Not!
I’ve heard that New Zealand looks very similar to the Pacific Northwest. I think someone took that too literally. Here we are, one week from summer, and we have the same weather as the Kiwis have one week before their winter.
I’m glad I have a good winter coat to enjoy this summer in!
Update: Not looking much better. Flights from Seattle to Auckland start at $2044. Hmm…
I just spent three hours surfing the net, looking at watches I couldn’t possibly afford. Let me repeat that: three hours looking at products I’ll never buy…
Well, it’s better than TV, anyway.
(Shown here, the gorgeous Langematik-Perpetual by A. Lange & Söhne. It can be yours for a mere $55,000).
Saw this pop up today on Facebook as the top books we in Seattle are reading. Intriguing when taken as a collection. A strong thread of political oppression with victorious heroes (Harry Potter), and heroes crushed by the machine (1984). Adolescent boys striking out on their own - Catcher & Potter. Apparently we are longing for supernatural activity and fixated on conspiracies as well.
In English, we say things like “the president annoys me”. Now, be honest - that’s not really true. Someone else can’t inflict annoyance upon you; you allow yourself to become annoyed in response to someone. That’s why you can choose to ignore it (though in some specific cases, it takes a lot of effort).
In German, we say “Ich ärgere mich über dem Präsident”. It’s a reflexive verb, thus, litterally translated, it means “I annoy myself about the president”.
Ain’t that the truth…
Update: Fixed the grammar… German may be cool, but it’s hard. Who ever heard of having to conjugate nouns???
I’ve succumbed to the widget fad. In the sidebar, you’ll find some last.fm widgets for your listening pleasure. These allow you to see and listen to whatever music I’ve been listening to this week. Why? Umm… because I can… Because I’ve never put a widget on this blog before… Because I keep finding great music I want to share, really. A mix of vanity & goodwill, perhaps.
Overture has an interesting tool I’ve been using for some market analysis I’m doing for a startup. You type search keywords into it and it tells you how many people searched for those keywords on Yahoo last month. It also gives you a ranked list of related searches. So, in need of a little break, I decided to type in something really general to see what it would come up with. I entered “house”:
Here’s what people are scouring the internet for using the word “house”:
We may have the internet, but some things never change…
My video camera had been sitting in it’s box for several months, so I decided that it was time to bust it out and fiddle about with time-lapse a bit. It’s just a typical morning at Casa Roberto.
Everyone lives under the probability that something really bad may happen - say, for example, a hard drive failing spectacularly. Let’s call this probability F for the first word that usually comes to mind in these situations.
I’m absolutely bouncing with unbridled delight at the release of Jessica Simpson’s song, “A Public Affair” on Yahoo! No, I haven’t suddenly become a Jessica Simpson fan. In fact, I’ve never really listened to her music. My joy at the release is Yahoo’s decision to release this song as an MP3 without DRM! Go buy yourself a copy today - only $2. (For those not in the know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management - it’s an evil technology that prevents you from listening to your music on any music player you’d like (as in the case of ipods), or renders your music collection unplayable because of some bug or crash (as happened to me), and generally treats you, the customer, like an unscrupulous, pirating criminal instead of respecting that most people are not all that bad. Guilty with no option for innocent).
Isn’t spam just wonderful??? I don’t see why people complain so much about it. It’s a treasure chest of odd names and phrases, perfect for the creative writer. Never in a million years would I have been able to dream cool names like “Pocahontas Brzezinski”, “Horatio Gillespie”, or “Dallas McKee”. Imagining what these characters are like is a delightful way to pass the time. The clever subject lines they use to subvert spam filters often turn up interesting phrases: “Tattletale mastery”, “Hobo afterlife”, “Clinging personage”, and one of my favorites, “Pharmacy insurgent”.
Spam truly is one of the great technological gifts for writers.
I spent the afternoon checking out art galleries & taking pictures downtown. On the bus ride home, an older gentleman politely asked if he could sit next to me. I let him and we got to talking, comparing Seattle to New York City (he was in town visiting his daughter). Turns out, he was the guy who auditioned Tony Bennett and produced his first few albums! How cool is that?!?
This is why it’s much more interesting to ride the bus than to drive. Cool, random stuff happens like meeting Tony Bennett’s producer, or that time when the bus driver lead everyone in the bus to sing along to “The Metro Bus” (set to the Brady Bunch theme. ‘cmon, sing along: “The Metro Bus. The Metro Bus. That’s the way, we all rode the Metro Bus”). You just don’t get that sort of thing in your car…
It’s that time of year when I get stuck doing a bunch of accounting. A time to start working on taxes; a time to figure out the budget. According to the numbers, I need to get me a wife:
Midway through our second day of hanging around the courthouse, the http://www.artisticwhim.com/blog/archives/2006/01/jury_duty.html returned to the PA and let us all go home. People screamed and shouted with glee. No, really. They jumped up and shouted, “hooray!” then made a beeline for the door. They were kids given a free recess. That fits perfectly with the way one of my fellow potential-jurist’s described the last few days: “it’s like detention for adults”. For me, this my sixth call to jury duty without being assigned a case. Twelve days of my life spent being a captive of the jury system. It gave me a lot of time time to ponder: how do they pick people for this tour of duty?
I love jury duty! I’m here in the King County Regional Justice Center (sounds better than “courthouse”, no? I’m sure they did a focus group on it) with my fellow citizens awaiting jury selection. We’re a bit like cattle, really: each of us sports a barcoded tag; we’re packed in a room just tightly enough to avoid a stampede, quietly mooing in the polite conversation of strangers, and we’re given pacifying food in the form of movies and free wireless (700kb both ways by my measure - not bad for local government. I’m beaming with civic pride).
I just looked at my web stats for the first time in a while and noticed that I had just over 1000 unique visitors last month! Welcome, everyone!
And you’re not just in the US: The top 5 countries visiting this site (other than US) are: Canada, UK, Iceland (!?!), Sweden, and Australia. I’d love to hear from you all.
Thank you everyone for stopping by and visiting my little internet shack. Comments and feedback from you is always welcome. Feel free to send me a note or comment here on the blog.
It’s a gloomy, rainy day. One of those days that makes me just want to stay inside and curl up with a mug of hot chocolate and a good book. Mmmmm… Except I’m out of milk and chocolate. I wonder if I can make it to my favorite coffee shop (Zoka) without getting wet. Probably not. You’d think that a dozen years of Seattle would’ve gotten me used to a bit of grey precipitation. Guess I just got spoiled by the 80 degree christmas in LA this year…
I’ve been a typeface-geek since the mid-80s when I’d wait for an hour for my dot-matrix epson to grind out a page of my homework in Palatino instead of it’s dotty default type. My favorite obsession is ligatures - those clever typesetting tricks that keep the f out of the i and give us interesting abbreviation characters like &. (see the Wikipedia entry for more info)
The crowd over at Typophile has been creating new ligatures for popular net acronyms like WTF, RTFM, LOL, et cetera. (ligature of WTF shown by Mark Simonson)
People’s response to my pictures always surprises me. Sometimes, I’ll take a picture that just blows me a way, but nobody else will get it. Other times, some image I’d pass over is adored by everyone who sees it. Here on the internet, things are even wackier.
I’ve been snooping around my server logs to see what poeple find interesting. Last month, this picture from my Tuileries portfolio hot. No less than five blogs featured this photo as their background image (1 2 3 4 5). The bloggers were almost all teens or early 20-somethings, ranging in location from New York and New Jersey, to way out west in Bakersfield.
Inspired by this fine upside-down christmas tree:
“Wha?”
“Dese christmas tree stands. Da schmucks put ceiling fan mounts on ‘em insteadda feet for da floor.”
“Christ! If it ain’t one ting it’s annotha.”
“I told youse we shoulda got ‘em from my cousin Melvin.”
“Your cousin Melvin is the only guy I know who coulda screwed dis up worse.”
“So, what are we gonna do?”
“We sell ‘em anyway. “
“Wha? They gonna hang their trees from da ceiling?”
“Bingo. We tell ‘em it’s tradition. Victorian or somethin.”
“Hey, dats good boss.”
“Den, we sells ‘em for twice what we woulda - ‘cause now they’re special, see.”
“Good tinkin. I’ma get da boys to change da prices…”
[nevermind that probably nobody at Hammacher Schlemmer talks like this…]
Holy crap! My blog turned one year old and I didn’t even get it a present. I’ll have to give it a software upgrade or something. Hmm… Just what do you get a one year old pile of metadata???
Just spent a week in New York City doing some photography for my friend Per’s new movie, Stanley Cuba. NYC is huge! I felt like I was on a hiking expedition through some concrete mountain range. Even using the subway as much as possible, I was so exhausted that I collapsed into a deep sleep as soon as I got back to my room.
I’ve always been the introspective type. Even as a kid, I’d spend time brooding over what life was all about and what role I wanted to have in it. At the tender young age of 10, I reached my first conclusion: the perfect age to be in life is 7 or 70.
No drips. No sparks. No light leaks. The Last Darkroom in America is finally open for business.
Ever notice that any home project takes at least three visits to Home Depot to get done? Three. Per day. No matter how much you plan, you will end up finding one more thing you need, or the part you bought isn’t right, or that you really did want the high power model after all. Your return is inevitable. Predestined. Personally, I think they put something in the ventilation system…
Just got back from seeing Star Wars Episode III. Yes, it was a bit hokey at parts, half the dialog wasn’t believably motivated, and the acting varied dramatically from shot to shot within a scene, but I still enjoyed it. I got caught up in the struggle, as well as the suspense to see which path Lucas would take to the end we all knew. Still, noticing how I feel after the movie, the thing that moved me the most was that it’s over.
My new favorite toy is a small parasail kite I’ve named Marcel. He’s a little kite that rolls up to about the size of a coke-can and fits in the satchel I carry everywhere. I don’t know why I named him Marcel, nor why I might think it’s male, but I do know that it’s a whole lot of fun.
I’m slowly learning these new-fangled stylesheet and template things and in the process have made some slight visual changes on this site. Please let me know what you think. In addition, I’ve created something the Recommended Reading list - a list of books, sites and other stuff that I think would be interesting to creative people. I’ve added a few items to the list and will add more over time.
This was never intended to be a political blog (though, I may wax political from time to time).
So, take a breather from the election aftermath and play bubbles.
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