Celadon Sun

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I run a few businesses, one of them being my multimedia company but I have another side to me. No… not the Chopped Liver Road Kill side which is a place to blow off steam and just have fun, but the artistic side. The one that makes too many paintings, too many drawings and wants to sell them. Perhaps inflict them on others is a better phrase. Along with my husband, I run a small studio in Dorchester which makes sci-fi blasters, magic wands and very questionable art. You can check it out here.

I’m have a lot of fun being creative outside of the computer. I’m also having a lot of fun writing the ads for the items. With that in mind, please enjoy this ad for my work.


You know how sculptures can be boring? The same old shit, the same old materials and they don’t even smell good. All that has changed with this fabulous encaustic painted sea shell sculpture! From the amazing real bronze painted right into it to the heady smell of scented wax, this sculpture has it all. Oh, wait, you want more? Well, my friends, we have more just for you! No piece of art is complete without a word or two and boy do we have a doozy. Offend your visitors with this one of a kind shell!
Not intended for in-laws or other people you have to actually interact with for life.

 

 

No Comment

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Actually, I have lots of comments. Too many in fact. This weekend alone, I had more than 80 comments added to this site and all spam. So I have turned the comments off because I have better things to do than dig through piles of comments about Uggs that will help my sex life, not to mention make me a rich and happy MAN to find the gem or two that comes from real people who stop by to say hello.

If you are a real person who has hello on the mind, you can always reach me via Google+.

The Information Age

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Well, it’s 2012 and while we’re sitting around waiting for the world to end, let’s talk about the internet. Because that’s what geeks do online. All the time.

Or not.

But right now, I am. Why? Because I’ve had some questions, one too many times, from people who ought to know better.  I used to teach software to adults for a living. Everything from basic programming to how to use Illustrator. It was horrible. All the students were given manuals. We even had an always on internet connection (yes, this was the 1990′s, how’d you guess?). And without fail I would get asked questions that the students could have answered themselves using their text books. Or even searched for online. But perhaps I expected too much.

Fast forward to today. We have an insane amount of information readily available ALL THE TIME. And most people now have instant and constant access to the internet. So how come I get asked questions that could be answered with a simple google search?

And while we’re talking Internet, let’s talk SPAM. I’m pretty sure all of the comments I have received on all my web sites are spam. The ones for Uggs, for better sex, for the secrets to banking are obvious. Others are less so. Is a comment spam because someone can’t spell? Or clearly used google translate? Maybe, maybe not. The ones that talk about my facts (ha ha) and want to use the articles for their research? Totally spam. I trash probably 85% of the comments this site gets. On choppedLiverRoadkill.com, I trash maybe 50% because I like to reply with snarky answers. I’m debating about turning comments off altogether but I think it gives my site(s) a sense of life. That maybe someone actually visited the site and it isn’t just a place for my ego to blow in the breeze.

Um… that sounded wrong but you know what I meant.

So, if you want to know the “best place” to buy Uggs online, how to improve your male libido or where to get your mortgage I can probably help. Which is sad. If you need to know how to use WordPress or how many ducks can fit in a Prius, for god’s sake, google the answer! I’m more than happy to help once you’ve done your due diligence but coming to me first is just lazy.

Sometimes I’m Sheldon

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I don’t watch much television partly because I don’t have time, partly because most of it is crap and mainly because I spend all day in front of a screen (my computer) so I don’t want to relax by spending time in front of a screen. But I’ve finally gotten around to watching The Big Bang Theory and it’s not crap!

Because we cut the cord a long time ago, we don’t have live television. And we don’t miss it. So we’re working my way through the dvds and we’re in third season right now. I find I tend to identify the most with Sheldon, though I try to keep my weirdness inside I do have actual seating positions chosen throughout the house for reasons of glare, breeze, proximity to the door etc. It’s sad. But anyway, this episode ”The Einstein Approximation” pretty much describes my week last week. This is the episode where Sheldon struggles with a physics problem and does everything from taking a menial job as a means of allowing it to percolate, to stealing the peas and lima beans off his friends’ plates to visualize the data. It affects his sleep and becomes an obsession until he solves it literally by accident.

(I can’t embed the video but you can view it here)

As Flash becomes less of a desired technology, developers like me are moving into other areas. My chosen path includes Javascript and jQuery. I’m already coding complex projects using jQuery and I’m finding the challenge both fascinating and annoying because many of these projects are re-do’s from their Flash versions. So I’m finding myself facing coding challenges I’d already solved in Flash and thought I’d never have to bang my head over again. Like pagination. Can I just pause to say how much I hate coding pagination? It’s necessary and you’d think it would be easy but it’s not. The results are usually coded tricks to give the illusion of pagination because actual pagination is either too processor intensive or just impossible with the technology as it stands. Since I’m a front end developer that immediately eliminates a server side option, though I did investigate those in the process. All the pagination you see online is actually hard coded! Fake! And the ones that aren’t are specific to ordered and unordered lists. Certainly not what I need because my project involves hundreds of long xml files that needs to be served and paginated. Imagine doing that by hand.

So, take Sheldon’s issue with his physics problem and apply it to this past week’s struggle with pagination in a technology I just learned in the last few months. I do finally have a solution to the problem, but it affected my sleep (I code in my dreams in projects like this) and made me hard to live with. Poor Pete had to endure several versions of “dumbed down” tech talk while I tried to simplify the problem and attack it from different angles. Programming isn’t his specialty but I find talking to someone with a completely different view point very helpful. Watching the episode with Sheldon’s struggles on Friday night was so cathartic. And yes, I have used peas to help visual data. It’s sad.

In other news, I have been busy creating new paintings but actually photographing them seems to be beyond me right now. Sheer laziness I suppose. But lots of encaustic pieces are ready to go into my store once I get off my butt and actually do something about photographing them.

Well, Light Me on Fire and Call Me Dinner

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Seems like Chopped Liver is gaining in popularity in a huge way. I’d have to thank G+ for this growth as it’s a very active community and apparently full of people who have an off beat sense of humour. I kind of think of G+ as Twitter but minus the limitations. Facebook is a very closed community and I haven’t seen the growth there for CLRK that is happening elsewhere. Which is fine. But interesting.

And it looks like I can call this year the end of Flash. At least for me. I’m getting so many requests for jQuery and JavaScript work now it isn’t even funny. The biggest concern is making sure applications are iPad friendly. While there are still some things only Flash can do well, like longer animations, most other applications can be made using other technology. Can this old dog learn new tricks? You bet! It won’t be the first time I’ve had to change and adapt and I’m guessing not the last. Though I will admit to still missing Pascal and C but maybe it’s a case of first loves will always be the sweetest. I’m certainly not mooning over Lingo!

Google is doing some interesting things with their Flash to HTML5 application and now I see that they have an extension for Flash so you can export from within Flash. Unfortunately, I ran into problems since my work is either too large (there’s a 1mb limit) or too complex for the plugin. I am glad to see them progressing though. I am also looking forward to Adobe releasing a version of Flash that can export to HTML5. Again, I think a lot of my work will simply crap out but I still have unreasonable expectations anyway. Because it’s 15 years or so of Flash work I’d like to not see die. Thanks.

So is anyone else in the midst of a serious case of January blahs? I get them every year but this year I’m in boot camp and on the off days I still make a point of being physically active for at least 45 minutes solid. It seems to help. It was either that or go postal and considering it’s mostly just me in the office right now, postal would be slightly ineffective and pointless.

Spammity spam! Wonderful spam!

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I get so excited, weirdly excited, when I see that I have unexpected visitors to my site. Especially when I update irregularly and usually in passing. Like a case of “Oh, right; I have a blog! Must remember to update it sometime.” Yeah. So today, there were 7 views. Wow. How the heck did that happen? And then I checked the comments. Anyone interested in Russian porn? Because I’ve got all the links I need… which is basically 7 too many! Gotta love spam.

I may shut this site down. I haven’t decided yet. I run too many blogs but the one I really love is Chopped Liver Road Kill. It gets daily updates and lots of Google+ activity on the side. It may be time to focus instead of scatter. I don’t know.

The Long Awaited and yet All Too Short Update

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First off, Happy New Year to all. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably just as glad 2011 is gone. I think the door even hit it on the butt on the way out. Phew! Now we can get on with a fun, new year!

There’s a lot going on around here which has basically sucked away my time from actually writing on this blog. I’m going to try to change that, maybe aim to update once a week or something. Anyway, what’s going on? I’m prepping to submit a number of paintings to some juried shows for encaustic work. I’ve finally finished off a triptych series that has been plaguing me for two long years. And I’ve completely two other encaustic pieces. Not to mention a number of sculptures and yes, even another wood carving. I’m feeling pretty good overall about my progress in the fine art department. Eventually I will take some good quality photos and actually talk about the pieces in detail here.

Other things going on, I’m working on two more books. One is the novel I started for NaNoWriMo and the other is a novella. While I continue to sort out issues with some aspects of the novel (like the unfortunate one where my two main characters end up hating each other when… well they weren’t supposed to!) I’m writing the novella. The first chapter and a half pretty much wrote themselves which is really great. The rest? Well…. I have a good idea where things are supposed to end up and it’s now a matter of filling in the blanks.

My children’s book…. I have been struggling with that. It’s been a long process and the hardest thing that came out of it was the realization that I don’t want to be an illustrator. I thought I did and my goal has always been to be a children’s book illustrator but the reality is that it has taken me five years to illustrate this book with an opportunity that most artists would jump at. To be fair, I haven’t been sitting on my butt; I have been working at it but never satisfied with the results. I am going to finish this book because I’m nearly there and I’m most pleased with the latest round of illustrations, but I think… I know… that I’m not going to go any further with this career path. And I’m at peace with that. In the end, I had the opportunity coming out of school to be an illustrator and what did I do? I become a programmer! Clearly my subconscious knew what I really wanted.

And finally, www.choppedliverroadkill.com has really taken off. After a slow start back in August and September, we’ve suddenly got readers galore. I find it an excellent outlet for my humour, which previously was only inflicted on friends and family, and it’s a great way to connect with other people. My google+ stream is active with readers and virtual friends from all over.

So that’s the short and short of my update. Not dead. Incredibly busy. I’m almost exploding with creativity right now and if I didn’t have to actually sleep at night I’d blog more here :-)

 

My Secret Other Life

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It’s true, I have another life that no one knows about (ok a few people do but let’s just ignore that shall we?). I run a blog that has questionable taste and a sense of humour only a few people could love. It’s mentioned in my About section but I thought it was time to come clean and admit that yes, I do find the crap I post on www.choppedLiverRoadKill.com funny.

To actually get the history behind the site I have to go back a few years. I’ve been online since the 1980s. Post 1985 actually. I was in university learning programming. Pascal. The university had what I can only call a crude intranet or bbs system in place. It completely rocked my world. When I finally got a computer with a modem, dialling in was mind blowing. Empowering. Moving forward there was CompuServe. And moving slightly forward there was the internet in its very early form. Even then, even in just text, there was funny shit being posted for (some of) the world to see.

I joined Facebook fairly late in the game; you see, I know a whole lot more about what’s going on behind the scenes in the internet than most people. I know that accounts don’t disappear. That backups are constantly made on various computers that can be physically located anywhere. That a lot of IT people aren’t as careful as people assume with personal data. That data can (and has been) sold to the highest bidder. That old hardware ends up in Africa or China and the hard drives are still full of that data. So joining a social network in any form made me pause. Having a blog? Nope. I had a static web site for promotion and not much else. It didn’t hamper my ability to get work and retain clients.

But things have changed and everything is social now. Information has become a commodity and content must be fresh. Of course a lot of that is bullshit being created by bullshitters to make money but there is a lot of truth to that too. I have blogs I like to follow. News I want that’s new. I tend to unfollow blogs that don’t update at least once a week. Kind of ironic considering this particular blog updates intermittently and erratically.

And of course, with the sudden popularity of the internet, we had an explosion of funny shit which ranged from images to videos (thank you broadband!) as well as jokes. And I started my collection of funny shit. But funny shit is funnier when you know you’re making other people spew milk out of their noses too. When I joined Facebook, I started posting some images, sites etc but the reality is Facebook is a closed system and not everyone can access this stuff.  I added Twitter to the mix but again there are limitations to what you can do with Twitter. It was clearly time for a blog.

I have a reputation. It’s one I’ve worked at for years especially once I started freelancing and later became partner in the company I founded. My reputation brings in work and keeps clients for years and years. My oldest client has been with me for 11 years now. It’s something I’m proud of. So running a humour blog made me pause and think for a bit; would my sense of humour turn off my clients? Would it negatively affect my reputation? I looked around at a lot of popular humour based blogs to see what worked and what didn’t. In the end though I had to go with what was me; I know it takes time to develop followers and I’d rather post things that make milk come out MY nose than try to pander to what possible readers might want. In deference to my reputation, and also to being a nice human being, I avoid posts that marginalise groups or individuals or genders. We have enough crap in this world without adding negativity.

So, now I’ve got the blog planned and lots of content, but what the hell to call it? A url is important though not as much as they used to be. I remember advising clients on urls (no dashes, go for .com and never use acronyms) over the years and now that the internet is ubiquitous those rules have relaxed a lot. I’d rather pick a url that meant something to me anyway since this blog was just my way of vomiting up stuff I found funny. When I was little the worst things I could think of, before I learned to swear, were chopped liver (omg the worst!) and road kill. Since I assume that the images and commentary I post are crap but funny crap, I wanted to express that and so ChoppedLiverRoadKill was born.

It’s taken me a few months to find my legs on the blog. I’ve switched themes 3 times with the current one being the most successful; themes do significantly affect viewership more than most people realise. I started posting individual images with the odd comment.  Then I started posting batches and finally I’m posting 10-12 images and commenting about them. I hesitated to add the information about the site to my email signature (see the reputation bit above) or even admit that the nerd behind Mould eMedia isn’t quite as straight-laced as you’d expect. I’m also traditionally a lurker online and drawing attention to myself isn’t something I’m all that comfortable with. But one needs attention to make a living and I now see this as just an extension of that idea; while I haven’t monetized Chopped Liver there’s no point in posting if no one ever reads it.

So here I am, one of the nuts behind a site that has hit a sudden all time high of 75+ views and I’d just like to say that yes it is me posting to that site and no I don’t offer free napkins to clean up the milk that may or may not have come out of your nose. I do guarantee that my posts are funnier than Norm Macdonald’s Weekend Update and you’ll enjoy them more than a hole to the head.

NANoWriMo

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Every year, November brings a challenge to anyone who has ever wanted to write a novel: National Novel Writing Month. For 30 days, participants are encouraged to write around 1600 words a day with the goal of reaching 50,000 words by Dec 1. The rules are simple and basically include write, write, write but don’t go back and edit.

For anyone who has ever written anything, you’ll know that the temptation to edit while writing is overwhelming and can completely derail a project. You don’t move forward if you’re busy perfecting the same thing over and over again. NaNo’s goal is just to get that novel written. Completely written. You don’t end up with a sale-able book at the end though because anyone who thinks that madly writing for a month without editing will give you a final book clearly needs to go do something else for a living. You end up with what I can only call crack!fic; your story written, probably badly, but it’s out.

I used to write a lot when I was younger (ha ha, that just means before kids!) and I actually went as far as to get several rejection letters, the odd publishing in obscure places. I also wrote a lot of things I’d politely call dreck. But the act of creating is something that bubbles below the surface for me whether it’s through paint, code or words I always have the need to create.

This year, I participated in NaNo using the germ of a story idea that had been flopping about in my head for a few weeks. I decided if I was ever going to rediscover myself, I needed to do it with a contrived deadline and the imagined pressure from millions of other people doing the same thing at the same time. I had a freaking blast. Completely. And no, I didn’t hit 50k words; I made it to 21 393 words before I stopped writing. My story didn’t stop because of a lack of time (well, there is that too) but when my two main characters finally met they didn’t click the way they were supposed to! I realised that everything I wrote was useful but not at all the way the story needed to come out. But I didn’t stop working on my story, I just stopped writing it. I spent a few days and laid out more background and my goals.

One of my online friends told me that if a story needed to be written, artificial deadlines like those created by NaNo wouldn’t be needed to get the job done. Now I’m definitely going to see if that’s the case or if I do need a set goal.

The things I learned from NaNo were invaluable though. I still love to write. A lot. Whether this story ever sees the light of day through a publisher remains to be seen, and is probably months or even years away, but my words and dreams of the me I thought was long gone have seen the light of day and it’s all good.

More Thoughts on Adobe Flash

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This has been a busy and creative month for me both professionally and personally. As we look to the close of this month and the real start of the silly season, I wanted to write about a few things close to my heart starting with Adobe Flash.

Professionally, Adobe’s announcement shook the internet world; the end of Flash development for mobile devices. There were several responses that ranged from calm to chaos. My response started out in chaos and went to thoughtful; after all I’ve been here before just over 10 years ago thanks to Adobe killing Director. The difference was, this time it looked like Adobe was pulling the rug out from underneath us only to reveal that the floor didn’t actually exist. I think the move was slightly premature on their parts but at the same time justified.

As time has passed, I have been thinking more and more about the future of Flash and the reality is that Flash is no longer, and has not been for some time, the ideal tool for web site creation. I personally have not had a Flash based web site in several years. I personally don’t like visiting Flash based sites with a few exceptions:

  1. Movie or entertainment sites that do not serve primarily text based content
  2. E-learning sites
  3. Video heavy sites (like YouTube)
  4. Anything that has to stream from a site (like grooveshark.com)

I think we can all agree that Flash was overused as a method of web visitor torture especially when it first came out. Long and boring and loud web intros were the name of the game. Hard to use interfaces, touted as being creative, were the norm. Catch the menu! No way to turn off the canned techno music! And just try reading any text with the odd, small, serify or other unreadable font treatments. Woof!

But we could do so much more with Flash and it eliminated hours and hours of cross browser testing and considerations for other platforms. Well, aside from Mac OS9 and IE. We….we just won’t go there. I’m still in therapy from that.

Flash really came into its own as a streaming platform. It changed what kind of media we could consume online and shifted us from text or game based content to video and audio. Sites like YouTube came out and were immensely popular. News sites could now stream live events or whole newscasts.  Suddenly Flash had grown up and left the family homestead full of cheesy games and shitty web sites and become actually respectable. Used by the great unwashed masses and actually enjoyed.

Mobile threw a wrench in the whole works.

Anyone who’s been making “multimedia” for years and years, like me, will remember all the restrictions we used to have to work with. From not assuming users had sound cards (once a very expensive part of computers and seen as optional) to working with 16 and 32 bit colour depths (I still have nightmares), we had to reduce our projects to fit a certain common denominator. Very quickly though computer prices came down, bandwidth went wide and suddenly we didn’t have to cater to 386 users anymore. In fact, we just had to sniff for the Flash plugin, make sure we didn’t have files that were too large to load fast, and go. I think in some ways it made us, as developers, soft. We suddenly had it easy and if someone couldn’t use the site or the application? Well, too bad and odds were they’d be upgrading hardware anyway so it didn’t matter.

With mobile devices, it seemed at least to me, that we were back in 1997. We had to account for slower graphics cards, less cpu, varying screen sizes and bandwidth. Instead of author once, we were forced to author for desktop and then adapt the site or application for mobile devices. Rollovers don’t exactly work well without a mouse! Screen aspect ratios changed and could be very different from device to device. And anyone who’s seen Angry Birds on Android knows that not every Flash game or application plays well or as expected on a device. With my own clients, we ran a number of tests on various projects and found that the limitations of catering to mobile, whether within an app or as an online application, neutered projects so much as to make them not worth pursuing. In fact, outside of Android and iOS test projects I don’t have anything available for public consumption that was built in Flash specifically for mobile.

To top things off, hardware for phones and tablets changes at an alarming rate. While Adobe perfected the Flash plugin on certain Nokia phones, those phones were busy becoming obsolete. Do we even need to talk about the ill-fated (read doomed!) BlackBerry Play Book? It was going to be a game changer as well and was pushed hard at FITC last year. And whoops! Gosh all that work down the toilet.

With this understood, and having been around in this industry basically since the beginning, I actually have to agree with Adobe’s stance on Flash plugin development for mobile devices; it just doesn’t make sense. I do, however, think it wouldn’t be nearly so dead if the Apple/Adobe war hadn’t happened. Allowing plugin development to focus on one particular hardware and software combination would have made a huge difference and actually may have pushed Apple ahead of Android in sales. Android surged as an outraged response to this move and the proof it provided of Apple’s very restrictive policies. (That’s a whole other story in itself)

But, I’m still developing in Flash. Right now. I have two major projects on the table and an ongoing one in progress. All Flash. How the heck is that possible and why would anyone want to put their money into an already dead but doesn’t yet know it, technology? Because, as I said at the beginning, Flash does have its place and will continue to do so for some time. HTML5 is amazing and can do lots of things and many of them very well. There are some things it can’t do, or do well, and I’m speaking from a developer standpoint here. At this point I can safely say I’m not an “Adobe fan boy” and ready to flame any new technology because quite frankly I will go wherever there is a useful technology for my clients. Where HTML5 falls short is in 4 areas that need to be addressed, and I get that these things are being dealt with because I’m following the updates as them come out.

  1. HTML5 and audio is just awful. Try animating a story that needs to sync the images with the audio. Have fun with that. Because you have to preload the audio (and make sure you have it in several versions to address browser based players) and preload all the images and animation information. This is ok for very short animations but try 2, 3 or even 5 minute ones.
  2. Which brings me to streaming. I love grooveshark.com. You can search and play any music online through your browser no problem. I don’t need to download anything, just set up some playlists and whoosh! Grooveshark dropped Flash last week. Now my songs start…. pause….play for a sec…ond and then….pause….and…stutter. It’s gotten better over time but it’s still not the same as it was. And having said that, how about video? Streaming is horrible outside of Flash and I know this because I’m working on an online, iPad friendly, video project. We spent two days trying to find the best codec, compression and streaming friendly formats that didn’t compromise playback quality.
  3. And then there’s browser compatibility. Because HTML5 does not work with older browsers at all. Nada. So we’re back to testing in every browser possible on the two major desktop platforms and every freaking device we can get our hands on. I swear my office looks more like a Best Buy show room than an office now.
  4. Finally, and here’s the one most people don’t get, your assets are not at all protected. At all. You know on YouTube where you have to do extra work to download the movies? Most casual users don’t bother or don’t know how. Techies know there are browser add ons for this. HTML5 saves you all that protection and with a simple right click any of your assets from audio to video to images can be downloaded. No problem. Nothing techie required. Yes, you can crack Flash swfs but again, they can be protected and obfuscated and made to load external assets that your end user can’t get their hands on. In other words, yes not perfect but you remove the casual cracker from the equation.

My clients get all this. From the Adobe move to where we should and shouldn’t use Flash. As HTML5 matures, we’re changing over some applications or parts of websites to make them more accessible by the tablet wielding masses. But for the most part, right now, nothing has changed. I specialise in e-learning applications and there is nothing better than Flash to set up games, track student scores and provide a more immersive experience. Until schools have tablets as part of their computer labs, Flash is still a relevant and useful technology that’s nearly ubiquitous. Just because mobile Flash is dead, doesn’t mean we need to nail the coffin shut and throw a wake…. yet. Until there is a viable alternative that at least addresses if not completely corrects some of the issues I’ve listed above, Flash will live. I’m not nearly as pessimistic as I was when the announcement was made but I still think the writing is on the wall. Adobe must too because I’ve read that Flash CS6 will have some interesting and new exporting capabilities including the possibility of creating HTML5 or at least non swf files playable on more screens. Who knows how accurate this information will turn out to be, or what restrictions will be placed on the types of coding and animation we can do to make exporting from Flash to HTML5 even possible?

In the meantime, let’s agree not to abuse Flash on web sites, deploying it for good (YouTube!) and not evil (pointless splash page intros) while it’s still here.  It’s slightly premature to turn our backs on it but it would be stupid to just assume same old same old and pretend change isn’t already on its way.

Flash is dead! Long live Flash!