May 26, 2007 – red paper boat

Unforseen Consequences

May 26, 2007September 21, 2015 Shelly

One of the things I hadn’t considered, and under the circumstances it wouldn’t’ve made any difference if I had, is that all my cookies are fubarred–even after importing them from my old drive. Hrmf! This has resulted in me being locked out of my Coppermine gallery, because forgetful me can’t remember my password. I have a list of numbers + words that I rotate through, so eventually I should be able to figure the correct combination, but in the meantime, I seem to’ve hit the limit for incorrect attempts. Grrr. For some reason, I’m finding that the words “You have been banned” in big red letters are just a little bit irritating.

This whole forced upgrade experience has not been going as smoothly as I would have liked. And by “not going as smoothly,” I mean “is a galactic-sized pain in my behindermost.

Clouds at Sunset

So maybe thinking about happy little clouds will help? Because, on the bright side, I think I’ve got pretty much all of my software installed, including the 99.9% useless Adobe Photo Deluxe, whose only purpose in existing is to provide me with cheesy faux film negative borders on images.

Addendum: I figured out my Coppermine password. Whew!

Crankypantsing

Instant Review: Dial-up

May 26, 2007November 2, 2015 Shelly

In two words: It sucks. Yea, verily, doth it suck. I suspect that my ISP is throttling the throughput, because I am unable to achieve anything higher than a whopping 28.8kps. Oh, yeah, bay-BEE. So I’m crawling the internet at something significantly slower than a snail’s pace. Which is why I decided to upload photos this ayem, before work, instead of yesterday, from home.

But I’m online, and everything seems to be working just fine, with the obvious exception of no Ethernet and therefore no DSL.

Also, if you are ever in the mood for the blackest of black comedies, and you have an hour or two to kill, try calling AT&T’s tech support. If their voice response system doesn’t give you an aneurysm, being passed around to kingdom come and back should do the trick. It did not help matters that my current phone number is not the same number that they have in their system for me[1], and that my e-mail username is not the same as my network username[2]. I’ve heard of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, but in this case, I’m not convinced that the right hand knows that there is a left hand. Heck, I’m not convinced that either the right or the left have hands, period.

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[1] They are THE PHONE COMPANY, for pity’s sake, they ought to be able to get that sorted out, or at least properly cross-referenced. Sheesh!

[2] Don’t ask me how that happened, but I suspect it had something to do with Yahoo wanting me to fold my 10+ year old e-mail account into my new AT&T DSL account.[3]

[3] And then Flickr jumped on the bandwagon, and everything went kerplooie!

Photography

Jumping Spider

May 26, 2007November 2, 2015 Shelly

It’s summer time, and you know what that means: pictures of spiders and other assorted creepy crawlies! This little guy (I think it’s a male) is a fishing or nursery web spider. He was hanging out on the outer wall of my building, near the downspout. He didn’t like having his picture taken, and kept crawling around and giving me the evil eyes (eight of them!). He fidgeted so much that it was difficult to get a completely focused photo of him.

Isn’t he gross and meaty? Also, hairy.

Jumping spiders don’t use webs to catch prey. They go out and hunt for it. Their silk is used to as a sort of safety line. If they jump and miss their goal, they can climb back up and try again. Jumping spiders are fast, which is necessary for their method of catching prey. They are not particularly aggressive, and usually won’t bite unless threatened.

Art, Artist Books, Collage

Balancing Equations

May 26, 2007September 21, 2015 Shelly

It took me half the day yesterday just to get it scanned. I would insist on making books that don’t quite fit on the scanner when opened. It’s not hard to stitch the two halves of a spread together, even in my old version of Photoshop, but it’s still an added pain in the ass.

A few of these will be repeats, but I wanted to stick them all together, in order. The entire set, with large versions of the images plus a few more photos of the book itself, can be seen here.

Addendum: You can also click on each individual image to go to that image’s page, then click on that image to view it full sized (for most artwork and photos, that means 1024px wide for landscape format images or 1000px tall for portrait format images).

Front Cover