Out of the Frying Pan

Art history online

It could be that I'll need to make up some art history courses. Smarthistory won't help with that, but it's a pretty interesting site.

Google+

Are you doing Google+? I am and would like to get some different circles going over there, including one for botanical art. If you're interested, please drop me a note or leave a comment.

More about settling and the iPad in the living room

If there were no such thing as an iPad, I've been asking myself, would one of the tablets on the market have persuaded me to buy?

No. Sometimes when no elegant solution presents itself, I have found it better to go without. More and more I find this to be true of hardware and software; my experience suggests to me that it might be true in other aspects of life, as well.

Settling, or not

Right now at our house, we're talking about iPads. I've kept them at arms length because of their lack of support for Flash and because they really don't have anything to offer to someone who works on RAW images all the time. But I have to admit, however grudgingly, that they have plenty of use for other purposes.

Comes now the entry of other iPad-like devices into the market and for less money. For someone as frugal as I am, that's a head-turner. But here's the thing. None of them has going for them what iPad has. They don't have the number of apps, their machines and operating systems do not have the polish, and most of all they do not have Apple standing behind them. Still, though, I hear the siren song: Save yourself a little money... It's almost as good...

Settling. It comes down to settling. I've made that mistake too many times, sometimes with little consequence but once, on a major life decision, disastrously. The problem with settling is that in my heart of hearts, I believe that there's something better, if only I have patience to wait a little more, the heart to commit a little more.

I'll stay in touch about how things go with the iPad.

The above photo has nothing to do with the entry. I just happened across it from last July and liked the colors.

Little notes

• The Programming Language with the Happiest Users, except for the commenters, of course. Someone who knows just enough Perl to have created a lot of chaos in her world of years past and enough C++ to have really caused some problems -- well, that person is not going to comment.
• BlockChalk API - yet another way for me to introduce a little more havoc to my disordered world. HT O'Reilly Radar on both these items
• You want to be a dinosaur? Keep using tables strikes at the heart of my wondering whether to spend time re-developing literally hundreds of Web pages or to press ahead with new content development.
• And on a perhaps not unrelated note, Dumb Little Man has a nifty article on The Art of Changing Easily & Gracefully. It's a pretty good crash course in overcoming inertia.
• Finally, I vote with the folks who thought it was a, ahem, Richard move, but it's still pretty funny: a customer billed a sandwich shop for time wasted... and the sandwich shop paid up. Don't try this at home, kids.

Clever things

• Time zone converter
• Open Clip Art Library
• Simple online database creation - free, for up to 1000 records (200 mb) and two users per month, which is a pretty sweet deal
• Mozy, remote back-up, unlimited for $4.95 per month; totally free (i.e., no credit card requirement or set up fee) for 2 GB per month
• When is good - a way to work out, well, when is good to get together. Useful for groups where scheduling gets a little complicated. Amazingly, there's no signup form
• How to pack a bento box - HT AGT
• Longmont area traffic twitters, just in case you'd rather not get into the 30 minute wait for road construction at Lyons. There's a lot of "auto vs motorcycle", especially taking into account that there's no helmet requirement here

Did you know?

HT CT

The Passion of Jesus Christ

Although I'm still finding link errors, I've released the updated design for a project of my main content contributor, Fr Victor Hoagland, C.P. It is the Web version of The Passion of Jesus Christ, which came out in 1997.

The Web version was actually available before the dead tree edition, and the whole project was published seven years before the release of Mel Gibson's film. I mention that just to allay any idea that the project was developed as a response to or augmentation of Gibson's work.

But if you've seen the movie, you should definitely take a look at Fr Victor's site on the Passion and, in particular, this book by him and by Fr Donald Senior, C.P.. (Yes, I've done what Wikipedia eschews, which is to repeat a link in an entry. Oh, well.)

So far

So far, CS4 is a complete PITA. Whatever the improvements are, for me they are well hidden under a hugely inconvenient "improved" interface.

A postcard after crossing the [CS4] rubicon

Dear Adobe,

Reproach and upbraiding of the self has daily been my lot since the I exchanged my signature for the little brown box borne to the porch with such ceremony by the UPS driver.

Daily I cry out against myself, Why, O Lord, hath thy poor specimen of a servant brought this thing of Creative Suite 4 Web Premium into my dwelling, when I lack courage thereto to install?

Today my soul arose and girded its sagging loins (O! From whence cometh my Spiritual Playtex Girdle? From China, and its sole importer is the High Executioner of the Trade Deficit, Walmart, whither thou goest not.) Thus spake I even unto myself: Be of good cheer! Remember that thou has obtained for thyself the treasure of Great Terabyte, both internal and external! Be of good cheer! Go a little crazy! Install the damned thing!

Better late...

The Winter 2009 edition of Compassion is finally live. They mailed it about a month ago; I've been playing catch up since the end of 2008. So now this is caught up.

Web publishing is great in so many ways, but it also has a ver-r-r-r-r-r-ry long memory. So when I looked at an old issue with relevant articles, it was clear that things needed to be overhauled. Oh, well.

If you look at the article in the old issue to which I've linked, at least scan to the bottom of it to the paragraph which begins, "Jamaicans are generous; the poor are generous." I suppose the story told there could be read as sentimental, if every word weren't true.

A useful application of Flash

Since becoming more fluent at Adobe Flash, I've started a list of possible projects which is constantly lengthening. It's such a useful, if often eye-crossingly perplexing, program. But once in a while my resolve is strengthened by seeing a practical, relatively simple application: How Many Triangles?

I'm sure I still have some old pages to clean up, but NOT USE THE COMIC SANS FONT (the header on the triangle page). Just don't use it.

Thematic mapping

Okay, this is just cool: Thematic Mapping Techniques. Huh? What's thematic mapping? HT, Robert.

"Vitality and cachet" might not be enough for me

25 years of Mac.

A couple years ago I began using a Windows machine for a while because I had to (not in my home office). It was hard, but not impossible as I'd thought. So as Apple's attention has wandered from its flagship product (down to 47% of sales, I hear, which explains why it's so hard to get a chair at the genius bar), I've thought about switching platforms. It is no longer inconceivable to me, even though I really think I still prefer Mac.

Windows might be for Grandmas, but as someone upon whom geezer-dom creeps quickly, if I have to deal with a complacent platform developer and hardware maker, it might as well be for hundreds of dollars less.

In, but not of, this world

Back at Regent Street today, my helper was a low-key, but efficient and completely charming young man who turned me on to Disk Inventory X, a great donationware disk usage untility for Mac users.

We foreigners have a special wavelength; he's not from here, either. He's also not from "Mac world" in the sense that he pins his future somewhere other than Apple: Greg Holden, singer and writer who claims Bob Dylan as his main influence.

An interesting encounter

Three hours door to door and more money than I seem to have calculated properly on the exchange rate, I'm back from Apple on Regent Street with doubled RAM (remember "Ram Doubler" back in the day?). But the genius bar couldn't fix the network preferences in 10.4.11. I expected the genius bar staff to be reasonably conversant in Unix: wrong! Anyroad, the recommended "fix" (is this a fix?) is kicking up to 10.5, which box lies malignly in my brief case.

This poor Mac Book Pro 3,1 (yes, that would be the one that doesn't like to be wakened from naps) was bought a year ago with the expectation of its handling email and some light word processing; it has a hard drive sized right for those tasks. It wasn't intended for movies and a CS3 Suite.

Of course, the plan didn't include having to buy a CS Suite for this machine.

Of course, I wasn't really aware of having a plan. Life is a relentless encounter with plans we didn't know we had.

Nifty widget for Macs

A timer is something I find very useful. I really like Bald Geek's widget and if you have a Mac, you might like to have this little piece of donationware. At the home page, just mouseover the timer.

New ways to look

A client suggests Search Me, which is in beta and which does NOT seem to work in Safari, which is odd, because the results are pretty Leopard like. He also mentioned Cuil, which claims to search more Web pages than anyone.

Accessories for the simple-minded

Hubs and multi-card readers are two things that make life a lot simpler for me. What helps you? I also like my prescription sunglasses, but they make my bag heavier and I can't seem to remember to put them on or... wait for it... take them off. They make life better, certainly, but not simpler.

No place for a perfectionist

Every time I fuss with the template on this thing, the css constraints make me just about scream. The $8.95 monthly fee doesn't allow doing wild and crazy things LIKE SETTING THE PADDING OF THE BANNER. /rant, until next time >:(

Slow adopter

For months I put off upgrading to 10.5; that was a good choice. So far, the best thing about Leopard is that Bluetooth refused to recognize the wireless keyboard. Changing batteries so often was getting tiresome, anyway.

Might be useful for WordPress users

WordPress is not my thing, especially not since having my sensitive knuckles rapped: "It's for CONTENT MANAGEMENT" (my emphasis added, I imagine). But I'm thinking about using WordPress for a project. WPCandy might be useful.

News you might be able to use

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

When Microsoft asks

I find it very funny when Word asks, "Do you want to change the existing 'Normal'?"

Try as I might...

...I just cannot make peace with Firefox. It's very 2005 of me, but Safari is still my browser of choice, even if it crashes too often on sites that don't pay a lot of attention to W3 gods.

On another kvetchy note, a lot of the Illustrator tutorials on the Web for beginners are outdated by several versions. Too bad the Adobe "classroom in a book" is just about impenetrable.

Biting the Apple

And when you get tired of that... go here ;-)

Well, this is interesting

Starting right now I'll be watching my data transfer verrrrrry closely. I've started hosting podcasts for one of my sites, saintmungo.org. Not that I'm encouraging y'all to burn my bandwidth, but there's some really fine preaching available there. The youth group's Stations of the Cross is really very wonderful, too.

Irritating

http://www.abcware.biz/ -- doing business on the Web as Match Software -- offers fonts for Macs that it purports to deliver online. Only catch is that they compress the things with software that runs on Mac Classic, not the current Mac OS.

Update: Mitch Bujard, who appears to be the proprietor of Match Software, sent along a .dmg file purportedly with files of the fonts. Only thing was -- the files don't contain any data. At least, none that is readable on Mac OS 10.4.9. Mitch's last email:

I am sorry, but there is no way to reproduce what you describe without more information :
- Name and type of your Mac
- Mac OS version (you get this in the let-hand side menu "about Mac OS)

It will then be necessary to test all fonts to see what maybe happening.

In the meantipme, I have refunded yiour purchase. Please remove our software you are no longer licensed to use.

Yeah. Well, I sent him a screen shot of how his fonts behave -- or, actually, don't -- and haven't heard back from him.