PopWars

We stepped out for a walk at the exact same time as our neighbor so we walked together down the road in to the park and back through the woods. We ordered new Merrill hiking boots when got back. Been meaning to do that since we’ve both worn through the bottoms with all or construction work. We called MedVed but they were out of both of our sixes so we shopped online.

We listened to a lot of music while we worked on our project and I got a little tired of all the big musical notes that my iTunes library shows when it can’t find the cover graphic for a song so I’ve started what could be an even bigger project – tracking down graphics through Google image search. Found a good one for Lee Perry “Disco Devil.”

Ethnic Heritage Ensemble plays out at the Lovin’ Cup tonight with the great Corey Wilkes on trumpet. How great is he? He filled the trumpet slot for the Art Ensemble when Lester Bowie passed away. I took this movie of Kahil El’Zabar’s drum solo last time they played the Village Gate.

My father is planning an open house for the Super Bowl. I don’t even know who’s playing and by that I mean the half time show. I could give a hoot about the game. Last great halftime show for us was Prince’s amazing performance in the Florida rain. Prince is always making a comeback and I love his new song with the double bass drums.

Facebook is great but almost everything about it bothers me. Do I really want to reconnect with my old friends in this photo? Do I want to know their birthdays? I don’t participate much the FB scheme but I accept friends when I go there and I’m always suspicious about who FB puts in my stream. Why are they there and not others? FB keeps track of every click of course, mine and my so called friends, and they build my page around those stats. They’re dying to get more content on their pages so they can sell ads and it is only a matter of time before photo albums will be interlaced with ads. I’d rather not think about their business model all the time.

Duane Sherwood recently rescued some thirty year old footage and posted some clips on the barely maintained Personal Effects FB page. He not only designed the production, he ran the show and then edited the video footage. He’s preparing a proper YouTube release this weekend.

One of the joys of keeping a blog is sorting through the spam folder, comments from anonymous senders who hope you will post links to their illicit site. They are pretty easy to spot and read like they were written in Russian and then translated to English through Google. Here’s one from Ethelene Pimentel.

“I intended to compose you that bit of observation in order to say thank you again on your pretty opinions you’ve contributed on this page. It’s quite wonderfully open-handed of people like you to allow freely what exactly many individuals could have supplied as an e-book in order to make some money on their own, particularly considering that you could have tried it in the event you wanted. Those solutions likewise served as the great way to comprehend most people have similar zeal just like my very own to understand a good deal more on the topic of this problem. I am sure there are lots of more enjoyable occasions up front for those who look over your website.”

I’ve been squirreling away sign photos, looking for the right format to post them with for quite some time. I had a batch on the Refrigerator and I put a batch into a php/mysql database on Popwars but I got bogged down with the mechanics and then I read the article on Tumblr in Sunday’s NYT Magazine. I like the guy’s philosophy for sharing content, so much cooler than the dreaded fb.

So I set up another blog. Just what I need. I picked the simplest theme (it’s called “Simplification”), one column, no geegaws. I wanted to get the endless scrolling feature going like my nephew has on his Twitter page but I don’t think it works with my theme. I’m just getting started but I found something to eat up my spare time. With 64,000,000 blogs, I was kinda surprised no one had taken “Funky Signs“.

Occasionally I check the stats that come with my WordPress blog. I don’t care about the numbers but I find the “Search Engine Terms
(terms people used to find your blog)” very interesting. I assume these are people who are interested enough in a particular search term to drill down to the PopWars entry on that topic but I don’t really know.

Today these random visitors were looking for “Keith Richards 1973,” Marlene Dumas,” “Snake Sisters Cafe Rochester,” “buffalo ’66 christina ricci,’” “beast dance cd,” “free budweiser wednesday,” “freedom village use bankruptcy,” “Buddy Holly last photo,” “burdock vs rhubarb” and my favorite “bike in bushes.”

My neighbor, Rick, and I were out playing horseshoes when the Google car drove by this afternoon so I wound up with this “making of” shot. I’m thinking we’ll both be in the updated street view when it is released. I had thought Google tried to take these shots early in the day so as not to get so many people, cars and potential lawsuits in the “street view” but that was based on our friends, Alice and Julio, who found themselves in the current street view of their neighborhood. They were up early, walking, and didn’t even see the Google car drive by. Months later they spotted themselves on the sidewalk halfway around the block from their house.

Rick beat me two games to none today. He keeps track of these things on his calendar. I’m up for the year but it’s a long season.

I like to say “the only reason I have a blog is so I can understand the content management system well enough to do blogs or cms sites for other people.” When someone asks for a website I recommend WordPress which pretty much puts me out of business and that is use fine by me. Peggi just did a site for Heather and it’s been fun watching her populate it. Why shouldn’t everyone be able to put content on their own site through a simple browser interface. This is 2012 for cripes sake. I also like to say I have a blog to keep track of things. I’ve used to search box on this site many times in order to remember what I did when. And then there’s the ability to share things. It sure saves a lot of “what’s new” conversations.

I suppose FaceBook is enough for most people but I know a few people who’ve recently dumped their fb pages because the whole creepy over-sharingthing thing. My nephew dropped out of fb and has gone twitter crazy so I ca still keep tabs on him. He’s out in Hollywood now walking a fine line. Maybe some day I paint a portrait of him.

I found this photo in my photo library on our iPad. I’m at least three years behind in photographing my paintings. Our addresses, contacts, email and photos all sync effortlessly with our desktop machines and we use theiPad for just about everything. Everything but productivity that is. Unless you count reading, surfing, listening to music or streaming movies as a productive activity. I kind of like typing on the thing.

Who would have guessed that it would take an heroic effort to crop and scale a photo to a particular pixel dimension like 450 x200 for example? As an experiment I tried a few apps like “Crop For Free” and then bought “Photogene” for $2.99 but that didn’t let me crop and scale which is one activity in Photoshop. So I bought FilterStorm and that does the trick in two steps. I saved two versions (the cropped version you see above and the full shot but in a scaled down size for the blowup) of the original photo back to my photo library and inserted them here. When I say “here” I should say I am in the WordPress app because I can’t even reach my photo library from the WP admin panel at my site in Safari. Not sure why that is but it acts like a limited version of Safari.

So I managed to do a post from the iPad but I’m exhausted. I still haven’t plugged in the $29 Camera Connection Kit but that would allow me to reach photos on my camera from the iPad and post to this site through the WP app. I’s all pretty amazing really.
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Ken, Peggi and I played as trio version of Margaret Explosion over the weekend and Brian Peterson took this photo. It was a 50 dollar a head auction/party for the The Genesee Center For The Arts. Rick from Watkins & The Rapiers sat in with on trombone in the second set and we tore it up while Ken’s wife yelled for Stones and Neil Young covers. They had nice spread of food but we had already eaten and the small cannolis on the dessert table looked inviting but I was already paring down my food intake for my Monday morning colonoscopy.

This was second one and because they found a polyp on the run so they wanted to do another in five years. I asked my mom how many she had had and she said she’s never had one and my dad said one of his doctors recommended one but the other said he was too old it. He didn’t really like hearing that. I was dreading this whole thing but as they say, “The prep is the hardest part. Last time I had to drink a gallon of Drano. This time it was one two quarts but that pretty much shoots the day.

The sedative never completely knocked me out but it did space me out for most of the day. I was able to read the paper as soon as they were done but I was little wobbly when I stood up. We went directly from the doctor’s to SEA Restaurant on Monroe for a big bowl of Vietnamese Pho and then to the used bookstore next door. Peggi picked up a few things from the horror section and I found a four dollar book on Picasso and Matisse written by Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s exs. It was such a nice day we pretty much blew off work and headed out to the Apple store. I wanted to buy a USB Camera Connection Kit for our iPad. I want to be able to backup photos on my iPad and also work with photos when I’m out of town. My laptop feels so big and clumsy these days and it’s heavy!

My parents took us down to Nick’s for dinner last night and the conversation eventually turned to the old days. My father, who grew up on Burlington Avenue over on the west side said there were two bakeries near his house on Brooks Avenue and another around the corner on Thurston. My mom talked about the ones near her place on Rosewood Terrace and lamented how now all we have is Wegmans where everything tastes the same. I was thinking about the Vergennes Laundry, a bakery in Vermont with an artfully presented small selection of incredible breads and pastries, so good it is almost worth driving to for a loaf.

This article in this morning’s paper has researchers concluding “The more ‘friends’ people have on Facebook the more likely they are to be stressed out and anxious”, according to a new study and “the negative effects of using the site outweighed the benefits it offers in terms of staying in touch with friends and family.” I like how they put ‘friends’ in small quotes. I have no idea who most of my ‘friends’ are and if I used Facebook as more than just a lark I would probably get stressed out too.

The other tech story I found interesting was about how blogs are getting less popular as everyone moves to fb.