A Picture Share!

Our attempt at making sushi.

An Album Share!

Juliana and Tracey @ Aunt Shellys house

A Picture Share!

Ava and tracey

A Picture Share!

Driving to milwaukee

A Picture Share!

Juliana rock star

Juliana Art Star

Juliana Art Star


Originally uploaded by plural.

monkeys make for fun parties

You know it is a fun party when there is a monkey involved.

First flickr post

thanksgiving


Originally uploaded by plural.

just testing out flickr. Tracey already posted this picture, but it was the one I had on my desktop. :)



So far flickr is very nice. Since flash works great on linux, i am not bothered by the plugin. Too bad the shockwave plugin sucks still.



Anyway, i need to investigate more of the services that flickr offers. Very nice from what i have seen.

MTRecentImages honors text formatting plugins

After doing a little bit of digging, I found out how to get the formatted version of an entry (rather than the raw version that I was previously using). What this means is that you can use MTRecentImages regardless of what kind of text formatting you wish to use. I am partial to MarkDown, so I am happy about this fix.

There are no syntax or usage changes with this release, only increased functionality. I have also verified that the plugin works with Movable Type 3.0 and higher.

As always, you may download the newest version at the plugin's home page or via the RecentImages page at mt-plugins.org.

travis morrison videos

i left the sound in these videos either to be a jerk or a purist. it is your call.

Aside from the sound sucking hard, the videos are pretty funny to watch. They certainly can't replace seeing travis act like this on stage, but they are a hoot (even in slow motion!).

So, mute your speakers and enjoy!

Travis Morrison #1 (3MB quicktime video)
Travis Morrison #2 (4MB quicktime video)
Travis Morrison #3 (4MB quicktime video)

travis morrison @ the onopa brewery

This is a couple of weeks old, but i did manage to snap a couple of good pics when Bill, Nate and I went to see Travis Morrison play with Greg Steffke's band, Chariots Race at the Onopa Brewery. The show was great. The sound at Onopa was much better than at the Cactus Club (although there was no J. Robbins this night. ). I have a little video clip to post, too, but I need to strip out the sound. My camera records awful sound.
The opportunity to hear Greg's band with better sound was a huge help. They were just in the studio and will have a CD coming out soon.
After Chariots Race, the Firebird Band took the stage, and bored me nearly to tears. Not because the music was bad (it was pretty good), but the stage show was: one guy way too animated for the tempo and one girl and one other guy moving about as fast as the tempo (very slowly). They played the kind of music i like to listen to, but didn't provide a show i wanted to watch.
When Travis and his band took the stage, the crowd gathered around and started moving during the first song. Travis is a crazy animated performer. When he gets going he dances like a Baptist preacher, with the hand shaking and over the top facial expressions. His keyboard player, Kristen Forbes was a good match for him. She kept up a crazed cheerleader routine throughout most of the show. Definitely a good stage performance. This capped the show off nicely and we left in high spirits.
This was a really great night. We ended up very drunk, playing Donkey Konga until the wee hours of the morning, and when I dropped Bill off at work, I picked up my iBook. :)

Trying to answer the eternal question...

can a clumsy man and his four-year old daughter make a boat seaworthy enough for the pond out back? The verdict? I will let Juliana tell you...

Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Here are my notes from the interview that Neil Gaiman did with Gene Wolfe. These are pretty much my straight notes, so don't expect something wonderfully structured.

The interview was incredibly amusing and gave me a very good feel for Wolfe as a writer, if not for his work. I will be checking some out from the Bartlett Public Library, or borrowing some from Ed if all goes well.

Nov 10, 2004
Gene Wolfe: Master of Time
The event was held at the student center at DePaul University in Lincoln Park, in Chicago. When I arrive, the place has more activity for the bookstore, coffee shop and religious group meeting than for the scheduled event. The mix in the line of about 50 people is split pretty evenly between young college students/slightly hip nerds, and an older crowd.
Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman were introduced by Jessa from Bookslut (which i will be checking out just for the name alone).
Wolfe has a very walrus-like mustache and a voice like that of the Sicilian from the Princess Bride. He jokes that he only writes books to justify the book purchases he makes to his wife. Research, of course.
Gaiman's voice is an interesting counterpoint to Wolfe. When he speaks, it is like a smooth wisp of smoke rolling lazily towards you. Wolfe's speech is much more animated and sharp.
Right away, Wolfe is asked what makes his work different. He replies that for his most recent work, he tried to write from the period perspective, not from the perspective of the 20th century fantasy works that depict the period (roughly 12th century).
Gaiman jokes that during a speech at MIT, when he was talking about a line from his collaboration with Wolfe, A Walking Tour of the Shambles that refers to the nonexistant www.preserveusfromthehouseofclocks.com, someone registered the domain on the auditorium's wifi connection.
Prodding Wolfe to get back to his writing history, we are told that Wolfe's first sold story was "The Dead Man," which ran in a skin magazine filled with topless showgirls.
Another early story, "Trip Trap", was written as two perspectives on the same story in two parallel columns. His editor, Damon Knight (sp?), gave it back to him with the instruction to combine it into a single story and contained suggestions on where to make the transitions. He was not keen on the advice, but could not outdo the suggested edits. Wolfe says that he learned a ton from his early experiences in being edited, both by the literary journal editor at Texas A&M and Damon Knight.
An anecdote about his correspondence with James Tiptree Jr (actually an elderly woman named Alice ?).
Neil Gaiman: "You are writing for a reader who is willing to work."
Describing the novel "Peace," Gaiman said that on first read it seemed like a bucolic, pastoral sequence of memories, but that on re-reading nearly 5 years later, it was very scary, filled with murders and horrors.
Gene Wolfe: "I practice the club sandwich style of writing."
Look up R.A. Lafferty.
Both writers share stories of dogmatic word replacement gone wrong. For Wolfe, who edited Plant Engineering for 11 years, they had a rule that the word "Factory" could not be used, as it was the name of their competitor's magazine. This lead to an issue being printed with the word "satisplant" instead of "satisfactory" due to an overzealous publisher.
Gaiman talked about the american galleys for Neverwhere which had undergone a global search and replace to change "flat" to "apartment." This lead to characters speaking "apartmently."
Wolfe asked Gaiman to describe how he got into writing and Gaiman told us how he actually wrote 2 nonfiction books while working as a journalist. The first was a collection of quotations from scifi and fantasy works and the second was a biography on Duran Duran. The publisher (Proteus - crooks, we were assured) offered him the choice of a Def Leppard, Barry Manilow or Duran Duran bio. He chose Duran Duran, spent three months writing it and never saw a dime as the publisher went into involuntary bankruptcy.

busy busy boy

so. a recap is in order, but will not be forthcoming. I have a half dozen posts queued up that will be trickling out in the next coupla days. They will not be terribly comprehensive, but should have some fun stuff, including video of the, umm, enthusiastic Travis Morrison live. :)

In the meantime, i am sitting in a coffee shop in Lincoln Park waiting to head over to the DePaul University student center to see Neil Gaiman interview Gene Wolfe and then to read from his upcoming work. Very exciting. :) If they have wifi at the spot i will take notes here. If not, i will post my notes this evening.

Yay fun!

Here W comes to save the day!!!

My buddy Dave Scott just finished up a really funny animation of George W. Bush and his crew singing an old cartoon theme song. Great stuff. :)




You can snag Quicktime files of the video right here:
NOTE: I have used 80GB of bandwidth for this so far, so let's spread the love. If anyone wants to host a mirror of this file, leave me a comment or email me and let me know. Otherwise, please use the excellent BitTorrent to snag the clips. And thanks to everyone who has seen the video so far and passed it along!!!


Medium Quicktime File (~6MB) via BitTorrent


Large Quicktime File (~16MB) via BitTorrent



Here is the first mirror for these files. To anyone that digs this movie, please let me know if you can provide any mirror space. Thanks!

Medium Quicktime File (~6MB)


Large Quicktime File (~16MB)

The Mighty Mason, or Another Brick in the Wall

What is Mason? The secretive cult that rules the world? How about the web application framework that will rock your world?

HTML::Mason is the web application framework behind Bricolage, Amazon and Salon.com to drop a few names.

On Wednesday, October 6th, i will be presenting a talk on Mason at the Chicago Perl Mongers meeting. The meeting will not be at our normal location in Vernon Hills. It will be at the Grayslake Public Library, north of Chicago, at 7PM. Please be punctual as we will need to be packed up by 8:45.

The talk will focus on HTML::Mason and show a practical example on how to take an existing CGI based web application and convert it to efficiently use (some of) the power of Mason. I will have code samples and the presentation slides posted here by Tuesday, October 5th.

Basic Outline:
* What is HTML::Mason?
* How do i use it?
* Installation
* Basic Syntax
* Express Yourself.
* Why do i need to use some fancy framework?
* Re-use/Don't Repeat Yourself
* Make the simple things simple, and hard things possible.
* Mason tips
* The Autohandler
* The dhandler
* Components
* A practical example.

If anyone has anything specific they would like me to talk about, please let me know.

quiet night at home last night...

Save BetaMax, flush INDUCE

I have already called my Senators about this, but i figure there is no limit to the amount of feedback these people need. I have signed up for a concentrated calling campaign to the Senate throughout the day on Tuesday, September 14, 2004, and I urge you to as well.
The campaign is to inform our Senate about the dangers of the proposed INDUCE act (S 2560 IS), from the one, the only Orrin Hatch of Utah. Funny how a Republican Senator from Utah would so willingly become a shill for the immoral types out in hollywood. Oh wait, there's money involved. Fuck freedom.
This bill would effectively outlaw (among other things), the iPod, the internet, the television, the radio, the telephone and basically any device that could be used to INDUCE someone to commit copyright infrigement.
It is time that the movie studios and record companies stop looking to Congress to bail them out. If my business goes south, I can't afford a congressment. Hell, I can't afford a city councilman and i live near Chicago, where the papers say they are cheap!
Please sign up to help. Or just call of your own volition. The people at your Senators office are very nice and will listen to whatever you have to say. Find your Senator's contact information.

Mrs. Shryack-Pagh, my high school art teacher

My high school art teacher, Mrs. Shryack-Pagh had a huge influence on me and helped me keep my sanity during high school. I went on to the photography program at Columbia College Chicago partly because i had such a strong art program all through high school. This will be nice to be a part of.

From the Rockford Register Star:

> Teacher's former students sought for ArtScene

> And, their art.

> This fall's ArtScene will have an exhibit called "A Tribute to Teacher" to honor Margo Shryack-Pagh, who taught 33 years at Guilford and Auburn high schools. She retired at the end of the 2003-04 school year. Student Amy Chavez, 16, says her former teacher went above and beyond, including sharing her prep time with students who wanted to take an art class but couldn't fit it into their budget-crunch-shortened schedules. "She just truly enjoyed what she was doing," says Chavez, now a senior at Auburn.

> Belles Firm of Architecture, 1001 E. Jefferson, will showcase Shryack-Pagh's and her students' artwork. ArtScene will be held around Rockford from 5 to 9 p.m. Oct. 1 and 2. Any of Shryack-Pagh's students are welcome to exhibit their work. For more information, call Lynn Belles at 815-961-0504.

new iPod (totally gratuitous)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh...............

MTRecentImages plugin error.

So i just made 2 posts using the Markdown text formatting plugin. (this is my third).

My plugin expects real HTML. Markdown (and pretty much any other text formatting plugin) may not actually have HTML in there. Fun! What i need to do is figure out if i can manually call the Markdown formatter before looking for images if an entry is indeed formatted using Markdown. Until I figure this out, my recent images page & montage page are not updating properly. Grrrr.

misty morning hop

Update: To fix my recent images stuff, i have converted this entry away from Markdown.

Aside from being woken up MUCH too early today, i was greeted by a beautiful mist over the back yard. Juliana and I were very impressed.

Gotham Invasion!

The Batman Begins production crew is doing some shooting in downtown Chicago, and on my way to work, I passed by a parking lot holding some vehicles for Gotham's Finest.

funny test failure

so I was writing some tests for a module at work that interfaces with another company's product and pulls down reporting data. Sorry, i will not be naming names. :) One of the tests i always like to write is a test to make sure that a call will fail properly as well as succeed. So I proceed to write the following test.

my $api = MODULE->new({ username => 'invalid', password => 'invalid' });
ok( !$api->login(), "invalid login should fail." );

To my anger, my login failure test kept failing! I looked at the code a couple of times for errors before it occurred to me that invalid/invalid could actually be someone's account. Sure enough, a manual trip to the site in question confirmed that invalid/invalid was a real login. That is insanity! Add some rules to enforce at least some type of decent password.

Stunning.

me slow, wife fast

Well, i was going to make a post about how cool it was that tom waits gives a big ups to rockford (my home town), but Tracey beat me to it.

As she has said repeatedly over the last couple of months, "I have beaten you to blogging like 20 times."

Harumph.

big release for MTRecentImages

Ok. After this post, i will get to some more interesting things, such as my growing interest in ruby, more fun music stuff and some random garbage. Once my schedule starts to even out, look for more regular postings.

Anyway, thanks to some helpful comments, i have added a few new features to the plugin.

* Offset to start the list of images off after N images
* Include/Exclude categories by name or number
* Image details can be generated as well as image thumbnails.

The plugin can be downloaded from http://www.multiply.org/perl/mtplugs/ and be saved right over your old plugin. You can also read the documentation for the plugin at that link.

What I would like to do is compile a list of people using the plugin and show off some nice examples. If you use it and want me to add you to the list, trackback this post or post a comment.

A couple of the sites that I know are using it come from the very people that helped me form this new functionality. Thanks everyone!!!
* rearviewWindow.com
* Everything New York
* Geren Mortensen
* Central Maryland Photographers' Guild

Data::Form::Elements is coming out

Well, I have finally put a module out on the CPAN (it's in the temp site of PAUSE right now. Once it gets verified it will go up to my CPAN page).

Data::Form::Elements is a module that provides a nice OO wrapper around Data::FormValidator for dealing with forms. I use it for a large mason site, but it does not have to be a web form. The docs have the pretty straightforward examples and more info.

You can download the module from my site.

Please send me any feedback. :)

new montage page

the development version of my plugin has a random detail function that will pull out a part of an image. I am using this right now to add a recent images montage page to the Notebook.

I like the juxtaposition of pieces of each image. Some nice shapes are showing up.

DIY green screen

I finally got around to building myself a small green screen. Here are the materials I used:

• 1 piece of plywood (free scrap)


• 1 gallon of primer ($8)


• 1 quart of Melon Green Glidden paint from the home depot ($8)


• 1 roller ($4)

Total price: $20.

Here are some pictures and links to the first video that I shot with the screen. Juliana took direction pretty well and had a blast helping me make the video. :)


Step 1: Prime Board


Step 2: Prime Board Some More


Step 3: Bloody Toe on Palette at Home Depot


Step 4: Paint with Melon Green


Step 5: Paint with more Melon Green

Step 6: Shoot video. :)

Here are 3 states of the video we shot last sunday.
Basic Clip, Unaltered,
Clip #1,
Clip #2

auto thumbnailing for MTRecentImages

I have wrapped up v1 of the auto thumbnailing feature of my MTRecentImages plugin.
You can see the new thumbnails in action on the homepage about halfway down the right hand side.
Thumbnailing is only turned on if you specify the new thumbnail attributes in your MTRecentImages tag.
This also will only work for stuff on your server, and following a pretty straightforward file structure. By this i mean that if you have fancy apache rules for where things are, the thumbnailing is probably not going to work for you. But that is OK. This can't be all things to all people. I just wanted something simple that I could use.

free wifi in daley plaza

life is good.

80 degrees, sunny, sitting in the shade at daley plaza in downtown chicago after having lunch with some friends. Oh, and the free wi-fi helps, too. :)

updated MTRecentImages plugin

Well, i have added automatic image thumbnail generation ( at Bill's request). I need to generalize one part of the code and removed my hardcoded hack before i release it, but i should be able to do that this evening. You can see the thumbnails in my recent images sidebar (halfway down the home page). The directory for the thumbnails is configurable as is the maximum size of the thumbnails. I don't want to make this too complicated, though, so I think that may be as far as these options go. Maybe i will add something to fetch remote images to make thumbnails as well, but for now this works solely on local images.

best ... bill ... ever

So instead of the normal phone company garbage, we have a Vonage phone. This is a little box that we plug into our cable modem and then plug a normal phone line into. This gives us free unlimited long-distance calls all over the US and Canada for $35/month. We would pay closer to 50 a month from Comcast for local calls plus calls no farther away than Wisconsin most months!


So I love Vonage. It is great. And then i get the letter...

We are very excited to inform you that your monthly phone bill is going DOWN! Our price on the Residential Premium Unlimited Plan has been dropped AGAIN!


The base price of the Residential Premium Unlimited Plan will drop from $34.99 to $29.99 as of your first billing cycle on or after May 17, 2004.


There is no need to contact customer care - you will automatically receive the 14% monthly savings. The new, lower price plan will be reflected in your next billing cycle.

By adding 150,000 customers to our network, Vonage has cemented its lead in the industry. As a reflection of our commitment to our customers, we would like to reward you by passing the operational efficiency and cost-savings we've achieved through our success directly back to you.


Again, thank you for your continued support and loyalty. Without you, we would not have been able to pass this significant savings along. If you have any questions, please email us at customerresponse@vonage.com with the words "Price Change" in the subject line.

Now that is customer service. They have more subscribers than ever, so I get part of the benefit. If only other companies would take a cue....

bugfix in MTRecentImages

I had a comment on mt-plugins.org in march regarding my plugin but hadn't been notified, so I didn't know about it. I did, however, realize that some of my images were not being picked up by the plugin, so I finally did something about it.

As it turns out, I was only processing the main entry body and not including the extended entry in the fold. This solved my problem, and hopefully it solves that user's problem as well.

You can download the updated plugin now if you need the fix.

my take on the new movable type licensing/software

I thought I had retired the movable type gripes category, but alas and alack, Mena, Ben, Anil and the rest of that wacky six apart crew has given much of the blog happy internet reason to groan this week.

The gory details come from the post, Mena's Corner: It's About Time at the sixapart site.

I have been waiting for MT3 to come out for a long time. I participated in the alpha and the beta and i have to say i am not impressed. Not that 3.0 is not a good piece of software, but it is almost purely an update to 2.6 with a new layout for the admin tool. The only 2 new features are the ATOM API support, which is incredibly poorly documented, and the TypeKey integration. Now, I understand that sixapart wants to have a lovely little monopoly on the blogging tools market, but i don't want someone who comments on my site to have to register with my site OR anyone else's to call me a jackass or suggest a link I missed for a story. They did add comment moderation, which is what i have been waiting for, but the math just doesn't add up for this update.

I run almost a dozen blogs for friends and family with movable type simply because i can control it and just turn them loose with a simple username and password. No muss, no fuss for me as sysadmin and friend helping friend. Now, with this new license, I will have to shell out $700 bucks just so my wife can keep our friends and family aprised of the girl's latest exploits, her friend can ramble, I can ramble and keep track of some code updates and friends can archive their dream lives.
Now, call me crazy, but that is bullshit. Ben Trott writes some beautiful perl code, but the thing about a blogging system is that they are not terribly complicated. And movable type has yet to add anything terribly compelling to make me care about it more than Blosxom (perl) or WordPress (php).

Feh. I expected more. Especially since they took their sweet time getting a new version together. And now they have money! Funding and everything, and they come out with a mediocre product and an outrageous price tag. Feh.

So, i think I will keep my 2.661 install for friends and family and then start looking for greener pastures for myself. As if I don't have enough to do.

"lamb" on Image Union

Chicago's PBS station, WTTW, Channel 11, has one of the nation's longest running video and independent film programs, Image Union. I haven't gotten into the habit of watching it, but the start of tonight's program was too good not to comment on.

"Lamb," by Emma Freeman, is a story about a down on his luck farmer in rural Australia with a young, blind son. The film is only 7 minutes long so I don't want to go into details, but the film is dark and hopeful and manages to squeeze pathos and genuine fatherly love into a short, short film.

Atom films online has this short categorized as "Dark Comedy" which i find a little off, but I could see this as funny if it wasn't made so earnestly.

View "Lamb" at Atom Films

movable type templates force productivity

Damn.

I haven't posted in so long that my last post broke my page. The templates are forcing me to write enough to fill out this page!

Get crackin, sucka!

i made a new friend in las vegas

While tracey and I were out in vegas last weekend, I made a new friend at the venetian.

aquacade photos

here are my photo choices from my set from aquacade. Bill shot a few of them, as noted near the image.


Aquacade's MC making introductions and bad jokes.

bill calahan (smog)

bill calahan (smog)

bill calahan (smog)

Joe Wenderoth

Harmony Korine reading

Harmony Korine reading

David Berman with guitar

David Berman telling us the truth of...

David Berman telling us the truth of...

David Berman with Chestnut Station (and Will Oldham, left)
photo by Bill Terrell

David Berman with Chestnut Station
photo by Bill Terrell

David Berman with Chestnut Station
photo by Bill Terrell

David Berman chatting with fans after the show

David Berman chatting with fans after the show