Month: March 2009

Bookarts, Found Poems, Photography

Partly Finished, Partly Not

Shelly

IMG_3235

The poem is done, but the artwork is not. That’s on the schedule for tomorrow. Survivor and Lost are on tonight, so I’m going to be gorging on television starting in about five minutes.

How many would have recognized
the world in which they lived?

Their ideas molded by institutions
and the imperial cult
the groundless assertion
of their unique devotion
the progress of the gods
kingdoms and empires acquired and expanded
wars and victories without piety.

The pact
formed by criminals and murderers,
they were sacrilegious masters.

They sided with tradition —
illegal baptism
enslavement to the martyrs
agony endured and born a new —
an order
founded upon divine claims,
and some dared insist
divine right.

Letters to Esther

More Letters to Esther

Shelly

The letter from Warren is adorable. He must have been about 7 years old when he wrote it. I laughed when I read Ruth’s letter, too. She scolded Esther for being cranky. The family back home had been quarantined for scarlet fever, which included a ban on writing to Esther and Clark (it was feared that the disease could be spread via contact with the letters). I expect the lack of word from home was at least partially responsible for Esther’s mood.

March 6, 1921 from Clark
March 6, 1921 from Warren
March 6, 1921 from Mamma
March 8, 1921 from Ruth
March 9, 1921 from Mamma
March 9, 1921 from Ruth
March 13, 1921 from Ruth
March 13, 1921 from Mamma
March 15, 1921 from Ruth

Music

Musical Interlude

Shelly

Neko Case has a new album out. I bought it, but haven’t had time to listen to it yet. That will happen this weekend.

What I have been listening to a lot of is Nico Stai. I don’t know much about him, aside from the fact that he’s a wee baby, but I came across one of his songs, then checked out a couple more, and ended up buying everything of his I could get my hands on.

Uncategorized

Instant Review: Track Pad

Shelly

When I first got Cracktop, I wasn’t so happy about using a track pad with applications like Photoshop. I’ve used track pads before, but they never worked very well for me. Trying to use one in Photoshop was just a royal pain in my ass. But, I told myself that I’d use this one for awhile, to give it a thorough test drive. If I sill hated it after a couple of months, I’d get a USB mouse. Well, it’s been almost two months, and I’m finding that I rarely wish I had a mouse. In fact, I find myself wishing my work computer had a track pad.

Part of it is that my laptop’s track pad is much more customizable than other tracking devides I’ve had in the past. I’ve been able to teach it to do what I want, instead of having to train myself. It also helps that I’ve made myself take long enough to get used to it. I was really frustrated with it on several occasions (yelling at your computer is not very effective, apparently), but since I didn’t have another alternative on hand, I was forced to work through it. And now, I’m quite happy with Mr. Track Pad.

Teh enb.

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Instant Review: Universal Wish List

Shelly

Amazon now has an “Add to Wish List” button for your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. I tried it out this morning, and I give it two enthusiastic thumbs up. No more bookmarking vendors’ pages, because they don’t have a wish list option. Or hoping that the page I bookmarked will still be there when I finally get around to purchasing what I want. Or having to clean out a folder full of year-old links to God only knows what. Added bonus, Amazon gives you a space to add notes for each item, which is handy.

You can make a separate wish list at Amazon for each vendor (assuming you buy from them frequently enough to warrant it), or a single separate list for all your non-Amazon items, or you can do what I did, and just save them to your default Amazon wish list. That way, you can prioritize and inter-sort them with all your other items.

I’m not a big fan of lots of extra browser toolbar add-ons, but this one is extremely helpful to me.