Former Santa Fean,

now Portland, OR-based writer/photographer (and good friend) Julian Smith has started his own weblog. MeFites know and love him because he’s gotta be funky. Watch for the upcoming release of his book, Chasing the Leopard, too [click the map for his pics, by country].

Host switched

to PHP SuExec.  My nav and comments ain’t working till I fix them.  I’ll get to it a bit later.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Later: A tweak to EE’s index.php file, from path_info to orig_path_info seems to have fixed the PHP5/SuExec issue.

Busy this morning.

Home improvement projects over the weekend, a very long bike ride.  Now to concentrate on the business tasks at hand ...

Ah. Finally.

Our winds have calmed quite a bit.  The birds are venturing out from the center of the junipers and piñons ... the white-winged doves are about, the scaled quail are doing their morning constitutionals, curve-bill thrashers are fixing their violently red eyes on delicious bugs, the piñon jay is taking a long, dramatic drink ... and the spotted towhee is yelling at the entire crew, in his bob-head manner.

RC3:

Is the personal Web site a thing of the past? Contrast this with WDES’s Too Much Suckage. Tough queries to answer.  Causes a certain amount of navel-analysis, for an old-school weblogger like myself.  Particularly: “What actual value do I add to the already overcrowded metacosm, and is it worth the time I spend?” I’ve concluded my ‘human aggregator’ bit is woefully tired, passé. Such newsreading incrementalism is counterproductive to health, happiness and living a compelling life [unless you can do it in some gorgeous exotic location and get paid gobs of cash for it].  It’s devolved into automatic habit, rather than an eagerness to jump upon the issues of the day.  Splitting hairs daily, only to find them pulled out whole later on - making such effort worse than useless.  The old Taoist Chuang-tzu would say I’m just adding noise to the already-cacaphonous world; to do so is inauspicious, unwise, and fruitless. Perhaps I should drop to the one-comprehensive-post-a-day model, and see how that fares. I’ve talked about it multiple times, but having encountered these posts, I think I may undertake a sea-change this weekend.

If I’d had more time,

I would have wished Rebecca a happy 9th.  I still do, of course, just a couple of days late.  I always believe it means more to express things on the actual day ...

Meetings.

Back later.

Just got busy.

Links later on.

Wall Street Journal:

”Prompters are like gods.” Yet we rarely receive kudos for our good work.  I used to teleprompt, when I started out in A/V ...

Extremely busy today.

Photo shoots, meetings, you name it.  Weblogging will be sparse, if at all.  Go surf around elsewhere, and check back on Monday.

NY Times Travel:

Flight Chaos Shows Passengers Have Few Rights. I don’t know if the service is still as good as it was in the early ‘90’s, but spending a little more per year for an Amex Platinum card (~$400), I could call one Amex travel representative who would do all the calling and legwork for me, presenting me with a ‘travel solution’ inside of an hour.  If I had to travel a great deal again, I’d upgrade to that level of card.

Playbill:

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra: A Sex Appeal. Okay, fess up. The only reason we late boomers got into Vivaldi was because of Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Unclutterer:

Experimenting with the GMail/Remember the Milk task-setting concept. Via Lifehacker.

I mentioned it the other day

and here the Times does a focus article on the Princeton Record Exchange. Synchronicity.

YouTube:

Digital Grunt. Via MeFi. Oh, this is glorious ... cathartic.  A frenetic style of work that was beshat upon us with the promise of increased production speed through the use of ‘newfangled’ computers.  We were doing the same thing in the ‘80’s, but with much slower systems. I replaced Forox cameras and a roomful of cut-and-paste artists.  Back when it took transferring through six programs to get a single Mac Pixelpaint image over to PC Targa format (Photoshop 1 hadn’t been released yet - what a godsend it was). No Red Bull back then, just coffee and really bad NY pizza (the indigestion would keep you awake for days). Many’s the time the only light I saw was through the frosted glass of the men’s bathroom - awoken from those rare periods of unconsciousness by the dulcet tones of the office PA system (or Leon, for those post-Aniforms buds who still read here) - wrapped in bubble wrap and duvateen on the floor at the foot of my TVL system. In the A/V business, there was only one rule ... the show must go on. Failure truly was not an option. 

I love the little touch at the end, the gofer handing the programmer a cup of Starbuck’s coffee.  After you’ve broken your mind for days with no sleep, a simple gesture by someone - anyone - does bring tears of gratitude and a renewal of work energy.  Each time you succeed in managing an impossibly short production schedule, management decides that timeframe is the new ‘normal.’ This whole video takes me right back.  Scarily so.

NY Times:

‘Train of Thought’. View the film. 

Tangential: A bit of personal trivia.  Last evening, a fan of the Aniforms process sent along this video. This shows the live animated character I used to support.  If you recognize him from a conference or a trade show from the late 80’s and early 90’s, likely I was a faceless technician backstage during the performance.  You would likely remember him as “Roscoe”, the moniker we used most often.  I think fondly of those days as ‘shoving rubber for fun and profit.’

One more observation:

Passed by a “road service” vehicle.  Nope, not a tow truck. Nope, not a minivan crammed with tools. Nope, not a pickup of any size, with accoutrements. 

A Yaris.

Businesspeople, at least in the auto repair industries, are taking current gas prices more seriously, it seems.

Overheard today:

Two older men, walking behind grandchildren on Paseo, talking.  “I’ve got the cure for baldness.  S’easy.  Transplant nosehair.  Every time I rip out a fingerwad, two more come in ...”

A terrible case …

... of ”weblogger’s keyboard.” I don’t think I even made nine months on this one.

Geez …

Haven’t found anything to blog about yet.  Soon.

CNN:

Yes, but then whose parachute was it? I think of my Uncle who went missing in a Navy SNJ in ‘46, flying in the Seattle area ...

CNET:

Turning over a new leaf at Quark. “It may well have been down to some pent-up anxiety over the level of customer service we were delivering, particularly in Europe, but we are fixing this. We may also have been perceived as expensive. I mean, people probably looked at Adobe’s products and probably felt that they had to buy PageMaker and Illustrator, so they pretty much got InDesign free anyway.”

Woof.  They’re still not living in the real world.  I, and everyone I know who utilized Quark, purposely and intentionally moved away because InDesign was simply a better product, no matter the price ... and could export PDFs without grief, which more and more printers were requesting.  Quark killed Pagemaker because of the precision of placement, thousands of an inch (Pagemaker couldn’t).  You could enter measurements directly by keypad in the interface.  That single feature converted more people than any other in the early days.  Printers loved the precision, hated the increasing quirkiness with every update.  Quark got too big for its own boots, buying Strata 3D and making other wacky business decisions.  I have a feeling the inertia of existing code and interface will remain daunting, and unless they make better strides with PDF creation, they will remain at the current marketshare.

Unless I find

miraculously free blocks of time today, there’ll be no posts here today.  Expression Engine-ing my way to a deadline for tomorrow.  I have to leave at least one link here, so try this: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison. If you like old music, try ”The Little Ford Rambled Right Along” by Billy Murray.  Appropriate for current oil pricing ... catch ya’ll on the flip side.

A landmark of sorts.

March 2008 (so far) is the first month in which RSS reads of this weblog have surpassed home-page reads.  By about 2,000 visits.

*Sigh*

Race, race, race.  Feminism, feminism, feminism.  I would like to remind the press that all races and all sexes are risking their lives in wars overseas, and all races and sexes are losing their homes here in America.  I realize the plea will fall on deaf ears, but perhaps the sentiment will resonate.