PopWars

I’m sitting over at Jerome’s Ignition while Igor looks at our car. It’s been making a clunking noise in the front end. This is already sounding like a Click and Clack episode. We are planning to drive to New York soon to see the Marlene Dumas show at the Modern and we are a little concerned about the thump. Igor didn’t see anything so he took it for a spin. When he got back he noticed that the lug nuts on our left front tire were loose. These guys are the best in the world. If only they had a wireless connection here.

I didn’t sleep very well last night and while I was awake I started worrying about my opening tomorrow night. Somebody was saying if I call it an “opening” that would not imply free food but if I call it an “opening reception” that would imply free food. I put “opening reception” on the post card so I stand to look like a cheapskate. I don’t really understand all the protocol of openings and what little I do understand I resist. For instance I can’t bring my own food or beverages in there because that’s their (not for profit) business. I could buy food from them and serve that for free but that’s part I don’t get.

Painting class started up again at the Creative Workshop and my father did some quick watercolor sketches from photos he took on Sunday night of Margaret Explosion on WXXI’s “OnStage”. I took this photo over his shoulder. I’m not sure that he spelled “Margaret ” right but I like the magic carpet under us.

The sun never appeared today. In fact the five day forecast, as unreliable as that is, calls for rain on Saturday and Sunday and then on Monday we’re supposed to get the remnants of Ike. So we stuck close to our computers and got sort of caught up with our 4D work. I had time to sort photos that were still on my camera and found this one of the back of the house under the brush. That trim around the windows is now dark brown and I took the newspapers off tonight. We still have window trim, the doors and the porch to do when the rain stops.

I chased a couple of deer out the garden. They were eatting the tops off our tomato plants. I clapped my hands and yelled “hey” and they ran. One of them crashed into the fence but shook it off and ran. Peggi’s helping John Gilmore with his computer. He used this near government level “FileVault” encription on his files and then his “User” folder got corrupted. We were able to recue the files from his old system and we did an erase and install. John brought a fish fry over for us from Captain Jim’s in our old neighborhood. And he gave us a cd copy of the new Brian Wilsom album from vinyl.

I like Apple’s WebKit and I heard that Google’s Chrome browser was based on it and Mozilla so I was excited to test drive it but I have to do that on my pc (or as Arpad calls it, my ‘shit pc”) because it is only available on Windows for now. Grrr

But pc people need some relief. What’s up with the wacky shoe store commercial with Bill Gates and Jerry Sienfeld? Our pc sits in the corner while we sit in front of our Mac machines. We only use it as a worst case scenario for previewing websites that we’re working on. Before I installed Chrome on the pc they wanted me to run Registry Mechanic. I did that and it found 122 problems that can’t be fixed with the free version. I have AdAware and AVG and Ad-Watch and Spyware Blaster running on the thing but no real virus protection. If it goes down, I’ll reinstall XP and a new browser. Chrome is up and running and looking pretty good. I love this browser cartoon.

Ran into Martin Edic last night. He is pretty much an expert on all things and he was telling us we should be using a roller to paint our house. Our neighbor told us that too but we like the brush. Our house is made out of concrete blocks and it was built right after WW2 so they are really cinder block and some of the surface is like moon rocks in some places.

I was wondering why I fell so out of it and the AP’s Ted Anthony laid it out. “Snowmobiles are good. NASCAR is very good. Football metaphors about God are better. “Sam’s Club Republicans” are the salt of the American earth. Hollywood, the media and academics are suspect at best, subversive at worst. Though not as bad as European ideas. And too much eloquence? That smacks of intellectualism, which smacks of elitism.”

We took a walk in the woods to clear the air and came across this message on a tree.

People who don’t host their own blogs have it easy. Blogger or Blogspot or WordPress or whoever it is that hosts the sites take care of keeping the thing up to date. I have to do it myself and I always worry that I’m going to lose the whole site during an upgrade.

Peggi installed the Akismet spam filter plugin on the Scorgies site it really works so this morning before coffee she decided to install it on Popwars. At the same time she did the WordPress Automatic Upgrade to 2.6.1. Went pretty smoothly until I tried to login to my own blog. I applied for a new password and that didn’t work. I could comment on my posts but I could not login. I pictured myself forever commenting on my Rolling Stones post. Peggi did battle and determined that the wp-login.php file apparently got corrupted.

Now, where was I?

 We hadn’t quite finished the paper this morning when the gears switched and we got into home repair mode. Could there a more boring topic for a blog entry? I had built this temporary form for the bowed concrete block sill under the windows in our kitchen and today I planned on applying concrete patch to try and restore the crisp corners that had worn away over the years. The two by fours propped up on the bottom of the ledge will serve as support for the wet concrete. This sill actually continues all the way around our concrete block house as a decorative accent. We have over hangs that are four feet wide and they shelter most of the house from the elments but this one section where the window is bumped out gets a lot of weather.

I needed more of the patch product so that meant another trip to our second home, Home Depot, and once I finish this concrete repair we will start painting. So that meant a stop at Mayer’s Hardware for Benjamin Moore paint. I tried to check their Sunday hours online but I got a Google warning, the first time I seen one of these.

“Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer! Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 08/19/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 08/19/2008.”

When we got to the store we asked,”What’s going on with your website?”. The girl behind the counter shrugged and and asked the other two workers, “Do you guys know know anything about the website?”. One of the other workers said, “I’ve never been there” They were nonplussed to say the least. But they had the New York Times at the counter so we continued where we left off while they filled our order. 

Pete and Shelley asked us to keep a look out for a used Apple laptop because their old laptop, a Powerbook 190 running System 7.5.2, was acting up. It could not hold a charge anymore and the floppy drive stopped working. We watched Craigs List for a few weeks and found a nice 1.5 GHz PowerBook at a good price. We connected the old laptop to a LaCie 1 gig SCSI drive that we borrowed from Walter Ketcham. We dragged years worth of documents (letters written in SimpleText and short books written in Quark 3.0 for a total of 29.3 meg) from the laptop to the SCSI drive.

You can’t see our PowerMacintosh G3 (we use it as a stand for our HP laser prnter) but that is where the magic happened. Luckily we had saved our old CRT monitor and a ADB mouse and keyboard so I dug them out of the basement. We hooked the SCSI drive up to the G3 and dragged the Pete and Shelley files to an external firewire drive. We had put a $10 firewire card in that machine years ago. It was kind of fun booting in System 9 and watching the SCSI drive mount and I happy we hung on to our old equipment. In fact we are still using the blue/grey 350 MHz PowerMac G4 in the upper left hand corner of this picture to collect our email. Matt from theiLife.com helped us get Leopard on it by booting it in Target mode and installing from his laptop.

The last step was a breeze. We just plugged the firewire drive into Pete and Shelley’s new used laptop and slid their files on to the new Powerbook, a major upgrade for them and a seamless transition for us. They can sit in the woods and continue and carry on their digital lifestyle until their battery runs down. And then they will have to depend on solar power to recharge it.

After finishing work at 4D we drove to my parents house to help my father trim the shrubs in their backyard. They have grown to about ten feet high and I did the job with my father’s three legged wooden ladder. On the side of it it says, “This ladder is designed for use in orchards”. I worked my way around the row of bushes and was almost done when I cut into a wasp’s nest. I got stung on my head and on my wrist and almost cut the electric cord jumping off the ladder.

We left there and headed out to Peggi’s mom’s apartment where we had dinner in our favorite restaurant, Le Petite Bistro”. As we sat down to dinner an instrumental, easy listening rendition of “And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like, I love you” was playing. But forget about making reservations here, it is open only to residents and their guests.

Peggi’s mom still gets the Wall Street Journal but barely reads it. I glance at the rabid right wing editorials  and usually find a few interesting articles. Today there was one about the guy who invented the Captcha system (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). I am really glad to know there is such a test. I get them confused all the time. Clusters of letters are distorted and presented for you to tell the computer what you see in order to prove that you are a human. Sometimes it takes me three tries to get it right so I am contributing my share of the estimated 500,000 hours a day (I had no idea there were that many hours in a day) that people spend solving these inane security clearance issues.

This guy has developed a new version, called ReCaptcha, that puts those hours to good use. Most people have used OCR software. I use this package that came with the free Canon printer/scanner/fax I got  with the last Mac we bought. Today I scanned an old article on Scorgies that Bob Martin’s father left behind when he passed away. Bob photographed the twenty five year old article and I  OCRed it rather than typing it. There were many words that looked like cartoon swearing so I had to go back to the photo to make a human call on what the word was supposed to be.

Google and other companies have been scanning printed books from the pre-computer age and they plan to put them online someday but their OCR software has the same problem as mine especially with books that are over a century old. And paying humans to make all these judgement calls is very expensive. So ReCaptcha funnels scans of the words that the software is stumbling over to the online companies that need the captcha service and it has people like us make the human call on what the word is. Others have already guessed at the same word and if a certain number of people all agree what the word is, they settle the issue. The system doesn’t sound exactly foolproof to me but I love the concept. Our security hassles will be worthwhile for future generations.

The pool temperature hit 70 degrees today and the air is supposed to be near 90 this weekend so summer has begun. One of the past presidents of the pool club told Peggi to add chlorine tablets even though the chlorine reading was above normal. He said, “I know it’s counterintuitive”. We are trying to figure this out.

I have been painting a lot in the basement, putting a push on before the last class next week. I’m ready to start spending more time outdoors. We have tomato plants, jalapeño, basil and cilantro plants in the garden. We don’t really have a garden. The deer would get it if we planted anything here. Our neighbor, Leo has an extra lot that he has put an electric fence around and he lets us use space in there.

I brought a painting into class tonight that had some wacky eyes. One was too low but expressive. The pedestrian way I painted the nose and mouth killed the expression in the eyes so the thing needs work. My teacher suggested that I look at Cubism. He said it started with Cezanne and was driven home by Picasso and Matisse. He found a reproduction of Picasso’s “Gertrude Stein” painting that perfectlyly illustrated what he was talking about. I did a little google research and found out Picasso and Stein were both influenced by Cezanne.

I’m getting the picture that I need to be more expressive. The elements of my faces have to carry more form. Thinking about this will be my summer project.

Margaret Explosion pulled off an unusual gig last night at the New York Wine & Culinary Center in Canandaigua. It was a client appreciation night for a wealth management group. Like Peggi said, “It must be tough trying to mange your wealth”. Bob and Ken set their little amps on the bench behind the drums and Peggi sat in a chair to the left. The place was beautiful and the acoustics were great. (If you click on the photo above you can get a little more detail) Before we started our host asked that we play standards. I said, “We’ll play our standards”. We made up most of the night and the crowd seemed to like it. We sold a cd and got quite a few compliments. Tonight we are back on more familiar ground at the Little Theater Cafe.

The only link I’ve had on this blog since I started this thing has been My Non-Tour Diary (my inspiration) but I’ve had a few requests to add others so I’m going about my business in the right hand column.

Spot the invasive species.

In my last post I referred to a histogram and Steve asked what it is. I’ve included Photoshop’s view of a histogram of the above photo.

Our friends and neighbors have their living room in concert mode. They like singer/songwriter stuff and they saw this guy, Eric Taylor, perform at SXSW in Austin a few years ago. They contacted him and asked if he would be interested in doing a house concert the next time he was up this way. Today is the day. Peggi was out pruning our cherry tree when he pulled into town. They priced tickets at $15 and sold out. There will be fifty people there tonight.