A Queer Mobile

The kids cool their heels

The kids were milling about while John moved strawberry plants to the new bed. Just behind the fence are Maeder, Sophie, and Dolores (from left to right).

2X2Xyou opens

One of the coolest art venues in Cedar Rapids happens right on the street. A group started 2x2xyou: meaning each artist gets a 2 foot x 2 foot square of plywood and instructions to do something on it. It's not juried and it's open to anyone who wants to enter - everything appears right on the street from May through September.

Here's John's piece hung on the side of his building; his shop is on the street where the action is. It's a very cool 3D construction of squares within squares. This year's theme is 'My Dream'.

Unfortunately I'll be in California next weekend when the block party happens to open the exhibit officially. John took me around yesterday so I could see everything early!

Ki's soggy...

We had pouring rain early last week. Ki insists on parking his butt right in the middle of the wettest part of the yard. John brought him back in, wrapped him up in a towel, and plopped him down by his food. He eventually shed the towel...

An owl in daylight!

We couldn't believe it when this huge owl flew overhead, landed, and took a good look at us. He then took off... see below

Spring time on the trail

We've had glorious weather for walking on the weekends. I shot this last week at Indian Creek where we walked under ideal conditions. The first wildflowers are blooming and trees burst out everywhere in yellow-green leaves. I'm always astonished how fast things change; by this morning leaves are fully out and growing quickly.

Tweaking the shoulder again

I headed back to my wonderful physical therapist last Monday so he could check out how I've been doing. Now I've been pushing myself in the exercise routines that he gave me, and I've seen real progress. My left and right shoulders are much more even; the left shoulder stays in place - meaning it doesn't separate as easily; and discomfort in the shoulder is dramatically reduced. The biggest benefit is that my breathing continues to improve, just as my osteopath said it would.

My PT was pleased indeed, and he put me down on the bench for more stretching. He's pushing me to stretch the fascia around the left shoulder so that things stay in better alignment. He also prescribed abdominal crunches to help me open up my mid-back. His way of doing crunches isn't how I've seen them done before - and they're brutal. On your back you first do a pelvic tilt and push the lower back into the floor. Then you lift up your upper body - and hold at maximum contraction for a count of at least three. Then you lower down slowly to a count of five - maintaining complete control the whole time. He says that he gets tons of patients who say they can do fifty crunches - and they can't do ten his way. And he says you don't need lots of reps if you do them right. So far, he's been right again - my mid-back is opening up and relaxing.

Playing hooky in the garden

With the launch of the systems I was introducing last week at work I decided to take a long weekend. For once my timing has been perfect! The tulips recovered from the cold snap in early April, and the weather's stunningly wonderful.

John and I hit the nursery for the first of many trips this season. He wanted cedar mulch to finish off the new and improved rose hedge along the front of the house. I pulled Creeping Charlie out of the beds and started weeding around the peonies and Echinacea that are leaping out of the ground. We're missing only a few things from last season, and it's still fairly early here.

My real goal is to bring in compost and dig the beds for salad greens, beans, tomatoes, and peppers. I figure I won't get it all done at once...

Meet Octavia!

I took the plunge last week and ordered a new 8-core Mac Pro system with a 30" display. It arrived on Monday and I've spent the week moving everything over to my new working environment.

Why Octavia? Because it has two Intel Xeon processors, each of which can do four computations simultaneously (four cores on each chip). The two processors work together on many of my hardest tasks, like creating 3D photorealistic artwork. My rendering software takes advantage of all eight cores, making it possible for me to create images vastly faster than before. It's incredibly less taxing creating images when the system moves as fast as you do.

The display's utterly huge and incredibly beautiful. I can work full size on images and do retouching with much greater ease.

I also bit the bullet on this system and decided to decommission my Windows machines. Because I can run Windows XP under Mac OS X using Parallels Desktop, I've moved all my Windows software development onto the same machine. Not only does it work well, I'm more productive than ever before because of the display: when I code I like seeing lots of stuff on the screen at once.

Figuring a new product direction

In my spare moments I've been working on an idea to build a tool to help artists present their work more effectively through the web. I'd done a minimal amount of competitive analysis and figured the space might be a good one.

Imagine my surprise last night on the Art Walk. Twice a year six art galleries in Cedar Rapids and Marion open their doors to their patrons - who move from gallery to gallery all night. We hit the two galleries where John has work. We'd just arrived at the first one where I overheard a conversation between the gallery's owner and one of his friends - who's been pushing him to develop a web presence. She recommended a service that I'd not uncovered before. I filed that away for later in the evening.

We had a smashingly good time talking with folks at the galleries. After feeding the dogs John settled in to watch a singularly weird Mexican horror movie and I retreated to the computer to do some competitive research. Imagine my surprise when I uncovered several companies competing in the same space that I've been targeting. I dug into the sites to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. And I went to bed just a little down.

Saturday's been a relaxing day so far - I've been working on my own art project: another of the Tarot's Major Arcana. As I worked I kept thinking about this project and whether it is worth pursuing or not. I think the answer is yes, but not in the same way as these competitive products. I certainly need to provide the same functions as these sites, but I think the real trick is to link artists and their potential patrons together into a more interactive community, rather than simply sticking out images for people to encounter. I'm doing an implementation for John. When it's done, you'll have to check it out!

Creating a new last name?... Not!

What should have appeared on the front page of the Cedar Rapids Gazette this morning than a story about a lesbian couple (yes, Virginia! There are lesbians in Iowa. Queers, too...) who combined their middle names to create a new last name for the two of them. I posed the following Gedanken experiment to John: Combine --

• Wright (his middle name; his mother's maiden name)
• Omar (my middle name; my father's first name)

into our new name. We came up with

• Right-O
• Om-right

Not our ideal name. Years ago I proposed translating the first part of his last name from German into English and suffixing the last part of my last name to yield:

• Blackbottom

Hmm. Maybe we'll stay where we are...