A Portrait a Day – Day 2
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This is the Wrong Chair
I was talking with a co-worker today who did my scavenger hunt yesterday with a couple of our other co-workers, and she told me about this.
This is #18 on the scavenger hunt with the clue.
That chair has always
looked like it holds a lifetime
of story in it, watching our city
officials coming and going.
Plus that Bramble of weeds is
so pretty…
That chair has always looked like it holds a lifetime of story in it, watching our city officials coming and going. Plus that Bramble of weeds is so pretty…
This is what they found when they got to #18
Notice off to the right, the little “HI”
And here’s a close up.
I love it!
Scavenger Hunt exhibit Bonus
My Scavenger Hunt exhibit opens in just over a week, and for those participating in the hunt time is running out to find all the locations and get your entry in.
If you haven’t downloaded the entry form yet you can get it from my website (www.marinatingthemind.com).
Now for the BONUS!
The following picture is part of the exhibit, but not part of the original scavenger hunt, because I forgot where I took it! I know I took it in downtown Wisconsin Rapids, but despite wracking my brain and driving and walking around downtown looking for it, I can’t for the life of my figure out where I took it.
The first person who can tell me where this is in downtown Wisconsin Rapids will win one of my limited edition handmade books that will be available for sale at the exhibit. The book is a fully handcrafted and illuminated photo respective on the exhibit, and is limited to an artist proof and an available edition of 7 copies.
Deadline for the Scavenger Bonus is 7pm Thursday August 27th. Please send a snapshot of the location along with the address for me to verify. You can send me your answer to the bonus hunt by the following methods:
email: scavengerhunt [at] marinatingthemind [dot] com
Twitter: @heniadis
Facebook: facebook.com/spyros.heniadis
Happy hunting, hope to see you at the exhibit Thursday August 27th 5-7pm!
I Love a Rainy Night
I love that Eddie Rabbit song, although that’s not what I’m listening to right now. Acutally it’s Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”
I love hearing this song on a rainy night. Anytime really since it’s my favorite Elton John song, but especially on rainy nights. The song is just so…. potent.
You can listen to it on songza if you’d like to indulge while reading the rest of this post.
Until the mosquitos got too agressive I was laying in the grass in the rain, enjoying the light shower and the flicker of the lightning off in the distance. The whole time I was out there watching the clouds roll by I had this song playing in my mind. It reminded me of that scene in “The Shawshank Redemption” when Tim Robbins character Andy DuFrane talks about the time he did in solitary as the “easiest time he ever did”, accompanied by the music in his mind.
These are nice kind of nights, and I miss them sometimes, but I’m glad tonight was one of those nights. I suppose it’s more about a frame of mind than anything else, and right now I feel wonderfully relaxed and tingly from the combination of the rain, metaphorically washing away the remains of the day and the cleansing of my mind as the clouds washed across the sky.
Borked by Technology
*WARNING* *WARNING* *RANT AHEAD* *RANT AHEAD*
Ok, so yesterday I was totally borked by technology. Everything that’s supposed to work a certain way didn’t. I mean everything.
It started out when I tried to check on a download I had going on our brand new slightly fingerprinted and smudged Dell laptop. This was the laptop Best Buy forced on me with their new and totally ridiculous *comparable SKU replacement policy* that they now use versus the previous dollar value replacement they *used* to do. (I’ll talk more about that someday soon)
This laptop runs Windows Vista home premium, and I reaaallllyyy miss XP pro, which was on the Gateway laptop we had that borked and had to be replaced (it was three years old and well used)
Well, for the umpteenth time in the short month we’ve had this laptop I had to do a hard shutdown because all the programs had locked up, Task manager wouldn’t kill the processes and Windows refused to shutdown now matter how long I waited or how many times I clicked Start>Shutdown.
That happened four more times yesterday, which could have been alleviated had I been using Ubuntu 9.04, my OS of choice, which I have installed on a 4 gig thumb drive. Except yesterday morning I ran the update manager, and when I popped my stick in to boot Ubuntu next, after the Vista Fail, I get a fatal Kernel failure and now my Ubuntu is borked too.
So fine, I’m using Windows for the day, whatever. (Three hard resets later I’m less than pleased…)
Then I’ve got my Blackberry Curve, (which normally I love) and I’m trying to actually be Virgo-like, which my wife tells me means, “Virgos make lists and get things done in a timely manner.”
Something I’m not always altogether good at.
Now, my preferred listmaking app for the Blackberry (BB here on out) is Got-2 by gwhiz mobile, a great app on all accounts, but an OS level conflict with Blackberry OS 4.5 breaks the program, rendering it useless to me. I’ve tried searching in vain for another listmaking app, to no avail, nothing out there meets the cost (free) or the elegant simplicity of this app.
Great.
So now I’m thinking I’ll try and use rememberthemilk.com (rtm) with the BB, and try to keep and use my lists this way. I set up rtm with an address book entry so I can easily email tasks in and hooked it up to my twitter so I can tweet stuff in too.
Rtm has a BB app called milksync, which syncs with the native BB tasks app, but has two flaws. First it breaks the ability to use mutiple tags and smart lists because BB tasks only allows one category, and second it requires a paid premium account. I’m not ready to pay until I know I’m actually going to use this consistently.
What burns me about this is the iPhone has a rtm app that let’s you add tasks, look at lists, do all the task maniulating and viewing that I would like on the BB, and we here in BB land get what I consider the far inferior milksync app.
So I think I’ll check out the mobile web version or rtm on my BB, and it’s pretty robust, with access to evertything I want, and while not ideal, this might just do until (if, PLEASE somebody do this) a good third party app is written for rtm on BB.
Right, so now I think I’d like a website launcher for rtm on my BB. It’s basically like putting a web shortcut on you computer desktop. Click it and Voila! The site opens in the browser.
Well guess what. Something that should be simple and easy and BUILT RIGH INTO THE BLACKBERRY SYSTEM is pretty much an impossible thing to do for a normal end user (are you listening RIM? This should be a no brainer for cryin’ out loud!!!)
Everything that could go wrong yesterday, did go wrong, culminating in me releasing a barrage of frustrated tweets to blow of steam.
Through all of that I’m trying to find answers to why my kernel failure happened in Ubuntu and how to make a simple stupid web shortcut on my BB. (I’ve already given up on Vista and am just waiting for Win 7 to be released to the public) I searched Google to no avail, trying all sorts of phrasings and words and variants and I got not one single iota of helpful information for any of my problems. I even tried Bing, Microsofts so called, “decision engine”. Well, it couldn’t decide to help me out at all!
Yesterday was a total technology failure. Which just shows how far we have to go.
#technologyfail
#fail
#fail
#fail
Food is the new Cigarettes
I’m going to dust off my soapbox here, but before I do that let me set the stage.
I don’t smoke
I don’t like smoking
I eat
I like food (generally speaking)
Food is the new Cigarettes.
What do I mean? Just look at what’s happening. Some time ago cigarette smoking was cool, hell, it was good for you and everybody was doing it. Cigarette companies were happy, people were happy, the government was, well, the government. Pretty much everybody was happy.
Then something happened. The cigarette companies tinkered with their cigarettes, added stuff, made the cigarettes better (from the point of view of the cigarette companies that is), people started researching cigarettes, found out that, hey, this stuff is bad for you and stuff. Like this stuff will kill you.
NEWS FLASH: Smoking is bad for you.
NEWS FLASH: Smoking is still by and large legal, but now it’s not 100% legal. You just can’t walk into a restaurant, pull out a smoke and start puffin’ away.
There’s all sorts of rules and regs and stuff. The greatest irony the government ever created was the schism that is the cigarette companies spending billions of dollars to help people stop using their products. It’s beautiful the way the cigarette companies have to talk out of the side of their collective mouth, “Hey, these cigarettes we’re selling, they’ll kill you. Want some? Here you go. Want to quit, we’ll help you with that.”
And why are they still legal, well, because the government just can’t see fit to give up all that tax revenue.
You don’t here as much about smoking anymore though do you. Oh sure, you still see the anti-smoking commercials, like that creepy one with the 18 year old kid at the end in the wheelchair looking like a 90 year old man. That and those “Truth” commercials keep popping up. I also liked the little bit in the Italian Job remake with Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham when Statham’s character Handsome Rob comments, “…you know, five people died from smoking in between traffic lights today.”
What we’re hearing about more prevalently now is food and obesity. Did you hear about the proposed soda tax? (If not read about in the WSJ here) What’s on all the news show and buzz, what do you hear more about, organic, healthy, natural, non-fast food, eating and how fat we all are, or smoking and how horrible it is.
So what do I think? Well, I don’t smoke, and if cigarettes are so bad for you, then ban the damn things. That being said, as long as cigarettes are legal, smoke away. I’ll ask you not to smoke in my house or in my car, but after that, I don’t really care.
The soda tax? I don’t drink that much soda, and I’m willing to pay a little more tax to fix this health care mess. Honestly though, when it comes to health care I want to see a single payer system. If we don’t end up with a single payer system and insurance companies continue to exist, then I want to see the profit motivations removed from the insurance equation. The stakeholders that the insurance companies respond to should be the insured, not the shareholders.
You want to find money to pay for this, I have a suggestion. Start taking benefits away from people who don’t need them and are gaming the system.
Who are those people?
Well, thanks for asking, I’ll tell you who they are.
They are the people using food stamps to buy soda and candy bars and highly processed foods that are completely unhealthy and contributing to the obesity problem.
But we need to help those in need don’t we?
Sure, I think we need to offer a helping hand up when someone falls on hard times; but if a person using food stamps to buy all this highly processed junk food can afford to also buy Newport cigarettes, carry around a Blackberry Smartphone with a monthly bill upwards of $90+/month, have their nails all done up and be wearing the latest fashions, well, I don’t think they really need the help. I think they need to budget their money better because I’d rather have a single payer national health care system than I would have all of these leeches sucking off the system for their own benefit.
Stepping off my soapbox now.
I’m going to dust off my soapbox here, but before I do that let me set the stage.
I don’t smoke
I don’t like smoking
I eat
I like food (generally speaking)
Food is the new Cigarettes.
What do I mean? Just look at what’s happening. Some time ago cigarette smoking was cool, hell, it was good for you and everybody was doing it. Cigarette companies were happy, people were happy, the government was, well, the government. Pretty much everybody was happy.
Then something happened. The cigarette companies tinkered with their cigarettes, added stuff, made the cigarettes better (from the point of view of the cigarette companies that is), people started researching cigarettes, found out that, hey, this stuff is bad for you and stuff. Like this stuff will kill you.
NEWS FLASH: Smoking is bad for you.
NEWS FLASH: Smoking is still by and large legal, but now it’s not 100% legal. You just can’t walk into a restaurant, pull out a smoke and start puffin’ away.
There’s all sorts of rules and regs and stuff. The greatest irony the government ever created was the schism that is the cigarette companies spending billions of dollars to help people stop using their products. It’s beautiful the way the cigarette companies have to talk out of the side of their collective mouth, “Hey, these cigarettes we’re selling, they’ll kill you. Want some? Here you go. Want to quit, we’ll help you with that.”
And why are they still legal, well, because the government just can’t see fit to give up all that tax revenue.
You don’t here as much about smoking anymore though do you. Oh sure, you still see the anti-smoking commercials, like that creepy one with the 18 year old kid at the end in the wheelchair looking like a 90 year old man. That and those “Truth” commercials keep popping up. I also liked the little bit in the Italian Job remake with Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham when Statham’s character Handsome Rob comments, “…you know, five people died from smoking in between traffic lights today.”
What we’re hearing about more prevalently now is food and obesity. Did you hear about the proposed soda tax? (If not read about in the WSJ here) What’s on all the news show and buzz, what do you hear more about, organic, healthy, natural, non-fast food, eating and how fat we all are, or smoking and how horrible it is.
So what do I think? Well, I don’t smoke, and if cigarettes are so bad for you, then ban the damn things. That being said, as long as cigarettes are legal, smoke away. I’ll ask you not to smoke in my house or in my car, but after that, I don’t really care.
The soda tax? I don’t drink that much soda, and I’m willing to pay a little more tax to fix this health care mess. Honestly though, when it comes to health care I want to see a single payer system. If we don’t end up with a single payer system and insurance companies continue to exist, then I want to see the profit motivations removed from the insurance equation. The stakeholders that the insurance companies respond to should be the insured, not the shareholders.
You want to find money to pay for this, I have a suggestion. Start taking benefits away from people who don’t need them and are gaming the system.
Who are those people?
Well, thanks for asking, I’ll tell you who they are.
They are the people using food stamps to buy soda and candy bars and highly processed foods that are completely unhealthy and contributing to the obesity problem.
But we need to help those in need don’t we?
Sure, I think we need to offer a helping hand up when someone falls on hard times; but if a person using food stamps to buy all this highly processed junk food can afford to also buy Newport cigarettes, carry around a Blackberry Smartphone with a monthly bill upwards of $90+/month, have their nails all done up and be wearing the latest fashions, well, I don’t think they really need the help. I think they need to budget their money better because I’d rather have a single payer national health care system than I would have all of these leeches sucking off the system for their own benefit.
Stepping off my soapbox now.
