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November 29, 2005
Use Automator to Append from Anywhere!
It turns out that one of the hardest parts of accomplishing things is remembering that you wanted to in the first place. The productivity pros call this 'capture': the ability to catch your ideas and to-do's whenever (and wherever) they occur. Now there's lots of good ideas for systems you can use to achieve capture that's as effortless and as universal as possible. For a while, one of my favorites has been the 43 Folders' Quicksilver append trick.
What's great about the append trick is that it lets you achieve capture without shifting away from what you're already doing. That way, you catch your ideas without losing the thread of thought or getting too distracted from the work that brought you to them in the first place. Now, an obvious next step would be to figure out a way to have this same option available to you when you weren't sitting in front of the computer.
Recently, a blog post on how to put your mac to sleep by sending an email gave me an idea for how to do it. I started working on an Automator action that would look for new emails from my phone with the subject line "todo" and append their contents to my master TODO.TXT file. Here's a screen shot of the final action (it's kind of long):
And here's a more detailed breakdown:
- Finder > Find Finder Items (give it the location of your todo.txt file)
- Finder > Open Finder Item (set open with to TextEdit)
- Mail > Find Messages In Mail (find messages, not mailboxes or accounts, set the Sender to your phone's email address (mine was my phone number @ vtext.com, if you don't know yours, you can find out by sending yourself a text message -- you may have to explicitly set your spam filters not to catch this address, they seem to like addresses with lots of numbers in them) also, make sure you use the arrow to tell this action to "ignore results from previous action")
- Mail > Combine Mail Messages (this will output the email messages as text)
- TextEdit > Filter Paragraphs (in order to avoid ending up with a bunch of ugly mail headers in your todo file, you've got to filter out a bunch of lines -- I set up rules to return paragraphs that are not empty, and do not contain: "*", and do not begin with: "SUBJECT", "DATE", "SENDER", and "RECIPIENT")
- TextEdit > Set Contents of TextEdit Document (set the pulldown option to "by appending" so you don't delete the whole contents of your file each time)
Now, all you've got to do is follow the instructions in the how-to-put-your-mac-to-sleep blog post to learn how to trigger this action whenever an email arrives from your phone and you're good to go. With this system, you can get one step closer to never forgeting a great idea or an important responsibility again.
Tagged: automator, mail, append, quicksilver, 43folders, applescript, todo, capture, gtdPosted by Greg at 12:02 AM | Comments (7)
November 18, 2005
Superman Jesus
Just found the teaser trailer for the new Superman movie via a post on Digg. It looks very slick and solidly mythic in scale and imagery. Lots of high contrast close ups with extreme low angles and raking light. There no dialog, just a stirring horn fanfare and a booming god-like voice (which sounds to me like Anthony Hopkins). Here's where it gets super weird. This is what the voice says:
Even though you've been raised as a human being you are not one of them. They can be a great people Ka-El. They wish to be, they only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.Wha? In the Superman story I remember, Ka-El is sent away from a planet that's in the process of being destroyed and kind of randomly flung towards earth as a potentially hospitable new home, not sent down to Earth by his Father, the Redeemer, to cleanse the sins of mankind, to show them "the light" and "the way". Is this a new superman for the new Evangelist red state America? Superman as Jesus? Ick! Tagged: superman, movie, jesus
Posted by Greg at 1:09 AM | Comments (21)
November 14, 2005
T-Shirt-A-Day
Today I had one of the best types of ideas: one that was big enough to be interesting, small enough to be achievable, and that would, if executed properly, change my life in a tiny but worthwhile way. Here's the idea: I should produce one t-shirt design everyday and make each shirt available in my very own CafePress store. The designs needn't be complex or interesting everyday. There's no time or labor minimum. The most important thing is the regularity.
Already, I'm off and running. The shirt you see above is today's offering. It's an adaptation of the most recent At Dusk poster. You can't quite buy it yet (CafePress just introduced their black t-shirts and they won't actually be available for purchase for a little while), but keep an eye on its CafePress page. Obviously, I've also started a new blog T-Shirt-A-Day where I'll post my shirts (and any other related notes or updates). If you want to subscribe here's the feed: RSS for T-Shirt-A-Day.
This project seems like it could blossom into another distillation of one of the best things about blogging: you spend a small amount of time making something every day and before you know it, you've got a pretty big body of work in the bank. (Speaking of which, I realized today that I've written 100 posts here [this one makes 101], so the timing couldn't be better.)
Tagged: tshirtaday, cafepress, blog, tshirt, designPosted by Greg at 4:13 AM | Comments (2)
November 10, 2005
The Secret Influence of Dr. Seuss: Jared Pankin at Carl Berg
In the history of art, there are plenty of painters who've been esteemed for a time well beyond the eventual long-term level at which their influence will settle. Rothko, Bouguereau, and Basquiat spring immediately to mind. Whatever you might think of the quality of these artists' work, for whatever reason, it seems to have made a surprisingly small impression on the work of artists after them. Obviously the oscillating focuses of artistic fashion play their part in this dynamic (Bouguereau, of all people, seems on the verge of coming back now), but maybe it could also be something inherent in these artists' work?
Then there are the artists whose shadow is immense, but invisible. Commercial success or an obscure medium bar them from the pantheon of named-influences. Lately, I've come to suspect that Dr. Seuss might be prominent in this category. Ever since Michael Knutson, my college painting professor mentioned him during a slide presentation about his own work, I've seen Seuss's tilted, wild landscape and architectural perspectives in more and more pictures by "serious" artists.
I added another name to the tally of Secret Seussophiles this month when I came across the great work of sculptor Jared Pankin, whose exhibit at the Carl Berg Gallery was reviewed in the most recent issue of Art in America. Pankin builds landscape fantasies out of tiny chips and layers of particle board and other highly processed wood materials.
Pankin builds up his pieces through innumerable layers of flat wood chips, echoing the striations of natural rock formations, but he also forces his forms to canter crazily over voids, spiral endlessly skywards, and just constantly defy the solid stolidity and logic that, in art at least, tends to be the hallmark of natural forms. All these are Seussian moves.
I wonder what other productive influences are out there like Seuss, hidden in plain view. Are there performance artists who are obsessed with the muppets? Painters who love Gary Larson? Sculptors who still play with their GI Joes?
Tagged: pankin, seuss, sculpture, art, influencePosted by Greg at 5:17 PM | Comments (2)
November 9, 2005
Site Redesign Leads to Discovery of Comment Gold
So, you may have noticed that, suddenly, things look a lot different around here (if not, you may need to force refresh your browser so you get the new CSS -- or click out of your newsreader for once, I mean, gawd!). I've been wanting to do a pretty thorough site redesign for a while but a couple of things had been standing in my way: the baroque inner-workings of the Moveable Type templating system and the profound (almost spiritual) mystery of Floats.
The second of these got solved when I happened across a great tutorial on making three column layouts in CSS. It's the first CSS walkthrough I've done that left me with both some working markup to copy and a greater understanding of how this crazy stuff actually works -- exactly what I want from a learning experince. MT on the other hand turned out to be an even worse muddle than I'd feared. I really have to edit 8 different templates if I want to change one link in my sidebar (and through a web form no less)? Maybe I'm missing an easier way to do this, but as it is the process was pretty miserable, not to mention highly maintenance unfriendly.
On the upside, while mucking around in the guts of the site's backend, I found a bunch of interesting comments I hadn't noticed on their way in (if anyone out there knows how to set it so that I get email notifications on the occasion of new comments without having to subject them to approval, I'd really like to hear about it). One thrilling comment for me to see was from Doug Kaye, founder of the great tech podcast network, IT Conversations. Doug commented on my entry about Hyperlinks for iTunes. Unsurprisingly, he's way out ahead of these issues -- IT Conversations already puts URLs for each of their shows in the Comments field of the ID3 tags. So, at least for their shows, someone could totally come along and build the iTunes plugin I was imagining in that entry.
Another fascinating comment that I'd missed came from Cobalt whose collage The Next Katrina I used in my entry on Flickr's Interestingness feature. Apparently Cobalt's had 10 of her photos featured in Flickr's Interesting pool, which is impressive. Another picture of hers which landed in that pool caused some controversy:
The Flickr Central debate that surrounded this episode is still some pretty interesting reading for anyone curious about the way a big and active community like Flickr polices itself on the fly in public. You can see from the comments on Cobalt's screen capture where she documented the removal that this scuffle over the "may offend" flag and Interestingness is part of a long running debate on the site about censorship and political expression.Imagine my surprise again, when it [the photo I linked just above, not the one from my original post -- ed.] was REMOVED from flickr temporarily, and replaced with another image from a widely-seen photo of the WTC Towers being hit by a plane. This was directly on 9/11/2005. I titled mine "Memorial to 9-11 and Katrina" and outlined my thoughts on that sad anniversary. This situation lead to a critical overhaul of "Interestingness" on flickr.com, which had been brewing for a while. I also documented the removal of my image and the replacement image and questioned "Why?"
Stewart Butterfield (CEO of flickr) came to post in my comments on this documentation and then reported back that my images had now been restored to public view. They had been removed from public view by anonymous members who marked them "may offend". Little did they know that their temporary sabotage did the most possible to insure my "fame" and following within flickr.
Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design (and, especially if you come across any little bits that seem like I may have missed them in the transition -- like the search results page, goodness gacious, will someone tell me how to style the search results page?!?). And keep those comments coming! They're the best part.
Tagged: Moveable Type, blog, redesign, css, Joshuaink, flickr, Doug Kaye, ITConversations, Interestingness, templatesPosted by Greg at 4:32 AM | Comments (6)
November 6, 2005
Roboflop 2005
Recently, reading Hendrik Hertzberg's collection of a career's worth of brilliant essays and reportage, Politics: Observations and Arguments, I came across an early version of a now popular portrait of a certain prominent national politician. The essay, titled "Roboflop", describes the politican as a "vain and unreflective" semi-draft dodging son of privlege prone to humiliating public gaffes and guided primarily by instinct, the leaders of "fundamentalist sects", "out-of-favor right wingers" and "cultural conservatives". Hertzberg imagines a world where this candidate had ascended to the presidency as one in which the US and its former NATO allies stand divided, crowds demonstrate against radically conservative supreme court nominees, all out partisan warfare breaks out in the senate, and the world stands posed on the verge of an ideological version of the same.
The candidate Hertzberg is describing is, of course, Dan Quayle -- the election that of 1988. From today's point of view Quayle's candidacy seems less like an easy punchline, the butt of a thousand Saturday Night Live skits and Tonight Show monologues than a chilling forerunner of today's political reality. And Hertzberg's response to him, a kind of throw-up-your-hands-in-disbelief irony of undersatement, seems quaint, even nostalgic.
Even in the midst of his horror at the prospect of an actual Quayle presidency, Hertzbeg is bitingly funny:
"Let's say it's next April, and President Bush is out having a brisk springtime sail off Kennebunkport. Maybe he gets his tie caught in the jam cleat. Or maybe, just mabye, he doesn't hear the cry of "Hard to lee!" when the boom sweeps over the deck. Suddenly -- bonk! splash! -- a vacancy occurs, and J. Danforth Quayle III, maybe still dressed in his lime-green golf pants, putter in hand, standing at the club bar, takes the oath of office as the forty-second president of the United States"He makes gold out of Quayle's famous foot-in-the-mouth moments as well as some forgotten gems, like his closing statement in the '88 vice-presidential debate:
"You have been able to see Dan Quayle as I really am. . .George Bush has the experience, and with me the future -- a future committed to our family, a future committed to the freedom."As Hertzberg so aptly comments, "What?"
Near the end of the piece, Hertzberg quotes in detail from an interview he did with Quayle near the end of the campaign when the candidate discussed his affinity for Machiavelli's Prince. Quayle outlines Machiavelli's "three classes of mind": the true leader who is creative enough to "lead a great nation without much help"; the second class which, while not as self-suficient as the first, "could take ideas, put people around him, and be able to lead nations forward"; and finally the third class who "didn't know much of anything. And they were the worst kind of leaders, because not only were they not creative, but they didn't know what was right or wrong and they just sort of went by whatever they felt like." To wrap it all up, Quayle places himself "somewhere in between one and two".
Faced with such rich material Hertzberg takes a light touch saying, "I'm not sure what I can add to this", but then brings the hammer down hard:
Quayle seemed like a pretty nice guy, and he can be charming. His politcal views, which is to say the political views of his grandparents and parents and minders, are of course awful. But they are awful in a way that unfortunately has become routine in recnt years. The question raised by the prospect of President Quayle is the same as the question raised by the likelihood of President Bush and for that matter by the reality of President Reagan: How long can a great nation afford to have silly leaders?I'm not sure what I can add to that other than to say: can you imagine how great it would be to live in an America where the worst thing you could say about our leaders was that they were silly? I never thought anything could make me feel nostalgic for Dan Quayle, but there it is. Tagged: Hertzberg, Quayle, Bush, president, 88, roboflop, politics
Posted by Greg at 7:47 PM | Comments (0)
One Hour Photo: Mark Takamichi Miller's Stolen Ghosts
Painter Mark Takamichi Miller pairs a keen eye for the poignancy of lost personal photographs with a material muscularity that neutralizes the potential sentamentality of his chosen subject matter.
Miller is an accomplished connoisseur of the lost or forgotten personal snapshot. He is a devotee of Costco's collection of unclaimed rolls (including a well-developed sense of the ethics of the situation which involve replacing one of the two sets of prints so that the original photographer keeps a chance to claim them). These lost photographs, filled to brimming with closely treasured and carefully captured (and thus dangerously cliched) personal memories, might make for soggy building material for a painter that aimed to make anything more ambitious than a recreation of the pictures' original effect. But Miller makes magic out of them, toughening up their impact with rough surfaces and liquid paint handling that somehow communicates the photographs' specificities while belying their actual details.
With another series based on a roll he found while hiking (from which the above painting derives) , Miller pushes this specificity even further, building up his smeary versions of the photographic figures in many layers of paint applied directly to raw canvas. This trick gives the figures, which Miller plucks from their surrounding settings, a physicality that, at least in reproduction, is shockingly close to bas relief.
In a kind of final flowering and logical conclusion of this progression, Miller produced a series paintings from a roll of film found "in a dumpster along with a whole household full of belongings." Apparently a common artifact of eviction in run down neighborhoods, "these were the last pictures these people took before the disruption." Unlike in the previous two sets, Miller made these paintings on glass and then scraped the dry results loose so the painted-figures could hang directly on the wall. With this treatment, the snapshots' subjects have finally completed their transformation into ghosts, breaking free from their original tragic context to mutely haunt the gallery walls.
Tagged: painting, takamichi, miller, snapshot, costco, artPosted by Greg at 3:12 AM | Comments (0)
