Category: Meta

Meta, Photography

Sunlight and Fog

Shelly

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The folks at weather.com are a bunch of liars, apparently. I woke up to bright sun sparkling on a heavy dew, with a veil of fog skirting the southern edge of the valley. It was hot already, though, so I decided to get my butt in gear and run my errands early. Not that it helped much, because by 8am the heat and humidity were already oppressive.

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Sunlight and Fog

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Southern Ridge at Sunset

As I drove home from work on Friday, the sky was overcast and there were intermittent sprinkles of rain. The cloud cover thinned as evening approached, and I was hopeful that we’d be treated to a beautiful sunset. As it turned out, the western sky didn’t produce much of interest, but the clouds above and the southern horizon glowed a lovely shade of pink.

Technical note: My web host is in the process of physically migrating to new servers. I’m scheduled for migration on the 17th, which means they could begin as early as midnight Sunday. The move will involve everything, including e-mail. I’ve had a look at the helpdesk boards and there are quite a few folks who have been experiencing migration issues. Coppermine, which I use for my image gallery, seems to be making a particular pain in the arse of itself. So, if there are outages or other problems, they will hopefully be temporary. If not, I’ll try to get them resolved as quickly as possible. In the meantime, please think lots of happy, painless migration thoughts for me.

Meta, Pets

Random cares and truant joys

Shelly
  • Via Boing Boing, there is a guy who recreates artworks by painting them in the dust on car windscreens.
  • I had my hands in bleach water for a long time on Monday, and now they’re peeling. Ugh.
  • I suddenly had to cut my hair this morning. Why on earth does that sort of urge always seem to strike at 4am?
  • Slathering your hands with lotion, then picking up a sweaty beverage, is not a good idea.
  • Also, averaging 4 hours of sleep per night is not a good idea. I feel a little bit like this.
  • Speaking of which, is Bea not the absolutely sweetest looking thing you have ever seen? I may need an insulin shot.
  • But, wait! There’s more! And more! And more! (Simone is just unbearably cute.)
  • Now, as an antidote to anyone who might be seduced by the siren song of The Terribly Cute Boxers: Meet Lilly. Lilly reminds me just a tiny, wee, itty, little bit of Harriet.
  • Speaking of Miss Brown… She just keeps getting more and more entertaining with every day that passes. She lives for car rides, so our new routine is for her to accompany me to the mailbox. We’re using it as an opportunity to work on automatic sits, waits, and whatnot. She knows this stuff already, but keeping that knowledge fine-tuned is a good idea. This entails making sure that her butt is always on the ground while I’m putting on her leash, that she always uses the same car door (rear, passenger-side), and that she doesn’t leave the gate or car without permission. She’s a funny, funny dog, so this refresher course has been a total riot for both of us.
  • It’s currently 78F and sunny, which in Indiana means we should be having tornadoes and floods by this evening.
  • Also via Boing Boing, an amazing website of lightning photography, including tips on how do your own lightning photography.

And, now, fun with Stats (a semi-regular feature):

  • nude blog? I expect the searcher was sorely disappointed at the lack of hot porn action hereabouts.
  • victorian punishment for wayward girls? Really? I don’t want to know what, exactly, they were searching for. Let’s just hope that it was scholarly research.
  • half cat half women drawings? I’m reminded of a furry freak who used to plague the dog newsgroups. He was also an amateur artist, and had a bunch of perfectly awful drawings of mating werebeasties on his website. O ick.
  • george munro moravia sutherland earl kenneth 4th halidon? Say that 10 times fast.
  • nathan dicks 1727? I’m guessing this–like the former query–must come from the Esther genealogy.
  • why would a kitten not use the litter box every time? I swear, I get searches like this all the time. Folks, take your cat to the vet! If it’s not using the litter box, it could be a serious–and very painful–medical problem. It’s far better to rule that out, then look to potential behavioral issues, than the other way around.
  • 87 files in 7 albums and 9 categories with 0 comments viewed 0 times? M’kaythen! My guess is that this was a cut-n-paste mistake. But, if so, how it got someone to my website is a mystery.
  • nick cave his son jethro? Now, I can understand Googling for Nick and Jethro. I’ve done it myself. However, the wording of the query is a little amusing.
  • jethro nick? That’s a little more to the point, but it’s gone a bit far in the other direction.
  • jethro lazenby? Now, that’s more like it.
  • psittacism? This one makes me inordinately happy.
  • civil war male wasp waist image? Sorry to disappoint, as I have no images of such.
  • the state hospital by ed kienholz? I get a lot of Kienholz queries.
  • precolumbian artifacts for sale stone heads? I also get a lot of hits returned for searches on Precolumbian art. Ironically, the essay in question is partially about why trafficking in antiquities is a Very Bad Thing. So, no, I don’t have any stone heads for sale.
  • maya penis? No, really.
  • funeral remember with with laughter as that is how i will remember you? Another fan of the original CuddlyGoth? Or, a Little House fan? Or, something else altogether?
Art, Drawings, Meta

This private thing

Shelly

My Flickr Pro account expired last month, and I neglected to renew it. Then, I got a bad case of the grumpies about it, so I stopped using it altogether. I suddenly decided this afternoon that that just would not do, so I renewed it and added a badge thingumy to my right sidebar. Ain’t it purty? I also created a smaller version of my gallery graphic and added that, too, cuz why the heck not?

Nude II
Nude, ink on paper, 24 x 18 inches

Then, since I was on a roll, and because I was suffering from an attack of OCD, I created a header graphic [1] and updated the style sheet for the main part of my website. Yeesh, was that ever a pain in the arse! I did finally manage to get something sorted out that is within the same general visual family as the blog and the gallery. I’ve checked everything in IE, Firefox, and Opera, and though there are various browser-specific quirks, everything seems to be basically functional. I don’t have Netscape (and their stupid download protocol makes it pretty much impossible for me to install it on my machine), so I can’t check that, but I’m hoping that nothing is too out of whack in that direction.

And, with that, I think I’ve enjoyed just about as much Fun with Coding as I can stand. And, I’m sure y’all are sick and tired of hearing about it, so that’s a win-win, eh?

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1. I thought long and hard about the image I picked. I nearly went with another filmstrip collage, but I just couldn’t get excited about that. The sketch I used was done in figure drawing class–a 10 or 15 minute drawing that was never finished. I hung onto it, though, because despite the fact that it’s rough, I really like it. I also like the symbolism of the nude, faceless figure. Blogging and presenting your art on-line is sort of like that. You tend to share more of yourself than is probably prudent, but no matter how transparent you are, you’re still, to some degree, an unknown quantity.

Meta

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Shelly

My apologies for the uglies, but it was suddenly time for a template change. Since I’m sick of the old template, and I can’t find one that has enough of the features I want, and I don’t feel like doing a major overhaul, I’m leaving the classic default template up for the time being. I’m likely to do some tweaking on it, unless I can find something else that will work and that strikes my fancy.

Why, oh why, can’t someone out there in template-making land cater to both my obsessive compulsive and my aesthetic needs?

Meta

Comments Policy

Shelly

FYI:

I get a huge amount of comments spam. To combat it, I have moderation turned on for first-time commenters. This means that it may take awhile for your first post to show up. I get e-mail notifications for comments, so if I’m on-line, I’m pretty quick about approvals. If I’m not on-line, though, it will take longer. Please be patient! As long as you aren’t a spammer, an misogynist shitbeard, or named Hugo, your comment will get through.

After your first comment has been moderated, all subsequent comments will go straight through automagically unless you have a dynamic IP address. If you do (and there are a few of you out there), then each comment you make will have to go through moderation. It’s an imperfect system, I know, but with hundreds of spam comments each day, the alternative does not bear thinking about.

Meta

IE Fortmatting Oddness

Shelly

Okaythen! Apparently, something about the blockquoting in the previous post caused Internet Explorer to lose its mind. It was running the left-hand margin off the edge of the column, so the initial characters of each line were cut off. I don’t use IE, so I don’t know if this has been a problem in the past, but for now, I’ve removed the offending blockquotes. That seems to have fixed the problem.

I’ll try to remember to check blockquotes in the future. It may be that I did something stupid, but in looking at the HTML, I couldn’t see anything wrong.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Template Weirdness

Shelly

My template has suddenly lost its mind.  It’s shoving the sidebar down to the bottom of the page, so if you’re looking for that info, you’ll have to scroll down.  If it doesn’t miraculously cure itself, I’ll have to go do some tweaking.  So, if at some point over the weekend you notice supreme template ugliness, fear not, it just means I’m working on it.  Because, you know, I don’t have anything better to do with my time.  Grrr.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Google-y Fun

Shelly

Gleaned from my various stats…

Animal related queries:

  • how i could write a rough draft about a cat (There are days I’m glad I’m not back in high school. Can you imagine what sort of writer’s block someone must have if they’re reduced to Googling for this?)
  • how to tell kittens apart (Apart from what? Dogs? Meatloaf? Hiking boots?)
  • Who is the voice of the gecko in the Geico commercials? (Beats me, and I have no idea why Google sent you to me.)
  • purple tongue cat dehydration (I sincerely hope they rushed the poor cat to the emergency vet, and that they were Googling as a post-visit, fact-gathering expedition, because those symptoms are seriously bad news.)
  • purple tongue pit bull (If it’s all purple, it’s not a Pit Bull. Any breed can have black or purple spots on the tongue/mouth, but only a few have solid black/purple tongues. And if it’s purple from dehydration, GET THAT DOG TO THE VET NOW.)
  • how do cats prints (I’m not even sure how to parse that.)
  • perineal urethrostomy pu surgery and cost (I get this basic query at least once a week. The surgery itself was around US$400, if I recall correctly. I mention it only because it seems to be something people go Googling for. But surely, asking one’s vet would be the most expedient and accurate way to find out what it’s going to cost you?)
  • mayan stingray piercing penis (Stingrays have ethnicity? Who knew? And, what, exactly, is a stingray piercing penis? Actually, I don’t think I want to know.)

Non-animal queries:

  • edward kienholz the cost (If you have to ask… Though, he’s on the wrong side of grass these days, so I don’t know why anyone would want to purchase him.)
  • things with three (Just any old things?)
  • why do shamans wear masks (42)
  • shape line color texture value of olmec head (Is that value in the monetary sense, or in the design sense? If the former, priceless; if the latter, they’re sculptures, so it doesn’t really apply.)
  • opposition to civil works administration cwa
  • aztec art monte alban skeletal head
  • which new deal agency hired artists to paint murals in public buildings
  • vision after the sermon iconography gauguin (Unfortunately, the paper in question was about Manao Tupapau, not Vision After the Sermon.)

Okaythen.

Letters to Esther, Meta

Letters to Esther Update

Shelly

I spent the better part of last night creating a header graphic and playing around with formats. I think I’ve finally got something that I’m reasonably happy with. I decided to go with hand coding, because I couldn’t find an automated way to get what I wanted. Yippee, more work. But, I think it’ll work out okay. For now, I’m dumping everything into a sub-directory of the mother site, but that may change at a later date. If it does, at that point, I can also re-visit the issue of content management systems that might (or might not) do what I want automagically.

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Esther Munro

Anyway, if you want to take a look at a rough conceptual draft: Letters to Esther. There are only a few letters at this point, and Home is the only nav link in the header area that goes anywhere. I’m trying to make sure that the letters themselves are legible but not huge. At this point, the thumbnails are around 10k each and the full-size images are 30-40k for half sheets and 80k for full-sheets (many of the letters were written on a folded sheet of paper that opens like a book, with two small pages and an interior centerfold page).

I also scanned some photos that were included with the letters. One set is a mass-produced group of photos of the University of Chicago’s buildings, c.1920. I’ve uploaded them to a Flickr set. The others are of the Indiana University Cosmopolitan Club’s 1923 International Banquet. One of the photos shows Esther herself. I’ve created a Flickr group for those, as well.

Letters to Esther, Meta

Content Management Systems

Shelly

I’m trying to figure out how to handle the Letters to Esther project, which has been dead in the water for several months. I just can’t get motivated to work on it, when I don’t know exactly where it’s headed. I’ve only transcribed a small fraction of the letters, but already it’s too unwieldy for a blog-type format. I knew that was only a temporary solution, but I was unprepared for how quickly it got out of hand. So, I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. What I want to do is transcribe each letter, then add it to a database, along with accompanying scans of the letter and envelope. Yes, I could do it in HTML, but it would be god-awfully tedious to code that many pages (I haven’t counted them, but there are several hundred letters). Plus, I’d like it to be easily searchable and sortable, which is beyond my coding abilities. So, third party software seems like the best bet.

My web host provides a slew of free content management systems (Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, etc.), but are any of them suitable? I need to sit down and do some research, I guess, but I’m really not looking forward to it. I suppose I could just install and test each of them one-by-one, then, if the program doesn’t meet my needs, delete the directory when I’m finished playing around. That, too, sounds like a lot of work.

Blah. I have a sneaking suspicion that any of them will work, and that they’re all pretty likely to be similar in functionality. From the descriptions on their websites, I sure as heck can’t tell why any one of them would be more appropriate to my needs than the next.

Anyway, I guess my main point is that I haven’t forgotten about Letters to Esther. I just haven’t had the time or the motivation necessary to do anything with it lately. I’ve been thinking about it, though. Hopefully, that thinking will soon turn into something more concrete. Or, um, virtual.