Thanks everyone

Thanks for all the kind comments and understanding about this year’s hiatus. I am especially delighted to hear about the adopted black kitty. Thankfully, I recovered some time ago from my minor surgery and related woes - currently I am just fighting a run-of-the-mill winter cold. As for the computer, it is now in rude health after two weeks in intensive care in the shop. It all started when I decided to add some memory and upgraded my video card in order to speed up Vista. When I got it back from the shop, it would just randomly power off with no warning. I defy anyone to troubleshoot this problem while remaining calm and collected - I developed a phobia about going into my office to see if it was still running. When I took it back, the techies did many hours of testing and found that the motherboard was bad. They replaced it with a new one, put in a new power supply, then also discovered that my hard drive was about to die. So they replaced that as well. Luckily they are the masters of backing up and moving data, so I did not lose much. About the only original hardware left at this point is the case and some memory. I am now running XP again - I don’t know how other people find Vista, but on my setup it was way too slow and unpredictable. I am usually an enthusiastic early adopter, but I’m going to wait awhile before trying it again.

Purr podcasts

Once again boing boing has found something quite delightful… purrcast.com. Check out the dulcet tones of Piglet and Fatty…

Are LOLcats running Technorati search?

Corporate Intelligence - today’s oxymoron

I really hate to jump back into blogging with a rant. I had a great Artweeks, met a local family that shares my surname who bought one of my prints - pleasant, interesting topics abound. And I will get to them. But honestly, why blog if you can’t occasionally give voice to the soul-destroying frustration that results when you try to reason with a large corporation. Name and shame, that’s what I say. (At least until m’learned friends see fit to get involved. That’s lawyers, for you stateside readers.)

OK. The story so far… I have had, for many years, an American Express card. Amex saw fit to give me this card when I was a just-graduated fine art major in the United States. Leaving that inanity aside, we move on to the present day, where I am now living in the UK (since 2002). Not, and this becomes crucial later, a US city called Oxford UK. Not a country called ENGLAND G, BR either (that one’s for you, Bank of America.) Recently, when trying to use said card online and filling in my billing address, I have been greeted with the error message “Incorrect Billing Address”. This seems to happen only on one particularly fussy website, but hey, my address should be correct in all situations, not be a good approximation that some sites might accept through poor practice. So I log on, check my account details, and sure enough, my billing address on file is some mutant hybrid of my UK address smooshed into the template of a US postal address. The website even warns that your address may appear formatted for the US postal service. An AMEX customer service rep on the phone admitted that they could not deal with my UK address. This crime against data may be a convenient workaround for someone, but it sure as &%^$ does not do me any good when I am trying to do an online transaction with my actual address. It also strikes me as the kind of muddle that is in no way conducive to “national security”. This is what I see when I look at my account details:

Address Line 1:<blank>

Address Line 2: Here they have my correct number and street, but on the wrong line

City: Oxford UK

State: <blank>

Zip Code: Here we have the first *5* characters of my *6* digit UK postal code.

Helpfully, as I once declined to give them my work phone number, it has been entered by someone as 777-777-7777. I can only guess what it would look like if I had given the full international phone number.

I understand that the US government seems bent on discouraging US citizens from living in “foreign” countries by taxing them anywhere in the world. Forever. I had until now not appreciated that large US companies seem to have jumped on the bandwagon and made it virtually impossible to keep your account when you move abroad. People - this is not quantum physics. If you are going to allow someone to keep an account when they move overseas, it might, and this is just an idea here, be a good idea to figure out how to format their address properly. Earth to USA, not everybody lives in a State. And remember, this is a specifically Travel Related Company we are talking about. It doesn’t inspire confidence for the next time you lose your travellers’ cheques, does it? I have a related gripe about how US political campaigns also conveniently forget that they might have supporters not currently living in the land of the “free” but who still, in hopes of rendering the political situation less noxious, bother to vote. But that will have to wait for another day.

Installed Vista, survived to tell the tale

Yes, never one to hang back from trying the latest technology, warts and all, I have installed Vista Home Premium on a part of my hard drive. I do still have the option of booting into my old XP setup, which allows me to sleep at night. So far, the transition has been surprisingly painless. One big exception: Second Life. I am a virtual exile from SL until my video card manufacturer (Hello ATI) releases drivers that don’t make Second Life crash when you launch it. At least they’ve released Vista drivers for my card (Radeon X1600 for those playing along at home), unlike NVidia who are getting lots of grief because they haven’t. I can sync my ancient Handspring Visor Edge organizer which is a lifesaver - I only found out that there was a Vista compatible version of the Palm Desktop software by consulting this helpful list, the palm site doesn’t make it clear. Anyone else in the same situation wants Palm Desktop version 4.1.4E.

On the graphics front, Photoshop CS and Painter 9 seem to run well. I am working on Page 1 of my comic and should have a b/w version of the first page ready to post in a day or two. Without text yet - I’m going to see how much of the story I can convey in pictures, then add text as needed.

In the garden, some of the 50 Free Bulbs I planted recently are starting to appear which is quite exciting. I’ve also planted three white agapanthus that were starting to grow in the plastic bag they arrived in… I took pity and put them in the ground over the weekend.

An observation…

Nothing more. But in the last couple days, Firefox 2.0 has slowed to an unusable crawl on my home machine. In contrast, IE is running at full speed. I’ve now installed FasterFox which lets me actually count the painstaking seconds it takes a page to load in Firefox. This afternoon, I was trying to listen Radio 4 online. RealPlayer was performing terribly, dropping the stream frequently. I switched to Windows Media Player. Much better. Coincidence? If the pattern continues, upgrading to Vista will make me wealthier, thinner and smarter.

Update: I may have spoken too soon. I’m listening to Radio 4 with Windows Media Player now, and it sounds as if there is a small pig grunting in the studio. I thought it was a report about farming.

Reconfiguring Tate

It’s quite interesting trying to retell this year’s calendar story in comics format. I’ve been using a rectangular animated image with text below it for so long that the thought of working in another way is a bit mind-boggling. What I’m figuring out at the moment is how much information I can convey without any text at all. Also, I realized this evening that I have been using the wrong digital tool. Here I have limitless virtual tools, and still struggle along with something inadequate - doh! - it’s not as if I have to run out to the store to replace it. I was using a very small “2B” and the lines were not satisfactory at all, they looked, in a word, pathetic. I’ve switched to a much thicker 2B now, and it is really fun to use. I’ve uploaded the sketch of panel 1 (click on thumbnail above) so you can see the line quality. I still wrestle with Painter. Case in point: tonight I needed to crop the image to get rid of excess white space. I drew my rectangle with the crop tool, pressed return, and - nothing. I was actually forced to consult Help, and it turns out that once you get the rectangle you want, you *click inside it* to complete the cropping. Like so many aspects of Painter, this seems to come from some other universe of user interface design. Hello? The standard parlance for “Let’s do this thing” is the Enter key. But I do like those lines…

Resurfacing

Just a quick entry to say that, no, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. A break for summer vacation has turned into a long dry spell on the blog - at the moment I am going through some computer travails, and am now awaiting delivery of my new machine. However, before the old machine went south, I did manage to load the latest version of the website at catwholaughed.com. It is not completely finished, but gives an idea of the final look. Anyway, I’ll post more shortly, to recap some interesting recent occurences. I was quite bowled over to hear Christopher Lydon mention my comment on the Open Source radio show (and podcast) the other night, and actually pronounce my moniker - “galoot”. I was once live on his Connection show at WBUR in Boston, when I was a winner in a a dot-com business competition with my idea “e-crops”. This involved webcams watching your own adopted plot of organic vegetables. No, I did not get venture capital and go on to become a millionaire.

Work in progress

A little sketch of a cyclist is now online. Most of my time at the moment is spent learning CSS (cascading style sheets) as I redesign the site. It can be frustrating - if you are used to page layout software, it feels ridiculous to have a block of text jump to the wrong side of the page, or get hidden behind an image. It is a rather blunt instrument to work with. Then, of course, the pages have to be tested in several different browsers to make sure nothing strange happens in any of them. Geoffrey has sent me a link to a good site offering hope that yes, you can produce an attractive, complex page using CSS, the CSS Zen Garden. Ohm.

It’s tough being an expat

I love this. I was trying to purchase a software upgrade online. The last time I used the site I was in the US, now I’m in the UK. The site helpfully pointed this out, and offered me a couple alternatives…

http://pics.livejournal.com/pschenk/pic/00001wh8/g1