Yet Another Bikeshed

Turkeys of all sorts

2007-11-20T22:30:51-08:00

An old friend tried to get a hold of me on GIMPNet the other day. I was kicked out of the channel by a child who long ago by now, I had to beg to "I am calling you the designer of the web site, please can you please write the stylesheet instead of telling people to make it do things?" and I think that is all that he did. I got kicked and banned when I was 'angry and showing it' -- not while 'angry and not showing it' the way I have been most of the time since November 2004. That is a long time for anger.

Today, I blame the publishers of books and magazines. The reason for this is that I would like to publish a list of all of the people who have been on the GNOME Foundation, but I think that "they" would just find some sucker to show up and be that person. That this is what O'Reilly and whatever Linux magazine published Akkana Peck did to me when I first went to Norway and came to be here in California.

This holiday about will be about turkeys rather than thanks -- I will thank everyone for stopping with the rough stuff when it happens. It was supposed to be beautiful, not artificially induced.

My first GIMP using friend; my first online misunderstanding....

Istanbul Not Constantinople

There were days when email was new to me and the first easy email exchange about GIMP and then life and other things will always be The First easy email exchange about.... One thing he mentioned then was that the people on the gimp-user list seemed like real jerks and assholes.

I actually logged in and searched through the tower of spam that is my mailbox looking to see if there was mail from an old friend there. I might have missed it for all of the real horrible dirt that is the mail I get now.

This mapped image is probably nicer the way I found it.

POTY Animal?

I have some new web pages which are not easy to find from here. They were actually more fun to make before I published the addresses anywhere. Not syndicated either, so if you see them in syndication -- that is just wrong and should be stopped.

I have a TODO list also. Since November 2005, there is supposed to be a new computer where my mail is. I even asked the admin there to allow me to rsync the mail to my computer so I could manage the spam and use the addy. Instead, I am getting stuff put into my food and getting everything I say verified -- oh, and also showing the young homegrown and educated California genius some of lifes more complicated things, like how the little marks work in between the big numbers on the thermostat. The TODO list is people that I should email as soon as possible that I am using their images on my web site and that some of them even look kind of cool and printable. One of the first user pages I visited there said something like, "please email me if you use my image" and later in the page it said "I never check my mail". I thought, there you go! they like email....

Search result editorial

o/~ Every picture tells a story, don't it? o/~ -- the Faces

How I Spent My Summer (other than being pissed off)

2007-11-13T19:44:59-08:00

In the case that Really Simple Syndication is too difficult for you or that the rss software you are using needs to deny that other RSS feed work, here is a list of tutorials and things I wrote this summer. Also, a list of tutorials and things I didn't write and sometimes why.

completed and online for a while

Lum-type Layer Effect: I can't remember the reason I wrote this. Those ducks that should probably not been walking on the streets here are on that page also. My site is a mess. Everyone deserves better than this, me too.
2.4 Splashes: I tried to make one that made me look like I am racist. It would be a wrong thing for me to actually be like this in real life, except that I have some questions because there does exist differences in things like the metabolism and such. I get treated like a northern Eurpean all of the time, and get warned that food might be too spicy for me. I was a waitress for long enough to know that sometimes, you gotta do stuff like that. Don't be offended and blame the Debian maintainer of GIMP for this. Although, to be honest, I think he was trying to make me compete with new tutorial writers and try to be the first person with the liqued resize tutorial. Screw that. "They" seem to want us to war with each other. "They" can screw off.
DVD and CD template generator: Is it because Windows users are used to not looking things up and doing a little math for fun and education?
Fake moon: Now I get to see respectable people make fake moons.
Mathmap: I think I annouced this and the mathmapers at flickr ended up giving their cars to a boingboing blogger. Then, I learned that I am the only person at wikimedia commons who has to learn tolerance and understanding.
Build GIMP: Dual processors like to make software. They tell me how much they love it while they are doing it.

Tutorials and things I didn't write

Planet making with polar coordinates

It is very easy to do. Jeff Waugh is so busy helping himself that there is really no good reason that I can see to say nice things about that software (even if the tute would have been funny). I like those Waughogs that make the blwaugher seem to be so totally cool and beyond reproach. I keep reading that crap because I must like it.

Mathmap stereo projection for polar planets

There is some stuff on this planet I have been living on that I do not want to project this stuff that is being dished out to me (direct satellite or food -- take your pick) to anything or one that might be a stereoism of me.

Liqued Rescale

I showed the author everything I knew about writing a plug-in. Then I requested that it get compiled for Windows so that Jakub Steiner could use it. Then I become accused of being a racist. Then I think, screw all of you! and I didn't write the tutorial. You can see what it can do here.

line2height rewrite

Mickey Mouse snuck in while I was away. Mickey Mouse is not welcome here.

That is really too bad also, because long ago, I had a conversation with someone about my dads KIM-1 and it could have been a great tutorial.

how to search the pdb

If you need that much help, you probably won't get that much help from my web pages.

California keeps it real

I read this about what Ricardo Montalban said on wikipedia -- so who knows if it is accurate or not. It is quotable regardless, the five stages of being an actor:

Who is Ricardo Montalban?
Get me Ricardo Montalban.
Get me a Ricardo Montalban type.
Get me a young Ricardo Montalban type.
Who is Ricardo Montalban?

what the oligarchy knows

There is online a lot of tutorials that are better than mine. I spend my days wondering what gives a child with no experience 5x the yearly income that I ever had and knowing that I was pretty good at both capitalism and free software.

Perhaps Jakub doesn't write GIMP tutorials because he is afraid of being relocated to California where they get to tell you how everyone wants to live here and how you did not accomplish the things that you did. Little people, checking the integrity of everything you say on his laptop. Who wouldn't want that?

My mom started this summer off by telling me that my dad was using crazy talk when he told me that one of the reasons that I lost my shitty little job which would not have allowed me to afford to live where I was working was that "They don't like it when you take over."

The last piece of advice she gave me was "They will not let you do just anything, I remember this time you are going through..." (something like that).

To any of those people who know who "they" are and are in communication with "them" (mom perhaps?), ask "them" this for me "Can 'they' make a rock that is so big that 'they' cannot pick it up?"

Entertainment

I saw some movies, as soon as I prove that I am not going to become an alcoholic or heroin addict, I will probably write about them. Until then, I recently saw Henry Rollins and wrote about the problems of working for Butch when she has to prove something. Where is Gwar when you need them?

I liked the Adult Swim 'toon "Lucy Daughter of the Devil", sometimes I even laughed.

The Bee Movie, I think I caught a metaphor in which Seinfield gets a bunch of people who get high and go to sleep in there. Also, the font they used for the closing credits (the whole half an hour or more of them). "a,e,n & m" which are lower case, while all of the other letters are upper case. Those letters spell enema. Was that the intention?

Do you want the kind of life in which you are told what is best for you or the kind of life in which, after 40 years of living it, you get asked what is best for you? Jeff Waugh, perhaps an interesting blwaugh about your feelings on this?

my family this summer

biological

My mom spent this summer being the bridge that doesn't join in the middle. It is too bad when a perfectly good human being replaces herself of a broken record version of a story she did not even write. (For the children, 'a broken record' is an old-fashioned phrase which describes what happens when the vinyl album finds a scratch on its surface and skips while being played, causing that portion of the music to repeat itself over and over again. We used to actually try to avoid this kind of blemish to the surface of the recording.)

adopted

I am sorry that I shared my biological family secrets with them; I thought that we would always be there for each other. I also find it interesting when grown men can figure out that a religon that has them confess things to a celebate figurehead probably will not get them that close to God, cannot also figure out that these same people cannot dictate what a healthy relationship between two people would be like. Like a religon lobotomy where this thing hurts and is really not well thought out so I don't do it, but this other thing that hurts just as much and is also not really thought out, I do do this. These people should not call anyone crazy.

So, I cross out almost all of the 1990s. Everything I have from then is stuff that I learned on my own -- nothing that the adopted family shared with me. The one thing that I would really really really be interested in reviewing from that era is this. Hilary Clintons national healthcare plan from then. Perhaps it is flawed; I would really like to read that document anyways. It would really make it look like the presidency was real and not something that was just cheaper to replace with a sex-scandal -- at least for me.

television and whoever occupies #gimp right now

They are not as intelligent and strong of people as the ones I met -- GIMP ircers that is. Also, when the TIVO seems to be using all sorts of psychology to manipulate you (instead of producing good programs and selling goods and services) it is time to turn it off.

That being said, I have learned one thing from that damn thing, and I thank Carlos Mencia for this: how to talk to over-assuming Mexicans. The Mexican who I was most familar with in Michigan had those religous lobotomy problems that the Michigan boy had in the nineties. Not a gender problem. What reasons are there to follow guidelines that were dictated by people who were unwelcome in most places they entered in the 14th century?

GIMP people. When I became involved with things in 1998-2003, I worked kind of hard on my day job because I really did not think that I could make a living from the things I did for the awesome free software that you wrote and continue to write. I did think that I could make a better living (like be able to afford to live where I worked) from those things that made me successful both while managing the web rewrite and while managing my little shift at the grocery store which we had saved but has since then failed where I was living.

Capitalism is not like those movies you can see about slimy salesmen selling things to people that they don't want. Capitalism is about demand and supply. I was good at capitalism. Free software was for me about choices. So what if Photoshop is better than GIMP -- it actually has to be better because capitalism is about competition and without GIMP, there is not that much competition for Photoshop.

Do go buy photoshop, and remember that it is better because GIMP is so good.

If you discover like me, that your direct satellite hook-up is only using psychology for the masses and not actually presenting entertainment and selling goods and services successfully -- turn it off. Hell, after I saw Spielbergs ET, I bought Reeses Pieces for a while. It is easy to make it work right. Cohen brothers did not manage to sell Huggies to me because I wasn't following a set of guidlines that had been written fifteen hundred years ago -- but maybe if you were following these rules, you could write a little something on your web log about how you used this product after seeing Raising Arizona and really appreciated the pointer.

Right now, I think that 3 Musketeers wants people to search for mint bars. Screw that! Princess crap might not work for the people who might like that product. What the hell are they doing? I think they are talking down to you and I know they are talking down to me.

The idiot box is mostly off.

my muse

I am not becoming an alcoholic. I don't know if there was some group of ignorant little twit college kids or something who wanted to show that if a person smokes pot for most of 15 years that when denied this mostly healthy substance that they will indeed turn to alcohol or those other things that are on the other side of the 'gate'. Perhaps those children should be drafted to help fight this war instead of hanging around trying to prove things that are just not true.

Who ever put that stuff into my food that made my heart race like mad for an hour or so; good luck when stuff starts to be put into your food without you knowing it! When I wanted to see what stuff would do to or for people, I told them and I took it myself. They had the option to partake or not and they knew the depth of my knowlege and experience on the substances. We also occupied the same environment for between 8 to 40 hours per week -- they knew me that well and I knew them that well. I don't get to know any of that about you. You suck.

Have you noticed...?

2007-11-12T22:55:37-08:00

Have you noticed that there are some web loggers who are web logging a lot more often now that the television writers have gone on strike?

I have noticed this happening in some of the aggregations that I read.

I am going to call this phenomenon strogging.

like buying the green cheese from a bankrupt grocery store

2007-08-17T03:38:41-07:00

There was a virtual blue moon yesterday, I wrote a tutorial to both celebrate this modern day miracle and to kill time.

To celebrate the virtual blue moon yesterday, I wrote a tutorial to both celebrate this modern day miracle and to kill time.

This soft light moded green cheese image is meant to be a companion piece for this lovely screenshot I grabbed the day before yesterday. I had a gift to give a friend at this years camp; I waited so many years for camp to happen again. So, this was some fish for the dolphins who had another camp without me. Very big men there.

What should not be in soft light mode is California, where the moon is made of green cheese and high school students completely understand graduate level thermodynamics even if they fail to understand that things that things fall down (he looked around to find the shell that fell down). They should be so proud.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear.  Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word.  Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before.  When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
                -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
carol@bread:~/journal/tools/bikeshed$

Considering changing the name of my web log

2007-08-14T21:35:12-07:00

gui.gimp.org has been getting some mention on gimp's irc channel, and good for Peter Sikking! I have been using this application for so long now that anything if anything that I use changes, I become frustrated. Some of this frustration (and you will have it as well if you are a long time user of GIMP and let your distribution or the label 'stable' determine when you upgrade, because things have moved around now for the approaching 2.4) causes me to consider renaming my web log from 'bikeshed' to 'gui-victim'....

Here is an example of how little knobs and options can victimize you.

16:18 (holycow) hi guys.  on this workstation when i'm using the move layers tool and i click on a 
          visible layer ... that layer becomes active in the layer palette
16:18 (holycow) this is perfect
16:18 (holycow) on my home workstation with a similar version of gnome that doesn't happen
16:19 (holycow) i can't find the setting to turn this on ... any suggestions on what controls this 
          behaviour?
16:19 (Jack_of_Trades) I think yosh would know.. As for myself I havn't had a problem like that so 
          I wouldn't know.. Sorry :(
16:20 ::: Jack_of_Trades has quit [Connection closed]
16:22 (carol) toggle in the move tool options?
16:30 (holycow) carol: i think you may be right
16:32 (holycow) didn't seem to do anything when i was at  home but it does change the behaviour here
16:42 (Kentrel) So what are your favourite sites for tutorials?
16:44 (Kevin) Kentrel: Depends what you mean by 'upcoming version'. If you mean version 2.4, then 
          no, IIRC. If you meant some future, then yes.
17:08 (carol) holycow: it might be some combination lock like thing between tool options and 
          preferences/tool options eh, options also
17:09  + carol begins to expound in a possibly unwanted fashion into the dark cold irc channel
17:10 (carol) at this place i have been staying, there is an old general motors oven. it is 
          separate from yet matches the range top and was designed to fit into a carpentered hole 
          in the wall. this might be too much information for what i am about to describe except 
          that it might help to get the age of the device
17:11 (carol) it has this combination of knobs which are labeled as the timer
17:12 (carol) frightening now because i imagine putting a large chicken in the oven and setting these 
          timers to start the oven at maybe 4pm and leaving for work at 5am
17:13 (carol) the chicken would ripen while it sat there in the enclosed area at room temperature or 
          dangerously slightly above it for hours
17:14 (carol) if one of those knobs gets turned now, perhaps several decades since it was designed, 
          purchased and installed here -- the oven refuses to work
17:14 (carol) it is now a combination lock 
17:14 (carol) all of the 'zero' settings have moved throughtout the years
17:15 (carol) move tool only has three behaviour options to toggle and untoggle
17:16  + carol stops thinking about it because calculating permutations *will* shorten ones life
17:16 (holycow) heh

just like freezer burnt bread from a bankrupt grocery store

2007-07-28T18:17:31-07:00

Somewhere A Californian is Distressed

2007-06-12T16:37:38-07:00

I was searching online for mention of some live shows that I have seen since arriving in California. I do not mind bad opinions and such; I was looking for the dates of the events.

I have a rant now and I don't want to "choose an identity" for this.

I need help from someone who has an identity...

Please leave a comment for the oh so likeable Tiffanni that I said it must suck to be her.

I don't know if this was one of the blogs that seemed to keep adding the words I was searching for to its meta word list, but the saga of the great woes of living her life tugged greatly at my heart, at the same while I was not enjoying the way google seemed to be making blogs as I used it.

Maybe she is like me and needs to not be in California any longer -- a place where little things seem really really big.

And, because I am sympathetic to the way different browsers draw different pages and more than a little experienced with how Google(tm) managed pages can change or come up missing, I have also enclosed a screenshot of how much trouble this poor girl has with this life of hers.

No matter where you are in your walk through life,

(and something here about toils and strife),

I am certain that everyone can agree

that it definately must suck to be tiffanni.

Sorry for the wrong message

2007-06-05T19:27:01-07:00

I am sorry for this statement:

If the most successful thing that you did was stand around with your thumb up your ass, perhaps you should not be running the business.

It would be directed at the superiors who put you there if that is how you are making your income...

Personally, I have never been fired for incompetence. I only guess what the real reasons were. The last time that I had my responsibilities removed, it was after I had been very successful at the task they gave to me and the few people they left to work with me.

A job well done, or at least competently handled under extreme duress should probably be rewarded with enabling or more security (financial or the equivalent) to stay there and continue to do this. Or some explanation of what the real (unpublished) task was and reasonable explanation for it being different than what had been told from the onset.

The country that I grew up in, the United States of America, they always said that this was how it should work. It was a proud, brave and adventuresome people who were not afraid of really really stupid things. This country that I live in now... what did they put into their koolaid?

Here is a discussion from the irc today:

17:25 (carol) ok. i saw the movie that had the soldiers who had nothing to do. 
              my comments were directed at the people who sent them there for 
              no reason whatsoever.
17:26 (carol) in my life, there have been many people fired but not for 
              incompetence.  i do not believe that i was ever fired for 
              incompetence.
17:27 (carol) when i worked for the fed, answering their phones. i took two 
              classes.
17:28 (carol) one was about how to answer phones. it was 95% for bill collection. 
              a little bit about politeness. the one little piece of wisdom that 
              i got from them was to never lie for your boss.
17:29 (carol) by boss, i mean not 'the wife' or 'women' like paul erdish used the 
              word, but your superior in the economic hierarchy.
17:29 (carol) (imagine i spelled his last name correctly)
17:30 (carol) ((don't lie [about my mispelling today] if anyone asks you))
17:30 (carol) the other course was the eight hour defensive driving course. good 
              stuff. the roads would be much less interesting if that one gets 
              around.
17:31 (carol) i have not lied that i know of for any of my superior -- except for 
              one time when the wrong phone rang at that lab. it was not even a 
              superior, just a hunk with an alias.
17:31 (Ankh) carol, re. soldiers, was that the John Lennon film by any hance, O 
             what a lovely war
17:32 (carol) i have fluffed and stuffed the truths as i knew them, or gotten 
              confused about some details. like the river was a country block and 
              a half away and not in the back.  that was an oops.
17:33 (carol) Ankh: i started to watch that. beatles have occasionally annoyed the 
              hell out of me since arriving in california. perhaps i would be 
              less annoyed if i were where i really wanted to be instead.
17:33 (Ankh) pippin - the play loaded and then wouldn't play
17:33 (carol) Ankh: nope. the movie i saw was a recent one about this war
17:33 (carol) Jarhead
17:33 (Ankh) ah ok
17:33 (pippin) Ankh: evil
17:33 (Ankh) i do reload and it still doesn't play
17:34 (Ankh) white bar slowly grows
17:34 (Ankh) mysterious green recycle icon is lit up
17:34 (pippin) Ankh: don't know which of them you're trying to watch, but they're 
               supposed to have a downloadable quicktime version there as well
17:35 (Ankh) i tried medium because i am feeling spiritual
17:35 (Ankh) low also seems to flash credits and then stop
17:35 (Ankh) flash movies seem unreliable, although I haven't ad problems with 
             youtube ones
17:36  * Ankh goes back to scanning some 18th century bookplates
17:36 (pippin) Ankh: which # is it?
17:36 (pippin) imt1071/#/foo
17:37 (carol) i am very very very irritated often lately from being removed from 
              jobs/responsibilities in which i did a pretty good job at for what 
              looked like foolishness
17:37 (Tommer) i.e. coked up media twats who were too busy discussing the latest 
               additions to their trainer collections to appreciate the 
               intelligent,humourous lyrics...their loss,keep up the good work 
               mr pip.

Sorry for not being clearer about things.

Sorry for editing this irc log also. Some urls, some joins and leaves were removed and also I edited what I said (the edits appear within brackets[]).

Sorry!

2007-06-05T14:49:05-07:00

I am still sorting through the images I have and the images that I need for this years LGM -- and it is (as was discussed there) International Sorrygiving Day.

Sorry I haven't mentioned that yet. More on that later....

California is a dry waste of land which used to be one of our countries great lands of agriculture. I am sure that the real news reporters will catch up to this fact someday -- perhaps when they are finished discussing Britney's panties.

Michigan. The people are not so easily annoyed. The limited growing time there seems to encourage growth. Weather to be endured promotes tolerance and friendliness, maybe. Or maybe there is some big problem because instead of selling groceries (or whatever the actual task was) -- people in Michigan and now people in California need to prove to themselves the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Allow me to make this simple enough for upper management (upper management is anyone who I ever had to answer to, btw). If you watch something, the very fact that you are watching it changes the outcome.

If the most successful thing that you did was stand around with your thumb up your ass, perhaps you should not be running the business. Sorry.

My flugg and stugg will eventually go here. Working with the ethics of criminals was better than working with the ethics of those who are 'legal' though. Legal is not always correct or ethical. I think that California experiments can easily show this.

HDTV templates for GIMP

2007-05-25T14:40:52-07:00

Popolon has put his HDTV templates where everyone should be able to get them -- attached to the bug report as I requested.

Now, about installing them ....

Here are the templates as they appear in bugzilla:

(GimpTemplate "HDTV 1080 - 1920x1080"
    (stock-id "gimp-video")
    (width 720)
    (height 486)
    (unit pixels)
    (xresolution 72.000000)
    (yresolution 72.000000)
    (resolution-unit inches)
    (image-type rgb)
    (fill-type background-fill))
(GimpTemplate "HDTV 720 - 1920x720"
    (stock-id "gimp-video")
    (width 720)
    (height 486)
    (unit pixels)
    (xresolution 72.000000)
    (yresolution 72.000000)
    (resolution-unit inches)
    (image-type rgb)
    (fill-type background-fill))

Install them by either: 1) After quitting GIMP, paste the above into your ~/.gimp-2.2/templaterc above the line # end of templaterc (or .gimp-2.3, whichever you are using) being careful not to paste this in the middle of an already existing template there or 2) Use the gui via Dialogs/Templates, there is a "New" button and enter this information into that dialog manually.

Don't be confused by the template directory which is within GIMP's user directory. I do not know what that is for. I think it is not for these templates.

A third option is to wait for a tutorial that I might write.

the Ghandi Toolkit Assistant in Sillycon Valley

2007-05-19T14:51:36-07:00

While walking on the pleasant streets of Sillycon Valley yesterday, I passed by a few couples, dressed in the apparel from the Indian subcontinent and frowning at me as if I had done something wrong.

I don't know if it is because I let their child get away with lying and really bad crap or because they too are nice now....

I had a long talk the last few days with the ghandi toolkit assistant. I mentioned how about six weeks after I invited him to see my life and world, that those people and things changed in illogical and somewhat repressive ways. That it was so clearly his doing or someone who works with hims' doing that one person who I hadn't told him about (except one mention of dbaseII and manual memorization from the eighties) was almost the same as when I had left him two decades before -- until he chatted online with this new-world, california based son of India.

This is pretty much how the conversation has progressed.

Nice has a different meaning in Hindwiish California

Ghandi has a car and a big belly now. Also, people to clean his home so that he doesn't have to. He is a big fan of the wii.

Here, Ghandi plays some with his wii and Deductive reasoning

Another quality of being nice is that you do not even have to get the bad logic correct.

I was discussing how I could be the same sort of nice back.

Sleep deprivation and imprisonment are non-violent in Hindwiish California

One day Ghandi says, "I understand you are sleeping in my computer room, I will respect that."

The next day, nice means promises and simple due respect do not have to be remembered or maintained.

I was able to joke last week in Montreal about the sleep deprivation. The nice Ghandi toolkit could not navigate himself around the expanded sofa bed I was sleeping on without jarring it violently and waking me up. A week later still being sleep deprived by Ghandi and I am unable to joke about it.

My solution (to move that Pentium II ram and other couple of boxes into the large room with twice the closet space that is all his here) was met by what I (if I were nicer than I am right now) would call "violent opposition". I suppose that offering real solutions is not the best way to acquire more wii accessories, here in Hindwiish California.

Perhaps he is too nice. One of the local Hindwiish elders could perhaps use some verbal and language skills to tell me what makes them frown on these nice nice streets they walk on....

While isolated here in Hindwiish California, it is true, there have been many times that I have interpreted things in a strange way, felt very very hurt by my perceptions of peoples implications and have often felt very traumatized by things I read via the computer and see on the television/TiVO. What is the most interesting part of those last few years is that both the computer and the television/TiVO are part of the ghandi-toolkit assistants network.

There are some facts that, when I ask for specific information, I retain and always get correct in the retelling.

All done now, bwii bwii!

First, the ghandi-toolkit assistant (already with a big belly but not then in need of more wii accessories) reported that he came from a loving family with two educated and respectable parents. That they had opted to not follow the caste recommendations when they married and were such better people for this.

Next, the pre-wii ghandi-toolkit assistant (with a bigger belly) reported that his dad had beat him once for telling a really really big lie.

Now, the wii-toting ghandi-toolkit assistant says that his father beat him repeatedly and decided not to do that to his younger brother.

He did not mention if he had sleep deprived his dad and caused him to stay in the computer room. He also did not mention if he had stolen his dads' menstrual cycle and denied him access to money to live on and people who were friendly. Maybe Ghandi used his network to make his dad do this and then I get the same niceness because, Lord Knows!, nice Hindwiish California needs more wii accessories!

Can somebody turn me into an instant nice-aire?

Ghandi has all the nice here.

A Sensual Tour of Montreal

2007-05-16T21:46:45-07:00

By the third day, I was somewhat honestly asking the other GIMP people attending LGM this year to remind me what it was I had done for GIMP that allowed me to be there.

Personally, I had had such feelings and had been presented with such satellite fed visions that I felt the need to attend just to verify the health and happiness of my friends and co-workers there.

[Something more about dislocation and relocation and my problems with that should go here.]

Everyone seemed good, not necessarily sane but at least healthy. Then I got to tour a beautiful city with them....

what to pack and what I was packing....

The only thing in this posed image that I really needed was the clothes pins which unfortunately I did not take with me.

I am fairly certain that the trout and the bacon took the whole round trip with me which seems to have become one of the facts of travel for me.

Anhk said "No white socks." so what you see there are the shoes and slipper layers I wore into the country. The three novelty cdrom were actually five and I traded them with Anhk for a bottle of his husbands calm breath tincture. My poorly engineered engineering bag filled with nicorettes, dramamine, my nurse (who I call mom) stuffed into a smaller than usual container and various hair clips and pinchers to assist with whatever weather and/or strapped hauling tasked that were to come my way. I can carry my baggage, but sometimes it really hurts my hair.

the enter and sniff tour or ode to the three legged quail

The talks that first day were lively and interesting -- I am certain that image making with free software applications will become better and better. Pictured here is a three legged pigeon that I photographed in Norway. It should be a quail for what I am about to say about Friday in Montreal.

That evening, we took the enter and sniff tour of Montreal -- miles and miles, it seemed, of full restaurants with happy and chatty patrons. Mitch suggested, a couple of times on this quest, that we eat in a random ally.

Hours later we had walked away from the Montreal poutin and all the way to Brazil where a beautiful waiter totally understood the paperwork involved when leaving Canada.

The rouge beer and the green salad I ordered were delicious and were consumed easily and with much hunger inspired gratitude. The raw tomato as my least favorite salad ingredient has been replaced in more recent decades by a certain green that can be found in some mixed greens. In a different decade, I grew this green myself and tasted it. I know for a fact that this one salad ingredient has the potential to taint the whole meal -- such long lasting taste. The memory alone will make me concerned about what might be in my mixed green salads.

In the moments between the meal courses, the cigarette smokers excused themselves and went to the outside of the restaurant to reniconate. We had the first of two or three such breaks.

Soon after returning to our seats the other other two tapas I had ordered appeared: roasted quail and french fries. I could hardly speak while suppressing the giggles, "This pigeon has three legs." This was the first time I had ever eaten quail, and given the opportunity, I would order it again. It was that good. I ate one leg with my fingers and attempted to eat the other with a fork. I suggest that you skip the fork when consumimg such a small yet dignified food as is a quail.

Next, I shared escargo with Mitch even though Yosh had told me, almost at the same time I was packing for this meeting, how little snails are made into this buttery appetizer. This is the third time I have eaten escargo, this time the poor little snails were tender and an unlikely privelege to eat -- equal to the butter sauce they were simmered in. Mitch might not know that escargo is not usually perpared so perfectly.

Pippin got steak with a large serving of shoestring potatoes, which made me very uncomfortable -- the memory of a cook whose last name I do not remember who I never lied to, no matter what my future then was to look like.

As funny as the quail was -- there was too much there for me to consume and still walk all the way from Brazil to Montreal in the healthy stride that most of the gimp people are known to me to maintain. Pippins plate had also been so sobering to me. I sent the plate back with the third leg untouched.

Later, the waiter would catch me still eating french fries though. I told him that I was biting the fries instead of my tongue.

Another reniconation break -- this one was more memorable due to the conversation. Pippin mentioned this one word three times or more and did not have to. I could have mentioned the next chef with the plastic mandoline -- but I the rest of the french fries were no longer with me and I was biting my tongue.

For dessert, I ordered water. French menus make it sound so good "Eau de source". And it was good, I think -- when it finally arrived on Tuesday. My mind was full of three legged fowl and seeing how things actually work in a kitchen so many years ago. The waiter recommended that Mitch get a Porto. Tor shared his cheesecake with me; my nurse, the miniature jar of non-dairy creamer was not in attendence at this dinner and just because those dairy foods hurt me doesn't mean that I do not love the taste of them. I cannot remember much more.

When we finally made it back to Montreal, the other LGM people had finished their beers and gone to where ever they were staying, and our small party did the same.

I did not sleep well that evening. I tossed and turned worrying about that pigeon. Long long ago, a home economics teacher once told me that her dad had been told that he needed to limit the number of eggs in his diet and I remember feeling the distain for her hack of the doctors perscription. She found a farm that had chickens which produced very large double yolked eggs and bought these eggs for her dad. This is the thing that I didn't understand for the first forty years of my life, perhaps -- that in this decade of being alive in whatever kind of life you are living in -- that it will probably be your own shadow which can scare you the most.

Even amid these dark and scary and sleep depriving memories -- I would eat this meal again! Eating this again would be even better than writing about it here....

pigs ears

I made and carried these cookies to the meeting. Not much more than pie dough shaped then baked and smeared with ginger preserves -- I opted to tell my lie about the ingredients to Simon when I told him that I had saved up 40 years of ear wax just for such an event as this second LGM was. Simon graciously tried the cookies anyway, after an almost on cue mention of a giant Booger Ball.

One of the things about going to this third meeting with the people who have invested their time with GIMP for so many years, is a formative familiarity which breeds a comfortable contempt. The Simon I have known for all these years -- I should have never shared this icky imagery with.

The Swine ears pictured here are not from the same batch I took with me to Montreal to share. I used less ginger preserves on the ears I made to share. These ears were in my trials batches. I experimented with apricot preserves, honey mustard and orange marmalade as well as a honey-garlic-pepper spread on the ear before applying the ginger preserves. Ginger can be hot to the tongue, so I spread it thin to both share (causing more ears to be made) and share (not everyone likes the amount of spice that I do).

Not that many of the gimp people ate the ears and there were plenty to share with the rest of the attendees. Two batches, one was made with lard and the other was made with shortening (in a futile attempt to make a vegetarian version) the lard based ears was one of the best I have ever made of such a homemade food, flakey and perfect. Fit for kings, perhaps.

In times of frustration, I might have used a phrase like "I don't give a flying fig" to express my disdain for irritating situations like the one I found myself in with these people in my project. If I could get the address for one who was not present at this meeting, perhaps I can send this curse more directly and literally this time about those who should be friends who did not try my cookies.

<<Operation Carbon Neutral>> or this ash tray was trayashed

Inside, Louis was asking people to fill out the enviroment study forms that had been included with the meetings packet. He used the word "please" and should not have had to. The questions on the form were interesting -- I perhaps made the mistake of thinking back too far in time to answer these questions in a way that would be useful for Louis' study.

The image shown here is one I took of some cocktail glasses I had to remove from the ashtray that was located at one of the two designated smoking areas that were around the host building. This container was a traditional public ashtray, the top filled with sand to put the hot part safely out. These plastic glasses shown in this photograph did not belong there. After arranging them for the photograph, I put the these used cocktail containers in a receptical a few paces away that seemed to be dedicated to receiving such used items.

I have to believe that if you put things into the right places, that the right things will be done with them. Please keep your trash out of the ash trays.

About cigarette butts

As a gardener, I learned that the only plants that respond poorly to nicotine are nightshades -- in the world of edible plants, this is the tomato. When I was tending to my garden, I would be careful to weed, prune and water the tomato plants first and discard my butts in other places. There had been some encouragement to wash your hands after smoking before handling the plants. While I loved my tomato plants, I had to drive to my garden and I did not love them that much. Their growth and fruiting never seemed stunted by the lack of handwashing before their maintenance.

Today I read the wikipedia entry and see that potato and eggplant are also nightshades. Back in my gardening days, I was only careful with the tomatoes and my eggplants and potatoes grew just fine even with a lack of caution from me and my cigarettes. Even that information is appearing to be a whole lot of nothing when you are talking about the amount of nicotine found in a cigarette butt.

As an enjoyer of public sewer systems and municipal water: here in California, they have a sign on all of the drain openings in the road with a picture of ducks on it explaining that anything that goes into this drain will end up in water that wildlife lives in. I have first hand experience with ducks. If you have a bag of bread and a lit cigarette and go into a place where there are a lot of ducks, the danger is that they will think that the cigarette is bread and try to eat that. I would actually consider purchasing water with nicotine in it (for air travel and such) since I think the stomach lining can manage this better than a patch on the skin or gum in the mouth. I would not purchase for personal consumption, water which contains automobile coolant or oil -- other things that go into these drains. I have been throwing my butts into these drains.

Walking on public roads and nature-like paths; the cigarette butts look bad. When it rains, they collect in one location sometimes. On pleasent woodchip lined nature walks, they stand out. On public parking lots, you can see the butts. But (excuse the pun) that is it. They do disintegrate quickly and I would not mind them in my garden. If they hurt the nightshades that grow on lands for public enjoyment, there is probably not enough nicotine to hurt these poisonous plants as much as ingesting the berries will hurt a human.

panoramic demonstration splash (almost spew)

In this photograph are pictured (left to right) Tor, Simon, Lars, Joao, Yosh, Michael, Roman, Mitch and Kamila. Several splash-like images were taken after this presentation of panorama projection technology.

The low cost presentation by the Society for Arts and Technology at what I think was their Art&D location, is generally the kind of thing that I like to pay attention to. I wasn't particularly well placed to hear the discussion at the first part of the presentation. Then when we moved to the projection area, the low cost panorama which did not join each others at the edges so well, caused me to be a little queasy and unattentive; this explanation was theirs, btw. With due respect to the presentors, the panorama which caused my dizziness was better than my own attempts at this artful endeavor.

I did fake bitch slap their photographer for photographing me as I am now, about a size and a half too big for my own personal standards.

crack

This building and the one attached to it were useful and interesting landmarks for me as I knew that when I saw them, I was near to the building which I slept in and which kept the things I travelled to Montreal with. I saw these buildings every day, yet it took yosh and his lens corrected near-sighted vision to see the crack which was in the side of the building.

Later when I write more about this stay, when I can be me and not some movie inspired muse, mis-housed and mis-located because no matter how hard I worked, apparently this life has been built for two to live in it and not the one I really really wanted to be.

All that I have written about this trip so far has been inspired by someone elses muse and not mine; perhaps a movie inspired muse at that. I miss the woman I was so much -- for whatever reasons, thinking that me and people like me would like to have access to free software apparently made that strong and mostly good woman disappear. The woman who liked to explain how the government works in terms of magic tricks; the one who talked freely with already indulging youth about how to manage the indulgences. The woman who did not have a television and rarely watched movies and liked it that way.

I was proud of who I was and where it seemed like I was going. While on one hand I was gratful to not be sleeping on the floor like I did for the last LGM (that was more my fault than any one elses) I had an equal amount of misgivings for the posh suite that I shared with Yosh. I slept easier on the sofa part of the sofa bed than I did on the bed part of the sofa bed. And by far, the most comfortable I slept (not just in Montreal) was the fourty-five minute nap I took on the firm and perfect bed that was there in the suite. Nice things are nice, that was definately the case for this suite. I would have rather been with the others in the student housing they were all complaining about. Honest.

my assessment for the purification of the air on non-smoking flights

I was surprised by how much I did not need the nicotine chewing gum or the motion sickness pills on my first flight. That was six or eight hours to Europe and I know myself to have problems in cars and on boats -- depending on the conditions, so I acquired and still have with me some motion sickness pills and some nicotine gum. On the flight home, at take off, my ears wanted help with the transition and the only gum I had available was the nicotine gum. I blame this on ignoring my nurse and partaking in some fine French dairy cuisine.

Flying is so cool, I am surprised how much I enjoy the "dangerous" parts, like the take of and landing. Then on this five hour flight, it was kind of fun to people watch. There was a red headed flight attendent -- perhaps I was still affected by the fine Rhone wine I had drank the night before, but I seriously had to quell the urge to chase that one around and see what she was made of. Then I watched her manage the coffee for that flight with the same respect that the wine had been given at the truly remarkable meal the night before. Then, a woman who looked just like the queen of England stood up and took a bow -- this flight home was particularly fun, until the need for ass mints occurred.

Long ago you used to be able to smoke on airplanes. Then they herded all of the smokers into the rear end of the air vehicles, separating them from the delicate non-smokers with a glass wall. Me and my poor nose now know the reason for that. The line to the restroom was long and busy for the whole trip -- then the gentleman next to me awoke and I saw him smelling his shirt to see if it was him that stunk so badly. I assured him that the stench was not from him, or me for that matter -- instead it was from everyone who was using the inflight toilet.

If there had been one more hour on that airplane with that line to the restroom, I would have authored a questionaire for each person in that line to fill out explaining what they had eaten since the last time they had gone number two so that I could at least know what blend created that odor. My cigarette smoke would have actually helped to dull the perfume from the rest areas.

Given another hour on that airplane with those people and their over clocked digestive systems, I would have had the time to make a mockup of an ass-mint, an insertable tablet whose design would help to lighten their odiferous loads. Loads that seriously needed to be lightened.

Long long ago, during the cold war when I was still in high school, I was in the smoking lounge inbetween classes as I so often could be found. I have a memory of Helen Tester (yes, that is her real name -- and no, I am not certain it was her with the question) asking me this: "Do you think that your shit doesn't stink?", my answer back then was honestly that I was pretty sure that my shit does have an unpleasent odor -- an answer that I might have kept to myself because I was unprepared for this pop quiz then.

I never once since that time ever thought that my shit didn't stink. I have on several occasions considered how most of the complaints of most of the people could be efficiently managed with good ventilation. The flight back from Montreal did not change this assessment of this seemingly unchanging human condition.

Until the time that good ventilation can be designed into the buildings and other containers which hold people: my assessment, ass mints.

On the navigation to and back from French speaking territories in the name of free software

This small summary is just to say that I was there and that I was looking around and once again enjoying this idea of getting together with the people that I like to think I am communicating with via irc, web logs, Changelogs and bug reports. There was more, much much more -- I am still sorting through images that are both in my camera and on my mind.

It feels like there have been so many misunderstandings and false assumptions since I started with this project and group of people -- these two LGM perhaps have cleared up many that occurred since my life went in a direction that I did not want it to go. This is one of the things that is good about the GIMP people being able to gather in real life occasionally, this chance to meet eye to eye and to discard with wrong ideas and impressions that the independently operating imaginations got wrong.

If patterns of behavior and social gatherings had a smell that your nose could identify; some of the places I have been and attended since early in 2003, as well as comments made by users of free software on the irc and on personal web logs since that time -- I would have to say that there is the stench of an abuse of what should be a really good thing. A stench I did not smell this time from GIMP people.

Yesterday, I was remembering a good time in my life when I was at the university sitting in the student union. The music in my mind did not match the music on the jukebox. The food was not expensive and no one knew who controlled the television set that was there and on. Everyone brought their own newspaper and the time in between the classes often was more educational than some of the time spent in the classes. Everyone came from their own lives to be there and went back to their own lives after their classes were finished that day. I mention this now because this is what I felt when I first became involved with all things GIMP; when my brain saw the beauty of what a project like this should/could be. All the social environments have changed so much since those happy times -- it might be time for the users of free software to review what it is they are doing.

My job there at these meetings, if there is one, is to try to be a good world citizen, not abuse the host city and to stick to what I thought working with free software would do for me -- which was supposed to be expose me to more people and perhaps improve my life style where I lived along with those material goods and clothing I had accumlated in the several decades leading up to my involvement with this idea. Since those very good days, (2001 - 2003) I appreciate being allowed to stay in a warm and safe place, relying on the financial security of others. I do not appreciate being thrust in what looks to be a game where free software is a front for some really stupid not well thought out things/games.

Stifling the screams of "it wasn't supposed to be like this" also stifles the much deserved "thank you". I don't presume that I am the only person in this condition.

The job of biting my tongue and enduring the judgement and schemes of others while being stuck in something that I never actually wanted to be stuck in is getting to be very boring. Seeing exaggerated versions of similar stories in the noise and trying to live my life without emulating myself in other times of my life -- can someone please write a how-to for doing that?

So much more to say about this LGM in Montreal; not all of it is pretty either -- I probably have enough of my soul back, if not my muse, to be able to write more about last years LGM in France, as well. It was at the very least, good to see old friends and great to meet new ones!

It will be so much easier when I get my self, my soul and my muse back.

Mothers Day and the Day Before

2007-05-14T22:04:49-07:00

Yesterday, I wanted to isolate the dianthus from the roses in a photograph I took locally for a web log "display" of child-like love and devotion that is scheduled for that day. GIMP's iscissors and pathtool made it simply easier to use the phone to talk to this woman; this unlikely undermimer (misspelling intentional) in my life.

Being the good mom she has always been, she did not allow me to speak about what had happened to me yesterday and then ended the exchange saying that it certainly seemed as if I needed to talk....

a Mothers Day banter about the physics of dream interpretation

the credentialed mother astrologer spends a decade interpreting a dream with her science/astrology hobbiest daughter

Mom had this dream about me in 1996 or 1997. When she first told me about this dream I got bored because it was such long and detailed story in which the physics and the season were all wrong. Her dream placed me in my station wagon, looking for a weed called hypericum perforatum; mom called it by its common name St. John's wort in the recounting of her dream. Apparently, I was having some difficulty navigating myself and this rearwheel drive, made in USA, luxury landboat named Wanda up a hill in my quest for this weed. Mom interpreted this dream to say that I had way too much baggage in the more than ample rear end; that the baggage there was causing me to not stay on the slippery road while on my quest for this June flowering weed.

Once again we bantered about the problem with the physics of the dream and she explained that in dream interpretation, the physics doesn't matter any longer. In real life, if you are having difficulty keeping your vehicle on the road and stopping when necessary and dictated -- some extra baggage in the back will help your vehicle to work as expected; especially if it is a vehicle which was designed to carry a lot of people comfortably and is only carrying one person; as was the situation while I was driving the Wanda Wagon. What I am not writing right now is a love letter to this vehicle -- and I could write and write of my love for this car, my three hundred dollar grocery getter who already had the name when I got her.

I suspect that it was when I reminded her of how she assumed that she could tell me to tell my brother Tom that she needed a new car in the era leading up to this dream of hers that it was only then that she realized that at least some of the baggage which was causing this "in her dreams" car of mine to not stay on the road was her baggage.

Her family is, indeed, the most long winded of all of my different families. She is the woman who managed my life from year zero until the seventeenth and a half year. I would like to keep her as she is my mother, if not my nurse. Astrologically, a potato with the capacity to lie lavishly, at 63 years old perhaps she can soon take the time to slow down a little and smell the roses that I did not have the time to blur from that image for a mothers day display.

the day before Mothers Day

In a world in which images can be the parent of new and younger images, I got to meet the artist who drew what I consider to be Tux's mom.

There was at this book signing, not enough of the new book, whose title seemed once again reflective of the things in my world, not enough of the newer old books and my copy of the old compilation that a photographer friend had given me back when it was current was also not here with me -- I opted to see if I could get the artist to sign the book of the comic strip that I did not think was funny, which was also current at that time.

Whether he signed the wrong book or not is left to the readers of this web logs imagination. This brief encounter left me so agitated and hungry; I went back to where I was staying, looked at the half-eaten fish in the 'fridge and screamed curses to God. "I need some brains to play with and all you send me are more yorkie terriors!! God, you bastard, this world would be different if you had a mom like mine!"

Happy Mothers Day!

Doomed GIMP Gloom

2007-03-09T16:23:56-08:00

I installed the gimp-ruby interpreter and kin today. The Gloom example that had been provided crashed.

I am very uncertain if this is wrong behavior.

The sunset example produced this beautiful image however.

What Harry Said

2007-03-09T16:23:46-08:00

Even in my small high school, I was not a good actress. I am not ever going to be very good at pretending that things are alright or pretending that my relationships are different than they are.

I sat alone for this last holiday season and tried to refrain from being the only person at gimp.org to write something to keep this little 'everyone can read the source' project alive.

A million reasons to be quiet. The best one to share here is one that Harry Shearer provided for me when he visited 'Dinner For Five' and I had the unrequested good fortune to hear via TiVOed reruns of the series.

Harry said that the Writers Guild does not need to give credit to nor acknowlege non-guild writers, or something like this. I have no way to verify this. I do know that there are times that you need to step back and allow the 'professionals' to do what they do.

The real writers are being paid to write and this makes the world better. I go in debt to what used to be a nice young man I knew, but one who failed to explain to me when I could do something about it that you are not supposed to get involved in a project like GIMP if you have some financial problems.

Is Harry Shearer David Lettermans new toddler? New York *is* in the same country I live in, but I get confused (like right now) by the way they use the same language that once I thought I could speak with.

My gut instinct is yes simply because it is easier to imagine this than to imagine David reproducing the way they showed in some of those books I am sorry I looked at.