A Portrait a Day – Day 2

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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…

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!

]]> http://spyrosheniadis.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/this-is-the-wrong-chair/feed/ 0 heniadis scavenger 018 this is the wrong chair wrong chair close http://spyrosheniadis.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/on-socialism-grammar-and-the-always-on-ness-of-stuff/ http://spyrosheniadis.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/on-socialism-grammar-and-the-always-on-ness-of-stuff/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:46:45 +0000 Spyros Heniadis http://spyrosheniadis.wordpress.com/?p=43 ]]> I’m sick of hearing about our country turning into a socialist society.

We’ve never had a purely capitalistic society, and if that’s what you want, then by all means, bring on the monopoly and worker exploitation and see what happens to your benefits and compentsation when there is zero regulation around business.

And socialism, when you distill it down, amounts to the government taking your money and deciding what to do with it and how you will (or won’t) benefit from it.

Hmm, that sounds kind of like taxes to me.

But guess what, I like roads and stuff.

Socialism is the boogeyman in the closet, we already live in a hybrid socialistic/capitalistic society. Is it perfect? Noooo, is there a perfect model? Nooooo.

Last time I checked the cold war was over and McCarthy was not running about anymore calling anyone everyone a communist. Let’s have reasonable discussions about these things and leave the boogeyman under the bed where he belongs. Besides, I bet if you discontinued Social Security and all Medicare benefits some of these folks crying foul over socialism would think twice once they’d lost their source of income and healthcare benefits.

***

I like grammar, although I couldn’t tell you what a dangling participle is without Google’s help, I can recognize poorly constructed sentences and illegal use of punctuation. My least favorite abuse of punctuation is the quotation marks used as emphasis instead of quoting something.

Drives me “mad”.

***

Ran across this article on WSJ article on Arts Journal, “A Manifesto for Slow Communication“

Based on the title, I agree, but I bookmarked it to read later because I was too busy checking Twitter and writing this blog before I go to bed.

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 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.

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

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.

So I’m sitting here combining the primitive with the technological. By that I mean that I’ve got a nice fire going in the pit, and I’m enjoying it as I pound this out on the laptop. Ah, technology and the simple pleasure of a fire on a summer night. It is lovely.

I put this fire pit in a few days ago, and as my wife was supervising and I was working, our neighbor came over with a question about his camera and taking some picutres under certain conditions. We talked about that and then commenced with what I like to call “neighborin’” which I define as, “the act of engaging in wandering conversation with those who live in close proximity to you. Topics of conversation can include local politics, the weather, fire pits, fine beer and spirits and other topics ranging from the inconsequential to the substantial.”

While we were chatting, my neighbor, an older retired gentleman, commented on how he doesn’t see us lying about in the grass and staring up at the sky as much as we used to. It was something he commented on shortly after we moved in, and something that helped cement us as good likeable people in his book.

He was right too. I have spent far too little time relaxing in the grass and gazing up at the sky, and in doing so, I have lost a critical component, that bit of release and relaxation that I need to really let myself wander and think and just be.

I’m glad he mentioned it, because I didn’t realize it was missing. I’m going to reclaim it now. Have a good night all, I’m off to stare at the sky.

You know, I look at all this web 2.0/social media stuff that’s going on out there, and I still find it difficult to fully engage and sometimes even understand the point, at a visceral level, of some of the stuff going on out there. Like facebook for instance. I cognitively understand the concept and purpose behind facebook, but don’t find myself using it much. I understand it to be a way to keep in touch with family and friends, share things about yourself, but all I see though is one great big quiz site where you can let everybody know how evil you are or which housewife you are or what your geek level is, or whatever. And sure, I can see all of these quizzes showing the tiniest glimmer of insight into the person you might be, and if you had some great big quiz aggregator that took all the quiz results for each person out there on facebook and ran them through some kind of horrific equation that was developed by Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory” you might just get a reasonably accurate personality profile that let you know that your brother’s new girlfriend’s best friend’s college roommate might just be your twin and soul mate, or a serial killer, well maybe that would be useful. Maybe. Maybe the FBI could use that, or those guys on CSI.

What I’m really getting at is that I’m still finding it difficult to engage myself at a level that is useful to me (and by useful I mean both entertaining and socially worthwhile) without it being a total time sink. This is where Twitter comes in. Someone somewhere on the web said that Twitter is just facebook status updates without the rest of facebook. (I will happily credit the quote if anyone knows who it is. I don’t remember.) It’s simplistic, but that person was right. Twitter is the best of facebook for me, and then some because of the simplicity of it. I love it because my friend in Arkansas can tweet, “I’m thinking about getting an iPhone, any thoughts?” and being the technophile I am, I can tweet with her about it, share what I know and tell her that I’ll be jealous if she gets one. (I do love my Blackberry though!)

Twitter is the best of web 2.0 in my opinion, because it allows you to do all the things the new web is “supposed” to do. You can engage with people, broadcast your own content, receive information about topics you are interested in, contribute to conversations you care about, promote yourself, coordinate a revolution, promote a business or charity, You can share news, you can receive news, on and on… and yes, I know you can do all of this on facebook too. I just happen to think Twitter allows it to be done better, for me anyway.

So I like Twitter, and I’m on Twitter and you can follow me @heniadis if you’re interested.

So how does this relate to anything else, or arts and culture more specifically? Well, as you might know, I like to take pictures, and I like to think they have some artistic value, and I even like to think I could quite possibly eke out a living through the proliferation of my artwork and related skills and talents. An easy way to do that has yet to manifest itself to me, (and countless other artists out there for that matter) but I have been starting to think about how I can use Twitter as a way to promote myself and maybe get a step or two closer to eking out that living.

But I want to do it in a way that isn’t carnival-barker-creepy-car-salesman-spammer-kingpin-like. So I’ve been very tentative, and the first self promotion tweet will go out to announce the posting of this post. Baby steps.

Over the past week I’ve spent a little time consolidating my online presence and trying to tie it all together. I have no illusions that I’m a social media master or web marketing guru. I’m just trying to carve my little identifiable corner out in the www.

The thing I’m most happy about is the bio page. Gina Trapani, self described technophile, writer and coder has her website ginatrapani.org which acts as a bio/resume page for all the world to access and see. It also points to the various places you can find her online and how to contact her. It’s so beautifully simple that I felt like an idiot for not thinking of something similar already.

So I set out to put together my own version of the bio/resume page at spyrosheniadis.com. I’d been holding onto that domain for awhile now without really using it, waiting for just the right thing to do with it. Well here it is. If you check it out you’ll notice a striking similarity to ginatrapani.org. That’s because she was generous enough to let me use her site design for my page. Thanks Gina!

You’ll also notice this bliggity blog here, I intend this to be the final resting point for a blog. I’ve blogged in various places around the web and schismed into different blogs trying to keep art/business related things seperate from personal/anecdotal things, and I just got all confused and unbloggy.

This will have it all, news, art, politics, personal, whatever. I’m me, I’m laying out whatever I put here on the line.

Want to know more about me? spyrosheniadis.com