Archive for April 2009

Burning Man 2009 Honorarium Art

This list taken from the Burning Man “Jack Rabbit Speaks” mailing list,  V13:#18:04.29.09

 

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2009 HONORARIUM INSTALLATIONS

Every year Burning Man allocates a percentage of its revenue from ticket sales to funding select art projects that are collaborative, community-oriented and interactive. We do this in order to support the Burning Man art community, and to facilitate the creation of outstanding art for Black Rock City. The vast majority of art installations on the playa, however, are not funded. In 2009, a percentage of your hard-earned ticket money helped to fund the following art installations, for all Burning Man participants to enjoy.

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The Ferocious Few

On my home from work on April 1 I came across the Ferocious Few rocking hard in front of the Montgomery Street BART station. They really rock.

How to Disable Windows Search When Searching Windows Explorer

You’ve installed the fancy new Windows Desktop Search. You can find things fast and easy on your computer. You’ve got that nice little “Search Desktop” thingie next to your system tray. All is well. But there are some things Desktop Search doesn’t index. There are some things you don’t want Desktop Search to index.

The trouble is, every time you open Windows Explorer and type “ctrl-f”, Windows Search begs to search for you. Every time you have to scroll down to where it says “This folder is not indexed. To search this directory please use Search Companion or add this directory to your index via Options.” You click on “Search Companion” and all is well again.

Here is how to disable Windows Search. I found this from from John’s Adventures.

Open RegEdit (hit Start > Run then type ‘regedit’). Go to the following node:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS

Then double-click on ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ and set the value to ‘0’. Close that and you’re done, the next time you click ‘Search’ in explorer, the old, reliable search companion will appear. This applies to operating systems before Windows Vista

If you are a masochist, you can re-enable it by changing ‘ShowStartSearchBand’ back to ‘1’.

Carpet Cleaner Telemarketers Visit My House, Get Violent

Click here to read my blog entry and watch a video were the telemarketing carpet cleaners from  888-587-5482 threaten me.

Their invoice reads “Carpet Steamers | 888-587-5482”

Zero Graffiti SF

I’m at the Zero Graffiti SF “Huddle” right now, typing on my iphone.  The first hour was 60 minutes of  aggrandizement. The second hour is starting with a 10 minute speech by Fred Lacosse, SF news anchor. Unfortunately it’s 15 minutes of him “newsifying” the literature we already have. He’s a good speaker but it only took me 3 minutes to read the original document. Feh.

I went outside to take a call and saw them setting up a free food bar. I’ll stay for that.

God, he’s still talking… I think my brain is going numb.

To be more specific about that first hour… Each of maybe 6 presenters had a 5 minute speech that pretty much added up to “I’m mad as hell and I hate graffiti!”

I don’t know… What should I have expected? It’s a tough problem with no single solution.

Poo.

Update: Do none of these presenters know that the are preaching to the choir? We came to a “zero graffiti” meeting, we don’t needsdxddxszxdchdhdtzgzzgzgzg. Erk. My braen I’d goone.

Wait! “introduce a new program… The ‘street smarts program’…’ the SF arts coalition… Clarion alley…”
I’m saved!

Man, blogging WHILE the event is happening is weird. At least it saved me from total boredom. It would have been rude to play video games on my phone. Blogging seems much more innocuous, yes?

Caminantes de la Tierra: More Wonderful

This is a followup to my first post about this event.

The second amazing thing I experienced at  Caminantes de la Tierra was Israel Haros. He read a poem to the audience near the beginning of the show and followed that up with this very intense performance that I’m just going to have to experience again to fully get the gist of.

Very cool.

 

Much of Lulacruza’s music is available online on their website.

Lulacruza Caminantes de la Tierra: Wonderful

Last week I saw Lulacruza performing with several performance artists. The show was fantastic.lulacruza

One of the most notable aspects of the show was what I’m calling the “Visible Dancer”. It was performed by Diana Suarez-Vargas, a Bay Area dancer and multimedia artist.  

A dancer in a darkened theater. She started low, sliding around the stage mostly sitting down. Behind her the video screen was dark except for a few faint red wisps. As she moves around to the music  I can see that there is a small video screen on her chest. It is showing many flowing abstract images. As she becomes more animated, the purpose of the screen in her chest becomes clear, it is showing what is going on inside her… it’s a window into her heart. That might seem hokey until you actually see it. It’s amazing.

The screen behind her continued to show vague outlines until she begins dancing more and more animatedly. Eventually I can make out wispy outlines of a dancer on the screen. I realize that the screen is showing a kind of spiritual x-ray of the dancer before me.

The effect is profound. The dancer and the x-ray are not entirely in time with one another… as is appropriate for trying to capture such energy. Sometimes the dancer leads, sometimes the x-ray. Sometimes the image fades and I see other things. I think the x-ray isn’t capturing the dancer’s motion but her intention.

As she moves, the heart window changes. Sometimes looking like flowing silk, sometimes almost dark and empty, sometimes I can see flames through the window as if I’m looking through the open door of a furnace. This is very intense.

More about the show

Current WordPress Plugins 4-20-09

I’m addicted. I know. Here are the plugins currently in use on my site, running WordPress 2.7.1:

  1. Akismet (v. 2.2.3) by Matt Mullenweg.
  2. Brian’s Latest Comments (v. 1.5.10) by Brian Meidell.
  3. Brians Latest Comments widget (v. 1.0) by Carsten Albrecht.
  4. DB Cache (v. 0.6) by Dmitry Svarytsevych.
  5. DoFollow (v. 4.0) by Kimmo Suominen.
  6. Exec-PHP (v. 4.9) by Sören Weber.
  7. FLV Embed (v. 1.2.1) by Yaosan Yeo.
  8. Google XML Sitemaps (v. 3.1.2) by Arne Brachhold.
  9. Hyper Cache (v. 2.2.3) by Satollo.
  10. No Adverts for Friends (v. 0.1a) by Donncha O Caoimh.
  11. Plugins list (v. 1.0) by Davide Benini.
  12. Recent Posts (v. 1.1.3) by Nick Momrik.
  13. Related Posts (v. 2.02) by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
  14. Search Everything (v. 5) by Dan Cameron.
  15. Search Excerpt (v. 1.2 $Rev$) by Scott Yang.
  16. Site Statistics (v. 1.7) by Fauzi Mohd Darus.
  17. Smart Archives (v. 2.0) by Justin Blanton.
  18. Subscribe To Comments (v. 2.1.2) by Mark Jaquith.
  19. Twitter Tools (v. 1.6) by Alex King.
  20. Wordbook (v. 0.14.5) by Robert Tsai.
  21. WordPress.com Stats (v. 1.3.7) by Andy Skelton.
  22. WP-PageNavi (v. 2.40) by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
  23. WP FancyZoom (v. 1.1) by Stephen Granade.

Lee.org domain not for sale / I wish I had been a domain squatter

4-20-09 update: Hmm, in 4 years not a single person has gotten a lee.org forwarding address or email account. I’m not going to offer that any more. This “domain not for sale” page used to live off my website homepage. I was moved with the site reorganization.

2-3-04 update: If you’d like a forwarding address at lee.org, write to me. For $10 per year, I can rent you a receive-only “lee.org” email address. For $50/year, you can have a full webmail/POP mail account with a lee.org email address and 5 megabytes of POP mail space. I’m also thinking of offering web space… buzz me if you’re interested. I might even change the homepage so it shows off all lee.org sharers.

12-12-02 update: I won’t sell you the domain, but I will rent out email boxes on lee.org. I’ll rent out a receive-only POP/forwarding mailbox to you at a very reasonable rate. I plan on keeping lee.org forever so this could be the best way for you to get a very easy to remember email address. Email me at Lee at Lee dot oh are gee!
 

I get a lot of requests by people asking if I’d be willing to part with this domain name. I’ve grown quite attached to it. I got this domain before Internic (now “Network Solutions”) was even charging for domain names. I’ve got to say that when I got this domain, I realized that I might want to become a “domain squatter” and gobble up a few thousand domains on the off chance that someone would want to buy them from me in the future. Now (11/1999) I look back at the varied history of domain squatters and think that I did the right thing in not doing that…. I think.There’s a lot of issues behind domain squatting.

 

  • It feels immoral because you are trying to create a scarcity where no scarcity existed before. Just like DeBeers has done with diamonds (did you know that diamonds are only slightly more “precicious” than saffire except that DeBeers has total control over the world’s supply)
  • It feels immoral because you’re then going to charge someone for something they wouldn’t have had to pay for in the first place.
  • The legal battles of domains vs trademarks is a sticky, icky one. I would find my conscience on the trademark owners side.

But then again…

  • There were buckets of money to be made.
  • I remember hearing about some “big” domains selling for 100-500 thousand dollars. And it was worth it for the companies to spend that much.
  • It’s just business. (I’m not sure if that is a scary phrase in this context or not

I know that domain space is a very finite resource. There can be only one “lee.org” on the planet. I used to own several domains (6 at one point) but that number has dwindled. TJIC and I had “nitrousburningfunnycar.com” for a long while. That was a gas!

Theme Song

With great aplomb and particularity, I present to you in majesty and grace the unofficial yet highly regarded theme song for Lee!

Theme song by Tenacious D (who by the way are the greatest band on earth). And no, I don’t have any rights to the song.