Peach and Blessing

I've decided, reluctantly, to find new homes for my birds, and it hasn't been an easy decision. First I posted on a pigeon forum, and got some weird responses there, none of which really worked out.

So I took the craigslist step. The first week, just offering the least desirable set of birds, I got a flurry of emails from a guy who could barely spell and didn't seem to know where Hollywood was, much less Northridge. When I suggested a specific place and time to meet up he panicked, "not so fast!". Like we were going on a date or something.

So I waited a week and posted today. Here's one of the responses:

HELLO ! IS BIRDS STILL AVALIABLE ? I CAN PICK UP TOMMOROW MORNING & OFFER YOUR CHOICE SODAS THESE FOR MY RETIRE DAD HE HAD BIG AVAIRY IN BACK YARD IF STILL AVALIBLE PLEASE CALL 714-***-**** CELL. THANK MUCH.

PEACH & BLESSING

BENNY


the soda part really stopped me. But sounds like a nice guy and I wish him much peach.
another one:

hi
call me at
818
***-****
t-u
Yair

that one was formatted at extreme right of email in tiny letters. Anyway, later today a woman contacted me and I could hear birds in the background. She said birds are her hobby and she would possibly take them all. She's going to contact me tonight or tomorrow. She sounded really nice.

Her Inner Rin Tin Tin

When I was walking Molly this morning I came upon a trainer and his student. He was a boxing trainer and they were exchanging fake blows and doing the boxing dance in the grass. Molly did NOT like this at all. Her parents are both working police dogs.

I could barely pull her past these two guys. She wasn't growling but she was really concerned, as if she felt somebody needed to step in and handle this disorderly situation. "Woof, I mean What seems to be the problem here?"

I got a new camera, Sony's latest Cyber-shot, and am trying to make sense of it. It seems easier to understand than other Sony's I've had and dropped. It actually has a pet setting! That's what I used for this photo. No idea what it's doing for pets. It also has a smile detector.

Sketchbook Pro

I have a trial version of Sketchbook Pro starting today. This is the first picture I've drawn with it. Definitely captures my not quite with the season mood.

The program seems quite nice actually. I figured it out enough in five minutes to get started, and the colors are more fun to play with than what I'm used to. I believe it's rather expensive but I haven't checked the price yet. It wasn't much more complicated than graffiti, at least to start out with.

Add to that Dinah just called and probably won't get home for Christmas because her horse developed an abcess in her hoof, which requires daily attention. It used to be you had to put your horse's hoof in a bucket twice a day, now you wrap a diaper soaked in cayenne mixture. The cayenne is so the goats won't eat the diaper.

Another tough dog from long ago

As I was looking through the giant pile of cd-roms to find replacement software for my old computer, I came upon a cd of this photograph.

I sold this on ebay about six years ago. A bidding war ensued and it sold for more than $700. It wasn't much bigger than a postcard. Two women who both loved pitbulls were battling. You may not be able to tell, but the girl's holding a pistol and the pitbull has his, uh, lipstick showing.

While trying to revive my laptop I've come upon all sorts of weird solutions that people say work, like "Turn it on, put it in a plastic bag, then cover it with several towels. Wait 45 minutes, turn it off, then turn it on again and hold down the j-k-l keys." Not the h-e-l-p keys?

It didn't work. People are trying to put together a class action suit for this particular hp tablet laptop.

Who's in the Kitchen?

Weird to come upon a picture like this in Facebook. Hey, that's our kitchen! But we weren't there in October. Oh. It's the woman who house sat for us. Cute costume and makeup!

I admit, I was Facebook snooping, because we haven't been entirely happy with the way she took care of things. That's how I came upon it. Nuff said.

But Facebookers beware. We all leave quite a trail. That's one of the reasons I like Twitter better because it seems less like a mining exercise and less about the individual. What Twitter is about is still bewildering, but maybe it's their trending topics.

On to meat loaf. I made a very tasty turkey meatloaf last night riffing off of a couple of recipes. Vegetarians, be glad your hands weren't in the bowl. I'm posting it so I'll remember about it next time.

A pound of ground turkey, some dried bread crumbs, chopped onion, chopped celery, chopped garlic. An egg, some oregano. A chopped chipotle chili from a can with adobo sauce is what gives it flavor. Mix all together, put in loaf pan. Then mix a small can of tomato sauce with just a little of that adobo sauce, pour that on the top. Bake at 350 for an hour. Let set up for 15 minutes out of the oven. It stayed really moist, perhaps because the sauce sealed it.

I still am on a buzz from the Breeders Cup last weekend, and Zenyatta's amazing win.

Money Fish!

credit Won Park

I spent a couple of hours going through (and editing) old bookmarks and came upon all sorts of nifty things. This koi fish is made of a dollar bill folded into its glorious shape. I came upon it at the terrific illustration site drawn.ca You may have other ideas of things to do with a spare dollar.

The artist is Won Park, and he even offers a video on how to make your own money fish.

Another interesting site is doing strange things with animated faces.

Oh and here's a gloriously peculiar product you may have heard of but I would have thought it was just a weird dream: It's a doughnut smelling wrist relaxer/stress reliever.

Could you really sit at a desk all day and not have to make a sudden run for the doughnut shop?

And don't forget a site devoted to Laff in the Dark rides. Got any favorite weird sites to share?

Twit Draw Chain

No, that isn't a command. On twitter they have the same drawing program available, Graffiti, but they have an option to do a drawing chain, an idea which is sort of fun, or is it just annoying?

I started one and sent it on to Linda and her talented pal Lisa Horstman. Namowal, I couldn't find your twitter name. Anyone else who wants to join in on another one, or start one, great. I have been feeling utterly uninspired, a regular blank canvas, and something like this gives me a little push. My twitter name is funonmars. Lately I'm enjoying twitter more than facebook. It's not such a load of information and prying questions.

Dots, anyone?

Charbucks 10 Years Now!

It's been about ten years since I last published my all animated gif comic strip, CHARBUCKS!

It all started at a lunch in Pasadena where I was a guest of dear producer Arlene Sherman and some of her CTW buds. Everyone was very funny and most of them smoked. At the time Starbucks was this kind of creepy phenomenon, appearing suddenly everywhere, and one of the women called it Charbucks because the coffee was always burned.

That got me started. I wanted to put some kind of animation on the internet. I knew the requirements were that it needed to be a SMALL file size since everyone was still getting the internet through their phone lines.

I thought two women sitting and swilling the bitter brew might work very well, and for a couple of years I turned out episodes of their story. Before there was google or any easy way to find things on the internet, I think I was writing for a very small audience.

At a certain point I got very intrigued with the idea of interactive animation-- too bad in a way, because the really interactive pieces were all coded for browsers that no one uses anymore, and they don't work in the current browsers.



For instance this image is a map of a fictional Mesquite, Nevada, and originally it was utterly clickable with silly things all over the place. I even ended up sending Anita and Whinsey off on a cruise on the Titanic 2. All this was before I was aware of Flash, though I think it was in an early stage.



Those cups are all episodes--

But over the last two or three days I've reassembled the strip, and it's made me DIZZY!

Lots of things have changed, including screen sizes on computers. I had to blow up all the images 50% or it would have seemed like internet postage stamp animation, which meant recoding every page. As a result they are blurrier than I'd like. At the time gifs were the only thing I knew of to get movement in a strip, and they repeat endlessly which is peculiar, and some times they go by too fast. There used to be silly messages down in the status bar, but browsers today don't allow that. And I even had custom comet cursors before I learned they were mining information from viewers!

But what I discovered was these earliest Charbucks strips are really funny, dammit, it's true.

So when you have some time, you can start at episode 1- I've got about half of them on line now, in sequence, and checked them mostly for errors.



Oh, and Happy Birthday Whinsey! She was based on a woman I rode with, and this strip was written in the heyday of my riding days, when Pepper and I were showing and winning ribbons in jumper competition.

Web Site Story

Still another creative take on West Side Story. Hope the embed works!

TheBoogley

An animator from Australia sent me a nice message via youtube, and I looked at all his animations on his channel TheBoogley. I really enjoyed watching them, and think he has a lovely fluid style and sense of fun and surprise. I was amazed to learn these were all done in Flash with a Wacom tablet.

He says:

I work using a wacom tablet straight into flash. I set the brush tool smoothing down to 35 which makes the line a little scraggily at times but keeps it fairly true to the movement of my hand. A few months ago I bought a wacom cintiq screen tablet, it's increased my speed by at least 10 times!

The Cintiq is the fancy Wacom tablet where you look at the screen as you draw. Now I'm thinking: I WANT ONE! This teenser laptop screen is a challenge for me.

I thought his animations were excellent, and love the look of the youtube channel too. Maybe he'll stop by here. It amazed me that they had an animation CLUB that met once a month and people would do animation just for the meeting.

Neat Image

I came upon this funny image of Molly as a puppy in my pictures folder . I don't know what had spooked her. The image below is what it actually looked like, but it had so much noise, something that's been bugging me with my digital pictures, those multi color speckles especially in black areas.

You can see it better here



Anyway, I still use Photoshop CS. Later versions of Photoshop have built in filters to remove noise. But I downloaded a free program called Neat Image which is how I got the nicer looking picture on top.

You all probably know how to do this already but it was new to me.

ambitious dream

I had a dream last night that I had a job selling a product called Nutritious Oil . (hey, catchy name that!) I was selling it door to door. It came in a spray foam bottle.

You could spray it on any food and turn that food into something nutritious. It was a white foam. But best of all, it doubled as an all purpose cleaner.

What the brain does...

Image is a tiny watercolor sketch for "Quasi at the Quackadero" that I came upon today while looking for something else. You can see how influenced I was by carnival and circus poster art from a long time ago.

March 18 the Bad

I've been struggling with this computer virus all week. It's a Humpty Dumpty event, trying to put things back together again. I didn't lose any files, because they're on another drive, but I lost programs, bookmarks, cookies that help me sign into sites. Because I use gmail I didn't have the worries of it ripping through my own email addresses, or of losing email.

Right before we went to lunch yesterday it started falling apart again. In a weird way I admire the nefarious nerd who coded this virus, because it is so detailed and far reaching. For instance, it blocks you from typing any name of any possible anti-virus software into google. If you do manage to download any anti-virus software, it makes sure it corrupts the file during installation so you get nowhere with it. It sets up google to go to an advertisement everytime you enter anything! Any anti-virus software you already have installed just skips through a scan in 30 seconds and declares all is fine.

So today I spent two hours wiping clean my C drive, 3 hours running a scan from Malwarebyte, which didn't find any trace, so then I started the long hard business of putting it all together again.

Another bummer-- my Sony Vaio is four years old, so in effect I'm going back through time to 2005. Some of the programs I've depended on since then require Windows Service Pack 2, always a controversial update, but Microsoft doesn't include it in their updates anymore, so the programs won't install. I'm sure there's a work around, but do I have to become an amateur IT to get my hard top back?

Bad computer day BAD!

I got one of those bad, bad very bad computer viruses today, the kind Mac users gloat about. (Not you guys though.)

It came in an email from someone I like, and was loaded with those kinds of cute :))))))))))) symbols that let me know of course it was from her, and indeed with this kind of virus the friend doesn't send it-- it just sucks up the Outlook email addresses and sends it on to everyone in the address book. I don't use Outlook. I even looked at the cc names on the email and thought gee, this must be something really outstanding. duh.

I have all kinds of virus and cookie tracking detectors plus Firewall on, so I didn't give it a thought, except that it was sort of naive of her to send an .exe file when everyone knows they can be dangerous. Um, everyone? Guess not!!! Sally says so!

Right away I could see that something was very wrong, and I struggled along, downloaded a program that detected it but after trying to remove it the computer restarted with less than a full deck. I had to do a clean wipe of my C drive, so now it's back like brand new in 2005-- kind of weird and a giant pain.

It could be worse though. I'd made the restore discs when I bought the computer and never had to use them until now, but there they were in a drawer. All my files are on a backup drive or the D drive, so it's just that now I have to reinstall every program I use and hope I have the id numbers saved for them.

Schmap Big Chicken!

For a while I was actively posting my pictures to Flickr, and adding location tags. Eventually I stopped. Too many places want your info-- the hive thing wears me down. It's a big enough deal just downloading the pictures.

When I started with Flickr, though, I (regrettably) chose the screen name Big Chicken. Have you ever picked a user name and really regretted it?

Imagine my surprise getting an email from Schmap, an offshoot of Flickr, congratulating Big Chicken because they'd chosen my picture to represent Hollywood Park on their Schmap map, as part of places to see in Los Angeles. In my picture the wondrous filly Zenyatta is walking with her devoted groom who's always a few feet away. (You'd think they could have found a better picture!)

Strange intersection of image and life. Only this week I was horrified to read that developers are trying to turn historic Hollywood Park racetrack into a shopping mall. Let's hope the economy stops it-- our grovelling mayor Antonio CallmeGuv Villairaigosa surely won't.

How they learned to text= TAMAGOTCHI

Do you remember Tamagotchis? These egg shaped mini computers were a huge hit with elementary school kids around 1997. They were made by the Japanese company Bandai and released in the US I think when the Japanese got sick of them or all their little eggs died. Dinah was the right age, and got hooked, possibly because her mother (ahem) was already a Tamagotchi fiend, struggling to obtain a wondrous computer egg. Their packaging was desirable too, if you like that sort of thing.

These keychain conquered eggs came in various colors. This gold egg was already a commemorative edition when it was released, but there was a time when I craved it. You set them on life's trail by hatching the digital egg on the screen, then had to keep on feeding them and cleaning up after them by pressing those tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen. You had to press those little buttons very often. Their state of happiness registered. The characters changed into different growth forms if you did it right, but if you forgot them, they, uh, died... OH NO!

I really think these eggs trained a generation for text messaging as they had to hold the egg in their hands in the requisite state of constant partial attention and keep feeding or cleaning up the poop.

At a certain point children weren't allowed to take them to school because they were looking down at their little eggs just as if they were, uh, texting in the future. So I became a Tamagotchi guardian. I was feeding many little eggs. I was the Nadya whats her name of the Tamagotchi world.

And we found an off brand with a penguin that I think was named Dinky. Dinky the Penguin was so cute. Far cuter than any of the Tamagotchi brand characters. I remember being especially devoted to Dinky. One day, while Dinah was taking a riding lesson, Dinky died. On MY WATCH! I was devastated. I pressed the food button madly, but Dinky flew off into the sky.

Need Flash/Wacom Help

About a week ago my old Sony Vaio XP got hit with amnesia and couldn't remember where all the programs I use most were found (Flash, Photoshop, Word, Note Tab Pro.) This happened a few months ago too.

I managed to patch it all together, (no thanks to Adobe support), but in the process my Wacom tablet isn't working in Flash the way it used to. I prefer to draw with the brush, not the pencil, but in spite of adjusting every setting I can find, the drawing on the right shows what I'm experiencing: a smoothing and redraw which isn't what my hand is doing.

The drawing on the left is no beauty, but at least it's tracking my hand moves. The one on the right has stylin in mind.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? It wasn't doing the "stylin" thing before the amnesia hit.

Comcast Town! (not World)

You may have seen this appealing commercial for Comcast. I saw it on a fuzzy tv while I was in New Jersey and liked it but couldn't remember what product it was advertising. (which wouldn't please the client.) Then a friend sent me a link.

From extra info in his email I ended up at Comcast world, where they have a nifty Flash app where you construct your own room, and can give dialogue lines to all the furniture. I set mine up as a musical chairs game, with each chair saying something, as well as the squirrel phone (yes that's what it is.)

It all works really well as you move things around, but I couldn't get the sign in to work for me, am still waiting for the approval email, and by this time I'm kind of sick of the whole thing. If the sign in doesn't work it suddenly erases everything you've created. Not fun. But it's nice to see an interactive piece like this, even if it is trying to sell you something and plugs into Facebook as part of their nefarious take over the world scheme. (just kidding, but they do urge you to hook it up to Facebook and all your friends.)

Still not sure what Comcast is but I guess it's like ATT and Verizon.

Oh, and here's a link to a picture of racetrack Rosie, the breakfast cook at Santa Anita, and a nice post about her birthday.

French Flying

This goofy serious postcard is a tribute to aviation. I'm flying back to California today. This seems to have been created in some amazing form of Photoshop in 1912. The figures and airplane are elaborately sculpted. The airplane looks three dimensional. Apparently the whole shebang was created just to sell as a postcard!



The signature is in clay. Wonder how big this thing was.
The background appears to be painted in.



I'm selling it on ebay today. Tonight I hope to be back in Northridge, Ca.

testing

something weird's going on with blogger. Yesterday Namowal's blog was a blank page, and today mine is. Hoping that posting this will change things.