Month: October 2009

Snow Leopard upgrade, Firefox crash

I ran across a problem that only seems to happen to people who use Firefox 3.5 (maybe other versions) with profiles (which I do, to separate dev plugins/links from the rest) who upgrade a Mac to Snow Leopard.

When you start Firefox from the command line with:

…you get a crash that complains about not having the right version of libsqlite3.dylib.

I did find a fix here, but you have to dig to find it, so I’ll lay it out step by step. Open a terminal window (I recommend iTerm, but the OS X terminal app will do), and do the following:

Now try restarting Firefox with your desired profile again.

Paint Experiments

I spent the afternoon painting. I wasn’t feeling energetic (or skilled) enough for an ambitious project, so as an exercise I tried imitating some of the abstract styles I see around.

Piece #1 out of this effort is “Agent Lee” (8″x10″, oil and acrylic on canvas board):

(Yeah, not the best photograph. I have limited facilities and much to learn about photographing paintings.)

Overall, I’m not displeased with my result here. I think parts of it are too controlled, and I may have left more negative space than I meant to, but I do like the warm, matte black of the background (Winsor & Newton Galeria Acrylic Mars Black, which I will be buying more of), and I like the colors (although I may break them slightly instead of using pure hues next time). I plan more experiments in this direction. If I get starved for entertainment, I may even put it on eBay (pending production of a better photo) with a high reserve, just to see what happens.

Piece #2 is “400 Kilotons over the Harbor” (8″x10″ acrylic on canvas board):

…and if you think that photograph sucks, you should have seen the one with the flash.

This is a mess; if I had to pick out a good thing about it, it’s the one thing that doesn’t show in the photo, which is the very pretty effect of the transparent crimson paint (another Winsor & Newton acrylic winner, Galeria Crimson) over the yellow background.

The other thing I’ll be doing for future knife-painting experiments is going with either a fine-weave canvas or dumping canvas in favor of gessoed board; the thick weave shows through more than I like and interrupts the textures I was going for. Very distracting.