Friday, October 27, 2006

"Future events such as these will affect you in the future"

"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."

Thus began my favorite review of the new Internet Explorer. Starting with a Criswell quote from Plan 9 From Outer Space is a damn fine way to get my attention!

The concensus seems to be that this is a big improvement for IE7 but it still isn't as good as Firefox (or Opera or a half-dozen other browsers). I suppose I'll eventually download IE7 for the rare times that I actually use it (some of the work-related sites that I hit unfortunately still do not load correctly in Firefox) but not until long after I've gotten all my home computers up on Firefox 2.0. I figured I'd give the Mozilla servers a few days to cool off and download it this weekend. IE? Maybe over the Christmas holidays.

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 11:32 PM 0 comments

Getting Ready for the Tour

Tonight was the reception at the Artscenter in Carrboro for the Orange County Artists Guild Open Studio Tour - most of us on the tour had a piece hanging which is great advertising for the tour as many folks will come look at those representative pieces before deciding which of the 60+ studios they want to visit. What goes less noticed (even by us) sometimes is that those pieces are also for sale. So when we showed up and noticed that JennySlash's pen-and-ink didn't have a label we were a little perturbed. While we tried to get an "official" label on it, we went ahead and put a handwritten label on it and before we could replace it, a red dot appeared on it. Sale!!

So we kinda decided that the handwritten label was just fine. Way to go, JS!

Had a lot of fun tonight - I'm getting more comfortable talking about my photography both to other artists and to the folks that came in looking. Had a nice conversation with a recent arrival to Chapel Hill from France with her kids who really seemed to like my Currituck Lighthouse photo and kept suggesting that I really need to go to Lyon and photograph the old houses and manors there. Sounds like a good idea to me!

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 11:19 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Addict

Damn Mr. Sun and Lex and JennySlash - between the three of them they've gotten me hooked on YouTube. I spent most of the evening last night watching stuff like the Connells Over There and 74-75, the Weird Al-produced Rockin the Suburbs from Ben Folds and the like. But the best is this bit of Dexter Romweber from when Peter Zaremba came to town with MTV's The Cutting Edge (the last good show MTV had except for maybe Remote Control) and shot a bunch of local bands - 1985 maybe? There was a Cutting Edge night at the Brewery with UV Prom, the Bad Checks and others and I remember a bit with Zaremba playing with Let's Active out behind the barn at Mitch Easter's mom's house but the bit here with Dex showing us around the Maus (a year or two before it burned down) is priceless. We've got a video of the show somewhere - we didn't even have a VCR at the time but we went out and rented one to make sure we got the show - but this will do for now.


posted by Tony Plutonium @ 10:33 PM 2 comments

Pat Tillman's Birthday

Found via The Poor Man, Pat Tillman's brother Kevin speaks out. Unlike The Editors, I've excerpted a bit but do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

As Kevin says, Pat Tillman's birthday would have been November 6. November 7 is election day. You know what to do.

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 10:24 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Great Moments in Television History

I seem to be the last person I know with broadband access to get into surfing YouTube, but I did spend a little time tonight when I should have been working and found the greatest punk moment in television history - one of the only times I can remember a performer using the fact that Saturday Night Live was, in fact, live to do what the hell they wanted to do. And who better than the computer programmer geek god himself.


posted by Tony Plutonium @ 9:44 PM 2 comments

Under the Bean

Via Ed Cone, Tom Lassiter has a very cool 360 VR done from under the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park in Chicago. (The picture from my old blog was taken before they removed the structure underneath.) Neat!

posted by Tony Plutonium @ 2:38 PM 0 comments