Blog. Book. Book Tour.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that my friend Henry turned his blog (Health Care Fine Art) into a book. He didn’t try to sell the book but gave it to the best customers of his art. Some call it “vanity press,” Henry calls it marketing.

A year later… Henry has been invited to give a talk about his book in New York. Last week he did a series of presentations in Boston. In a couple of week he’ll be in San Francisco and next month, San Diego.

It’s a beautiful book and nobody know more about this kind of art than Henry.

Welcome to the new normal.

Pimp my netbook

Local artist Jim Dike pinged me for advice on a new computer and wound up buying a Dell netbook. He wanted good battery life and reports the new Dell can run for 8 hours on a charge.

And it will look smashing the entire time. All you need is some clear sticker paper and colored sharpies (and a pick-up truck load of talent). Not sure how I feel about putting “sticker paper” on m precious MacBook Pro, but I’m tempted.

Too much stuff

This PBS program on design has stuck with me for a couple of days. In one of the segments, a designer said something about removing everything that is not essential until all that remains is the essential. (This MacBook is a very nearly perfect example of that aesthetic.)

The same, I suppose, could be said of the theme I chose for this blog (the theme… not my execution). Thesis is the creation of Chris Pearson. More creative types have done all sorts of wonderful things with Thesis but I like the way it looks “right out of the box.”

I have gone through phases where I thought I could add a little “pizazz” to a site. If you have that designer gene, you can pull it off. If not, more is less. Knowing that –and lacking the gene– I shoot for simple. And let’s face it, nobody comes to a website twice because it looks cool.

I just finished a book by Deepak Chopra in which he says something about simplicity as an element of happiness. I’m paraphrasing here: If you acquire something, give something away. Sort of, “stuff neutral.” I’m going to give that a try because I clearly have too much stuff.

PS: So much for “less is more.” Got to playing with Thesis options and figured I’d play around with a header image for a few days.

Song of @fezmonger

Going for a bike ride and leaving the phone behind.
Keep the ratings up and don’t forget to roll
the credits when you’re through.

It is days like this that I wish
I had a café lifestyle
and not the sit in front of a computer
life I have today.

The train is running extra slow today.
Not a surprise considering
the rain tends to jack it up.
Gonna be a looong ride home.

This train is moving
a bit slower than I would like.
At this rate we won’t reach basecamp by tea time

And it begins again. I hope the train shows up soon
my cloud cover is breaking up
and it looks to be a hot day ahead

Sitting on the train platform in a warm LA night.
At least the smoke has cleared out…
I’ll be back here tomorrow

The damn couch keeps calling my name.
I’m trying to get something… hell anything, done today
but a nap sounds so very nice

The lines above were compiled from random tweets by Jason Rogers. No words were added or deleted. I did break lines as spirit moved. I hope someone with music in their soul can make this sing.

Do you have anything in first class?

During our brief chat this morning, my brother told me of a recent trip he and a co-worker took from one Indonesian city to another. Half-way through the 12-hour train ride, the lights went out. The crowded car was pitch black. A trip to the toilet involved trying not to step on the people who were sleeping in the aisle (or the rats and cockroaches).

On the return trip, they opted for the bus. There’s the regular bus which allows you to bring small farm animals aboard… and the “Executive” bus which does not. They chose the latter.

The most exciting part of the trip never happened. As they sat on the train, waiting for it to leave the station, two men got on, stowed their luggage, and then got off. My brother and his companion agreed they would get off the train if the men were not back on by the time it departed.

TED Talk: Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

From the TED Blog: “NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.” [via @greatdismal]

Marco Brambilla’s Civilization

The vision behind Marco Brambilla’s Civilization was to take “hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven.

Alrighty then. And where will we watch this video?

“The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.”

You really need to watch the video to get the idea. I found the link on William Gibson’s blog where he observes: “Stuff’s finally starting to look like the 21st Century. Next, your shower curtain.”