2020 Hindsight

and your point is?

Powerpoint In addition to the two comments posted here about powerpoint, I see that Sheila has some observations about Powerpoint-induced meeting slumber. I've no idea why is this so damn topical, but I'll make note of it nonetheless.

Memeworthy: Then comes lunch Yesterday I posted a quote

From uncertainty comes chaos

From chaos comes anarchy and fear

Then comes lunch

and I've gotten two responses to my question of where the quote comes from. Katrina's google searching yields a slightly different phrasing.

Out of confusion comes chaos.

Out of chaos comes anarchy and fear.

Then comes lunch.

I received an email from Jenny, whose Google search strategy included "then comes lunch" phrase and anarchy. The results led to this page of quotes, where a slightly different version of the quote...

Out of order comes chaos,
out of chaos comes death and anarchy,
then comes lunch

...is attributed to a person named Chris Connolly. Well, a Google search for Chris Connolly yields a site with a discography page. I've emailed in hopes of finding the disc and track. Stay tuned (that is, assuming you're interested).

After lunch comes a sauna. Hee! [via Al]

Birth of a phrase? Here's the scoop on a potential new phrase/verb: scooby (scoobying, to scooby, scoobied), to sleuth out by mass internet investigation.

Kaycee makes the NYT for a second time! Well, well, well. Hoax stories now make major national press. [via Scripting News]

Grrl bidness Doc comments on Brent, recounting what Guy says. A totally different take on the glass ceiling after, um, boyz throw stones n shatter glass software company houses.

end of May, June starts tomorrow (!!), and both the star jasmine and gardenias are in bloom. Gardenia blossoms in the house... mmmmmmm! : )

Oddities

62-year old woman gives birth Now she can say, "By the time my child is 18, I'll be 80 years old."

Hippy Women live longer [via Al]

The research – conducted at Gothenburg University in Sweden and being presented at an international conference on obesity in Vienna this week – found that women with a hip measurement of 103cm or more suffered less ill health than their slimmer counterparts. 103cm = 40.5inches. Cool.

I got this quote in an email, and thought I'd try to find the original source. No luck yet.

From uncertainty comes chaos

From chaos comes anarchy and fear

Then comes lunch

(but what of the afternoon nap?)

ABC: Beautiful cancer victim a hoax [via Scripting News] Kinda odd to see this story in the context of all these other oddities, no?

2000 undress for photographer in Montreal

``This was the easiest performance of this scale that I have

done,'' an ecstatic Tunick told a large group of reporters

Saturday outside the city's Place des Arts, where the unclothed

participants lay on the ground to be photographed in 55-degree

weather.

More on Spencer Tunick and his series of naked city photos

Who, me?

Never got around to flipping the page today. Prolly because the sun came out for the first time in what seems like days and days and days.

Now where was that camera? I had a picture of a wild cactus monster plant that I wanted to slap up here.

I went on a walk through the botanical gardens of the Huntington Library and Gardens the other day.

Can't you just see this plant in motion, flailing its fronds around like some serpentine monster?

This plant is docile compared to its wild neighbor... a fuzzy plant wetted by the light rain/heavy mist that morning.

They're Real!

Real Well, the Amsterdam ScriptingNews/Blogger dinner took place, and if Andrea and Oliver and Scott are to be believed, all people shown in the pictures are real. (lessee... I've met Dave W and André in person, so that lends an air of reality to all the others, too. ...that is, if you believe that *I'm* real.)

Cool... Oliver took a survey for using weblogs to teach. Here's the entire thread (questions and survey responses).

Sincerely your's A grammar rant that I'd wish I'd written. Well, no, not exactly, I explain the error of hi's her's it's their's (can you hear the fingernails on the chalkboard with those examples? eeeeeek!) in a slightly different way. But I totally concur. Via Backup Brain, back from their honeymoon, woo hoo! plus a picture of the bride n groom! Congrats! (oh and by the way, they're real, too. I've seen 'em in person. Met Tom long long time ago at an LAMG meeting in April. It wasn't a happy situation. I'll tell that story some day, along with all those other stories I'll tell someday.)

Watching them watching us Weblogs takin' a hiatus: Fucked Weblog

Yet another weblog tool Live Journal ...a tip o' the hat to JD for the link.

Fugitive ...and I don't mean cloak n dagger... I'm talkin' bout inks that fade over time. Inks from inkjet printers and papers.

• Some not-good-news about Liege and longevity
  "Unfortunately, Liege's coating seems to react with just about every known ink, causing them to fade quite quickly.  As a result, Liege will remain a great "portfolio" paper, but it will never make it as an art paper for the serious conservator."

• Oh! Liege has been discontinued! Replaced by something called Somerset Photo Enhanced

• Ink Jet Solutions for Archival Fine Art Printing Not that my Epson 800 inks are archival, but it's good to get to know the archival situation.

• A Google search under Somerset Photo Enhanced yields a rich variety of sites devoted to digital art and ink jet printing.

• Ink Jet Mall run by Cone Editions Press. Lotsa info on inkjet inks and supplies, plus a knowledge base.

• What InkJet Mall recommends for my Epson 800 printer. yes, Somerset Photo Enhanced is in the list.

• Oh my! I could print with archival inks in my Epson printer if I so choose!

• artpaper.com All sortsa papers and other archival art-making supplies.

• Legion Papers, fine art and digital paper distributors ..turns out that Legion bought an L.A.-based outfit called Paper Technologies. Of course, the old domain name for Papertech no longer works. Only later did I figure it out. Why don't these guys keep the domain name and do a simple redirect? Sheesh!

Point Power I don't use PowerPoint. But I've heard a lot about it. The topic came up in conversation yesterday ("Powerpoint has a huge futz-factor..it's amazing how much time you can spend adjusting little lines." "Heh...I recently read about Powerpoint on a weblog: 'power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.'"). So I looked for the Doc Searls Searls comment on PowerPoint to tell my PowerPointer friend. Now I'm continuing to stumble across more PowerPoint commentary. Textism elaborates on a New Yorker article on Powerpoint.

The quote about twit executives wasting time animating pie charts bolsters something I’m always yammering about: communication design software, particularly PowerPoint, is invariably clogged up with features that actually reduce the likelihood that the message conveyed – no matter how terse – will be understood; that put the container in the way of the content. It also shines a bright light on the problems that follow when everyone publishes, but no one knows how.

So, after reading the grammar rant, does it really matter if Powerpoint is really PowerPoint (i.e,. InterCapitalized)? And.. is there a hyphen in "anal-retentive"?

BTW, Textism is definitely worth a look. It's one of those sites that makes me very jealous. Damn, I wish I wrote like that! If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is jealousy a sincere runner up, or an insincere form?

Lassies an' Laddies

Lassies I was at the Scottish Games today. Fun. My niece competed in the highland dancing competition, moving up into a new level where she's "dancing with the big kids." Here are a few pix from the reel (my niece is wearing purple):

A perfect highcut! Oooh! look at that perfectly pointed toe positioned exactly right at the back of the calf!

For newly moving up in her class, she did pretty well, winning medals for placing in two of the four dances she did. Here, her proud aunt examines her medals

Laddies ...did I not say that Alasdair Fraser was going to be playing there, too? And he did!! He played the hairs off of his bow....

...and, with a cordless microphone on his fiddle, he was free to roam about the entire audience, inciting us all to dance and carry on....

He even roamed outside of the aisle area—anywhere that people were inspired to dance, he was there, spurring them on...

Do you think we all were enjoying this kinda spectacle? Och aye!

Up and down the aisle he roamed. Here he dances a jig with an enthusiastic member of the audience

Not only did he roam up and down the center aisle, but he even went into the rows of benches!!

Down the center aisle he came, near to where I was snapping an' groovin. I turned the camera on both of us....he is playing here, the music broadcast to the whole area, while he poses! :D

Alasdair even did this little Jimmie Hendrix routine... playing his fiddle with his teeth!!

...well, actually, he was just talking to audience through his microphone!

Reconfiguring

IP stands for Itsa Pain Oh joy. My DSL internet service provider sold themselves to someone larger. Now I got some new IP addresses and all that rot. I won't say anything about the advanced notice (negligible) or the messages that went awry in an attempt to provide me with my new IP/subnets/routers etc, or the fact that they didn't say *when* the changeover would happen. I guess it happend this morning. Oh. Anyway, I got all my new numbers, and am now trying to enter the new IP/subnet/Gateway numbers in my Qube. Ouch.

It's not obvious at the outset that a number is the same with three places or two places. I wondered if

000.000.10.000

is the same as

000.000.010.00 ?

yes, it took a while to figure out.

(I must applaud those ISP guys on changing everything on a friday before a long holiday weekend. That way if you're down, you're down for three days! All I can say is, Laphroaig —smoky single malt scotch—helps)

other Scottish foodstuffs ...are not delightful, especially when they're thrown at your front door as a racial protest. But Manchester England protesting someone from Scotland?!? It does nae mak guid sense at a', lads an' lassies!

Och aye! Y'know, I think that today's turning out to be a thorough Scots theme day... tomorrow morning I go to see my niece compete in highland dancing at the Scottish Games. My brother tells me that the Costa Mesa games have been going for some 80 years now. That's a lotta cabers that've been tossed. Oh good, and Alasdair Fraser will be playing too, as well as Bad Haggis (the band, not the kind being thrown at native Scots who live in Manchester, England)

A new old camera

A new old camera Last night, thanks to the prodding of a photographer friend (and mighty fine dancer!), I finally figured out what the Nikon Coolpix Slow flash mode is for. It's like I got a whole new camera! Maybe one of these days I'll unearth the Nikon CD and hunt down the pdf documentation and find out what else I've been missing. Slow Flash mode trips the built-in flash but also uses a slow shutter speed so that there's blurred action. (Gotta go say something about it at photographica.)

The setting: A small club in Montrose called The Mix. Friendly people. Lots of dancing. Lots of space. A new discovery by some of us taking a jitterbug class; we go there after class to really try out what we did learn in class. Way fun!

First, for comparison: Here's what it looks like with no flash. The shutter stays open long enough to let in sufficient light. Meanwhile, everyone (including the photographer) has moved, so the resulting image has streaks:

Then, there's taking pictures with a regular flash. The flash freezes the motion, but the background is dark dark dark

To Daaa! the new discovery— use slow flash, and keep the shutter pressed down for a while, and the result is the best of both worlds—frozen motion and blurriness and sufficient light overeall:

(Check out the feet of the guy on the left; he's realllly movin'!)

I'm pleased with the overall effect. Now I wish that I could go back to the night after my grandfather's funeral, when there were four generations of family on the porch at the White Camp, cousin and brother playing guitar, singing for hours and hours: old folk songs, childrens' songs, old standards...the best way to go hoarse, methinks. I took tons of pix, but they're either red-eyed flash, or bbbbllllluuuuurrrr city. I'd love to have mixed in some slow flash, too.

---

Structured Procrastination: I followed this link from Glenn Fleishman's blog. (I got into weblogging as a form of structured procrastination!)

I don't understand all the fuss... Okay, so all of us who don't live in Florida felt that we were on the tail end of a national crack-the-whip being played out by the presidential election there. ....and have been living in Republican glee, Democratic rage, or, like me, feeling ostrich-ized (just wake me when it's all over). And now that one person, a senator from a tiny New England state decides to make a change in accordance with his conscience, and once again, we see a counter crack-the-national-whip and lo! the great balance of power, teetering all the while on such a narrow apex, shifts in the other direction with this change, all the vested interests sliding down in the other direction. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the American constitution at work...Now we have Republican rage, Democratic glee and a somnulent ostrich saying, "wha? huh?" Who was it last fall that kept saying, "Get over it!" ? Oh, the tragedy, the tragedy! Republicans, presidents and former presidents/fathers of current presidents, I feel your pain. But wait? What's that I hear? A memory of a little sound-bite clip from the Great American Season of Electiontide... which, in light of this, er, division in his party, is telling: "I'm a uniter, not a divider." Uh huh. [some links via dangerousmeta]

A Wit of Habeas Corpus*

WooHoo!!! With this, Radio is now useful! really and truly! Thanks, UserLand!!!!!

Go grab it! [via NetDyslexia ]

---

A Wit of Habeas Corpus* Okay. Just so you know. Al is not a figment of the imagination, a virtual entity that lives only on a weblog, email, IM, voice. He's not been pulling a hoax. He's a real person. I can vouch for him (for what *that* is worth!)

We met in Anaheim, at a little adjunct to Disneyland/California Adventure called Downtown Disney (cool restaurants, bars, shops, fountains, concrete benches with dynamically changing lights).

We plotted our own hoaxes.

(I'm bad, I'm bad.. I'm really really bad... and....Garret caught us in our hoax!)

Mwa ha ha ha haha ha!

What did we talk about? Why, Kaycee, of course! "Al, so what's her voice like? Did you talk to both of them?" "No, just to Debbie..." and the stories came out....

I gotta tell ya, if you're gonna meet a fellow blogger in person, the best time to do it is right during the aftermath of a great big hoax. Especially when one person talked with the perpetrator on the fone. It's eminently satisfying. (well, for me, I mean. Al may have his own take on it.) Life imitates art imitates life imitiates real world gossip imitates online gossip.

Oh, and what else did we talk about besides Kaycee? There's a whole category of life experience that's summed up, "I could never post *that* on my weblog!" Yeah, *that* stuff. Al's a good listener. He also spins a good yarn. Oh, the stories I heard! Oh, the stories I told. You wanna hear those stories, too? Face to face. Leave your audio surveillance equipment at home.

What is real? What is fake? What better place to debrief a hoax than in the environs of The Magic Kingdom, which has a place called Fantasyland and all the staff call themselves "Cast Members" and the rest of us are "Guests"?

For a tie-in to the California Adventure, Disney built a hotel in a pointedly California style. The Mouse Does Greene n Greene Architecture. (Greene n Greene is the California version of the Arts n Crafts movement. The Greene brothers built many houses in Pasadena. So it's kinduva local thing. Well, seeing as how Disney is local too, in Glendale, the next town over, they went for it. But I digress...)

Here's the lobby of the hotel. All the beams are out in the open, as per the style. But so many stories high! Great big lamps! wow!

Here's a cool little lounge that was something of a library. The sign above the bar says, "Nature is the source of all artistic expression" Notice the lamp above... and the shape of the patterns on it.

Here's a detail view:

Greene n Greene Does The Mouse

Oh, and this great great fireplace with riverstones set all around it. My good friend has a house constructed in this style. But here, you see the scale is all weird... or is it just that Al and I were on the Monsanto Incredible Shrinking Human ride from Tomorrowland of so long ago?

Honey, I shrunk the webloggers!!

Elsewhere in Downtown Disney: Here's looking at you, kids... with the fishies in the sea swimming over our heads.

The underwater cloak of silence is going to descend.... and we'll talk and go blug glub blub....

(great heavens! Al sez I'm 'insubstantial'! What a kick! The poet Rabbie Burns wrote, "I wish the Lord the giftie gie to see ourselves as ithers see us" ...and I got my prayer answered, in this case. But as a tall grrl who overlooks a good 80% of the grrl population, I don't think of myself as *delicate* and leaf-blow-away prone. hee!) 

*Habeus Corpus definition

The Truth Comes Out

Kaycee. All Hoax, All the Time Wow. Say it backwards. Wow. Reading MetaFilter (MeFi) Kaycee threads has been enlightening.

Randall van der Woning adds to his description of the mess.

Now there's a Kaycee FAQ and a MeFi discussion thread to talk about it.

I gotta say... I"ve been really impressed with the level of discussion over on MetaFilter through all of this.

Psych Central: Deconstructing Kaycee

Can't get enough Kaycee Hoax? Great linkage here! [via cockybastard ]

There's a Yahoo group surrounding the whole incident (relieve the pressure on MetaFilter's server). Here's one salient quote: "I knew a fictional person, and I'm a better man for it. That's an

extraordinary thing to have done."

...now it's time to get some more..um.. press for weblogging!

• Inside: Webloggers Cope With Comrade's Death, and then Her Denial.

  How do you know when a community has come of age? With its first scandal, of course. Webloggers -- those online diarists compelled to share their personal thoughts, mundane habits and favorite sites with the rest of the world -- have been shaken by the news that Kaycee Nicole, a blogger fighting leukemia who supposedly died on May 14, was a made-up character.

• MSNBC: A painful affair of the internet heart Complete with picture of the presumed Kaycee (actually is someone named Julie something). Identity theft. What's worse? Identity theft? or getting your picture plonked all over the news as a result of your identity theft? [via dangerousmeta]
  

  Saundra Mitchell, the woman whose writing helped blow the thing wide open, comments on how it was being interviewed and the resulting MSNBC coverage.

• Kuro5hin: The Life and Death of a False Warrior

• Netslaves: Kaycee Nicole Rests in Pieces

______ is not a figment. I'll even prove it to you! And... heh heh... this evening I get to prove to you that Al is not a figment... he's in SoCal and I'm gonna meet him. Camera in hand. None of this blog/IM/email/phone stuff. Nope. face to face! (of course, *I* may be a figment, but that's another matter...)

---

I think it's getting to be too much text, gotta post some pictures time again.... and on a more interesting topic. (well, this Kaycee one is pretty damn interesting to me)

I'm reading a book, An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears. Garret, you'd like it. (cover blurb compares to Eco). 17th century restoration England murder mystery told from four distinct perspectives. Suspicion and intrigue.

Say What?!?

WTF?!? MetaFilter: It's time to come clean Reality or a waaaay over the top commentary? er.. overthetop server's pummeled pummelled, geez, canchatakeajoke commentary.

..well, Google doesn't come up with anything for Andre Patel, really.

VGL, that's what I say (VGL is a TLA for Very Good Laugh. I just made it up)

Totally Brilliant! [via dangerousmeta]

Selfless Selfish Self-ish CNN: Researchers find brain area that controls 'self'

An area in the front portion of the brain's right frontal lobe appears to harbor the sense of self -- in other words, personality, beliefs, likes and dislikes, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California-San Francisco.