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.
Looks like I’m getting a visitor from somewhere around Congress St. in Boston. Hi there!
If you caught MTV’s Video Music Awards last night, you probably saw Kanye West grab the mic out of Taylor Swift’s hand during her acceptance speech and rant about how much better Beyonce’s video was.
Yeah, seriously. Does he not know that most of the people voting for these awards are bubblegummers?
Anyway, this one’s for you, Kanye: http://www.kanyeneedstostfu.com/
PowerBookMedic.com is doing it again: This time they’re giving away a free iPod Nano – the new one, with the video camera. You can get entered into the giveaway for connecting with them on Facebook and Twitter, or for putting up a blog post like this one. Details are here.
The exceptionally nice people over at PowerbookMedic.com are giving away a free MacBook. Details are here. Even if I don’t win it, I may take an interest in their stock of stock of pre-owned Macs.
It’s sad that this is my first blog post after so long without writing, especially with all the cool stuff I have going on right now, but there you have it. Mac lust got the better of me.
I’ll be posting next about some experiments with oil paint. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I expect.
The Problem: The main drive on my Mac Mini was filling up, but I needed room to install more development tools. The main culprit, of course, was iTunes – between the music, tutorial videos, and language lessons, it adds up. And I’m not deleting any of it.
The Non-Solution: iTunes has a preference for which folder you want to use to store your stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn’t move any of it – even if I specified a folder on my huge-ass external drive, iTunes would start using that folder in addition to the old folder, and wouldn’t free up any space for me.
The Fix: (only for those comfortable making symlinks)
- Close iTunes
- Copy the iTunes folder to the huge-ass external drive.
- Rename the old iTunes folder.
- ln -s /Volumes/HugeAssDrive/iTunes ~/Music/iTunes
- Start up iTunes and make sure everything works.
- Nuke the old, renamed folder.
Victory! Now I can install my Xcode update and the fix for the Ruby DoS issue.
Besides my technical exploits, I haven’t had a whole lot to share here. (Though after the current round of projects, I plan to get back to painting in a serious way, so watch this space if that turns your crank.)
Things on the software side have been buzzing, though, and in light of that I direct you to my most recent post at Kickass Labs, covering bending Google Maps to my will on an iPhone. Also of interest: Gabe has posted about a subtle gotcha in Rails ActiveRecord.
Expect another period of silence here, followed by a flurry of project announcements, then (hopefully) a more regular stream of activity as I get back to having a life.
On the off chance that anyone besides my wife is still reading this blog, are any of you doing Script Frenzy this year? I’d love to start a support/accountability group to help us all keep up the 3.5 pages/day pace.
Now on Guitar Cardio: Modes! Also the Harmonic & Melodic Minor scales.
