I’m leaving this post here as a sticky in case anyone else would like to donate, however, I’ve moved the longer post behind a cut so that it won’t take up quite so much space on the front page. - Cecily
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It took a couple of hours, but I was finally able to download Picasa. A review is forthcoming, but early impressions aren’t great.
Wired reported that Picasa, Google’s image editor, was available for the Mac OS. I like iPhoto, but I find iPhoto ‘08 runs a bit slow on my MacBook, so I was eager to try out this alternative.
I went to the URL posted in the article, only to be greeted with this:
Whoops.
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Snow has been falling for the better part of three weeks. I’ve felt housebound for most of that time, thanks to unsteady knees and a fear of falling. I rarely move from this chair on any day that isn’t a work day, and even then it takes a battle of wills to make it into the office.
Today I reached the breaking point. Snowflakes, drifts, and icy conditions be damned, I decided to go out for a walk, not once, but twice on Sunday.
Slip, slide, stomp, stomp, stomp. SNAP. I’m out and about with my camera. I stare upward to watch as the flakes keep falling. I stare ahead at the mountains of weeks-, days- and hours-old snow drifts expand, contract, and expand with each passing day.
It isn’t as cold as it was when the snow started falling three weeks ago, but I don’t think the thermostat has moved above freezing for very long, or for very many days in a row. The stuff on the ground is obstinate, used, grouchy snow, while the fresh stuff is as sticky as velcro, or as wet as a spring rain shower. Sometimes it even falls as sleet.
I marvel at the sound of icy snow as it trampolines off my umbrella. Distant sirens punctuate the silence, but only briefly. I hear my breath leaving my lungs loudly, accompanied by the soft slush, slush, swish, swoosh of cars passing gingerly over unplowed city streets.
As much as I’ve complained about Vancouver’s cold, rainy winters and how my feet and fingers are never warm enough all winter long, I’m actually looking forward to a few days of gentle soaking showers and a several days-long stretch of temperatures around the 4 to 5° C mark. I long for lawns and sidewalks. I’ve grown tired of feeling like I’ve moved to the Moon.
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After moving to a private server, Dreamhost has informed me that I’m using more resources than before (what?), and as such my hosting bills have increased. The biggest culprit seems to be WordPress’ built-in Gallery feature, along with the Lightbox-style image displays I’ve been using to share larger copies of my photos.
I’ve been experimenting with using a combination of WP Gallery, the NextGen Gallery plug-in, and hosting photos on Flickr to see which would be the least drain on my server’s resources, and Flickr is the winner, hands down. The problem is that if I use Flickr to embed images in my posts, you can’t see the full-size versions unless (1), you click through to Flickr and (2), if you’re one of my Flickr contacts.
So I’m asking your opinion: do you like it when I use lightbox to display my photos on this site? Is the Flickr embed good enough? Do you care whether I post my photos here?
Please leave your answer in the comments. Thanks!
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Have you noticed that your taste in movies has changed as you’ve gotten older? What about your willingness to drop $12.00 (the average ticket price here in Vancouver) on a film that you’re not sure you’ll like?
What follows is a list of movies I saw in 2008. Those I enjoyed most appear in bold. It was quite a year for superheroes, if my list is any indication. I’ve also noticed that I’m far more likely to go see a “popcorn pusher” in a theatre, but I usually rent smaller films on video.
In order of release date:
- How She Move
- Leatherheads
- Baby Mama
- Iron Man
- Get Smart
- Wall-E
- The Dark Knight
- Pineapple Express
- Tropic Thunder
- Ghost Town
- Nick + Norah’s Infinite Playlist
- Religulous
- Zack and Miri Make a Porno
- Slumdog Millionaire - my pick of Best Film of 2008
- Quantum of Solace
- Milk
- Doubt
Are you surprised that Milk didn’t make my list of favorites for the year? While it wasn’t one of my favorites, it has stuck with me for weeks now, primarily because I can’t quite put my finger on why I was so dissatisfied with it in the first place. It may have something to do with the overt sexuality of the film. More correctly, I think it has to do with the fact that Hollywood wasn’t able to make a movie about a Gay historical figure without making Gay sex such a large part of it. Many movies have been made about other political figures, and short of the HBO miniseries John Adams, I can’t think of one that I’ve seen that featured sex scenes.
I understand the other side of the question, though. If they hadn’t shown Harvey Milk in loving relationships with other men, some LGBT activists might’ve gotten upset, saying that he wasn’t a fully drawn, fully realized character, that Gus Van Sant was playing it safe by not showing sex in the film(when has he ever done that?). I knew going in that Harvey Milk was gay, so I didn’t necessarily need to see Sean Penn macking on Diego Luna or James Franco. Let me be clear, I wasn’t put off by the sex, it just seemed like a curious addition to a movie about a historical figure.
I’m still working this one out.
What movies did you see in 2008? What made your best of the year lists?
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The image you see here is what was left at the end of a life.
Thanks to Facebook and the act of reconnecting with high school friends, I just found out that one of my closest, dearest friends from high school died of a drug overdose three years ago. That one brutal line of black text on white is all that I have left to remember him by.
What can I say about him that won’t sound like a cliche? I could tell you how I used to spend hours sitting behind him in class running my fingers through his curly red hair. I could tell you how we came out to each other at the exact same moment on a sunny, summer afternoon. I could tell you about the parties, the laughter, the dancing, the companionship, and the countless hours we spent together, learning, growing, finding our way in the big bad city, finding out who and what we were.
I could tell you how bereft I felt when he moved away two years after high school to pursue a career he had wanted for most of his life. I could tell you about the distance that grew between us as our paths diverged, and how we learned to accept the fracture of something that seemed so permanent just a few years earlier.
I could tell you how happy I was to hear that he was thriving, that he’d bought a home, that he was settled and seemed happy when I last spoke to him five years ago. I could tell you how abruptly his emails stopped, and how I resigned myself to losing him again when ‘delivery status failure’ notices started showing up in my inbox.
I could tell you all of these things, and maybe someday I actually will, but right now the only thing I feel capable of talking about is my anger. Maybe it isn’t the right thing to say, and maybe it isn’t the right time, but I’m deeply disappointed that someone so vibrant, so very much alive threw his life away. I’m upset that he refused all help that was offered by family and friends, and I’m furious that he thought he was so infallible that he could take foolish chances like this. We’ve known people like this — we’ve known people who ended up dead, and yet… and yet…
And yet all that’s left is one line of black text on a white page, and my misdirected resentment.
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You knew it was only a matter of time before this foolishness hit the intarwebz, right? Seriously though, as idiotic as this may seem, it’s just as idiotic as Blackbird.
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Despite my complaining, I really did have every intention of going to work today. But what’s a girl to do when her landlord can’t be arsed to shovel the sidewalk? Not that he was alone in his indifference, as this photo will attest:
I’m not made for this kind of weather. Oh sure, I’m plenty well insulated, but when it comes to actual cold weather/snow gear, it’s pretty darned difficult to walk into a store and buy suitable snow gear when you’re built like I am, and when your feet are big enough to be mistaken for snowshoes.
It took approximately 15 minutes to walk three blocks. Between jumping over snow banks, unsuccessfully avoiding being splashed by passing traffic, and almost being bumped off the sidewalk by some git whose mama didn’t raise him right, by the time I actually made it to the bus stop, I was already in a bad mood. Waiting for the #17 Oak for an hour didn’t help matters any.
I knew when I was licked. I knew that if I stood there any longer and waited, I’d only end up wetter with more snow dumping down my back as it melted from tree branches, and given that I’d be in an even worse mood, which, despite all efforts to the contrary, I’d undoubtedly take out on a unsuspecting patron. I gave up, called my boss, and trudged back home. I’ll try again bright and early tomorrow morning.
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Y‘all, this snow is getting ri-damn-diculous.
This photo was taken at 1:49 pm on Sunday afternoon:
I snapped this one at 7:15 pm Sunday night:
And this is the view from my window at 2:00 am Monday morning:
As I write this, it has been snowing for approximately 28 or 29 hours straight. Being that I’m from Georgia, I can safely say that I’ve never seen this much snow in my life, unless I’ve made a concerted effort to go to the mountains where this sort of snow is commonplace. I don’t have the proper footwear to go outside and actually take a measurement, but I feel fairly secure in estimating that there is at least a foot, maybe 15 inches of snow outside my front door.
We’ve had “blizzards” in Atlanta where Arctic winds whip up against moist Gulf air, resulting in approximately eight inches of snowfall over the course of four to six hours. The stuff that has been falling from the sky since Saturday night is fine, glittering, diamond snow, the kind of flakes you can only make out when you look directly under street lights, the kind that is so beautiful, so ethereal and otherworldly that you feel as if you’re standing on top of a Bundt cake and you’re being lightly dusted with icing sugar. You start to think it won’t hang around long, or you look up and think the snow has stopped falling, only to find out it hasn’t.
It simply goes on silently falling, piling up on light standards, power lines, garbage bins, and parked cars. Everything is blanketed and still, which is, of course, quite lovely to look at. Still, there’s something sinister about this stealth snow, and I’m not just saying that because (as far as I know) I’ll still have to find my way to work tomorrow morning.
I suppose it’s Nature’s way of slapping me upside the head and saying “DUH! You live in Canada. What’d you expect?”
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