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Driving down with Alex and Marissa to Nikki's 21st birthday party

Eating a vegetables with pasta sauce lunch - having exercised, blogged and scanned old data. Yay!

Home Exercises

I'm writing this while sitting at my desk - sweating. OK, it is fairly hot in here. Thermometer says 77 F /25 C degrees. But really I'm sweating because of forty five minutes of exercising quite hard. This is the eighth time I have subjugated myself to a home exercise program. I am over one quarter of the way to 28 days of home exercise. People say that if you do something for 28 days then it becomes a habit. What started as a resolution becomes routine. Twenty eight days is sort of a month with a few times missing. Not perfect but doable. Anyway who decided on the 28 days (or one month as other say) anyway?  Got to look that up.

There are several reasons for home exercise rather than classes  - such as the Pilates classes that I have been taking  at my Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club since 2001. First is that I can't seem to make my classes travel to France and elsewhere with me. I can't do classes in San Francisco and home exercise while I'm on the road. At least I have not been able to do this in the past. Even with the best of intentions, my home exercising on the road has only lasted for one or two rather desultory sessions. My hope is that I will soon be so acclimated to my home exercises that It will naturally follow that I continue the routine while traveling. Knock on wood.

I'm out of the stuck elevator. After a while the doorlock released and I was able to pull open year door. I'm on tram on way home.

Stuck in an elevator at UCSF. A lady said she would call for help.

Somebody thinks my eyes are pretty. My eye doctor wants to take pictures of them. Going to his office.

Going home after long dinner. Diana said 7 to me and 8 to Ken. Anyway venison chili was delicious.

Going for dinner at Big Four with Diana and Ken.

Going for a cup of coffee at MoMo's with Philip and Helen.

Three things I'd like to see

1. De-criminalize drug usage

2. Re-purpose the military

3. Fix education and health???

3. More power to the States.

What are the very biggest over-arching objectives for the future?

encourage more smaller companies. family companies like in China? break up the military industrial complex.

Fog is rolling in - very dense. Time to do my laundry.

Still scanning thousands of pages of old paper notes and files.

2008-07-03

More scanning of old files. I've scanned thousands of pages in the last few days. Mostly personal notes and files from the 1990s. Lots of memories of life in Mill Valley and work at Autodesk. Good times and not such good times.

It 's difficult to do anything else while scanning because the scanning requires so much but not all attention. So I'm trying blogging while scanning. Can I do some lightweight writing while I can. Well, for the moment it seems possible.

I just had my first issue with the Fujitsu ScanSnap 300 scanner. It 'lost' a two hundred plus page scan - about twenty minutes of work. I have upgrade to latest revision of the software. I should probably stop the scans at 100 pages and start a new file. it does not seem to be possible to append to an existing file using the ScanSnap driver. On the whole, the scanner is working really well. Ir scans fast. makes small files, and very rarely misfeeds.

I am learning how to hack it. If the top of a sheet - an old fax for example - is ragged, you can open the scanner and insert the paper just beyond the ragged edge. Also if you see a sheet going in slightly crooked, you can gently hold the tail end of the sheet - causing the sheet to straighten. If worse comes to worse and a sheet is being mangled, you can open the scanner in mid-scan to stop the scanning. The you can re-feed the scan and resume exactly where the last good scan finished. The ScanSnap is an excellent product. A nice benefit is that it is quite small and, in particular, not high - making it easy to feed in sheets while it is sitting on a normal desk top.

Last night I went out for drinks at WineSF and dinner at Sens with Pierre Gasztowtt. We talked of the differences between life in San Francisco and Paris, between city and country life. We talked about the in and out of his finite element analysis software. We had a good time.

Blogging Idea

I'd like to start an unofficial Safeway blog. The blog would offer suggestions to Safeway about what products people liked or did not like. There would be a good number of contributors - basically anybody could join. But all posts would be moderated. The idea would not be to dump on Safeway but to offer constructive advice.

I shop at Safeway several times a week. It's my most frequent shopping experience, So I might as well be part of the story to make Safeway even better.

Mobile blogging

Blogging from my BB. It looks like it's better to blog by sending an email. Cannot edit a post. Just create a new one. Well you can keep one going. But feels easier in gmail.

title testing

I can't seem to find out how to get Blogger to use nice URLs. So I am creating a new post to see what happens. ... OK so it looks like this is a good URL for this post: http://theoarmour.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html#title-testing

test

Conceptualizing random endpoints in a access matrix provides reach extensions enterprise wide. Respective divisions historically insignificant, upscale trend lines in a management inventory analysis survivability format.

We've Moved

I have just moved all the data for this site from the Dreamhost server to the WordPress.com server. The downside will be that there is less flexibility in customizing the site. The upside is that WordPress will take care of all the updates, hosting, and protection. Before too long, I hope to get all my sites on WordPress (or Google) and get entirely out of the hosting 'business'.

Art of the Net - Good to Go

I have finally have Art of the Net at a stage where I feel I can show it to people. Today I edited and published What is Web Art? and started and published Read Me. I also updated the tags, and did minor edits throughout. There's still a lot of errors lurking, but now I'm sure that other people will help with proofreading.

Tomorrow I will send the link to Ken Goldberg and Steve Gordon. I am so excited that Ken is so excited. We have lift-off!

New HTC Advantage is good - maybe even delightful. Fits into the pocket and has a long battery life. VGA resolution and quite fast on the Internet. Anyway, I went for a long walk today - quite happy to be out of my 'office' and still very much connected. It's quite a bit smaller than the current UMPC's and has a great battery life - which the UMPC's do not have.

Update 2007-10-10

Several posts on koudachev, evereverland and artofthenet in the last few days. So maybe I am getting in the habit of blogging. I think I would still rather code than blog. Coding is more enthralling, but for the moment I am a blogger.

I'm looking forward to going to the Berkeley Art Museum on Fridayto hear Ken Goldberg and others speak on new media. Will I go to Engadget tonight. We'll see.

Next up is more work on aotn. I want to look at every entry in the rhizome artbase, catalog it and note down as to whether it is a work of web art. I must also start looking for some new sources of works besides rhizome.

Four Posts on Koudachev.com

At last I've added some real posts to Koudachev.com On the Ingres portrait, Berdyaev, Rolland and Norman  & Myra Armour engagement.

08-12

Blogging from my BB using the wordpress.com mobile page.

First Real Posting in AotN

I wrote '100 Years of Cubism' today and I'm quite happy with the writing. It tries to get a point across and it has a fairly entertaining ending. It took three or four hours of writing and research to put together.

The especially nice thing was that when the post was finished and published I had the feeling that I had done my work for the day and it was now safe to do something else. When I've been working on other people's web sites, there always more to do, and the work never has an ending feeling.

So let's go to the Ferry Building for caviar (from Marin County) and tea.

Art of the Net Updated

Art of the Net has been updated from a competition web site into a blog. Tomorrow I will write a post about the 100th anniversary of Cubism.

Changing Course

For several years I have been building web sites for other people. I have learned much - more perhaps than the people I was trying to help. But now it is time to start making web sites for myself. One of those sites is this one.

I hope to write here more frequently than I write in my own private journals. In doing so I hope to question the act of writing a blog. Is this a form of narcissism or is this the creation of data for future data-miners or something else entirely?

I've just looked up narcissism in wikipedia. There are a lot of references - too much to think about for the moment.

Anyway, courage Theo. Come back here often and exercise your writing skills and then use those skills on other sites...

2007-01-10

just looking at how this version is handling file uploading

What I did yesterday

On Wednesday afternoon I went over to the Dolphin Club with the intention of becoming a member. Outside the locker there is a blackboard. Here is what was written on it:



I went for a swim anyway. The TV news cameras were still there waiting for somebody to get bitten. I didn’t get bitten. I joined the Dolphin Club anyway.

Walking in San Francisco with Cynthia

I'm sitting at Cafe Express on Powell and Sutter Waiting for Cynthia who is shopping in Walgreen's. We spent the morning looking for the best price to Cynthia from Santa Cruz to Paris then Shanghai for Christmas and back. Eventually we found a pretty good deal, except the trip back will take 2 days with an overnight in Paris. Finally got out about 12:30. At BofA, We transferred $700 to her account so she can use her credit card to pay for her Lufthansa ticket CDG to PVG (Shanghai). We bumped into Laurie a friend from Pilates class and sell hello. Then to Bill, my barber, to see pictures of his enormous personal backhoe he keeps at his house up in Ukiah.

On to Lychee Garden for dim sum. As it was after 1:30 the place was nearly empty and we got what we wanted quickly. Ha Gau, Sui Mai, Cha Su Bai, flat white noodles with stuff inside, the hairy taro balls (mentioned the other day by Doug - see below). Even sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. They really do a very job of preparation, I'd like to see the kitchen one day. Cynthia was very happy. Her first dim sum in YEARS.

Then to Imperial Tea Court. My first visit to the HQ. Roy the famous owner was not there, but I met Grace who manages the shop. I met somebody I knew but I cannot say who it is because they told me there being in San Francisco is a secret.

On to the Chinese Cultural Center to see a superb exhibit of ceramics by Dottie Low. Outstanding work: inventive yet respectful of tradition. Great range of thought from settings to sculptures. Humor, serious, satire, it was all there. We went to this exhibit at the suggestion of Doug, her brother, who is the frozen food shelf stocker at my Safeway. Siblings with two very different paths in life.

Then we remembered that I started out with a bag but currentlly it was not with us. Cynthia dashed back to Lychee Gardens. And somehow stole it away because the man who was there kept saying "nothing here".

Then she went to Walgreens and me to Cafe Express. Now I'm sitting in the ladies shoe department on the third floor of Macy's.

The more I walk through San Francisco with people I know the more fun it is. I frequently run into people I know. Odd coincedences occur. Always familiar, always new. Walks in Paris likewise.

We've walked right by H&M and now I'm sitting in ladies dresses at Urban Outfitters. At each new place, I add more detail and thoughts to this draft.  We then went on to the new Westfield Mall on Market Street passing through American Eagle, Banana Republic and Bloomingdales. After that we took a bus home.

We went to Olivier's for Dinner. Cynthia had a splendid and tasy porck chop and I had monkfish. Fo dessert we had their incomparable chocolate soufflé.  All the time we were chatting with Yassim who had just returned from Paris. He gave us both a glass of Baume de Venise as digestifs.

A nice day.

Night Swimming at the Dolphin Club

The Dolphin Club is where I practiced for my Alcatraz swim. I went back today for another swim. I entered the water around 5:00 pm. By 5:30 after swimming half a mile it was quite dark so I got out because I though they might close the Club after it gets dark. As I walked up the beach, I saw a man getting ready for a swim. I asked him if the Club closed down He replied that her thought that maybe between 110:00 pm and 5:00 am the outside door was locked so people could not get in but that otherwise you could do what you wanted. So I turned around, went back into the water and swam another half mile.

Though the skyline was well lit - with the huge Ghiradelli sign illuminated just above - this time I could barely see the buoys. I could not see my hand when it reached the bottom of its stroke. So the swim was a bit eerie. If I drowned how long would it be before they found me and how well can sharks see in the dark. Of course, I bumped into somebody swimming the other way.

The water temperature was 58 degrees Fahrenheit or 14.5 Celsius which was quite OK. When I got back into the water for the second half mile the water felt warm.

The Dolphin Club has its membership committee meeting next Wednesday. I think I will attend.