer (he doesn't live in Cambridge), while he was with his family, and asked him if he were going to apologize for his conduct. He made it clear that he was not going to apologize, as it was all part of his line of work. Nobody asks him to apologize for other arrests.

Reading the police report, I'm not sure I see any reason he would/should apologize. He didn't use force, he didn't say anything derogatory (although I would imagine if he did, it would not be in the report).

While Boston does have a notorious history of being racist, Cambridge in recent times doesn't seem to have the same level of issues (as a white male, I can hardly say whether it is bad or not, but I can say that compared to history, it is certainly not on that level here).

The professor was coming back from a trip, and he and his driver were trying to deal with a stuck door on his house (the professor's). A neighbor (her race is not listed on the report) saw this and called the police. Black men with backpacks trying to break in.
No word if there had been recent issues of break-ins in the neighborhood, if she's racist, if she calls the cops a lot, etc - just that there were two black men trying to break in to the house next door.

When they showed up, they saw the men inside, and the officer explained he was there in regards to a reported break-in at that address, and asked if he could speak with the professor outside of the house.
(again, this is according to the report, which in theory could be all lies)

So what could have happened was that the professor said "Oh, you are mistaken, you see I live here. Here's proof, thank you for investigating the matter."

Instead, he started yelling that this was a race matter, repeatedly yelling "This is what happens to black men in America!"

(And then showed his ID - which Obama then said was proof he lived there - presumably it was a drivers' license with that address on it.)

At some point due to the commotion this guy was causing, the police arrested him.

Now, personally I feel the professor was in the wrong for immediately blowing up at the police officer. But I have no knowledge of his history and/or influences - he could have been tired and having a bad day after a long trip, and he could have had a childhood full of harassment and this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and off we go.
Too late now, as he acted.

But I also don't know that he should have been arrested for that.

What I do know is that I live in Cambridge, and I'm white. So I have to ask what would happen were I to do the same thing?

Well, I did the same thing. Sort of.

I got locked out of one of my apartments. I lived in a basement/ground floor apartment, so I walked up to the window, knocked out the screen, lifted the window, and climbed in.
I didn't try to hide it. I did this during the day on a weekend. I made a lot of noise, in plain view of many houses across the street and several apartments surrounding mine.

I fully expected the police would be called, and I would then be able to explain the situation.

But instead, nothing at all happened. No police ever came.

So who knows what would have happened.

Maybe he lives in a nicer area than I did (I lived in a fairly crappy area), or maybe his neighbor is racist - don't know.

But I have to wonder what would have happened were I in his shoes.

I can only imagine the officer would have just burst out laughing when I started yelling "This is what happens to white men in America!"

I'm contemplating writing a Facebook app/game, and as a result signed up for one of the most popular ones: Mafia Wars. I wanted to see what was popular, why it is attractive/addictive for users, and how they generate actual revenue.

While reading their forums, I ran across a post with the title "Money is Meaningless".

This has had me chuckling for about an hour.

Inside the thread, the user is noticing how that in the game, the more money you get, the less it really matters in the game and therefore chasing it is devoid of meaning and/or pointless.

I am laughing due to:
1) He doesn't seem to find the game itself pointless
2) He doesn't seem to find life itself pointless, let alone a game that mimics a lifestyle
3) I am playing a game that is pointless and reading its forums in the search of making money, which itself is a pointless exercise in a pointless existance

So many levels of meta amusement, pointing fingers everywhere at the same time.

Also hilarious?
This image.
(I asked the model and it was not intended for comedy, which makes it that much more hilarious.)

I mentioned this on Twitter, and in turn by saying that I feel like a douchebag (in that I don't feel any different at all) - but much like jwz and likely countless others, I am simply too bombastic to get out a complete thought very often onto Twitter.
(it is fairly well suited for my campaign to misattribute quotes to various figures though)

Anyway, there was this guy named Dash Snow. He was considered an artist (in that really anyone can be an artist, it is merely a matter of self labeling, or having the label placed onto you) by some, including himself.

He died a few days ago in the Lafayette Hotel in NYC. From what appears to be a heroin overdose (leaving aside how heroin overdoses are frequently less about the heroin and more about what it was cut with - he had supposedly gone clean and then I guess had a relapse, which lead to problems).

As when any artist dies, he is getting more press than when he was alive.

Many are asking the same question, especially after actually seeing his work: "Why was this guy considered an artist at all, let alone considered a meaningful one in any way?" (in that people gave him money for his work, and said work was in museums)

Clayton Cubitt has been railing on this for the past few days.

On the surface, Snow's work was just a series of Polaroids he took while being exposed to a bunch of assholes doing irresponsible things (makes me wish a Senator would start a website where they take cameraphone shots of their life at hourly intervals, as I suspect that it would really be a very similar compendium of work, just more suits).

But ignoring the chain of influence along the way, take a big jump back to expressionism and impressionism.

Degas (and his contemporaries) painted ballet dancers and absinthe drinkers and this changed the way modern art viewed beauty.

Today, ballet dancers are considered high art, but back in the day it was considered low art and was very much like what today's strippers are ("I don't like the term stripper, I prefer to be called a dancer." Sure. We're all whores, when you put your mind to it.)
So for him to be hanging out with them and painting them, is not that much of a stretch from people hanging out now with a camera and taking pictures of strippers and/or pornographic work (amusingly, this brings Clayton Cubitt back into play).

And then those styles were influenced by their times, but also by the drugs of choice (opium and absinthe were big) - both in terms of context and visually.

So while I don't personally find Snow's Polaroids of naked threesomes and people shooting heroin while watching porn all that wonderful - I do think in the context of art history, saying they are horrible is somewhat ignoring the past masters.

I think the main sticking point is when you deal with people who look at art in terms of a reaction to a set of ideas, in the context of a long chain of world events - and those who want to see a pretty picture (Thomas Kinkade fans, after all, he's the motherfucking painter of light - as if there is such thing as any visual representation of anything that isn't due to light).

Art is about far more than beauty.

Kitsch, on the other hand...

So while I never really cared much one or the other about Dash Snow's work, his death has at least made me realize that the Lafayette House in NYC would make for one fantastic location for a photo series I've been wanting to do.

Can't find the rates online - looks like I will need to call or email someone, or like... try harder.

UPDATE:
This seems to indicate it is "expensive" (although about on par with pretty much everything else in NYC):
http://nymag.com/listings/hotel/lafayette-house/

One thing I do a lot of in FireFox is the following:
1) go to a page
2) see an image
3) drag the image to a folder

I don't know if it is a Windows thing, or a FireFox thing, but say the image is named "1.jpg" on the page/server, and there is already a "1.jpg" in the folder I want to drag it to - I will get a message that says something along the lines of "That shit already exists, do you want to overwrite it?" and then I get "Yes", "Yes to All", "No", and "Cancel" as my options.
I assume that "Yes to All" is if I were copying several things and I wanted to overwrite all of them - but in this case it is just one - so I guess instead of checking for cases of more than one, it is easier to just always show that.
Yes presumably overwrites it.
No presumably doesn't copy it.
Cancel also presumably doesn't copy it. Not sure the difference there - again, perhaps it is related to when you want to copy multiple things at the same time.

But what I would prefer is the option "I still want to copy it, but I want to rename it".

I can instead right-click on the image and do a "Save As" and then name it differently, but it is a slower process.

Another thing related to that process that I haven't yet figured out, is that if I drag an image in the above manner, and on the server it is "abc.jpeg" (note: ".jpeg", not ".jpg"), then it will try to copy it and save it locally as ".jpg" - not with that ending, but literally as a no named file with a ".jpg" file type ending - I have to do a Save As in order to get it to show up as a full name including the ".jpeg".

Another oddity there is that sometimes when doing that, FireFox will refuse to save it as anything but an HTML file, even though it is certainly an image format coming off of the server (and it isn't even like it is a dynamic page that streams content out, but it is a genuine file).
This is usually a sign that FireFox will be crashing soon.

In IE, there is a similar thing, where files that are actually jpeg/jpg/gif/png will only be allowed to save as bmp files. That is a sign that the IE cache is full, and you should clear it (and sometimes you need to restart IE). That resolves that issue.

But in FireFox, clearing the cache doesn't resolve the issue, you need to actually restart - and if it takes 30 minutes to close and still shows a process in the Task Manager and you kill it off, you lose all of your saved tabs and all of your sessions (need to relogin back into all of the sites you previously were already logged into).
It is hit or miss as to whether that generates either a FireFox or Microsoft crash report.

I'm assuming that the process of drag-and-drop copying of images creates a memory leak of some sort, which is what causes my constant FireFox crashes - or at least contributes to it.

I just asked this guy a question:
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How tall is it after it transforms, and how long does it take to do that? Also what condition are its weapons in?
---

UPDATE:
Got a response:
"He's 53' when transformed, happens quickly. As for weapons NEST does not let us reveal that. Sorry classified."

Since he clearly has a sense of humor about it, I am far less interested in continuing this discussion.

Filed under "things that really matter":

* I spend most of my time posting useless stuff to Facebook/Twitter than I do on here.

* Absolutely dead tired at 8pm last night. Went to bed at 9pm. Woke up at 10:30pm ready to attack a brand new day. Well played.
As a result, I sat and finished Albert Camus' The Stranger and contemplated how fucking awesome that was.
Then contemplated some website/iPhone app ideas.

* Going to Canada later this month for a few days. My wife is away all summer and so I will visit her.

Yesterday I posted about how FireFox uses a lot of RAM, and they go and release a whole update for me.

(Not going to update until the plugins catch up and I wait a bit to hear what other people are saying.)

Is there a way for me to see which tab in FireFox is using the most CPU/RAM?

The CPU is usually relatively obvious, but the RAM is harder for me to figure out just out of common sense.

My FireFox uses a ton of RAM (approaching 1GB) and I usually have somewhere around 30 tabs open at all times. The longer it is open, the more it uses. But if I close off tabs, then it will drop some.
Obviously some of this is due to caching, and then I know FireFox has had memory leak issues in the past that they claim are fixed (or "more fixed") - but it still seems excessive to use that much RAM.

I can close off FireFox, watch Task Manager so that the process goes away, slowly clearing the RAM, and then using the Tabs Mix Plus on restart (the FireFox built in session recall is pretty useless) to open those same tabs back up, and usually it is around 400-650MB in size, and then over time grows back up closer to 1GB (and by "over time" it is usually within the day).

I have a lot of tab churn, so I suspect it is related to that (and the fact that it remembers closed tabs and such, so it is likely caching details about that as well), but it just seems excessive to me.

I know of a few tools that let you look at a Windows process and the memory it is using - but for FireFox, they seem to be at the general level of "FireFox" or down to process levels that don't really give any ideas as to which tab it may be.

Guessing nothing like this is really out there, but figured it would be useful if it is out there.

My mouse died a tragic death via The Smashing this morning.

The replacement does not please me.

I made myself a steak last night.

I can remember back in college a girl in my dorm telling me that raising a single cow requires enough water that you could float a battleship.

I'm keeping my promise to her that I would do my part, ridding the earth of those fuckers.

She didn't seem to get my joke.

Ever since, I've always liked to measure things in terms of whether a battleship could float in it. Seems like an extremely useful and applicable metric.

Shot an homage to a Mario Testino shot over the weekend:



Other images from the weekend, as they get uploaded.