2021: 515 posts.
-
Jennifer Simpson, Rest In Peace
(originally posted to Facebook on December 14, 2020): Reckoning with and making sense of loss was Jennifer Simpson’s topic of choice. I read remembrances of her this morning on Facebook, not quite yet believing that it could be true that she has left the material world. In 2018 I started making short autobiographical comics and…
-
Fry’s Closing; Memories of Fry’s
Archiving text from their website for posterity. After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc. (“Fry’s” or “Company”), has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in…
-
Cybertronic Spree
THANK YOU FOR WATCHING LIVE FROM INSIDE FEATURING THE CYBERTRONIC SPREE ON DECEMBER 11, 2020 This was so fun! Loved seeing the robot-based band The Cybertronic Spree back in December. Check out this version of Barracuda:
-
Jennifer Simpson’s Pozole Recipe
Jan 27, 2010: better late than never! I have a vegan version of the soup– but the recipe is not perfected. Here goes anyway. Maybe you can experiment with it. Ingredients for the soup: a block of firm tofu, onion (chopped), a couple of carrots (chopped), garlic (1 or two cloves chopped) 2 cans of…
-
Email of the week: “Upcoming changes to FeedBurner”
Hi Joe, FeedBurner has been a part of Google for almost 14 years, and we’re making several upcoming changes to support the product’s next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared. Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure….
- 28-Jun-2021Video & Resources: Adapting Comics for Blind & Low Vision Readers
In May I attended a fascinating presentation on adapting comics for blind and low vision readers. At one time I was quite attentive to a11y issues and since I’ve made a handful of comics it was of interest. I am nowhere near to attacking this need. But the resources they emailed I felt would be…
- 29-Jun-2021The Art of Wave Riding sounds terrific
Via The Inertia: One has only to watch a swarm of bathers at any crowded beach in order to see that thousands of people are interested in the sport. Whenever a good wave for riding comes in, about half the people make an attempt to ride it, and only about one-tenth of one percent of…
- 29-Jun-2021Bodysurfing is good for you.
…and good for me, I know. In recent years, there has been a push from scientists around the world to understand the positive affect exposure to nature plays on the human psyche. In his best-selling book Blue Mind, marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols makes the case that being in and around water has therapeutic benefits…
-
A reminder about upcoming FeedBurner changes
From the shutdown mailbag: Hi Joe, As we announced earlier this year, we’re making several upcoming changes to support FeedBurner’s next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared. Now starting in mid August, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This…
-
Laugh While You Can Monkey Boy!
It’s very impressive that I can run Print Shop in a browser (with a server component, I think) in a browser: theprintshop.club
-
Beach Law!
I attended a Beach Law zoom webinar put on by the San Diego Law Library this afternoon. I learned things. Lifeguard jurisdiction goes out way farther than I realized. 3 miles! Alcohol got banned at the beach in 2008. But apparently in the years after that there were “Floatopia” get togethers – people drinking out…
-
Small shoutout; Perl and 1994 Yahoo!
Earlier this year I did a bit of research that contributed to this article about how the very first versions of Yahoo! were built: 1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo on the excellent webdevelopmenthistory.com
-
Lost Keys Mission Beach: Found 19 August 2021
Did you lose these keys in Mission Beach between lifeguard towers 11 and 12? Found with the clicker sticking out of the sand along the shoreline. #lostkeys #sandiego originally on Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CSwpn6IHLbi/ via IFTTT
- 29-Aug-2021Lee Scratch Perry, Rest in Peace
I was turned onto Dub music by the writing of William Gibson, whose spacefaring rastas lived in orbit and listened to the homemade reggae beats augmented with electronic loops and heavy slow vibes incessantly. And like so many other cultural artifacts, Lee Perry getting mentioned in a Beastie Boys song—“Sure Shot”—pushed me to seek it…
-
Dolphins at the Jetty (compiled)
I’ve learned a bit of editing with iMovie which is sort of fun.
-
Literary Journal: Chiricú Journal
In 2020, during the pandemic I submitted a comic to a journal, at the urging of my late friend Jennifer Simpson. And in 2021, I got a copy of it. I even have an academic citation. The reach of a small literary journal may be small, but as a kid whose academic achievement maxed out…
- 17-Nov-2021More Video of Ocean For Precious Few Viewers
We all are pretty much aware that YouTube is a special sort of land of trouble. It has radicalized people. It thrives on the most outlandish and incendiary videos because those are what keep us watching. All that said, I’ve made another video (the last one was of dolphins) and put it on YouTube, it’s…
- 18-Nov-2021Nuclear Exclusion Clause
I worked in a bank “note department” in my first job in a bank. I was tasked with documenting and making sure each “note” aka “mortgage” has proper insurance. I was 15 years old. In looking at reams of paperwork I remember seeing “NUCLEAR EXCLUSION CLAUSE” and as a kid in the 1980s that certainly…
-
Migrating my old static pages into my WordPress theme
For one, I updated the Colophon. For another, I updated a jillion pages under the “Words” section. These had been static pages for, uh, 20 years. And finally I’ve imported those pages into the blog. It was relatively painless to do the import, but the old static pages were pretty quixotic, so customizing their unique…
-
Music Friday Roundup
Yesterday I was talking to gRegor. gRegor is a chap I met at the end of 2019 when he was trying to get an in-person #indieweb “Homebrew Website Club” meetup going for San Diego. We had just a few before a global Pandemic. But meeting a kindred spirit is always wonderful. Two years have passed…
-
Citysuit!
In July 1999–or rather 01999 as Long Now would write it out–I designed an entry for the Viridian Couture Contest. The design brief can be read here, here are some excerpts: (((The natural question then arises: what should really wealthy, technically proficient, middle-aged people dress like? What kind of clothes will garner them the rewards…
-
Cabbage Salad (the Crawford family recipe)
Ingredients 2 heads green cabbage salt 2 thin green onions 1-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons mustard seed mayonnaise Directions chop cabbage finely, layer in Tupperware with salt chop green onions finely mix green onions, lemon juice and mustard seed thoroughly with cabbage let rest overnight add mayonnaise to mixture an hour before serving
- 22-Nov-2021Wayne White
I surely wish I’d seen Wayne White’s exhibit “Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep” — it is goofy and wonderfully made. I’m ragged but I’m right, you know. I think I’ll watch Beauty is Embarrassing a few more times before the year 2021 ends.
- 22-Nov-2021Clay Shirky is blogging again
at getrevue.co/profile/cshirky. It looks like the first time I referenced Mr. Shirky’s work was in July 2001 back when I was still using Blogger. Irritatingly, the article I mentioned “Java is Essential to the Software Ecosystem” has suffered terminal link rot on both shirky dot com and oreilly dot com. Kudos to Salon.com for preserving…
- 23-Nov-2021Today’s List of Bodysurfing Yoga Poses
DOWN DOG UP DOG PLANK FOUR-LIMBED STAFF POSE WARRIOR TWO PIGEON POSE EAGLE POSE SPLASH DOWN via seven yoga poses all bodysurfers need to know
-
Chonk Chart (2019)
Back in 2019, “chonk” was very important at my workplace. I added Becky the Racoon, of course. originally on twitter
- 24-Nov-2021Ron Cobb!
RON COBB: 1937-2020 Everyone ought to know who Ron Cobb is.
- 24-Nov-2021Quote of the day: on personal websites
Personal sites evolve in different ways, and they’re all valuable. There’s design and expression that makes whatever statements you might have at your own domain interesting; the visual sandbox. And there’s the predominantly written or photographic documentation of a life and career; the blog. And sometimes, both of those kinds of site intertwine into a…
- 26-Nov-2021Quote of the Day: from jwz:
Everything about the modern tech ecosystem is just… so… exhausting. – jwz
- 28-Nov-2021Religion!
Last week I did some work importing the Words section of my site into WordPress. I pulled all that ephemera in as pages. It was fun. I like working with WordPress. I also found a stub of an essay I never finished. The preamble on the page said: People keep asking me about my evolving…
- 30-Nov-2021Obituary: Jennifer Simpson
I don’t think I saw this obituary for Jennifer back in December 2020. It’s a lovely tribute to a person I miss a great deal. A person who encouraged me to write and gave positive feedback at every turn. A good friend to me. Talk Story Publishing founder, Jennifer Simpson, passed away unexpectedly—December 2020 Jennifer…
- 30-Nov-2021Frequently Asked Questions (2011 or earlier)
More old stuff! Deleting the former page, turning it into a blog post. Things got to change if they’re to improve! Affiliations What do you have to do with the Web Standards Project? Are you active in that group now? I wrote the first version of the Baseline Proposal / Manifesto when the WSP was…
- 30-Nov-2021Why are so many folks compelled by web3?
I think this describes it well, by Robin Rendle: The future feels like it’s already owned by Google or Facebook or some other enormous corporate interest, so I can understand that impulse to create something new like web3 because of that. Read the whole thing. I suspect people–particularly younger people–see “just websites” created by individuals…
- 01-Dec-2021Own your newsletter
People talking about newsletters today this week. I appreciated this: Set up a way for your blog to slurp your new Substack posts (i.e. on WordPress you can use an RSS aggregator plugin to pull in your Substack RSS feed) so they’re automatically archived on your own domain. That was from Have you “Moved to…
- 06-Dec-2021Adapting Comics for Blind & Low Vision Readers: Seminar Resources
Email from earlier this year. There’s a vibrant community of people talking about accessibility in comics. Reposting to my site for posterity. Thank you again for attending our March program, “Adapting Comics for Blind & Low Vision Readers”! If you want to watch again or share the program, you can do so here: Adapting Comics…
-
Extract #Hashtags from Titles and Content for WordPress
I’ve been using IFTTT since 2013 and use it to import posts from my Instagram account into artlung.com for safekeeping. One aspect of that is hashtags, which mostly I’ve imported manually and in batches over the years. Based on WordPress HashTags by Matthias Pfefferle I was able to build a small plugin to popular the…
-
Surfline Camera of Crystal Pier this morning
Very comforting!
-
Comic Con Special Edition
I’ve been attending San Diego Comic-Con since I was a kid in the 1980s. When I started going it was at the Civic Center. We stood in line to buy tickets on the morning of. At the end of each one, there was a booth set up to buy tickets for the next year’s Comic-Con….
- 10-Dec-2021Bullocks Wilshire Tea Room Sit In
At the end of 2016 I heard something vague somewhere about Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles having a Civil Rights Sit-In in their Tea Room. I’ve not been able to track down more information on it and I don’t even remember where I heard it. Bad on me.
- 10-Dec-2021Mosaic Browser, 1993! (new post from webdevelopmenthistory.com)
The histories of the web by Richard MacManus on webdevelopmenthistory dot com are wonderful. Read the latest: 1993: Mosaic Launches and the Web is Set Free
- 16-Dec-2021Oatmeal Chocolate Chips Cookies by Leah
As part of my ongoing “going through my files” efforts I found this, made by my ex, Leah. Here’s a great recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Chocolate Chip Cookies most often lack oatmeal. Oatmeal Cookies typically have only raisins to accompany them. Oatmeal Chocolate Chip is my favorite cookie combination! Ingredients 1 cup butter,…
- 20-Dec-2021Quote of the Day: Brian Eno on NFTs.
Brian Eno on NFTs & Automatism on the crypto syllabus: I’ve been approached several times to ‘make an NFT.’ So far nothing has convinced me that there is anything worth making in that arena. ‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account….
-
About Radio Garden. Thanks WNRN 91.9FM!
This is a sort of strange followup to my music roundup from November. I worked at Slacker Radio (now LiveXLive) for many years and enjoyed that service a lot. Now I use Spotify mostly. Before that I managed my iTunes music collection onto iPods over the years very carefully and deliberately, making playlists as needed….
- 21-Dec-2021Another thing to worry about! Surfer’s Ear
My sister, who loves me dearly, is now worried about me getting Surfer’s Ear, something I’d never heard of. I did used to get swimmer’s ear as a kid a fair about. I’m pretty sure it was the result of me not cleaning my ears well enough after swimming in pools or the ocean. In…
-
Remember .sig files?
I used to spend a great deal of time on mailing lists. Listservs. Majordomo lists. eGroups. Onelist. Yahoogroups. So I agonized about good formatting of my signature file. Here are some old ones! I think they’re great. Joe (ArtLung@aol.com) http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3384 http://www.earthlink.net/~artlung Joe Crawford mailto:ArtLung@earthlink.net http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/3384 http://www.earthlink.net/~artlung Joe Crawford > ArtLung = Artist + Respiratory Therapist…
-
phpStorm: URI is not registered (Settings | Languages & Frameworks | Schemas and DTDs)
So I was looking through ancient HTML files last night, as one does, and noted this peculiar error in phpStorm around the DTD of one of the files: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd”> phpStorm did not like this DOCTYPE. It reported to me: URI is not registered (Settings | Languages & Frameworks…
-
Resume View Tracker from 2010
Back in 2010 or so when I was looking for work. I wanted to track when recipients were looking at my portfolio, so I added some code to alert me whenever the page was loaded, by anyone. It seems more innocent than sinister to me now. Note how I had to alter it to filter…
-
One of the best feelings: retiring debt
This was a credit card shared in common with my ex-wife. Took a year and a half, and it feels so wonderful to be clear of it!
-
Quote of the Day is from Jeet Heer
Fabricating Consensus Why The View’s search for a palatable Republican will fail: In a polarized America, The View is trying to manufacture a reasonable conservatism that is a miniscule and an ever diminishing part of the political spectrum. They are trying to create out of thin air a conservatism that has no bearing on actual…
-
Specklefin Midshipman
I go to the beach a lot. And I post to Instagram the things I see. The waves, the sand, sometimes: sea creatures. On the morning of December 6th I came across a bunch of foodstuffs, and one unusual fish. So unusual that when the photo was shared to Facebook, my angler cousin remarked that…
- 30-Dec-2021On Atemporality
At the “end” of the year, as we are, one can’t help but think about time. Time “passes.” And we can “waste” time. But in a very real sense “time” is not a “thing” in the same way as other nouns. We are bound to our temporal space. We can “remember” prior times but we…
-
Longmont Potion Castle
Part of blogging in WordPress that’s great is that I can save drafts. This is one with just a link to wikipedia and the title Longmont Potion Castle. What did I mean? Why did I save it? To research? Longmont Potion Castle: Longmont Potion Castle (born 1972) is the pseudonym of an anonymous surrealist prank…