Lee.org

I just took over administrating the QBOX Events mailing list. Laughing Squid is apparently getting out of the Mailman mailing list business.

This from the mailing list itself:

Charles Gadeken charlie@NOSPAMcellspace.org
Wed, 08 May 2002 16:51:13 -0700 (PDT)

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Welcome to the QBOX list. This list is managed by Charlie Gadeken, if you have
any questions about how you ended up on this list feel free to ask me.
charlie@NOSPAMqbox.org If you do not want to be on this mailing list please follow the
link at the bottom of this message and unsubscribe yourself. 

This is the very first mailing for this new list. Many of you were on the My Old
Burningart Presents list, some of you are just my friends, others have requested
to be on this list directly. 

On the list you will hear about Events focused on mechanical, kinetic and
electronic art in the Bay Area. I expect to send out about one or two mailings a
month. All of these posts will be related to performance events, lectures and
gallery shows that support mechanical, kinetic and electronic art in the Bay
Area. I will be sending out an announcement for a show this Sunday "Power Tool
Drag Race after Party" which will follow this message.

Thank you for listening and i look forward to seeing many of you at our upcoming
events. 

charlie gadeken
director: QBOX
http://www.qbox.org

You can subscribe to the list via qbox.org or here.

5 Stars. Up there with Deathstalker. Not quite Evil Dead, but fun. I want to see this movie played at Bad Movie Night at the Dark Room. It was just wonderful/awful. I appreciate all the good that this movie has to offer.

I just finished reading “Farewell, My Subaru” by Doug Fine.

I don’t like his writing style at all. He mixes exaggeration, humor, and supposed facts such that you can never tell what is true. He’ll be narrating about what he is doing, standing working on a project and then mention someone that has apparently been standing next to him for the last hour, only we did not know.

He throws in these stupid “facts” all over the place in pull-outs that piss me off. For example on page 139 he is talking about that toxic purple PVC cement used to join water pipes and he interjects

A Finnish Company called Uponor makes a piping material called Aquapex that “doesn’t leach toxics into your water”…

That’s wonderful except that the pipes are made with polyethylene which might be less toxic… or not. So he is implying that there is a better, safer product only he’s not using it. He doesn’t explain why.

On page 152 there is another pull-out

Farmers in Virginia are testing poultry waste as a biofuel.

Of course what he is trying to imply is that chicken crap should be used as fuel instead of oil. The trouble is, they can test all they want, until those Virgina farmers make a viable, affordable fuel, he’s not saying anything.

Like most wide-eyed, staunch liberals, he puts a lot of blame on others. He talks at great length as to how WalMart is the enemy but his reasons come down to, “Because it’s WalMart, man!” To be fair, he also talks about the long distances the products travel to market and the Chinese people employed in their manufacture. I’d say that 1-Transportation fuel is currently relatively cheap, otherwise we wouldn’t import from China. 2-All those Chinese would be out-of work if we didn’t buy their products.

I was happy to see that at the end of the book, his suggestions for a better future didn’t come down as if from a manifesto but from a heartfelt desire to do the right thing. He gave some useful, if obvious suggestions to help keep local economies local.

Farewell, My Subaru paraphrased:

Live on a farm, it’ll be an adventure. Drive a vegetable oil powered car, while I know it won’t go too far to saving the world, it’ll be an adventure. If you have the space, getting a solar powered water heater works pretty good (and it’ll be an adventure). Solar electric is expensive but works pretty good. Owning goats and chickens is an adventure. Buy local, make what you can local, you’ll be better for it.

Dave, the author of the terrific-fantastic-makes-blog-comments-possible-I’ve-donated-to Spam Karma has decided to call it quits on the project. He’s opened it up as GPL. I certainly hope that someone picks up the slack. Here is Spam Karma GPL edition.

Slightly prettier.

Google Gears helps mitigate the slowness of all the freaking modal windows they keep putting in. Note I say “helps”. Modal windows are bad for performance. This isn’t a heavyweight application, it’s just moving text around. It should be lightning fast. It used to be. :-(

There are changes to how images are uploaded but still no performance improvements. In version 2.3, it took 1 click and 1 drag to insert an image exactly how you want it, in 2.5 and 2.6, you’ve got to jump through several hoops. See here and here. And there is no word on whether Flexible Upload will be getting an update. If I were the author, I would be tired of making updates.

Annoyances:

When writing a post, the title of the post is automatically set the few seconds after you leave the Title window. That makes it a bother to change the title.

Fucking modal windows while uploading images. In version 2.3 you could upload images while writing the post, then drag the image into place. Now it’s a multi-window, multi-step process. This really pisses me off

You must scroll down to the Categories section at the end of every post. Why isn’t it on the right side of the screen where all of this new useless crap is sitting? (I just noticed that the Press This thingamajig uses the old Categories-on-the-side layout)

Feh.

Followup! Arg! The jerks broke WYSIWYG image layout.

Another Followup: In order to be WordPress 2.6 compatible, I found that my CSS stylesheet has to support alignleft, alignright, and centered. Aparently “align=right” isn’t good enough any more. So I added some image code that I borrowed from the White as Milk 1.8 theme.

Yet Another Followup: Lester Chan is correct in saying that Post Revisions in WordPress have very little utility and clutter up the database. This very post already has 16 revisions. In other words, the post you are looking at is taking up more space in the database than my previous 3 weeks of blogging combined. That is not right. (one major reason for all the revisions is that in order to view a preview of a post, you have to Save it first).

I have disabled post revisions with Lester Chan’s instructions.

To turn off this feature, add this following code to wp-config.php:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

To change the timing (in seconds) WordPress auto saves a post, add this following code to wp-config.php:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60);

You can also delete all post revisions by running this query in phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'revision';

Be sure to backup your database first before performing any queries in phpMyAdmin.

I changed the autosave to 180 seconds so it wasn’t so irritating and got rid of post revisions. Thanks Lester!

SWARM has some new stickers in the mail. Not only will they protect you from the robotic singularity that is to come, but they are really cool (and shiny, we like shiny!).

So the next time you see me or a killer^H^H^H^H^H^H beautiful spherical robot approaching, ask me for a sticker!

The folks at StickerGiant did a very nice job on them :-)

They got into our art project so much that they commented about us on their blog and gave us a batch of stickers fer free :-)

Rock on Stickergiant.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

over the Fourth of July I was in Vermont with my family. I had not spent time at the house for several years.it is very reassuring that the place is still there. It smells the same as it has for more than 30 years now. Oh my, 30 years.

The best moment I had all week was when Julia and I went on the Bromley slide. We hadn’t really planned on going on the slide, Julia has a hard time getting into new adventurous things. Riding down the longest alpine slide in America at full speed would probably not be at the top of her list… well, read on.

I was surprised that she wasn’t freaked out by the chair lift… I would be. No, that was not an issue. We went up the chair lift saying that we would just “check it out at the top”. The lift operators said that we could go on a “scenic ride”, no problem. Though frankly I was a little worried about getting back on the lift on the way back down. Well, we got to the top and just sat around for awhile. We watched some people go down but not with any intention. I suggested that we go pick flowers at the top of the mountain but she was a little uncomfortable and said “no”. After a few minutes, Julia was ready to go back down the chair lift; we started walking up toward the lift. If I were Julia walking back up toward the chair lift I would have been a little bit unnerved at all of the activity… the people getting off the lift, the people helping, the chairs spinning around. Well, in one movement she turned around and started running back down toward the slide saying that she wanted to go. I grabbed a sled and that was that!

When we got down to the bottom, she ran to the chair lift. On the second run, we went down just as fast as we dared!

I just set up the video sitemap feature of the terrific WordPress plugin FLV Embed. With it, you and search engines can now find all the videos on my site by going to http://lee.org/blog/videofeed.xml.

Enjoy

PS, I’m a frog.

Look and laugh.

And dispair a little for getting the joke

Coreyfro and I will be making a 10 minute presentation about SWARM at the Burning Man Desert Arts Preview. Our presentation will be at 9:45 p.m. They might stream the video on the Burning Man web site but I don’t have any more information about that.

Here is the schedule…

Burning Man
2008 Desert Arts Preview
Thursday, July 17th
Burning Man Headquarters
1900 3rd St. @ 16th, San Francisco, CA

Masters of Ceremonies: $teven Ra$pa and Bettie June

6:30-7:00 Wine reception

7:00-7:15 Welcome & Overview of Burning Man 2008 Theme and Artist Grants by LadyBee and Beth Scarborough

7:20-7:30 Mike Thielvoldt and Lira Filippini — Lepidodgera

7:35-7:45 Michael Emery — You Are All So Many Of Me

7:50-8:00 Gene Cooper — Heart of Burning Man

8:05-8:15 Jared Gallardo — The Amazing Jellyfish From The Year 12,000

8:20-8:30 Philip Raiser — Babylon

8:35-8:45 Dadara — Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia

8:50-9:10 Intermission

9:15-9:25 Crimson Rose — Black Rock Arts Foundation

9:30-9:40 False Profit Labs — Pyrocardium and the Hydrogen Economy

9:45-9:55 SWARM — Lee Sonko and Coreyfro

10:00-10:10 Flaming Lotus Girls — Mutopia

10:15-10:25 TuckerTeutsch — Basura Sagrada

10:30-10:40 Questions and Answers