Expose yourself to art...

Yesterday was Art Fair time. I always enjoy the Broad Ripple Art Fair. Even though I can't tastefully decorate a jillion square foot mansion with original pieces, I can still wander around and "Ooh!" and "Aah!" at all the pretty stuff, and I usually manage to take home a trinket or three as a sort of souvenir...

Expose yourself to art! (Click to embiggenate.)

A square coffee mug from Dutch Lake Pottery.

The knife blade is hammered from an auger bit. The handle is sambar stag with a blood jasper pommel. From 2Jakes Custom Knives.

Postcards from ArtFroH! Including the awesome Lincoln vs. Washington: 4 Score and 7 of Butt-Whuppin'!

Dear Product Designer:

Why did you make the thread pitch so fine (or whatever the technical term is) on the cap on your tube of facial moisturizer? It takes 379 complete revolutions to get the cap back on the tube, which is a tricky thing to do nine-fingered while balancing a big glob of moisturizer on the tip of your index finger.

I hate you every morning.

Three and a half miles...

It's not much, but biking into Broad Ripple Proper and back in the mornings burns more calories than sitting at my keyboard.

Becoming a non-smoking user of Apple products has made me fat and stupid, and I'm trying to rectify that situation.

I think beer consumption at home is going to have to come to a screeching halt. If I want a pint, I can bike or walk to Twenty Tap or Fat Dan's.

There's also the synergistic effect that quitting smoking and doing most of my reading via the Kindle app on my iPad has had. I need to figure out a new reading ritual to replace sitting on the porch and smoking, because I've read maybe three complete books since I quit back in March, which is down some from my accustomed book-every-day-or-two clip.

And the reason I say three "complete" books is that the difference between reading on the iPad and reading a regular book is that on the Apple product, the distraction machine is built right in. Reading a history book and encounter something that tickles your hindbrain? Wikipedia is a button press and screen touch away! And while you're in there, better check your Facebook and Twitter, and see if anybody's posted in that forum thread you replied to, and your email account just chimed, and... where were we? Oh, yeah... page three. Still.

My Kindle currently has probably half-a-dozen or more books in various stages of completion, which is uncool.

Seen outside the Broad Ripple Art Fair...

Parked up along the Monon were these two very Broad Riparian steeds:

Very unlikely to be confused with the other bikes in the rack.

Pedaled into Broad Ripple Proper for a delicious brekkie at Petite Chou*. Wandered all over the Art Fair, then went to the Blogmeet, then went to see the new Trek movie. Absolutely whupped. More later.


*I had an omelet with Smoking Goose Ham, brie, and caramelized leeks. Yum!

BANG!

The post is over at the other blog this morning.
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Found on a random memory card...

Random Numbers "Rannie" Wu

My weird little lopsided chatterbox of a cat. She'll be twelve soon.

Clean machine.

While I was out yesterday running mundane errands, like getting Swiffer refills and more Epsom salts for the almost-completely-faded bruise on my backside, I stopped at the Staples next to Target on a whim and checked out the keyboards they had there for sale with an eye toward replacing the buck-wretched unit that came with the new machine.

Lo and behold, I discovered there is such thing as a Logitech washable keyboard. The keys are spaced a reasonable distance apart to avoid fat-fingering and give satisfying, if not exactly IBM Model M-like, tactile feedback when struck. As a bonus, there's a little brush clipped to the bottom of the keyboard for dusting stuff out from under the keycaps, and the USB connector on the cord has a tethered cap to cover it when you're giving it a scrub in the sink.

Very much liking it so far. Living at my keyboard as I do, this definitely has potential.

The whole freaking system is out of order.

I wonder how many liberal Democrat party loyalists who are indignantly pointing out that it's not like President Obama specifically called the IRS and told them to go after them right wing Tea Partiers would also insist that Captain Ernest Medina is as much of a war criminal as Lt. Calley or, to use a more recent analogy, hold Bush responsible for the excesses of Abu Ghraib.

Power that can be abused eventually and inevitably will be abused.

Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.
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Ugh.

Awful dreams, thankfully only remembered in fragments.

A dank, gray, decaying urban landscape, perpetually overcast and chilly enough to make the joints ache but never cold enough to snow. Rusting chainlink and unpainted concrete and brown weeds. Mobbed-up Russian immigrants. A handful of broken teeth. Always late. A daughter's feigned concern over the damage done by her father's fist, disgust flickering in her eyes and behind her words. Stolen moments of something like happiness in the shape of a pint flask, always fearful of being found out.

Brr.

One of those mornings where it was a relief to open my eyes. Time to pedal.

That's a lot in Internet Years.

Kevin at The Smallest Minority just celebrated his tenth blogiversary.

To put that in Internet Perspective, when Kevin started blogging, he couldn't link to YouTube videos because YouTube didn't exist. The world was a better place because there were only two Matrix movies. He couldn't make fun of World of Warcraft players, although CoD was fair game, since the very first Call of Duty game came out at the same time. It would be four years before someone could leave a comment on his blog with an iPhone, and nobody could link to his blog via Reddit or Digg.

When I started VFTP, I wanted to grow up to be cool like Kevin.

Congrats on ten years, dude!

Overheard in the Office...

RX: "We're getting closer to Miss Bobbi's preferred world, where you could roof the house with solar cells..."

Me: "What, petroleum-based shingles and solar panels are on intersecting price curves?"

RX: "Exactly."

Blogmeet Reminder:

Saturday at 3:00PM at Fat Dan's.

Since there's an Indy 1500 Fun Show coming up on the 31st/1st/2nd, we should also arrange some sort of meet & eat for that Sunday, too, right?

Blogging Rule #17: If you've got nothin', cat picture.

As Bobbi related, I had to run an errand to the neighborhood plumbing supply joint yesterday; it was the kind of wholesale place I haven't been in since my brief dabbling in contracting when I was between gigs lo those many years ago.

While I waited for the guy to fetch my part from the back and write me up, I saw a perfectly enormous gray and white cat patrolling aimlessly on the floor on the other side of the counter. I made a *miaow* at him and he looked up and immediately hopped up on the countertop to check me out and accept a petting.

Plumber's Helper

"He's awful shy, ain't he?" I noted aloud.

I'd met Book Store Cats on plenty of occasions, but a Plumbing Supply Cat was a new one. His tag read "BELL BOY"; I didn't ask if it was his name or his job description.

Service was prompt and friendly. I hope nothing of a plumping nature goes tango uniform here at Roseholme Cottage in the near future, but if it does, I will be a cheerful repeat customer at Winthrop Supply. Besides, Lowe's doesn't have a cat for you to pet while they go get your stuff.

Stay on message!

Police have used video of the incident to identify an accomplice in the Mother's Day Dammit-We-Almost-Had-A-Massacre in New Orleans.

Hopes are high that if this accomplice is captured, he'll turn state's witness and finger the gun that actually committed the crime.

Stay tuned for more after this word from our sponsors.

*cue 'Gun Debate: USA' title card and theme music*
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Live free...

...but pay to park.

Don't you dare mess with the revenue flow from petty infractions; we're saving up for a new gazebo in the city park!

Pop goes the world!

So of the known great global plague outbreaks, the one in the Sixth Century AD is one of the most interesting. Cropping up at a turbulent time in history and alluded to in plenty of historical material, it was always assumed to be an earlier outbreak of the same y. pestis that devastated medieval Europe, but we didn't know...

Until just now, when digging up a graveyard and doing some testing turned up the plague bacterium on the bodies.

The reporter obviously needed a swoopy angle for the headline, however, and went with the sensational pop science History Channel-esque dubious conclusion:

Plague Helped End Roman Empire, DNA From Medieval Graveyard Suggests

Which reminds me of Tom Cruise's character in Collateral telling Jamie Foxx's cabdriver that he didn't kill the guy whose bullet-riddled corpse had plummeted five floors to land on the taxi's roof, he "just shot him; the bullets and the fall killed him."

Brownell's sweepstakes on the Facebookings...

Maybe a bottle of some zoomy gun cleaner isn't exactly the Powerball jackpot but, hey, free stuff!

This link should work.
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The gift that keeps on giving...

Marion County law enforcement is like a never-ending fount of blogfodder. If it's not IMPD officers getting likkered up and plowing through (and over) the scenery (and the voters), then it's shady dealings in the prosecutor's office.

The latest news is that the former chief deputy prosecutor of Marion County, David Wyser, has been arrested on multiple counts of "How Would You Like To Be A State's Witness?"

Carl Brizzi, former operator of a work release program for drunken prosecuting attorneys and well-known real-estate whiz, as well as being Wyser's old boss, is rumored to be the target of an ongoing corruption investigation.

Of all the...

...complaints about Windows 8, the one that least affects me is the loss of the "Start" button.

I have only just now realized that the only things I ever accessed through the Start button were the calculator, character map, and Paint. Everything else had a desktop icon or a taskbar button.

The idea of the Metro active tile interface is neat in concept, but its usefulness on a traditional desktop machine* is hampered by two things: Lack of a touchscreen, and the fact that Google and Facebook are now de facto competitors to Microsoft and Apple (and, increasingly, each other.)

I spend most of my time in Firefox, which runs in the "desktop" environment, anyway.


*A shrinking category, it seems. A thumbnail market survey shows that the traditional desktop market now largely consists of  high-end towers marketed to gamers and little "Grandma needs to do email" machines. The laptop section takes up more than half the computer department real estate at Fry's and half the laptop department is netbooks, ultrabooks, and tablets.

News from the late empire...

So there was a big election in Pakistan, tensions are still high in Asia Minor as Syria flings accusations at NATO member Turkey, the IRS stands openly accused of being a tool of the party in power, and what's NBC's BREAKING! LEAD! STORY! on the Today show this morning?

Angelina's boobs.

I went to get links on the other big stories mentioned above from BBC.co.uk/news, because they usually make even CNN.com look like People magazine, but this is what I saw in the Beeb's sidebar.

Sorry, Limeys, looks like you're in the shallow end of the pool with us. Pass that inflatable sea horsie over here, will you Nigel?
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Technical difficulties, please stand by...

Since the previous iteration of VFTP Command Central finally lunched its hard drive, I've been using my laptop as my primary computer.

Sure, a 17" laptop is in the class that brochures refer to as a "desktop replacement", but it's more like driving on a space-saver spare, at least if you're using the on-board display for desktop publishing type stuff. Trying to put links on a magazine page in Acrobat was like trying to read the Times through a mail slot. (That, and I question the ability of the components used in a <$400 commodity laptop to stand up to the heat and rigors of daily use for very long.)

So I finally sucked it up and bought a new tower; a name-brand highish-end game-y box on the lagging edge of the spec curve, on sale, and an open-box special to boot; and a monitor to go with it.

Upside: This thing is blazing fast compared to what I'm used to. I can hardly wait to start up a game on this thing and crank all the graphics sliders all the way to the right. It's been literally a decade since I could walk into a store and grab a game off the shelf without having to look at the requirements like some kind of peasant, and I plan on enjoying this sensation for the month or two it will last...

Downside: Windows bleepin' 8. Playing with it on tablets or touchscreen netbooks in stores, I've found it more intuitive and less onerous than all the whining would suggest. On a desktop with a mouse instead of a touchscreen? Meh. I'm underwhelmed.

Also, I had forgotten just how chintzy the keyboards they pack with these things are. I need to go dig out my old Logitech...