Art

Just ordered myself a new Konica Minolta printer. These printers aren't very fast, but they're inexpensive and super compatible with everything. A friend bought a similar model a few years ago, and the print quality is amazing. The compatibility is the biggest thing for me though.

Two weekends ago (August 2nd, for those keeping track), I rewove the seat on my post and rung stool. Friday morning I tested it out, and it held my weight without sagging. In other words: I can now make decent shaker style chairs, hopefully for sale. The seat still needs to be finished, and that could be its own excitement, but looks pretty straight forward.

The chief differences from my previous attempt at putting a splint seat in a chair:

1. I used six foot splints instead of four foot. That makes fewer joints that can stretch and fail.

http://mosaicartsource.wordpress.com/category/mosaics/architectural-mosa...

This has to be one of the coolest pieces of found sculpture, i.e. art created from trash, that I have ever seen. Cool enough, in fact, that when city officials found the artist building the piece on land that he wasn't supposed to be on, they gave him the land, a salary, and workers to complete the project.

I've been bitten by the video bug lately, probably inspired by my wife's interest in the Flip video camera. We don't, of course, have said camera, but I figured out earlier this week that our digital camera can take very short videos. I also found Kdenlive, a video capture and editing package for Linux.

I've been warned that video editing is very complicated, and even more complicated on Linux. I was happily surprised when I downloaded Kdenlive, installed it, and found it to be extremely easy to use. You can see my first effort here:

Just started seeing the new TV ads for Meerkat Manor. I think they're absolutely hillarious. Check them out at http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/meerkat/meerkat.html. Animal Planet has always pitched this as a soap opera, and they aren't wrong. These little guys lead busy and complicated lives. And nothing in those ads are exaggerations or distortions of the truth. The neighbors really are trying to evict them. Flower's daughters sleep around. Carlos probably does have fleas.

After reading Raven's discussion about "300" at http://greyorm.livejournal.com/86401.html I decided to rent the movie when it came out on DVD yesterday. The first notable thing is that I didn't find the visual style as offensive as it seemed in the trailers. At first glance the movie looks like it's been rendered by a video game engine. The reality is more that of high-contrast lighting with a lot of color filters, and I quickly adapted to it.