Tag Archives: Off-Topic

links for 2009-06-16

(Photo credit: My new netbook from flickr user yurukov.)

links for 2009-06-15

Fine Art on Downtown Streets

Each year, Belleville, Illinois plays host to Art on the Square, which is a rather unique gathering of artists from all over the country (and in some cases, the world). They descend on Belleville to set up in the downtown square in individual tents, proudly displaying their craft and offering fine art, photography, sculpture, jewelry, glasswork, and woodwork of all shapes and sizes. It’s really a fascinating sort of event. They block off about four blocks’ worth of street in the downtown area just to hold it, including the roundabout that’s right in the center of town.

This year was the second time we’d visited. There’s no way we can afford many of these pieces of art (some of them cost into the thousands of dollars), and I’m always nervous taking the kids for a walk around the square when just about everything around is breakable, but it’s always an enjoyable time. This year, the weather was nice and cool, the sun was shining, and as always the people were friendly. It’s a great thing to be able to engage the artist, to ask about their work, how and why they create it, and where they are from.

We plan on continuing to go each year. Someday we’ll take back a piece of art to adorn the walls of our home.

I’ve prepared a small flickr photoset with additional images of the event. If you’d like, check it out.

Let's Play Musical Themes

Tonight’s been a game of flipping from one theme to another for me. I have been using Carrington for a while here, but I grew bored with the base look of the thing and wanted something a little more unique.

I worked with one for a while—even edited some old posts in order to fit the theme—but discovered a few problems in the admin side of the theme and unfortunately had to abandon it.

What I landed on is something that interests me greatly. It’s originally designed for a photoblog. The big thing you will notice is that it doesn’t have a traditional front page like most blogs do; it instead has a series of images. Each post on the blog will now have an image uploaded that works with the theme of the post. I’m going to use a combination of images from my own photography (something I intend to continue working on) and Creative Commons-licensed works from flickr like the one that accompanies this post.

I will of course give credit where credit is due for any and all CC-licensed images.

In addition, I’ve taken some steps to simplify here. You’ll notice that the new theme doesn’t support a standard sidebar. I’m OK with this, as I normally find that sidebars tend to get overly cluttered and stick out like sore thumbs. The main page wouldn’t work with them anyway, and if you’re interested in my Delicious links or in my Twitter posts, I’m sure you’ll just find your way over to those services anyway.

I’m also taking a large chunk of posts beyond a certain date, permanently archiving them, and removing them from the site. The past is great, and I will always have a record of those posts and stories, but right now I want to focus more on the present and on what I have going on. Everyone’s entitled to a reset once in a while.

(Photo credit: “Musical Chairs” by flickr user David Maddison.)

First Everything

I recently had to go back and come up with a few dates for a project I’m working on, and part of that was determining a few of the “firsts” in my life. I figured I’d share. (I also added a few things that are trivial just for fun.) They are in roughly chronological order. They trend towards the geeky.

  • My first home: The first house I lived in was at 13217 Mercier St. in Southgate, Michigan. It’s changed quite a bit since we moved out of it many years ago, but you can take a look at it on Google Maps here.
  • My first computer: The first “computer” in our house was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I learned to program simple things in BASIC on it; we even had the speech synthesizer module (incidentally, the TI-99 was also my first video game console). The first “modern” PC in our house was a Laser 128, which was an Apple II clone.
  • My first movie seen in a theater: Follow That Bird.
  • My first job: My first place of employment was Six Stars Family Restaurant, also in Southgate, Michigan. I eagerly took a job at 14 (the youngest age at which you could work in Michigan) as a busboy and dishwasher. If I was lucky, I even got to step up and do some cooking once in a while.
  • My first car: My first car was a 1996 Chevrolet S-10 pickup. It had power nothing and was as simple as could be, but it got me from point A to point B and the ability to haul things was very useful. It died after surviving a tree falling on it and not surviving softball-sized hailstones.
  • My first Web site: When I was in high school (1996? 1997?), I first became fascinated by the Web, and my family first had an Internet connection. Wanting to learn more, I picked up a book on HTML 3 (I think) and learned from examples using TeachText on my Mac LCII. The first page I publicly released to the world was either in our AOL-hosted Web page space or on Geocities; I can’t remember which is correct. I vaguely remember the page having something to do with either Macross Plus or Star Trek, and I’m about 99% certain it committed a number of gross copyright violations and was ugly as sin.
  • My first blog: The first Web site I had resembling anything like a blog was created while I was in college; in 1999 or 2000 I first had a hand-coded site that I managed without the help of a database or any of those niceties, and later I actually worked out a front-end to a Snitz Forums 2000 installation that took posts to specific categories on the forum and translated them into blog posts. The oldest post that has survived to date is from April 13, 2001 and was the first post I made to LiveJournal.
  • My first degree: B.A. in Theological Languages from Concordia University—River Forest.
  • My first child: Joshua was born March 18, 2003.
  • My first WordPress post: I moved to WordPress as part of the mass exodus from Movable Type in early 2004. The first WordPress post I have from that move is dated February 18, 2004. This means I would have been using version 1.0, though I distinctly remember playing around with 0.72 before that.
  • My first house: I won’t give the address here, but Amanda and I bought our first house in October of 2006. I haven’t managed to bring it down yet.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, but I’ll throw a few more in here if I come across any other interesting ones.

(Photo credit: “A first street. STOP!” by flickr user cleber.)