Saturday, March 26, 2011
One Question to the Wisest
Friday, March 25, 2011
The Two Sinclairs
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Bush Personality and Iraq Surge
- closed cognitive style - stubbornness, high risk acceptance, closed-mindedness. Stephen Biddle wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon" regarding strengthening a friendly govt. Against an insurgent force. -- Petraeus, McMaster; people who have thought very seriously about war in all its manifestations.
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Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Lazy Intellectual
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I Used to Know That
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I Used to Know That
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GIMP Bible- wiley.com
Paths
Masks
Channels
Text
Blur
Filters
Animation
Plug-ins
Canvas
Raster & Vector graphics
Compression
Automated Scripts
Native format XCF
Faking an ink drawing
Layers
Transparency
Blending
Zealous crop
Guillotine
Channel mixer
Gradient map
Brushes
Calligraphic lines
Smudge
Dodge/burn
Clone tool
Healing tool
Gaussian blur
Tileable blur
Antialias
Deinterlace
Despeckle
Distortion filter
Whirl & pinch
Jigsaw
Maze qbist
Sinus
Spyrogimp
Laplace
Neon
Sobel
Fractal space
Warp
Cubism
Gimpressionist
Animation filters
Spinning globe
Batch processing
Filtermacro window
GAP's Video Navigator
Audio tool
Scripting languages
http://www.wiley.com/go/GIMPBible
Gnu Image Manipulation Program
Peter Mattis
Spencer Kimball
Extensibility Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
6th Grade Daily Proverb
Monday, March 14, 2011
On Facebook Groups and Public Domain Open Source
Friday, March 11, 2011
Praq Rado in Dreaming American
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Jury Duty 1
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Sitting 1st day jury duty
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Monday, March 07, 2011
An unusual project today
An (expletive deleted) casting director sent a poorly planed EMAIL with 20 performers names and I had to find the phone and email for each one in casting networks and email them two sides for some commercial.
From my perspective, the casting call was not well thought out, but I suppose from a directors point of view that is why they pay an agency... to do the grunt work...
The audition (or whatever you call it) is Wednesday... (Drew is coming in tomorrow and i am on jury duty) ... and about 5 of the people did not have email addresses.... I got all done with those 20 and THEN the [expletive deleted] casting director sends a second email explaining that there can be no SAG, and then a bunch of substitutions.... and it was a very vague email... no mention of pay, no mention of the directors phone number... so I had to google for that.
One actor wants the part but is in New Orleans and cannot get a flight because of Mardis Gras.
Two people wrote to say they were abroad (one in Europe and the other in Australia).
I created a folder on desktop called something like email-projects.... then in that I created a folder with the project name... then I saved the entire email as NOTE .txt . AND I saved the two word document sides... then I resaved the original email with the name list over and over under each performers name, and deleted all the names EXCEPT their name from their copy.... THEN, I opened dptalentinvest@gmail.com and ADDED each one I found as a contact (because the Yahoo address book SUCKS). MOTE THAT IF YOU METHODICALLY ADD EVERYONE TO AN ADDRESS BOOK THEN IN THEORY LIFE WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME EASIER IF YOU DO NOT DIE FIRST... but even then it will be easier for those who replace you. I created a GROUP for that casting director's name and Co. and tagged each CONTACT with that group. I pasted the wednesday time and date in their NOTES and filled in name, address phone... USE THE CONTACT NOTE SECTION TO DOCUMENT RECENT ACTIVITY. ...
As I successfully sent each email with the two sides attached, I changed the FILE name to leading 0000 so FINISHED files would float to the top in a directory listing.... I had a copy called ORIGINAL where I mintained a call list. I had a text file for the BODY of the email which starts off with DP's famous caution... DO NOT put down your own phone or email...put the AGENCY phone and email and erase your contact info from head-shots... wonder how many abide by such instructions? ,, I guess it is the "honor system" .... Five had NO EMAIL so I had to try and call them on my cell...
A curse be upon those interns of yesteryear who never bother to key in an email address... and a curse upon performers who are too dumb to include their email address... what do they expect, CARRIER PIGEONS?
I am posting this to illustrate some of the things that an Intern may have to do in certain situations.
Oh... Lou gave me a valuable suggestion.... whenever you look at a resume... check out IMBD because ALL the televsion roles will appear (though some low budget films may not.)
Truth 4
Truth 3
More regarding TRUTH
What is TRUTH?
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Praise Ye the Name of The Lord - (Psalm 134) - Plagal 1st Tone
Saturday, March 05, 2011
Best to start with GIMP
GIMP vs. Photoshop / Dreamweaver vs. KompoZer
NO, this is not a horror Sci-Fi thriller, it is how some people make their living.
Right now it is Saturday, March 5th, at 10:14 p.m. and I have just spent the past solid 12 hours teaching myself to use KompoZer (which is a free open source alternative to $300 Adobe Dreamweaver) GIMP (which is a free open source alternative to $1000 Photoshop) and Filezilla (client) which is a free FTP (file transfer program) which does the job (and there are FTP's which COST MONEY (perish the thought.)
I should add that I used free pspad.com text editor to edit some of the HTML.
I should ALSO add that I used a screen capture/image editor PICPICK to
insert the actor's NAMES into their thumbnails.
You may examine what I have done so far by clicking on THIS link
http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test.html
Go to the bottom of that page and click on the link which says
SOME RECENT ADDITIONS TO OUR FAMILY
which will bring you to THIS link
http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test3.html
which has the THUMBNAILS of 18 randomly selected actors who are in Dorothy's database.
When I started at 10 a.m. I didn't have the foggiest idea what I was doing. All I knew was that whatever I did, it must not in any way disturb the present functionality of Dorothy's website
http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/
I would ask you to pay particular attention to THIS one actor's profile:
http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/testdir/testheadshots/male/Actor_Pages/adammichael.html
because I began to experiment with certain features of KompoZer such as TABLES and various fonts of which, curiously enough, I chose BROADWAY. Now, I realize some people
may find certain fonts tiresome after a while so do feel free to make suggestions. Nothing is written in stone (except, well, of course, Moses's Ten Commandments, but then he smashed them and had to go back and get them all over again, but that was before the days of carbon paper... but most of you are too young to even remember carbon paper.)
Anway, I spent the first several hours experimenting and failing until I stumbled upon something that worked which is why I am wise to pause and document it all before I fall asleep and forget everything. And I shall post this now before I write another word, so that the computer does not crash......
(to be continued)
CONTINUED AFTER FILING...
One of the things about Dorothy's current site which bothers me is that when you look at the thumbnails, you can barely make out the performers's names which makes it difficult to search for a certain performer when asked (and I was asked to do such a thing.)
I do not know very much about HTML. I decided to use GIMP to RESIZE each photo once as a tiny thumbnail and again as a larger image for the profile/resume. The thumbnail has the performer's name as TEXT. Each thumbnail is also a link so when you click on one it opens up the resume and since the performer's name is in the resume there is no need for text in the larger photo. I do not understand how IMG height and width work and so I used the resizing of GIMP to achieve the image size and this eliminates the distortion which comes from wrongly using img height and width parameters.
The other thing I don't care for is the way the resume shows as an image. I realize it is faster to just plunk a scanned image but I want to see if it makes sense to key in the curriculum vitae. One advantage is more control over the appearance using table. A second advantage is that POSSIBLY the search engines can index on the text of the page and bring more traffic to the site. A third advantage is that anyone viewing the resume may copy and paste details.
This entire effort is an act of desparation for several reasons.
1.) My wife is in Las Vegas with her sister for 2 weeks so I can stay up all night long and be as sloppy as I please. Once I learn all these new things then I will be able to do them more easily during spare hours but the initial learning phase requires long hours of total immersion.
2.) I have jury duty starting TUESDAY so Lord only knows how that will go, but I will feel better if I have these skills under my belt.
3.) It is good if more than one person is able to update Dorothy's website on the remote chance that the one person who CURRENTLY does it may become preoccupied with something else (possibly a newborn.)
4.) As new interns fall into Dorothy's WEB, they may ALSO learn some of these useful and tedious things.
ALWAYS REMEMBER that no matter how complex a piece of software is, you usually wind up using only 10 or 20 commands over and over and over.
I am fortunate to have 4 computers in my livingroom. One is Ubuntu Linux and the other 3 are Windows XP.
Last week I installed KompoZer on my Ubuntu machine but could not figure out how to connect the FTP aspect to Dorothy's HOST.
This morning I installed the free Window's version of KompoZer and after about an hour figured out how to get it to connect to the website host.
Two weeks ago I was desperately searching for an FTP that would connect to the HOST and I chose a 30 day free trial of CuteFTP (which I had used in 1999) but then I figured out how to get Filezilla FTP. My huge mistake was that I installed the SERVER version of Filezilla, when what I really need is a CLIENT version.
Three weeks ago I was able to use CuteFTP to DOWNLOAD all the HTML for Dorothy's site.
I also made backups of the Actor and Actress files which contain a folder for each performer. In each folder is a scan of the head shot and a scan of the resume. I decided to start my experiment with Actors and save the Actresses for dessert. (One does have to start SOMEWHERE.)
I created a folder called DPThumbs which contained a folder called tActors, and another folder called Larger and a third folder called Smaller.
tActors contains all of the actors folders which includes head shot and resume scanns.
As I created each THUMBNAIL I stored it in "Smaller" folder, and as I created each large profile photo I stored it in the "Larger" folder. My naming convention, arbitrarily chosen, is that the thumb nail for an actor named John Smith is called tjohnsmith.jpg while the larger photo for the profile is called ljohnsmith.jpg (notice the lower case L) and the actual page which contains the HTML for the photo and resume is johnsmith.html
On the actual SERVER for the website I created a folder called testdir
and within testdir is a folder called testheadshots
and within testheadshots is a folder called male
and within the folder "male" are THREE folders: Actor_Pages (which has the johnsmith.html), a second folder called "fullsizepics" which contains the ljohnsmith.jpg and a folder called "thumbs" which contains the small thumb nail pics.
A page called TEST3.HTML
http://dorothypalmertalentagency.com/test3.html
contains the code for all the links to the profiles as thumb nails pics with the performers's names embedded. You will notice that each thumbnail is a different size which is the result of not knowing exactly what I am doing with GIMP when I resize. BUT, the human eye ENJOYS variety, so this may actually be a nice touch.
Friday, March 04, 2011
Escrow Funds
History
The crowd funding approach has long precedents in the sphere of charity[citation needed]. It is receiving renewed attention from both commercial and social entrepreneurs now that social media, online communities and micropayment technology make it straightforward to engage and secure donations from a group of potentially interested supporters at very low cost.
One of the pioneers of crowdfunding in the music industry have been the British rock group Marillion. In 1997 American fans underwrote an entire US tour[2] to the tune of $60,000, with donations following an internet campaign - an idea conceived and managed by the fans before any involvement by the band. Marillion has later used crowdfunding with great success as a method to fund the recording and marketing of several albums, Anoraknophobia,[2] Marbles[3] and Happiness Is the Road.[4]
Crowdfunding in the film industry was pioneered by Spanner Films with the climate change documentary The Age of Stupid[5]. The Age of Stupid team, headed up by Franny Armstrong, successfully raised more than £900,000 over a period of 5 years (december 2004 to 2009, date of release) to cover both the production and promotion of the film. The film’s crew worked at very low wages but also received crowd-funding “shares”. Under the terms of the crowd-funding contract the investors and crew are paid once a year for ten years from the release of the film.[6]
They were followed by french entrepreneurs and producers Guillaume Colboc and Benjamin Pommeraud from company fr:Guyom Corp. when they launched a public internet donation campaign in August 2004 to fund their film, Demain la Veille (Waiting for Yesterday).[7]. Within 3 weeks, they managed to raise nearly $50,000, allowing them to shoot their film.
Crowdfunding's earliest known citation[citation needed] was by Michael Sullivan, fundavlog, August 12, 2006, "Many things are important factors, but funding from the 'crowd' is the base of which all else depends on and is built on. So, Crowdfunding is an accurate term to help me explain this core element of fundavlog."