Hello, Lovine.com

So I caught up a little bit on this side of the web. The nice part is that my extended hiatus means the number of eyeballs regularly visiting this now forgotten corner have dried up. Which ironically means that I can comfortably babble as much as I want, without any fear of people I know IRL reading my brain farts and making possibly inane and semi-unsubstantiated judgments about my moral character and psychological well-being. Not that I cared to begin with, but it helps to pretend not having an audience sometimes.

That being said, I was experimenting with automatic uploads of my Instagram feed into blog posts. Well, that didn't work out too well since the pictures really get chewed up in the conversion. In a server somewhere, they're being downsampled to oblivion. So in a weird throwback of analog-esque proportions, Flickr really is still the way to go in keeping tabs with how sharp I like my pictures to come out. The process might be tedious, but so is this life if you want things a certain way.

It's so easy to flood our social media with useless drivel, but in the same manner that I curate my Instagram feed to troll on my van-life fantasies, I would like to somehow try to take nice photographs of the memories that define the zeitgeist of my life, without being enslaved by the burden of an audience.

And so it's nice to have this alternate universe, where your platform is wide open yet at the same time private, because it's not forced into a screen like FB and IG. Jesus I really need to sleep. Bye.

Oops.

In the course of tonight's unforeseen late-night website housekeeping, I managed to completely destroy a few things on my blog. It's 1996 all over again here at Geocities and I'm putting up the equivalent perennial animated GIF that screams "Under Construction" in 16-color glory. Apparently I keep adopting tools that do not automagically correct themselves, seamlessly, and painlessly for all those concerned. Hence all the juicy errors and crap layout- the scabs of building my own fort outside the social network. I kept thinking about the mad crowd chanting the "F" word. No, I will not do Facebook because I like causing myself unnecessary pain and passionately seek the sensation of dried out eyeballs staring at the cold glow of a monitor typing code one line at a time in the middle of the night.

I hope I could say these words sooner rather than later: that I would like to invite you - dear stranger on the intarwebz - to say hello and throw me a bone on the comment system. Because a guestbook from the 90's don't cut it anymore, and I'm testing out a mew (metter than new) commenting system that logs you on using your social network credentials. Yes people, that means Facebook, Twitter, and of course your ATM pin.

Need. Beer.

Guess who?

And this is what it looks like in real life:

Roar! My girlfriend is the bestest evar.

Today's lesson number one. When working with filtered columns in Excel, doing a "Paste Value" will also plow over the hidden rows. Which you won't see until you unfilter the column. Hurrah!

Today's lesson number two. When you save a document right after doing something incredibly awesome, it wipes out the Undo cache which makes it impossible for you to get back to the version before saving it. Hooray!

Life's lesson: Don't save, and don't save often. Stop working and go buy vinyl records instead.

We as consumers have expectations on how things should work. A microwave should heat up my food. A brake pedal is designed to stop the car. We buy things because they're meant to do something in particular. Manufacturers/service providers thrive in this capitalist market, and owe their existence to generating value through their ability to address a need and fulfill it. Of course there is that delicate balance between money and value, both horizontally and vertically through the supply chain. Doesn't matter if you're a consumer buying from a retailer, or a wholesaler buying from a manufacturer. Spend less, get less. Spend more, get more. Or that's how it's supposed to be.

Technology needs to become more transparent. The last thing anyone in the cube wants to worry about, is a supposed solution that only causes more problems. Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck with 1988-era answers to 2010-era problems.

I was going through my old files when I came across the following printout. It was for an art class in my junior year, when I was in the throes of attempting to get a Studio Arts minor under my belt (short lived, and was blown out of the water once I started taking upper division Finance classes). Prof. Holman asked each of us to bring a little snippet, story, picture, whatever that speaks about art and design, make a copy for everyone and take a few minutes at the beginning of each class to talk about it. Here's what I brought:

Another package of super high power magnets (strong enough to to make hamsters sterile and grown men cry) arrived in the mail today. I've always had a fascination with magnets and lighters, so I can't wait to get out of the warehouse and test them out when I get home. Zzzap!

I bought several magnets a few years ago from the Gaussboys already, in a failed bid to create a very cool minimalist picture frame system using masonite and acrylic. Well, it hasn't exactly failed miserably. I just bought all the parts and never got around to completing a functional prototype. Plus the masonite started warping since it was sitting in a dark moldy corner of my room. So I guess that does qualify as FAIL. Sigh.

This batch of mini magnets, meanwhile, is a set we are testing for the retail display of Paul and Kat buttons. If you are my friend or frenemy, please feel free to show up at the UNIQUE LA show on December 5 and 6. I'll give you a free hug. Because I have lots to give! And then I can zap you with some hamster ball-blaster magnets.

Debating if I should get a GPS photo tagger. I also just installed Picasa 3.5, and it's parsing through 171 gigs of data, a total of 116,667 images for faces of friends and random fools. Pretty damn cool. Pretty soon we'll find out who has the most pictures! And I have a feeling it'll be Ate Pat. :)

Just about to finish packing a bag for an Alaskan cruise with the family for the week. I'll be a zombie later since we need to leave the house in 2 hours. Hurrah!

My new toy will keep me company through lonely times. This thing is great!

Kat and I are big fans of analog. We've always had a thing for vintage and classics, warm saturated tones and colors and what not. This is a print from her Diana F+ Lomo that's fitted with Fuji Instamax film (basically: polaroid) that makes instant prints. Pretty dope, but took her awhile to get a framing technique together (which is still far from perfect). We have dozens of prints in various states of failure, many pitch black, total white, or of our friends with no heads. So basically, its pretty accurate and depicts real life very well.

Meanwhile I'm holding a box contraption that blocks out light of a Kodak Duaflex III, which is a medium format camera. I point my camera through the viewfinder to come up with a picture of, well, a picture of what a person sees when looking through the viewfinder (TTV). It's a pretty big square piece of glass, and really cool looking through it. It's amazing how the image can pop out - it's basically my own portable camera obscura.

We've all been conditioned to think that perfect is always better, that you want clean, pure, expensive, unadulterated. Yet the warm hiss and pop of vinyl, the saturated tones of a lomo print, the struggle of a 79 VW bus traversing a grade, these embody for me the beauty and soul of art. It's more fun making mistakes, it's a lot more beautiful, than being perfect.

So much has happened that I wanted to write about, but I'll probably just back-date the posts to coincide with what I wanted to write. I couldn't update since I moved out of Blogger and moved to my own install of WordPress until all the dust hath settled. The biggest hurdles were porting the old comments over from Haloscan and choosing a new theme to go with it. Well, there's still some loose ends that I need to fix and fortunately there is always a late night awaiting me at the end of every day. Long days, can quickly turn into very, very late nights.

It's 3:25am and I'm still in the nerdery. Found this cool website EasyVMX! that creates blank VMWare images for you to play with. Now, all of this wouldn't have been necessary if my old printer is supported under Vista. Unfortunately, I am being forced to run a VMWare image running XP just to be able to print crap out. It seems wasteful to junk a perfectly good printer (HP Photosmart 1115) because a purportedly new and better OS (i.e. Vistacrap) does NOT support it. At. All. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot.

Insanity.

Dear Microsoft,

Your software SUCKS. It is terribly inconvenient to disable VPN connections by default through your dumb stupid crap "OneCare" package that overrides any and all other system settings that should normally be configured in your control panel. This is simple design, I don't need to have switches and levers all over the place. Instead, you are totally obfuscating and constricting the usability of the entire operating system with no regard at all to your users who have shit to take care of, and don't have the entire day to weasel their way through your dumb pre-loaded crap that no one wanted in the first place.

Totally arrogant, totally unnecessary, and totally stupid.

I just pray the future comes here faster, because Linux (and Google) will kick your software into obsolescence, right where garbage belongs.

No Regards,
Paul Lovine

Action packed!

I'm typing this from a brand spankin' new X200 - a sexy beast indeed! I'll have to readjust to the smallish 12.1" screen again, but I'm rolling with a full-size keyboard and speedy responses from the black box. Not too bad. Although I miss the rubbery feel of my old X23.

This is from last week's Big Sur camping.

Nickel in a sleeping bag, hehe.

Finished packing this morning for Yosemite. Weather forecasts light showers all over the weekend, so it may not be picture perfect, but our team of adventurers always finds something to gawk over. Like a rock! Or a shadow!

Congratulations to Marco and Wendy, can't wait to meet baby Isabella :)

Today I ran to the Home Depot to score some PVC joints to repair my laundry hamper. It's the kind made of plastic PVC pipes, shaped like a long quarter circle, and a drawstring cloth bag liner. The connecting parts have crumbled away and the whole thing is always prone to popping apart at the seams. I had to dremel the pipe threads out of the pieces, but it all worked out beautifully.

Still toying around with Ubuntu. I just installed Apache so I can run PHP locally on my box without having to test on a remote server for my random web projects. I still need a couple of hours to get my feet wet. Can't wait to deploy our new ideas for Paulandkat.com. :)

And... one of these days, I would really love to be in an Eichler. :)