Instant Massaging
March 31, 2007
What I love about having clients is the variety–one minute I’m working with an incredible photographer, the next minute I’m helping folks who are building an amazing site for aging baby boomers. Right after that I’m talking to people who probably know more about SEO (search engine optimization) than any Webdevs I’ve ever met. And then it’s on to the guys who do cartoons for a living.
That’s the good part. The not so good part is that all these guys use a different instant messaging system, and when they all get going you can’t see the screen for all the popups. Yahoo, Jabber, Microsoft, AOL–you name it, I need to talk with them in it.
On the PC, the answer’s obvious: Install a unified IM system. I figured there must be something similar on Mac–which is where I’m doing most of my communicating these days–and I was right. The one I picked is called Adium, which says it supports 16 different IM protocols, and now that I’m getting used to it, I like it a lot.
I downloaded it and installed it on Freddie Mac a few days ago. After a smooth installation I was completely lost; Adium munges all the interfaces it supports into a common one that’s just enough like–but not exactly alike–to be dangerous. I spent a lot of time wondering where everything went.
Fortunately, Adium’s also pretty customizable so it wasn’t a problem for long. It’s also more subtle than single IM tools–instead of a caption saying your correspondent is typing a response, the small “LED” for present (green), not present (red) turns into a pencil. I prefer the text, myself.
The big deal, though, is that it seamlessly consolidates all your IM correspondents in the same place, and in fact will let you group them according to category, not according to the chat system they’re using. And Adium does have some very cool elements, such as the best chat transcripts browser I’ve seen. It also allows you to consolidate contacts with multiple IM accounts, so that whether they’re coming from AIM or YIM, they still appear the same way.
It supports Growl, an event notification system that comes with all kinds of sound plug-ins and event fine-tuning. In its default form it’s chiming or pinging about every coiuple of minutes, which is annoying. (Do I really need a chime to tell me that Frank hasn’t touched his keyboard in the last 5 minutes?)
Overall, though, this is a nice soution that’s pretty much taken care of all those IM icons in my dock. I believe I’ll keep this one….
Skysquawker
March 29, 2007
Ain’t bad enough that you trust your life to funky engineering…you gotta also PAY for the privilege. Through the nose.
Developers officially opened the $40M Grand canyon skywalk this week. This horseshoe-shaped bridge to nowhere swings out 70 feet over the canyon floor. Glass-bottomed, it lets tourists see all the way the river below, more than 4,000 feet. That’s about four times higher than the Empire State Building without its antenna.
They say the skywalk can withstand the weight of 71 loaded Boeing 747s, 100mph winds from 8 directions and an 8.0 magnitude earthquake as close as 50 miles away. It can also put a large hole in your wallet.
Unless you have a high-clearance 4-wheel drive you’re willing to sacrifice–the roads are that bad–you’ll pay $10 person for a shuttle to get you over to the skywalk, which is about 14-15 miles away from the usual tourist stops. And you’ll also likely pay to park. If you’d rather not drive, you can spend about $300 (per person) to take a helicopter directly to the site.
Once you get there, $50 lets you see the skywalk. If you actually want to skywalk, that’s anywhere from $75 to $200 per person. $600 to $2,000 to walk on a bridge? Don’t think so.
Of course, we’ve never really recompensed the Hualapai Tribe, who owns it, for seriously screwing up their homes. Maybe this is a clever way to finally get some reparations.
Still, I keep looking at that chest-high glass rail separating skywalkers from gravity, and the soft, slippery socks visitors must wear to protect the glass floor…and wonder if the designers ever saw stuff scooped out of the back of a speeding pickup by wind and goofy pressure differentials…one good splat could wipe out a heck of a lot of that profit.
Roads less taken…
March 28, 2007
Came across Steve Jobs giving a speech to some graduating class about three key incidents in his life. His description of the rocky road he’s had getting from starting Apple to getting kicked out of Apple to going back to Apple (with Pixar and NeXT along the way) is worth listening to.
“Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going is that I loved what I did.”
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
I don’t always agree with (or like) Jobs, but those are words to live by.
Making color samples for pate de verre
March 24, 2007
IndieArtsDVD: Art on a disc
March 21, 2007
If you visit a well-stocked magazine rack, (I went to Powells, a fabulous glassland bookstore that’s only equaled by (maybe) Amazon in selection), you might see a DVD case sitting in with the arts and culture magazines. It’s called IndieArts: A Visual Adventure, and it’s an interesting rich media publication.
It’s a quarterly, about $17 (i.e., pricey for a magazine) and each edition features video interviews and portfolios from various visual artists. The edition I saw focused on Southern California, and offered mosaics and glass, watercolor, silver, 3D paper sculpture and dolls.
It’s the brainchild of Karen Landey and Gloria Page, and it looks like a lot of fun to put together. The video tours aren’t overly polished, which is fine. Page and Landey wisely host online versions on YouTube rather than setting up their own infrastructure.
Still, with the whole world online it seems kinda retro to put this out as a DVD and not a ‘zine. Not sure of the logic there, except that you *can* play this on the TV as well as the computer. Interesting idea, anyway.
if (backus.LT.alive) then write (*,*) ‘farewell’ endif
March 20, 2007
Dr. Backus, one of the inventors of the FORTRAN programming language, has died.
Backus, a member of the IBM braintrust that did so much for computing in the 50s and 60s, created FORTRAN (which is short for FORmula TRANslator) as one of the very early “human” program languages. In those days, it was more common to machine-code. FORTRAN used standard English words, arranged in mathematical syntax, and it was relatively easy to learn.
It wasn’t like there weren’t other languages out there, but for the time this one was pretty conversational, and that was cool. By the time I got around to learning it, though, its popularity was dying. I soon abandoned it for Pascal and C and then C++…but I doubt I would have done that if FORTRAN hadn’t made it so easy to write my first program.
I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Backus as a CSci student in college…my team was going out to do a project at a local hospital (with FORTRAN) and we timidly proffered our code. He offered a few suggestions and then said something that’s helped me through most of my career: “Never lose sight of the fact that the customer, not the computer, is the end goal.”
Farewell, Dr. Backus.
The right grade of steel
March 19, 2007
A colleague is job-hunting right now and sent ’round a really frustrated e-mail. Seems he’d found a job ad that matched his qualifications perfectly. He was so excited that instead of sending a cover letter with his resume he sent a detailed table listing all the requirements on one side and the many ways he fitted them perfectly on the other. (Can you tell that he’s an engineer? 
So after a couple of weeks he gets a polite letter saying “while your qualifications are impressive we’ve decided not to pursue…yada yada yada…”
Now ya gotta give this guy props–at this point most jobseekers would shrug and send out another 10 resumes to somebody else. But his engineer blood was up so he calls the HR guy managing the job and asks him to get the hiring manager to tell him why he wasn’t selected.
Answer comes back: no hands-on experience (which is clearly not true in his case). Again he doesn’t give up, points out the flaws in this conclusion and asks them to reconsider considering him. The response was a terse “go away, please.”
At about this point in his story it occurred to me that the only thing more soul-searing than job hunting is perhaps standing on a playground with a bunch of other kids choosing up sides for baseball. (Well, baseball was soul-searing for me because I could never remember NOT to throw the bat when I connected with the ball–regularly took out the catcher, the umpire and any stray batters warming up…so it was generally a cold day in hell before anybody would choose me.)
Come to think of it, the two situations are remarkably similar, especially for people like this guy, who carries a pretty significant measure of his self-worth around with his profession. When the job is your identity, rejections hit hard.
I told him that it wasn’t that he wasn’t perfect for the job, it was that the company’s hiring practices were less than perfect and it sounded like the manager wanted something besides what was in the job description. (Writing a job ad is an art that, alas, many managers will never master–now THERE’s an opportunity for some great software.)
Anyway, just ’cause he’s not the grade of steel these guys want doesn’t mean he’s not a superb grade of steel. I don’t think he really believed me but maybe the sympathy helped.
–sigh– Poor guy. He’s a skilled professional so he’ll find something soon. But I really feel for him.
I remember when I was first starting out in journalism–it took me a year and nearly a thousand resumes to land my first reporting job. I became a connoisseur of fine rejection letters; most were bland, impersonal things but once I received this:
“I’m sorry but we’ve hired someone else for this position. I know this must be a disappointment for you but I would like you for just a moment to stop thinking about yourself and put yourself in my shoes. Imagine how terrible I must feel right now. It’s not easy to send out a letter denying someone the means of making a living and I don’t sleep well every time I do it. So before you think badly of me, just think about how badly I’m feeling right now.”
When I finished that letter I couldn’t decide whether to apologize to him for not getting his job or slap him. Still, it could have been much worse–this guy came into the BBC for a job interview and wound up on TV by mistake. Nothing like getting “TV interview” and “job interview” mixed up.
Later–
–cynthia
Stumpbowl completed: lessons learned
March 16, 2007
So StumpBowl, my first playing around exercise in a long while, is done and I think I have managed to create the vitreous equivalent of the hooked rug. Humpftt.
Five Finger #1: Stumpbowl
March 11, 2007
Emerging 1 and keeping it real
March 7, 2007
Sometimes making the hard part easier makes other things much more difficult. These days I’m wondering if letting the glass manufacturer do all the work is really a good idea.
I think the biggest challenge of working with kilnformed glass is that you often take the final appearance of your work on faith, since the glass may change radically between cold assembly and the final firing. Sometimes colors react, sometimes textures change (as with coating-side-up irid), sometimes colors strike to new colors…and sometimes the glass simply reverts to its original color.
Obviously, an artist working in this medium must understand and make allowances for that as they’re designing a new work. I’m finding, though, that even when I’ve tested and sampled and planned, at some point the creating gets spontaneous and I go from working to plan to working solely with the visuals in front of me. The plan suddenly seems confining, I have new ideas…and I start adding colors, textures, etc.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s better than the plan. Lately, though, I’m thinking this stuff looks like circus clowns where I originally wanted cool contemplation, and I don’t like it.
The modeling medium (at least when I’m casting) has something to do with it. If you create in porcelain clay you’re working in a delicate silver monochrome and (for me at least) that influences the texture and shape. Adding color to all that grey can be an unwelcome jolt.
In other cases, though, prepackaged frits exacerbate the problem. When I was in France, we used crystal cullet for pate de verre, big honking chunks that we had to grind ourselves to make packable pate de verre powders. When you had the cullet right in front of you, it was far more difficult to envision anything but the real color while you worked. Packaged powders seem to divorce my brain from the real thing and I start designing with the color I see, not the color I know it will be. I also get tempted by the kitchen sink syndrome with all those lovely frit jars right there behind me. (I’ve got a post on my studio layout if you want to see what I’m talking about)
OK, so blaming the frit-maker is a cop-out and no way would I *ever* give up Bullseye frit for cullet I ground myself. But apparently, until I get my colorsense under control again, I need all the help I can get.
Emerging 1 (below), another Emergents, is an example. I started out intending this for deep vermillions and cool blues and it’s a largish piece, about 12×18 inches. Here’s what I’d planned to do, color-wise:
Somewhere during the modeling process I fell in love with the porcelain effect and began exploring textures.
Too much rich color will confuse all the texture going on and I kinda like the serenity of the monochrome palette. So I’m sitting here, invested mold at the ready…and as usual I’m rethinking the plan.
Maybe it’s time to pull back a bit. Maybe the joy I have working with frits and porcelains is a signal that bright, bright colors aren’t working for me. Maybe I need to get the forms right, close off the wild hues and just concentrate on getting the message across.
It’s what I’d tell clients–”too busy. let’s simplify.” It’s what I did in photography (move to black and white), and it helped immensely. Maybe it’s the way to take the next step in maturing as a glass artist.
So…I’m gonna do some five-finger exercises to get the color out of my system, and see where this takes me. Get thee behind me, frit jars!
P.S. (3/10/07): Thought I’d add a shot of the original inspiration for Emerging I as promised in my comment below. I’m obsessed with the lifecycle of tulips in my garden every spring, and pretty much the focus on my camera stops down to recording little bits and pieces of them until they’re gone. Here’s the image that started Emerging 1. You can see just how far the final model has gone…
