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Now that my professional website is updated, I am really itching to update the design on this very blog. But alas, it will have to wait, as I have a (to borrow an expression from my friend Mo) high class problem: tons and tons of current work. It is funny how the ups and downs of freelancing go. One minute, you have no work or very little (October, for example) and the next you are flush. This, I think, is the hardest part for many people when considering working for themselves: the uncertainty. If you have the temperament for it though (and I most definitely do), I think it is far more rewarding than working for someone else on a set schedule. To name just a few of the practical benefits: No rush hour commute, shopping/errands when the stores are empty, taking a walk outside whenever you want, setting your own hours of work, setting your own places of work, variety of work and clients, and more. These benefits far outweigh the perceived security of a regular, full time job. At least for me they do.
With ever increasing frequency over the past few months, I would cringe a little when people asked me for the address of my professional website so they could check out my work. This was because although I was very happy with it when I first launched it, that was back in 2009. The site was definitely showing its age. I had updated the work section a little since that time, but I was feeling less and less convinced that it was presenting me and my work in the best light. I have resolved many times since then to redesign the site, but something (usually other work thankfully) got in the way.
Then last week I was at a party where I met (as I often do) a potential client. I winced as I gave him my contact info with the URL to my work site. It could not go on like this, I thought. I had to at least redo the work section if nothing else. So I resolved to just put up a simple, clean showcase of a few projects, nothing else. This would just be a quick redo so that potential clients could see and understand the work better, and not have to wade through all the other information about me that was cluttering the old site. Just something I could quickly add to or edit, and a placeholder until such time as I could redesign the entire site properly. I would just spend a few hours on it, nothing fancy.
Yeah, right.
Four days of almost constant work and tweaking later, I finally have a new website. And although I spent far more time on it than I originally had envisioned, I am very happy with it. Like most of my sites these days, it is based on WordPress, which will make it super easy to update (as opposed to my last site), and I will be able to modify the template much more easily over time.
So please, check out the new site here, and let me know what you think!
The New York Times has a fascinating article this morning about a group of expert forgeries attributed to some very well known modern artists. Millions of dollars are at stake as art collectors and investors have been duped into purchasing works they believed to be authentic creations from Motherwell, Rothko, Pollock and others. Reading the article, one can’t help but notice the sheer panic of “art lovers” cast adrift in a sea of uncertainty around questions of authenticity. And this is the sad state of art in a capitalist society, where nothing is appreciated separately from its market value. And where the market value of something has nothing to do with intrinsic value, only what the market will bear. Although this idea is often presented as hardy and utilitarian, it is in most cases the opposite of that, and offends a common sense interpretation of things. I have long believed that art should be public, and that great ideas and works presented by artists are necessarily corrupted when produced for the private art market. Especially while the artist is alive and reaping the financial reward, it is rather like producing advertorial content in a magazine. As long as works are for sale, what guides the artist’s inner vision? Is it what sells? Is it what interests the artist? Is it social or political commentary? Maybe the artist divides between private, “not for sale” work and public “pay the bills” work. And who could blame him or her? We all need to eat.
But to the Art Market, the ideas or forms represented in the work are very much beside the point. They deal only in market value and in manipulation of levers that add to value, such as rarity or scarcity. This is especially true of art photography, printing, or sculpture moulds, which have at their very heart ideas about reproducibility and mass production. The output is intentionally limited to increase value. One can see why the same rules do not exactly apply to other art forms such as writing or film making, where they are intended to be communicative to as wide a range as possible. Those works are meant to be seen, and widely. Again this is the problem of art in the hands of private collectors, that the art is shut out from the rest of the world, unable to interact in a discourse with the culture around it.
And this is the rather amusing joke that has now been played on these collectors who claim to care about art. On the one hand, nothing at all has changed about the paintings they supposedly love and have collected. They still have them, can still look at them closely, appreciate the work in close quarters, revel in the meaning or technique or whatever. On the other hand, they have been duped. These works are not original to the artists in question. They suddenly lack authenticity, and for the collectors all value has gone out of them. Why is that? Is the form or content suddenly different? Would they have purchased these works for any reason at such exorbitant pricing (or any price) if it were only about the work, and not about the investment? Of course not.
Perhaps it is because I have many friends that live outside the US, or because I am at heart an internationalist, but I often have to make quick conversions from Fahrenheit to Celsius when discussing things as mundane as, well, the weather. Since I have a lot of experience doing this off the cuff, I am usually pretty accurate to a degree or so. But niggling doubts nevertheless remain in my head, usually resulting in a trip to the weather widget on my dashboard, to change the degree type and reload to see how close I was. I have been thinking it would be great if there was a weather widget that displayed both at the same time, but I haven’t yet found one, despite a few searches.
So today I thought I would learn something about how widgets are made. I opened the code and found it really wasn’t that difficult to rewrite a few things, and voila! I give you the all-degree widget:
Btw, I was debating whether to use the term “nerd” or “geek” in this post title. “Geek” had a lot going for it as Wikipedia provides one definition as:
“a computer expert or enthusiast”
But when I saw that their definition of “nerd” was
“intelligent but socially awkward and obsessive person who spends time on unpopular or obscure pursuits, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities”
it seemed to fit better in this context (n’est-ce pas?).
Satori, Stephen on November 25, 2011 @ 8:28 pm — 1 comment
What can I say about the orgy of consumerism represented by Black Friday that hasn’t been said before? Watching the local news (and national news) is all about the state of consumer spending in this country. Every story is about retailers, and fat ass shoppers loading up on more crap that will fill our landfills in a few short months. Why can’t we see how unsustainable this is? Why do we as a culture want to buy stuff we don’t need today and won’t want tomorrow? What void are we trying to fill with ever more stuff?
Other than that, and not to sound all gloom and doom, it has been nice being back in Indiana with my family. We have been hanging out, catching up, eating, drinking and making some merry. Tonight the gays (family and friends, there are a lot of us) will be meeting up for a night out on the town.
Josh and I (and the rest of the family, wherever they may be) are making our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage back to the midwest today. It is always my favorite holiday, it really brings out the best in our family. If I don’t see them during the rest of the year, Thanksgiving is the one holiday that remains inviolate. That said, I have seen my family more this year than any other since I left home in 1985. Not that I am complaining, I love my family — their warmth, their politics, and their quirks.
…and they drink a lot. Well, I did. Honestly it wasn’t that bad, except for trying to find a suitable costume for my character (a gangster hit man posing as a gambler. No, really.) To be honest, the amount of characters and all the “clue” pages and background story were just too much to get a handle on with a martini or two in hand. I noticed that the crowed really divided into two groups: Those that took it seriously and those who didn’t. Guess which camp I was in, which made it a bit uncomfortable when people would approach me “in character” asking what I knew about the money or the body or the affair. And on a secondary layer, when you met anyone, you weren’t sure if they wanted to know your real name or that of your character. On the plus side, the food was very good, and most of the people were very nice, and the view from this apartment was spectacular. The oddest moment of the evening was meeting an honest-to-god right wing nut in the kitchen, who kept moaning about those no-good Occupy Wall Street people and how under Obama the country was careening towards “socialism”. I swear, he actually used those words. After berating him for a few minutes, I had to get out of the room he was in, or the night was liable to turn into a real murder mystery (minus the mystery).
Satori, parties — Stephen on November 19, 2011 @ 10:42 am — 2 comments
Although I am admittedly somewhat of a geek, I was never the type to engage much in fantasy role-play of any kind. I was never into DnD, never dressed up as a favorite comic book character for Comic-Con, never wanted to be a blacksmith (or wench for that matter) at a Renfair. And with the developments of virtual reality and the internet, I have likewise never felt the siren call of Second Life and its ilk. Not to put too fine a point on it, but even in the bedroom I couldn’t be less interested in pretending to be a fireman or cable repair guy in some elaborate getup or setup. I kind of like interacting in the real world as myself, and feel a little silly when playing a role.
So it is with some trepidation that I agreed to go to some type of murder mystery birthday party this evening. I am not exactly sure how I got roped into it, to tell the truth. I was invited by a good friend of a good friend of mine to a birthday party and I RSVPd before knowing that there was anything special (or odd) about it. As far as I knew, I was just agreeing to come to a party on a certain date (tonight). Ok, maybe I didn’t read the original invite too closely, but let’s just say it didn’t become all that clear to me until I received an email informing me of my “character” and suggestions for what I should wear. This was followed in the mail a few days later with a secret letter (addressed to my character) that is not to be opened until this evening. Since this is some type of murder mystery, is it too much to hope that mine will be the character who has been murdered?
It is in trying times that you find out who your real friends are. I am grieved to tell you that I apparently have no friends. I was told by the host that I could bring someone along with me, but NONE of my so-called friends would agree to it after hearing the setup. Nurse me through surgery? No problem. Help me move? Check. Loan me money? Of course. Go with me to a wierd role-playing party? See ya.
Pretty much everything I do on a daily basis I have learned how to do on my own. It stuns me sometimes that I earn my living doing something that was never taught to me in school, that I just picked up over the years. The pace of change and the ways that the internet and technology have changed our lives (mostly for the good, sometimes for the bad) have been so all-encompassing that we often fail to take notice.
But every so often, you have to step back from this modern world and say “wow”. I realize that a large part of the reason I have been able to live as I do, making my living as I do, is because there is a wealth of freely available knowledge out there. Recently I’ve been auditing a programming class at Stanford University. No, really. And it is absolutely free. Who would have thought that I, with my terrible grades in high school, would one day be taking courses at such a prestigious university? Or that any of the things I would want to learn about are just a few keystrokes and a little motivation away? I can take courses and ask questions of some of the best minds out there, and they respond, helping me along in my education. And I in turn try to offer help to those at an earlier stage of development than me. This free exchange of information is vital to a creative society. It is one of the reasons I am so concerned with the runaway laws pertaining to copyright and patents in this country. They are overkill and poison to a creative society. Copyright and intellectual property rights were meant to secure benefits to the creators for a restricted period of time, after which they should be public domain. It is only through the free exchange of ideas (in all realms) that a society, its arts and sciences, can move forward. The rise of the internet, when coupled with the extension of copyright in perpetuity, has a chilling effect on the ability of creative people and innovators everywhere. None of us stands alone, we are all bathed in the culture, and it is in relation to that culture, and on the shoulders of others that we are able to contribute to both our own and the general welfare. The recipe for progress isn’t a single ingredient, it is a mixture, timing, and refinement.
Fortunately, there are some wonderful responses to the problem out there, from Creative Commons to open source software to various universities and individuals in all kinds of fields that share their work without charge or after a short period of exclusivity. They set an example for how I want to live my life and why I think it is important to give back. It is clear to me how I have been helped by freely available information, and it is clear to me how important it is to share what we know with others.
I received the following postcard in yesterday’s mail. Are they trying to imply that I am still single for a particular reason?
