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Archive for December, 2007

I really Don’t Give a Damn about Jamie Spears

20 Dec

…how­ever, the news that Nickelodeon is con­sid­er­ing a show deal­ing with the sub­ject of sex and love just makes me groan.

Their absolutely ludi­crous treat­ment of the sub­ject of youth romance with the inane, point­less Naked Brothers Band alone should warn par­ents about the “value” of any­thing else Nick execs might have to say on the topic. And to make mat­ters worse, Britney seems to be in denial about the whole thing.*

As for the entire Spears family:

  1. I can’t imag­ine any­one being sur­prised by the news in the first place;
  2. What sort of a sad com­men­tary is it that the Spears are appar­ently dis­traught because they were rely­ing on Jamie to pro­vide the fam­ily with income — I mean, how hard is it to get a job at Wal-​​Mart?; and
  3. A sixteen-​​year-​​old girl is preg­nant. Under vir­tu­ally any other cir­cum­stance this would not be news; but appar­ently the topic of sex is just too del­i­cate for some par­ents to cope with. Parents who are wor­ried about talk­ing to their kids on the sub­ject might just need to do a lit­tle grow­ing up of their own first.

It appears the train wreck of the Spears fran­chise is just going to continue.

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* Though, given her ten­u­ous grip on real­ity of late, this isn’t exactly sur­pris­ing either.

 
3 Comments

Posted in You Must be F***ing Kidding

 

Postergasm I: Mars, Venus, Moon

19 Dec

I men­tioned last week that I’d assem­bled a few tabloid-​​sized posters for Yoshi’s room, in what I hope will be a suc­cess­ful attempt to instill won­der at the nature of … well, nature.

Below the fold is the first set of those posters, as JPEG pre­views with links to the PDFs (for high-​​res print­ing; these are pretty big files), in case any­one else wants them too.

There are other posters; I’ll put them up later. Enjoy!

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Posted in One Thousand Words, Yoshi

 

Inexcusable Stupidity

18 Dec

A 10-​​year old Ocala [Florida] girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. […] The stu­dent now faces a felony charge for the pos­ses­sion of a weapon on school prop­erty and the prin­ci­pal sus­pended her for ten days.

There’s no real need to read far­ther, is there?

 
4 Comments

Posted in You Must be F***ing Kidding

 

Gingerbread Boy

12 Dec

Almost some­times, almost
I can feel you there beside me, as I walk
along the aisles in the store and select pro­duce,
fruits and veg­eta­bles crisp
vibrant and bright — and there
almost, in my vision, another vibrance

unan­swered by the full gaze but almost, almost there, and I won­der how I can miss some­one
I have yet to meet.

In the car, on the drive, my palm
rests open on the seat­edge beside me
where your knee might be as I think
of what we might say as the world rolls past beneath
flash­ing and flar­ing in wild desert tans and reds and
dusky greens, and

with the the­ater seat beside me as empty I won­der if the ice bears would scare you. Or if they have already,
for you are alive now, a name, a face, a breath, held with mine in unspo­ken hope.

And if, after a day weav­ing light and dark in the depths of this sam­saric exer­cise, you
would open your hands to direct the flow of cloud and rain­bow,
the spat of rain on glass tak­ing you back to the nar­ra­tive and your eyes, dark or light
alight
as you say you want to learn music
just like August.

— the roll of time pass­ing parsed in the beat of one heart,
and yours, unknow­ably dis­tant, and the flashes past, beyond, out­side the chill glass.

Eyes closed to the twi­light empti­ness of your vacant room
made more so by the made bunk
unsul­lied, unused unwrin­kled and unex­plored,
I feel and know the mis­fire, the flashes fad­ing into dysthemia’s tarbaby pull,
the draw­ing off of day into a world of shade and autumn’s with­ered hope
— another sea­son to weather, the man­tle light but lifeless

the cease­less point­less futil­ity of wait­ing has had its effect, the course has shifted into
the chill cur­rents, and the mast has heeled over under the cold disc of the dis­tant dark.

This sea­son of such impor­tance to fam­ily, the drive that,
one year ago, brought me to this place of wait­ing
and which remains, still,
unful­filled:
Another time best shared is pass­ing, the shape of you in my life
still almost

but not yet
filled.

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1 Comment

Posted in Yoshi

 

Stranger than we Can Imagine

12 Dec

Sir Arthur Eddington said this of our cos­mos: “Not only is the uni­verse stranger than we imag­ine; it is stranger than we can imag­ine.” I was reminded today of that fact by an image I’d forgotten.

In an effort to reduce the bare­ness of the walls in Yoshi’s bed­room (as well as in an effort to lay the foun­da­tions for his ulti­mate nerdi­fi­ca­tion), I went on an image hunt, aim­ing for some good plan­e­tary graph­ics that I could turn into tabloid-​​sized posters. I googled Mars, the Moon, Venus and so on, and went look­ing for some Hubble shots as well.

I found some great art­work, includ­ing cylindrical-​​projection topo maps of Mars and Venus. This page yielded some great pics par­tic­u­larly, sug­gest­ing what Mars would have looked like if it still had water on its sur­face. Most of the con­ti­nen­tal mass would have been in the south­ern hemi­sphere, with the ocean a more or less solid body of water utterly dom­i­nat­ing the north­ern half of the planet.1

But I also came across this page from ESA, and specif­i­cally this image on that page:

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Posted in O, Pine With Me, One Thousand Words, Reality Trumps 'God', Yoshi

 

Why Macs are Better

10 Dec

…well, if you’re a graph­ics per­son. Who likes to get his work done on a sta­ble OS. That doesn’t harass you all the time with dia­log boxes like a needy, attention-​​hungry child (I printed the file! I sent your memo! I installed the pro­gram! Do you like me? Can I please be even bet­ter? Huh huh huh?). And espe­cially if you dis­like viruses, Macs are better.

Anyway, each year the hos­pi­tal does a gath­er­ing for its employ­ees called the Snowflake Ball. Last year it was at the fair­grounds, and I put together a (sigh) PowerPoint slide show recap of the year. For this year, the gath­er­ing was at a casino out­side of Laughlin, and instead of a PPT we were asked to do a DVD. The request came from the casino’s side of the event; they were set up for video play­back but a PPT pre­sen­ta­tion would have been problematic.

Fortunately Macs have iMovie built in, as well as DVD author­ing soft­ware. (I know, a lot of PCs have that too, but the Apple tools are pretty quick to pick up and have a tol­er­a­bly use­ful set of features.)

The loop part was pretty straight­for­ward, but the title sequence gave me pause. It was some­thing that really needed to be seen with atten­tion, ide­ally just once for max­i­mum impact. It was decided to use that for the pro­gram opener rather than as a bit of eye candy run­ning in the back­ground form time to time. The piece I did fol­lows the fold; it’s a 3.1 MB QuickTime video.

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Posted in General Foolishness

 

OSX ‘Leopard’ and Adobe CS2: BAD Juju

04 Dec

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time — update the work Mac to OSX 10.5 to take advan­tage of the new fea­tures, par­tic­u­larly Spaces (the vir­tual desk­top man­ager) and Time Machine, the auto­matic backup engine.

Aha, ha ha, silly me.

I use Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 to do most of my work. This includes the big three tools: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. PS is great for bitmap hack­ing; AI is a non­pareil vec­tor edi­tor, and ID is a pretty damn good page lay­out pro­gram. CS2 is one ver­sion down from CS3, the cur­rent release, but CS3 didn’t do much for adding fea­tures so much as it changed the way a lot of the tools func­tioned, mak­ing them more acces­si­ble to rel­a­tive novices.

Oh, I also use Acrobat 7 to print to PDF, because when your work is sent to press, that’s gen­er­ally the for­mat desired.

Imagine my sur­prise when, after fin­ish­ing the 10.5 upgrade, InDesign began behav­ing like it was run­ning on Windows, com­plete with ran­dom crash­ing and unpre­dictable print­ing behav­ior — by which I mean that some­times a doc­u­ment would print, and other times the exact same doc­u­ment would not print. OSX Leopard: Bad, bad kitty!

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Posted in General Foolishness