iPad – PopWars

April 18, 2011August 21, 2019

I Miss My Mouse

Three stacks of crime faces from the local paper. Oil paintings by Paul Dodd

I found this photo in my photo library on our iPad. I’m at least three years behind in photographing my paintings. Our addresses, contacts, email and photos all sync effortlessly with our desktop machines and we use theiPad for just about everything. Everything but productivity that is. Unless you count reading, surfing, listening to music or streaming movies as a productive activity. I kind of like typing on the thing.

Who would have guessed that it would take an heroic effort to crop and scale a photo to a particular pixel dimension like 450 x200 for example? As an experiment I tried a few apps like “Crop For Free” and then bought “Photogene” for $2.99 but that didn’t let me crop and scale which is one activity in Photoshop. So I bought FilterStorm and that does the trick in two steps. I saved two versions (the cropped version you see above and the full shot but in a scaled down size for the blowup) of the original photo back to my photo library and inserted them here. When I say “here” I should say I am in the WordPress app because I can’t even reach my photo library from the WP admin panel at my site in Safari. Not sure why that is but it acts like a limited version of Safari.

So I managed to do a post from the iPad but I’m exhausted. I still haven’t plugged in the $29 Camera Connection Kit but that would allow me to reach photos on my camera from the iPad and post to this site through the WP app. I’s all pretty amazing really.
.

1 Comment

April 5, 2010August 23, 2019

La Cucuracha

Swans prepare nest in pond in Trott Lake at Durand

After reading the “They Gay?” article about pets I can’t be too sure exactly what is going on here but what I think we’re watching a male swan prepare the nest for his Mrs. He was yanking these dry weeds out by the roots and piling them up on the nest while his lady worked the material under her butt.

Spring is moving in so fast it is going to be over with before we know it. We took a walk early then knocked out a backlog of work. We did a print ad for the Bop Shop for the Jazz Fest brochure and we airbrushed a a photo of the Stone Tolan house for a brochure the Landmark Society is putting together. And we did a layout for a new website, our second shopping cart set-up with the Russians (X-Cart). They use funny names for portions of the site that you need to customize to make it your own. They call the nav bar the “Speed Bar”. And when you want to add your own html content to pages within the data base framework you go into the “Languages’ section. They charge for customer support so we spend hours duking it out rather than paying.

We had Easter dinner at my sister’s and played Wii Music with our nephews. Peggi played guitar and I played percussion on a wild version of La Cucuracha. We passed the iPad around and my father wants one. We knew how easy it was import photos from iPhoto and music from iTunes but we were astounded how easy it was to set up our email accounts when we tried syncing with another computer. I bought the $9.99 Pages app this morning so I can have a program to work in when I’m not online. And my brother-in-law hooked me up with an WFMU app for streaming wacky music. I’m listening to Liza Minelli tear up “Stormy Weather” as I write this. In fact I entered this post from my iPad.

There Is Still Time

Now that the snow is gone, the beer cans are starting to come out down on Hoffman Road. We’re not really sure who is dumping all these. We have speculated wildly and even suspected neighbors but who knows. I bring them home so I don’t have to look at them, that and I collect the five cents. I don’t think kids would be so stuck on the Budweiser brand. And they wouldn’t always throw them in the same place. This seems like the work of an obsessive alcoholic, as if there is any other kind.

Well, I signed up to be notified when the iPad becomes available. I read so much hype and speculation about the product that the movie on Apple’s site looked like a spoof. I’m guessing Bob Martin will already have an iPad when get to the Little for tonight’s gig.

Brad Fox sent me one of those small 33 1/i books on Trout Mask Replica and the behind the scenes tales of that seminal Captain Beefheart lp were really interesting. I noticed a few other books from this series on the shelf at Duane‘s place in Brooklyn so I asked if I could borrow a them. I read “Low” first and learned that David Bowie was a bit of Nazi nut. So it came as no surprise when Quentin Tarantino used Bowie’s Cat People Theme (Putting Out Fire) in Inglourious Basterds. It seemed everything was borrowed in that movie and then I heard the movie itself was a remake. I dug out our 45 of that song and it sounded fantastic, best thing in that movie, the theme song from another movie.

I’m reading Joe Harvard’s (sounds like a made up name) 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico and loving it. Next up is Exile on Main Street and then I might have to buy one. Bruce Eaton has written one on Big Star and it includes a passage on Pete LaBonne. I never caught on to Big Star in the day but I guess there is still time.

5 Comments