lightcastle

Not feeling great right now, but worst seems to have passed.

Photoshoot went well, although it is clear that my improvised backdrops are too narrow. I am going to have to buy a second round and reposition the curtain rod (probably buy another) to stretch over the whole back wall.

I need to talk to Miche about casters for the couch so I can roll it more easily if I do this. In general, I think I need to throw a "put things away and on the walls and hammer" party. This is the kind of thing that can get done in an afternoon with help, but will just not get done if I'm alone. Bribing people with alcohol and food afterwards might work.

On the technology front, I want to pick up some sort of laptop-esque thing before work sends me to Florida in October. I really only want it to write and surf the net on, mostly, which is why I keep thinking netbook. There's not much point in me going bigger unless I am going to start bringing it to shoots and editing on it, and that seems like overkill right now. I'm not even sure I need a cutting edge dual-core netbook, since that may be overpowered. Some have recommended iPad and buying a keyboard, but that seems vastly less portable or useful. That said, I came across the Asus Transformer tablet/keyboard dock combination and it is tempting. I am unsure of how compatible Android is as an OS with anything else, though. I suspect it might be difficult to sync documents and things between that and a desktop if I choose to use it.

I downloaded Firefox 4 here at work to give a spin to. I'm somewhat browser agnostic in general. Unless there is some feature I can't do without, I am fine with most of the leaders. (I still find IE annoying, but Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all are more or less fine for me.)

It does remind me that I want to find an email client, though. I know everyone just uses gmail on the web, and that's fine, but I'm not always fond of the gmail interface and how it works. As I have switched computers too often, I prefer IMAP to POP - although I don't know if that's actually smart since it means I never have a copy of the emails myself anywhere.

The real thing with clients, though, is that I would really like emails to be tagged instead of have folders. More and more I find I would prefer if I could tag them in multiple ways. Gmail obviously does let you do that with labels. Opera seems to do that, but the client isn't stand alone and has always seemed a bit odd. (It also seems to not work with gmail labels well, but then that seems to be a general problem with gmail.)

So does anyone have an email client to recommend? (Or an email management strategy that would make current clients work?)

I have a new shiny toy!

I havent' figured out how to use it, since it didn't come with the manual.

I will have a new cell phone number sometime this week, along with actual Internet access again.
(This is still borrowed.)

The work explosion/crisis means it is almost certain I will not make Arisia.

The entire layout of my apartment will also be changed, should you have seen it before.

On an entirely different subject, does anyone know the deal for downloading books from other countries? You would think that even if a book is available only in Italian, in Italy, that you could purchase it in Euros from the Italian Amazon site to read on your Kindle. This appears to not be true, and you cannot purchase it if your IP address is in North America. Does this make sense to you? Is there some legal workaround here so that people can - you know - legally purchase e-books they want to purchase?

Forgive the Princess Bride paraphrase.

As some of you know, my mom is an artist. One of her media is book binding. One day, she took a workshop on re-purposed art, right around the time some old computers at her lab were being discarded.

The result has been a recurring theme of circuit board books, each hand bound with some piece of circuitry.

(And wow is photographing art hard.)





The first two are both Japanese bound watercolour paper, with a motherboard as the front cover.



The one on the right is Japanese binding again, and I don't know the name of the other style. (It may just be "Western".) The Western has a single small circuit as a decoration, while the Japanese binding again has a large circuit board almost as the entire cover. I do believe that circuit is hand stitched, if that's an appropriate turn of phrase.





This last one is bound in a texture that almost looks like bark, decorated with buttons, and tucked into its own case which I believe is a re-purposed disk mount.

Some links from the beginning of the month that I never got around to putting up.

First, with Law & Order officially ending, Stanley Fish looks at all the people it didn't like. Hint - it is just about everyone.

The only way to be O.K. in Dick Wolf’s world is to have a job that is steady but doesn’t pay very much, to drive a five year old car you’re still paying off, to live in a small house with a large mortgage, to have an education that helps you get by but doesn’t give you any fancy ideas, to attend a house of worship that is the center of your social life, and to have almost no leisure time. Unless you fit that profile, “Law & Order” probably doesn’t like you.

Charles Stross asks,

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you.

The unpacking is quite interesting, and gets into the fallacy of some of the libertarian utopias that get proposed, as well as the tech level of space colonies and indirectly the whole question of what would actually keep working after an apocalypse.

Henry at Crooked Timber adds in The Tasmania Effect, arguing that because teaching is lossy transfer of information, it takes even more people than you think.

On a mostly unrelated note: Anyone know anything about this OpenDNS thing and if it is useful?

I had lunch with my friend E__ today, at Anancy - a Jamaican restaurant by her place. Terribly yummy it was. (The Drama is hers. I am actually on the tail end of drama, as now that I have internet I can wrap up that trailing piece.)

Resetting the connections in the desktop seems to have helped with that, which is good, since I have a model coming over Monday to sort some pictures. I am tempted to use this as my replacement.

Does anyone use Sketch Up? I've thought about trying to plot out what to do with my living room with it. (Separately, I am also considering using Page Four as the Windows version of Scrivener. Mind you, CeltX is looking more and more promising.

This article is old, but it looks at the culture of diving in Football, and why different teams have different views on it. To some degree, there is the issue that if you already have a rep, maintaining it makes sense.

That Picture of the Universe


(Extra bonus garters for reading to the end.)

The Housewarming was ok. I sadly gave people too many options in an attempt to accommodate those with kids-limited schedules. The result was people trickling in two to three at a time and never staying long enough for another group to show up and kick the numbers up into critical mass for a party.

Interview this morning went well, there should be a second interview Wednesday. It's a medical education company, with a multimedia bent. It would be perfectly decent work and the stability will help get me on my feet. So fingers crossed.

A couple of other job options also seem to have opened up.

A Cecil-tastic update will be coming soon, as she has some projects and signings and tea coming up.

The 9/11 play (Hope in Chaos) took a hit as the lead actress quit under mysterious circumstances, but it looks like we will have a solid replacement. The production of Stop Kiss I auditioned for called me back for tomorrow to read again.

I should have the internet hooked up Thursday (I went with Teksavvy) and then I will once again have easier online access and free reign to be called on Skype for those of you who only have free US calls and not cross-border access.

Mattress saleswomen should not be quite so adorable, btw.

This is obviously a Montreal question. What are the best options for getting online? I don't intend to get cable TV, as I really only watch The Daily Show and the news. I can get things via the web, so that's not an issue. But what to get? I'd rather have cable over DSL (unless DSL has gotten radically better). I know Videotron is in the area, and I assume Bell still competes. Anyone have a story to recommend either one? (My experiences with both previously were that they both kind of suck.)

In the meantime, I will be very much offline for a while.