Friday, March 30, 2007

Technology and Shifting Hats

Coffee (microwaved from yesterday) in the Chicago skyline mug, "So Long, So Wrong" by Alison Krauss and the Union Station on iTunes. Computer technology has progressed amazingly in the past 20 years and I still want more. When I got home from the BMAC I amused myself by looking at another artist's catalog on the web and creating my own version in Word by dragging and dropping the images from the web straight into Word. We take that kind of functionality for granted. Ho hum. Click here, move there, don't even think about what has to be going on in the software underneath so that the two programs (Word and the web browser) can pass enough information to make a seamless hand-off. Heck, just thinking about it might make most people's eyes cross and brains hurt, but I want more.

I was going to write what more I wanted, but in the middle of writing this post I took a phone call and finished with a senior moment: I have no idea where I was going with the whole need for more tech rant. Ah well, guess I better move to glass.

No, I know! I want to be able to easily link a snippet of the song of the morning to its title at the beginning of the post! I have done it before, but it was a real pain, I don't remember how I did it, and I don't know how well the snippet played--I work on a Mac these days and I have to use iTunes to preview music. The soaring lifts of AK's voice on "So Long, So Wrong" are worth sharing. But I can't 'just do it'. So now I get on to glass and you'll have to experience Alison Krauss' voice somewhere else.

One of my many hats as a single business owner/artist is to photograph my work for daily, small-scale updating (on a webpage, for a catalog, etc.). Today I futz around with lighting set-ups, backgrounds and table heights. And I may need to learn how to cut Formica. Dave bought me a nice sheet of black Formica to use as a seamless background for my work, but eight feet is too much to wrangle onto my table set-up. Maybe I need to put it back further away from the work. I am beginning to wish I worked smaller. I envy the Hulets and their obviously marvelous set-up for their teeny-tiny chocolates. Extreme efficiency exemplified. I will spend the afternoon trying to get my own version up and working. What's left of the morning will be spent purchasing a crate. No glass will be harmed today.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can send someone to the preview of the song on the iTunes Music Store. Just search for the song in iTMS, right-click (or control-click if you have a Mac without a 2-button mouse) on the song, and select "Copy iTunes Store URL". Then you can paste that URL wherever you want.

For example: So Long, So Wrong

Anonymous said...

Heh. That comment was from me! Forgot to sign my initials.

-jyk

Brenda Griffith said...

hey JY, looks like your link requires iTunes to be installed. What if they don't have it (like I don't have RealPlayer so can't use Amazon's links)?

ren said...

ok, i don't actually KNOW anything about this but i have seen people using this in their sidebars...

http://www.ilike.com/

maybe that will do the trick?

Anonymous said...

Oy.

I know what you wanted to say; you want technology to read your mind, and remember things for you, so you stop having "senior moments".