Rocky & Carlo's & Elmer's
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Rocky & Carlo's Reopened Today! - Blogging New Orleans - (Posted Feb 8th 2007)
We've been talking abort going to Jazz Fest, kim and I, and then I found this headline. Rocky & Carlo's re-opened!? How cold we not go to Nola now? I don't get the red gravy, but yes, I would travel 1,100 miles for that macaroni & cheese. Well, that and the fact that I feel like my kids don't even know who my parents are, my dad in particular. I had this realization a few weeks ago that my son doesn't really have any idea who his other grandpa is.Elmer's Candy
My mom kept talking about how she was sending an Easter package for the kids, so I made a request of my own for some Elmer's Pecan Eggs. This is what I got in the mail:
4 Heavenly Hash, 6 Pecan Eggs, & 6 Gold Brick Eggs. Mmm, it's a New Orleans Easter. It's funny, Elmer's for some reason reminds me of K&B. Except the chocolate bunnies in those big yellow boxes. They remind me of our Easter baskets from my grandma, waiting for us on her piano when we ran in the door.
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google homepage diatribe
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
I was a pretty early adopter when the Google Homepage first came out and I've been a big fan of it since. I just did a quick count and see that over the last 2 years I've added 55 modules to my homepage. Obviously most of them are just RSS feeds from this blog or that, but I've been trying to add a bit of color throughout the page. I found a few decent image-display modules today, like this Random Poster one.I was trying to find a good flickr module to display nola pics, but in the past all I had been able to find were ones that displayed images from your account or random "interesting" photos. Since I last looked it seems that several people have created gadgets that let you display images by their tags. The two I've found that I like are Flickr Slides, which I like mostly because it's got previous and back buttons, and one called Random Flickring which I chose over Flickr Slides primarily because it seemed to be displaying better image results, but that's not necessarily a reliable criteria at this point. It does have this cool "Light box" slideshow functionality, though, that overlays your homepage. But the big drawback to this one is the lack of prev/next buttons in its normal display mode. That may be the deciding factor to go with Flickr Slides instead. Oh, except for one thing: the Random Flickring module lets you change the display for the module name. This sounds rather in consequential, but if l have it displaying only pics from Nola, it's nice that the module name can be displayed as "nola pics" . If I have a 2nd instance running showing pictures of my kids, I can change the title of that one to "Family Photos" and, though it's a small thing, the differentiation makes for a better user experience.
Something else that I think brought the quality of the Google Homepage a big step forward is this new module to stream Live TV to your home page. Now if I can get TV listings I'll have no use for my Yahoo! page. Obviously some of the channels in this module work better than others, but the list is pretty decent. ABC News Now, CBS News, CNN, ESPN (I'm assuming this is an ESPN Sports News channel without live games), Cartoon Network... It's still not like watching actual factual TV in your browser, but its something.
So then. Today Google introduced Homepage Themes. Of course, the first thing I thought was "can I make my own?" It's hard not to think that they'll eventually open theme development to the public, especially since it's CSS based, but it seems like for the time being they're keeping it in-house. The themes they put out look really nice, but they're a bit too cutesy. What is really neat about them is how they change to match the weather and time of day, although mine seemed to get stuck in "sunset" mode for a bit too long with this funky pinkish brown. Now that it seems to be settled into Night more the colors are pretty nice and muted.
(See what i mean about the color?)
And finally, to cap off my Google Homepage diatribe, I've got these two NBA Scoreboard modules I'm debating between. The NBA has a text-only RSS scoreboard that's fairly utilitarian, but the nice thing about it is that when you click the little plus sign you get a one or two line recap of the game. Contrast that to this Scoreboard "widget" nba.com created. The down side to the widget: no in-page recap. You can click the score to go to an overview page for the game, but it annoyingly loads in the modules frame, not the full window. To be fair, they didn't officially release this as a module. Really, I don't know what their intention for this was. they just supplied some embed code that I put in an html file and threw & quick module on my site. The pros to using this scoreboard are, except for the fact that it's really big: it looks good. It's colorful and has a high production value. Also, it displays LIVE scores, not last night's games.
One other fairly recent functional addition to homepages is "Send to a Friend". Soon I'm gonna try to compile a list of links to modules and RSS feeds I'm using to help a few people I know build up their pages. I think I'll also raid Netvibes to try to hunt down a few more good feeds to subscribe to. I'll try to post that all here once I've got it done.
Labels: google homepage
posted by j. Permanent Link
"Eyes" painting is done!
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Click for a larger version
The new painting is done, yay! Actually, i finished it Monday night. It might have even been Sunday had i not been running so much fever. I got sick Thursday and ran fever for a good four days straight. Sunday night i was trying to work on the lines and i was shivering too much to work. I wound up getting the rest done Monday while i sat on the floor with a space heater pointed at me.
It's been hard to get a good picture of the painting, but this captures the colors pretty closely. I used only burnt umber, burnt sienna, white and black. The shadow on the face oddly turned out to be this shaded flesh tone, which wasn't exactly what i was intending, but i thought it was ironic that i mixed such a good dark flesh tone with no "fleshy" colors. I'll have to remember for future reference, though -- trying to mix a good color for shaded flesh tones is pretty difficult. No more! I tweaked this photo of the painting just a bit to get the colors closer to what they are in actuality. The dark brown is about 2/3 burnt umber and 1/3 burnt sienna, which is lighter, with an orangish hue and more of a radiance. It took two coats to really cover the canvas, but it gave it a really nice depth that's just hinted at in the section above kim's shoulder in this photo.
The only thing that i'm a little disappointed in is the thickness in the lines of the face and eyes. It's kinda hard to know what a 1-point stroke in illustrator is going to translate to on a 3'x5' canvas, but i think the lines are a bit too thick, losing a little detail. To some extent, i'm starting to think that, unless i start buying REALLY big canvases, I'm going to have to deal with the fact that the lines lose a bit of nuance in the translation from digital to analog. That said, I think the painting came out almost precise to the original line drawing.
One of my favorite parts is the shadow in the couch that comes up on that fold, like a flower... or a piece of popcorn. I tried to be conscious of how the shape is formed. If you look, the shape of the "stem" is repeated in two places -- the shadow under her right collar bone, under the sweater, and the shadow across the forehead and down the bridge of her nose. And of course, the popcorn or flower shape is repeated on the other side of the couch. I should have made the shadows of the neck a bit more elegant, I think, but in all I think there's just enough going on to draw you away from those eyes and around the rest of the piece for just a few seconds.My last thought on this is that her expression in the painting seems to lose a slight bit of the seriousness that she has in the original photo. Here she looks a bit more friendly, or curious... and i'm not sure if that's good or not.
Labels: painting
posted by j. Permanent Link
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New painting
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Usually when I start a post about a new painting, I include the line-art drawing that I'm starting from. But this is one that I've been wanting to do for along time, it's because its one of my favorite photographs of Kim. I don't generally go for symmetrical compositions, but the hard contrasts and the focus of her eyes on the camera really make this picture engaging. One of the difficulties with symmetrical pieces is that it's hard to keep the viewers' eyes moving throughout the picture. Here, her eyes draw you in while the cushions of the sofa appear to gently flow away on either side, leading you out with them.
It's a picture I took of my wife probably sometime in 2000. We were newlyweds, living in a lower flat in a duplex on the East Side of Milwaukee. I was going to MATC and had taken about 2 rolls of pictures of my adorable new wife for photography class. The photo that I did use from this assignment had less contrast, but the instructor still deducted a few points for it being "to contrasty." I wonder what he would've thought of this one.
This is going to be a quick painting - nothing like the time it took to do the Nola porch. I'll post pics in a few days.
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