Category: What Googlebot Sees

We sat on a couch with my sister as we watched the Super Bowl. She laughed heartily at many the commercials and said she thought they were especially good this year. We see so few commercials we really have no reference point. The big budget ads featured a parade of celebrities, Beyoncé, J.Lo, Arnold and even Messi but that only cheapens the appeal for me. I like to think I still have a sense of humor but I didn’t find them funny. There was one I found really interesting though.

Called, “He Gets Us,” (there were a few in this series that ran last year) one ad grabbed my attention with a simple technique. A series of still photos. Or rather carefully crafted, staged and lit illustrations of hyper real people in role reversal parts. A policeman washing a Black man’s feet. The ad is payed for by the Hobby Lobby family and their hate group foundations. There are multiple layers of deceit in the one minute ad and then a tag line that reads, “Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.” 

The illustrations were surely created with AI and the concept was probably generated with twisted prompts. The Times ranked the ads, Best to Worst, and included this disclaimer. “Religious, political and social advocacy spots were not included so He Gets Us was not included. USA Today ranked them all and He Gets Us came in at 44. For me, this one stood out from the pack.

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I asked ChatGPT to “Write a short blog post for New Years in the style of Paul Dodd.” It came up with the heading above and this:

“As we bid farewell to the old and embrace the uncharted terrain of the new, let us channel the spirit of Paul Dodd and embark on a journey of self-discovery and growth.

In the canvas of time, each stroke of the clock paints a unique masterpiece, and the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is a symbol of renewal. Dodd’s approach to art teaches us to find beauty in the imperfections, much like the tapestry of our lives.

As the year turns, let us not just make resolutions but rather, let’s sculpt intentions. Dodd’s artistry lies in the ability to capture the essence of the moment, to freeze time with a stroke of his brush. Similarly, let us freeze our aspirations in the frame of purpose, creating a roadmap for the months ahead.

In the spirit of Paul Dodd, let’s not fear the blank canvas of the year ahead but instead, embrace it with open hearts. May we paint our stories with courage, resilience, and a touch of the extraordinary.

As the clock ticks, let the stroke of midnight be a celebration of the infinite possibilities that lie ahead. Here’s to a year of artful living, where each day is a canvas waiting to be adorned with the colors of joy, love, and purpose. Happy New Year!”

Hear, hear!

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My neighbor wears headphones when he takes the dog out. Who reads anymore? If I were you I would skip reading what I have posted below and just click the play button.

Does my voice sound funny? That’s kind of what I thought. I created a fake voice and I’m tryin’ it out. If you didn’t know better, would this fool you? I know the cadence is wrong. It is too formal and the personality is a little flat. I plan to do another take – loosen it up.

This is not a tech post by any stretch. I stumbled my way through the setup process. I read about a new feature in the latest IOS and I couldn’t wait to check it out. Apple gives you 150 sentences to read. Mundane sentences that have no relation to one another. All matter of fact like. And when you’re done you plug your device in, lock it and let it grind away. In the morning you’r’ll find a “Personal Voice” waiting for you, one that sounds an awful lot like you. But something is off.

Our friend, Pete, was using this technology back around the turn of the millennium. He created a radio show called “Ask Mr. Breakfast.” The guests who called in spoke in the default system voices. This track is on the recently released $100 invisible box set of digital downloads of twenty full length projects. A real cd is available here.

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I took the photo above yesterday. Today was just as nice.

We were heading through the park along Log Cabin Road on our way to the lake when an exceptionally clean cut man approached us. Peggi thought he might be a religious missionary. He asked if we had heard that a body was found in the park last night and we told him we had seen the headline. He asked if we minded answering just a few questions. At that point we started putting it together. His shirt read “WROC News” and he had a camera in the bag he wore around his shoulder.

He introduced himself as Alex Love and and I asked if that was real name. He said it was. “How often do you walk in the park?” “Almost everyday.””Do you think there should be a bigger police presence in the park?” “No.” “Are you afraid to walk in the park now?” “No.” He told us he had talked to woman earlier who told him she usually walked alone in the park but she brought her Rottweiler with her this morning. And then, “Do you think this is some kind of trend?” We laughed. Sure, this is the second body found in the park this year but people aren’t gonna start stabbing people because it is trendy. Here is the news clip.

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I spent most of this week, well, on and off, trying to figure out what we could do with an Apple AirTag. Our friends on the west coast sent us one of the Tim Cook doo-dads from a two pack that they had purchased. I spent some time wondering what they may have used theirs’ for, their kayak maybe or the catalytic convertor on their new used car. They told us there has been a rash of thefts from their parking lot.

I was thinking we could put it inside Peggi’s saxophone case but we’ve only had one gig in the last year. We occasionally lose the tv remote but the AirTag would look pretty stupid attached to it. It’s about the size of a thick Communion wafer. I finally decided to put it in our car’s glovebox. Maybe we’ll take the car to a Woodstock reunion and be happy to be able to find our car after the psychedelics.

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When we were young my mom had us try to be quiet between noon and three, the hours Christ is said to have hung on the cross. If he could hang up there for three hours and die for our sins the very least we could do is be quiet. Needless to say, it was an impossible task. I think of that each Good Friday. The grand bargain and impossible tasks.

We never had meat on Friday during Lent. Not that that was much of a sacrifice. But we gave up stuff, like candy, and the five weeks seemed to last forever. We are starting our fifth week in near isolation. We used leave school in the middle of the day to observe the Stations of the Cross in the church next door. I liked the solemnity of it all. The graphic depictions of the crucifixion felt very real, human. It was not all glum. My father would bring home hot crossed buns on the weekend.

And then poof! The Resurrection. That never felt right. But Lent did end. And the pandemic will too.

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I feel as though I accomplished something even though it took the best part of the day to straighten out our Apple ecosystem. I mentioned how our iTunes stream crapped out during our party. The Airport Express, sitting next to our stereo, lost its wifi connection but it still had the green light on. I only found that out the next morning when I opened Airpot Utility and saw it had no signal. I rebooted the Express and my computer and then HomePod played what it wanted while something else was coming through the stereo. I tested HomePod by asking Siri what the definition of is is and then “When was the War of 1812?” I learned that HomePod remembers commands and when we asked it to shuffle music, it will until it gets further instructions (which it lost when the Express went under). And I found out where you go to control it.

I got up the guts to turn iCloud Music Library back on in iTunes and stuff flooded onto my iPad mimi and I’m good to go. What did I learn? I’m thinking maybe I didn’t unplug the Express long enough in order for it to straighten itself out. It is good to shut everything down. It fixes things. Pete LaBonne wrote a song about it, “Shut Down,” on Glob. I’m planning on shutting down right now.

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While we were in Spain we got a message from the PopWars server that read, “Our performance monitoring system noticed that your account hit its memory limits. When you hit these limits, our system temporarily stops the related web processes, slowing performance.” Could it be because I was still using the default WordPress theme, something Google kept warning me was non-responsive? We bit the bullet and updated the php version, the theme and the plug-ins and then we moved the blog to the root folder of the site. No more www.popwars.com/blog, just www.popwars.com will do it. It was quite an undertaking.

Peggi and I spent the better part of the last five days researching templates, plug-ins and ways to tweak the code. Peggi did all the heavy lifting, using an outdated version of Dreamweaver, the hosting control panel and custom code in the child theme and additional css panel. I was afraid to touch it until now.

Everything works better than ever and it should be compliant for a few months but I’m waiting for one strange behavior to get sorted out. If you try to go to the old address (www.popwars.com/blog) you are immediately sent to a post of mine from 2014 (http://www.popwars.com/2014/05/bloggers-law/).

Is it because I have the word “blog: in the title? Why didn’t it pick other posts of mine like “Face2Face Blogging,” “Pimping My Blog,” “Takin’ Care of Blog Biz,” “Can I Comment On My Own Blog?” or “Trapped In My Blog.”

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We lay pretty low, I think, but the last five days were a whirlwind. It started last Wednesday when Pete and Shelley came into town. Pete joined us on piano at the Little Café and of course we carried on into the night after the performance. There is so much to talk about when you come out of the woods with a bottle of homemade dandelion wine. My brother and his wife came up the day Pete and Shelley left. They operate in their own time zone so even though we gained an hour we still managed to see 3AM two nights in a row. They left Sunday afternoon and we met Alice and Julio, who were visiting from Maine, an hour later.

We visited “Witness” with all three guests. The exhibition is up for another week and my brother became an integral part of the show once we connected the dots. I met Alice when I first started taking Fred Lipp’s class at the Creative Workshop. At that time she was painting luscious abstract constructions but she has moved closer to landscapes. She is one of my favorite painters and I was so pleased to learn that she was knocked out by the new charcoal drawings in the show. Her comments carry more weight than anyone else I know.

I was lucky to be at RoCo when Howard Ressel, the chief design architect of the Douglas Anthony, was there. He was drawn to the show by the postcard image, my father’s painting of the bridge. He told me he remembered someone sketching the construction and told us how the initial design was modified to include the bigger central arch, the one that shared weight from both directions of the eight lane highway. Formerly known as the Troup–Howell Bridge the triple steel arch bridge carries Interstate 490 over the Genesee River and Exchange Boulevard and is a major commuter route connecting eastern and western suburbs to downtown Rochester.

The official name of the bridge is The Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge, a mouthful. And it is commonly referred to as the Freddy-Sue Bridge but Howard Reseal refers to it as the “Douglas Anthony Bridge.” I like that. The other was irreverent to such important figures. I told Howard the “Death to the Inner Loop” chant was a lonely cry twenty years ago and today the eastern half is filled in. So I will from hereafter refer to the bridge as the Douglas Anthony Bridge. Pleas pass this along.

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We ordered a few coloring books for my mom, one on birds and one on butterflies, and we rode our bikes over there today to drop them off. I also had a computer problem to address on my dad’s machine. He watches Charlie Rose most night and he sketches the quests on his iPad with a program called SketchBook Pro and lately he has been unable to save his drawings. His iPad is out of disc space and there are maybe a hundred drawings on it that I can’t transfer to his computer because the application wigged out when it ran out of room. I kept getting a message that says I cannot sync because there is not enough free space even after I took a bunch of apps off the iPad. The Apple forums suggested I “reset” the iPad and that helped. At least the error messages now made sense. But I still couldn’t transfer or even email the drawings to my father’s computer without getting messages that the files were corrupt. It is the first generation iPad and the times come. I’m thinking of heading out to the Apple Store with him and picking up the iPad Pro and Pencil combination. It will make it a lot easier on his tech support.

We crossed Portland Avenue at an intersection, on a crosswalk and with the light but a woman turned right into us. Came right at the side of us on our bikes with her car and we swerved. No acknowledgement whatsoever. I know “close” only counts in horseshoes but I was struck by how indifferent someone can be to snuffing out another life. Don’t know if she was on a phone, texting, spaced out or what but I’m quite sure if she had taken one of us out she would have kept going as if nothing happened.

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I was on the roof, making a racket with our leaf blower. We don’t really have any leaves up there yet but plenty of sticks, acorns and moss to dislodge. I had my Home Depot earmuffs on, in my own world, trying to remember to be careful when I got near the edge when I spotted the green Google Earth car coming down our street. I was out playing horseshoes the last time a Google car visited. In fact I can be seen taking a photo of the car in the Google shots of our house. I’m hoping they got me up there in my element.

Visual Studies Workshop had their annual Pub Fair on Saturday. The auditorium was filled with book artists and self publishers. It was tempting to buy something from every table but we held off until reaching Marc Pietrzykowski’s table. Peggi bought his novel about a murder in an old age home and I sprung for a three volume set of his poetry. We ran into Anne Havens and made plans to get together and play music before she heads back to Florida. Visual Studies has such a great art book collection in their library it is upsetting to see them sell parts of it off each year but we always manage to scoop up a few things. Peggi found a book of Flannery O’Conner photos and I came home with “Ninety-Nine Drawings by Marsden Hartley.”

The writers’ readings, which should have been on the main stage, all took place upstairs. Rob Tyler read eight vignettes, each wry and crisp. They walked a funny fine line between mundane and absurd. Louise Wareham Leonard didn’t so much read as perform her Rumpus piece, “How To Date A Writer.” Her performance was hilarious and especially searing in the room full of writers. Reading entries from her new book, “52 Men,” she brought new life to the pieces and made you want to read the book all over again.

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Flickr and Tumblr dropped a vowel and their name got so much cooler. I’ve dropped two in PopWars for this post. I back up all my photos to Flickr. They give you a terabyte of space for free and I’ve been using their slideshow embed code on my home page for years but it never worked on the phone or tablet. You’d think they would be hip to all that stuff. I found this little “Flickrit” java script page that lets you link to a Flckr set and create slideshows at fixed or responsive sizes and I stuck iframe in up above. It stops at 100 photos but it even works on my first generation Touch. Update: The slideshow has stopped working.

Google’s new policy of ignoring sites that aren’t mobile friendly has tearing apart all sorts of stuff. I hardly get anything done anymore. I feel like I’m going backwards. If don’t have anything better to do for a few days drop a url in here and see what I’m talking about. Even my Tumblr signs page flunked. “Text too small to read.” “Links too close together.” “Mobile viewport not set.” Anything Else?

My Google custom search at the top of the site is not even mobile friendly. Everything needs reworking. I have all these web pages open now and will probably not come up for air for awhile.

Mobile Friendly Test
Google Webmaster Tools
Custom Search
Learn About Sitemaps
Responsive Typography With REMs
Responsive Web Design Fundamentals
Understand key points in going mobile

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“Do you have any idea why I pulled you over,” he asked as I rolled the window down. I went with, “I have no idea why you pulled me over.” He said I clocked you at forty-seven in a 30 MPH zone. The speed limit was 55 last I looked and I apparently missed the sign that dropped it to 30. It was a speed trap and he had me.

Thing is I wasn’t driving fast to get somewhere in a hurry or anything. I just spaced out. No excuse, I know. So when are these Google cars going to hit the market. I would be perfectly content to leave the driving to the robot.

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I had almost forgotten about Microsoft’s search engine until i spotted a Bing car with Colorado plates on east Main Street yesterday. The little periscope was twirling around up top so I assume it was collecting data, mapping our corner of the world.

I must say it was a lot less exiting than when the Google car came our street a few years ago. The Google car was all decked out in the corporate colors and the driver waved and smiled while I took a photo of the car. The Bing car was as low profile as you can get with all that apparatus strapped to your hood. I’m thinking these collectors have met some resistance now that the novelty has worn off and surveillance has gone too far.

I had a dream last night that there were two Bing cars and they were mapping a section of the city that overlapped somehow. They were trying to sort out the confusing data they had collected in a city they knew nothing about.

Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theater Cafe tonight. 7:30-9:30

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