Hamlet enjoying the swan boat ride. #101Smiles #scenic #Florida #Orlando #LakeEola
Hamlet Goes On a Swan Boat
Swan Boat at Lake Eola in Orlando
Peddling a swan boat as a swan swims in the distance. #Orlando #LakeEola #scenic #Florida #101Smiles
The Jellyfish and the Zombie Mermaid featuring Emily Kinney
Emily Kinney of “Walking Dead” fame held a costume contest at Eddie’s Attic on Oct. 31, 2014. My friend Kathy is the jellyfish that was called up on stage to be part of the contest. Watch what happens…
Dogs are Miracles with Paws
Hamlet entered my life at three months of age shortly after I lost Sydney. In these photos, taken by the wonderfully talented Leesia Teh, (except for the one of me and Hamlet) my golden retriever/great Pyrenees mix was posing for a Red Bandanna calendar. He was just two years old at the time.
Helvetica, Objectivied and Urbanized – Movies about Design in Our Lives
These three documentaries by independent filmmaker Gary Hustwit go hand-in-hand with each other as each explores the elements of modern design in our lives.
First came the documentary Helvetica, as in Helvetica, the most common and popular type face on the planet. In fact, Helvetica is celebrating over 50 years in existence, which makes it, in typeface years, as old as hieroglyphics or cave paintings.
This film covers typography, graphic design and global visual culture to show just how much type influences our lives. If you don’t think it does, consider this article about how cursive writing may not be taught in schools anymore. But whether you’ve wondered about typefaces, or not, you can view the entire movie for rent or to buy. Rent will cost you $3.99 or buy it for $9.99.
Hustwit is also known for I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, a documentary about the band Wilco, Moog, a documentary about Robert Moog; and Drive Well, Sleep Carefully, a film about Death Cab for Cutie. He worked with SST records in the ’80s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press in the ’90s and became vice president of Salon.com in 2000, amongst many other things. I don’t think he ever sleeps.
He originally premiered Helvetica at SXSW in 2007. It has screened more than 200 times at festivals, on BBC television and on PBS in America.
The two other films that are part of this design series include Objectivied and Urbanized.
Urbanized is “about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.”
Objectivied is “about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.”
There you have it – a triumvirate of exploration into the world of design and how it shapes everything in our lives from our perception of things to our daily use of them.
Watch Helvetica
Watch Objectivied
Watch Urbanized
Portfolio of stuff and just figuring things out
I’m trying to figure out the best way to present a plethora of stuff. I’ve got so many clippings… all from print. This means I’m either going to be spending a lot of time scanning stuff in or typing things out. I would love to be able to store all this stuff – half my life, really, of articles, stories, record reviews, tidbits and blurbs – in some kind of digital format.
I’ll be looking at document management plugins or maybe directory listing plugins or maybe there’s even a clippings plugin. Hmm.
If you have any thoughts or ideas or suggestions, leave them below. This will be my next project – to hunt, conquer and implement. Sure is a far cry from hunt, gather and eat when we were all cave people.
Random picture.
Regarding all those free WordPress theme sites
As a human that builds WordPress sites for various other humans, I’m always running up against free themes that are loaded with malicious code. So, alas, thank goodness I found this post from Siobhan McKeown at WPMU.org on “Why You Should Never Search for Free WordPress Themes.” Even though the post is dated 2011, it is still a valid read that teaches you how to look for malicious code. At the end of the article, there’s a list of some sites that offer free themes. Let’s look at those sites in 2013:
ThemeShaper – This site was put together by a group of people who actually worked for Automattic developing themes for WordPress.com (Automattic is the parent “company” that created WordPress ala Matt Mullenweg). They offer a theme tutorial to help you create your own in 16 lessons starting from scratch! So, why download a freebie when you can create your own? They do offer a free theme – the _s theme, and a link to get Themmatic, a free WordPress framework, too.
My first Storify is about cats – why the heck not?
I’ve been exploring Storify for various purposes. It’s a bit cumbersome to get exactly what you want, but it is fun to play with. I can see it would have uses for aggregating content. Certain (if not all?) Patch online newspapers are using it to aggregate news around themes/keywords. Go play with it and let me know what you think.
Jeff Buckley
I had the honor of interviewing singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley in November August (thank you, Mercedes, for the correct month), 1994 at The Point in Atlanta, GA. The interview ran in “Ink 19,” originally an alternative print music magazine out of Melbourne, FL.
I sure miss Jeff”s voice, music and spirit. He was incredibly gifted, as was his dad, the late Tim Buckley. We lost Jeff in May of ’97. And what a tragic loss it was. This is a scan of the article. I need to find the original so I can embiggen it (Flickr fans will get that term…).
Photo taken backstage before the show of Jeff (left) and, I believe, Michael Grondahl backstage at The Point.
Read more to view the original interview.
Pinterest for fun, fashion and food
I’m learning more and more about Pinterest each day. I use it at work to post images that promote the college I work for. We’ve got our first student blogger, or Pinner, posting to a Tumblr account and then pinning her pics on our Pinterest page for one specific board. It’s a start. The demographics are overwhelmingly female, but that’s more than half our student population so… you never know.
But in the meantime, I’m sure having fun with my own. I found a plugin I like called Alpine PhotoTile for Pinterest, a WordPress plugin by the Alpine Press. It creates a shortcode that you place on the post or page. You can adjust the shortcode and preview it within the plugin for various layout choices, lightboxes and whether or not an image will click over to the Pinterest page or simply just load an image. I like it so much (and it’s extremely easy to use) I will check out their other plugins for Instagram and Flickr. They also make plugins for 500, Picassa, Smug Mug and Tumblr.
It’s been a long, strange journey and it all began with cats!
The Cathouse was my first foray onto the Internet highway. I created my little electronic bulletin board (bbs) using an Atari XL (later ST), basic XL and an electronic bulletin board program (the name I can’t remember).
In 1984, those of us foraging around on the newly minted electronic roads did so with all the gusto of a race car driver. If we crashed and burned, it was all good. We’d just reboot, mess with the program a bit and get everything up and running again within, well, maybe a few days. Debugging the code was always the trickiest part because part a was connected to part b which was connected to part z and that was connected to part h… you can see the headache coming, right?
Pretty much anyone could into the mix, post a few messages about how to find their board and then wait for the crowds. Every ping of the modem and blink of an LED meant someone was logging in, browsing through the message boards and seeing if there was anything worth coming back for. Early adapters of such technology skidded around looking for interesting conversations as that’s pretty much all you could do back then (beyond downloading pirated software).
From A (Show) to Ze Frank
It’s amazing how much we are bombarded during our waking moments on a minute by minute basis. Sometimes, cool stuff gets through and sticks, for however long it holds our attention. The Internet is made up of short bursts of fireworks and smoke signals – we see them go off if we’re near by.
“Life isn’t a sequence for waiting for things to be done.” – Ze Frank from “An Invocation for Beginning”
And so it was with Ze Frank, a sort of digital creative experimentalist (ah, a new title in this new age) who notes that technology without humanity (art, culture, humor, etc.) can be exceptionally arid. (Watch Frank on TED talks).
I first learned about him from a viral bit of Flash that somehow got spread around the Internet through email, message boards and forums (hey, this was BF (before Facebook)). The bit was called “How to Dance Properly” and it has entertained me countless times.
Sometime after, Ze Frank began a year long experiment utilizing video to create “The Show,” in which Frank would comment, caffeinated style, on news events of the day and feature contributions from his fans.
Frank’s ability to combine content from his fans and create mash-ups with other forms of new media has influenced so many from vloggers to digital artists.
But best to just show than tell…
