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ArtLung

Read Cat and Girl, you!

Cat and Girl for August 30

Donation Derby has been going great as well.

WIFE POWER!!!

This is the most wonderful thing I’ve read in a week.

Clowns KKKick KKK ass! – Asheville Indymedia

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

It was at this point that several observers reported seeing several Klan members heads exploding in rage and they stopped trying to explain to the clowns what they wanted.

Apparently the clowns fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the rally, they believed it was a clown rally and came in force to support their pointy hated brethren. To their dismay, despite their best jokes and stunts and pratfalls the Nazis and Klan refused to laugh, and indeed became enraged at the clowns misunderstanding and constant attempts to interpret the clowns instruction.

Email Disasters: SXSW Podcast

The incredible, appalling display or rudeness and rancor that sometimes occurs on mailing lists has a lot to do with the fact that email is incredibly easy to get wrong. The podcast “I Can’t Believe You Sent That: E-mail Disasters, Large and Small and How to Avoid Them“: ( direct mp3 link ) … is an excellent and entertaining talk that helped me understand how things go so very wrong in my own email communication and has helped me get more out of email. Email requires more work than dashing off a few words.

Email is communication. It requires the sender to communicate an in a way that the receiver can understand. It requires the receiver to participate in decoding the message, and to ask for clarifications if things are misunderstood. It requires give and take. When give and take does not occur, when assumptions get made, when pressures are brought to bear, when ego is allowed to go unchecked, you get miscommunication and escalating tensions. On a mailing list, it’s only worse. A dozen or so well-meaning hotheads misunderstanding each other soon results in the harshest of flamewars.

It saddens me when this happens on mailing lists I like, such as Web405.

My Internal Musical State

I had forgotten about last.fm, but it seems to be showing a pretty good representation of my music choices, since, *ahem* it’s always watching what I play when I’m working on stuff at home. You can see the whole list at http://www.last.fm/user/artlung

Here are the top artists overall:

1 They Might Be Giants 1,416
2 Steely Dan 1,092
3 Frank Zappa 680
4 Stew 495
5 Negro Problem 331
6 Elvis Costello & The Attractions 308
7 Ben Folds 252
8 Ben Folds Five 194
9 The Negro Problem 179
10 Feist 157
11 Beck 148
12 Randy Newman 144
13 Morrissey 118
14 Donald Fagen 115
15 Talking Heads 105
16 New Order 96
17 Mazzy Star 90
18 808 State 87
19 The Puppini Sisters 83
20 Warren Zevon 77
21 The Smiths 70
22 Lullabies 64
23 The Beach Boys 59
24 Christina Aguilera 57
24 Madness 57
26 Vince Guaraldi Trio 56
27 Tom Waits 55
28 Bob Dylan 54
28 Joy Division 54
30 Devo 50
31 Fiona Apple 48
31 Public Image Ltd. 48
33 The Beatles 47
34 Beastie Boys 46
35 Flight of Conchords 44
36 Norah Jones 43
37 Johnny Cash 41
38 Toshinobu Kubota 40
38 Kate Bush 40
40 Brian Wilson 39
40 Bryan Ferry 39
42 Roxy Music 38
43 David Byrne 37
44 Kanye West 34
45 Matthew Sweet 32
46 Liz Phair 29
46 Los Lobos 29
48 R.E.M. 28
49 Dwight Yoakam 27
49 Tree Wave 27

Outlastin’

Don’t you call this a regular jam
I’m gonna rock this land
I’m gonna take this itty bitty world by storm
And I’m just gettin warm
Just like Muhummad Ali they called him Cassius
Watch me bash this
Beat like a skull
‘Cause you know I had beef wit
Why do you riff with me
The maniac psycho
And when I pull out my jammy get ready ’cause it might go BLAAAAW
How ya like me now?
The river will not allow
You to get with, Mr. Smith, don’t riff
Listen to my gear shift
I’m blastin’
Outlastin’
Kinda like Shaft, so u could say I’m shaftin’
All English filled my mind
And I came up with a funky rhyme

(Song and Lyrics of the Morning by LL Cool J)

Ladies.

Ladies.

I like this photo a lot.

Bas in the Puzzle Box

Bas in the Puzzle Box

He’s great. This photo was sent to me by my sister.

Good night, moon.

Good night, moon.

Unfortunately, the moon was too pale to be visible in this photo. This is Santa Barbara — looking down Chapala Street toward the ocean from the corner of Chapala and West Yanolani. It’s very pretty there, but where we were there is not enough surf, just harbor.

I prefer waves. Many many terrifying waves.

Santa Barbara Buddha, $135

S B Buddha,.$135

What’s a Buddha?

In Buddhism, a buddha (Sanskrit: Awakened) is any being who has become fully awakened (enlightened), and has experienced Nirvana.

Interactive Table @ Art Center

Art Center Interactive Table

Back on August 17, my friend Chris Greazel and I attended the Graduation show at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. This fuzzy photo is of (I think I remember this right) Jeffrey Jarvis, a student at Art Center and this table is interactive. The table responds to touch and Jeff had programmed it to respond in interesting ways. I bent his ear a little and got him to talk about the technology a bit. It can respond to multiple touches but it’s not a multitouch screen, it responds to the various inputs/touches serially. His application was built in Flash/ActionScript and it did various semirandom actions when you would put a finger down. The resolution of the display is 768×768 pixels, relatively low resolution compared to Microsoft Surface I should think. Jeff was telling me that before they put the leather outer casing (making it nice to lean on) the interactions people would do were much less comfortable. Making it easy to get engaged. I mentioned that I had heard Jim Bumgardner speak about interfaces at Yahoo a few weeks ago at the Web Developer Meetup and he said that is was Jim Bumgardner who taught this class! All in all, a great evening out for my old friend and I.

More from http://www.artcenter.edu/mdp/:

Philip van Allen is teaching students to work with Interactive Multi-Touch table this summer using an Oracle, a round, multi-touch table designed originally for use in the harsh environment of the Detroit Auto Show (e.g. it does not use a camera for touch detection). The table, on loan to the MDP from George P. Johnson (GPJ) in exchange for a first-look at new concepts developed by our students, was originally designed by MDP alum Nikolai Cornell, Interactive Design & Technology Lead at GPJ, who brought in Philip van Allen and the Moto Development Group to design the technology.

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