New Look Sux.

That’s the title of an email thread that went around my universe. No one likes the new look of Gmail. You can search the web for details of the usability nightmare. But let me just offer this one tidbit.The CSS is so broken that the pages often don’t render well in Google’s own browser.

That and so many mis-steps with privacy and cross product snooping and then there are some things that the Google universe just won’t do for me. (I need to be able to make calendar entries for past dates. Like when I’ve been working so hard that I“m not tracking hours at the end of the day but putting it off until the next morning.)

Not that my Google account won’t be going away altogether. It’s just going to go back to being what it was intended to be in the first place. A quarantine for mailing lists that allows me to just not see them when I need to focus on other stuff. A decent chat client. An RSS aggregator. A website analytics manager. Lots of things. But not a mail manager and not a calendar manager.

What to Do About It

I have access to Microsoft Office 2010 and Office365. I have domains that I can use for email addresses. I can move away from GMail to an Exchange server. Importantly I can move to an Exchange server that I don’t have to manage. That’s a variety of black magic that I don’t have time to learn right now.

My choices are not appropriate for everyone. . If you aren’t doing business with your email addresses or you enjoy the arcana of running your own email servers you can leave GMail for a lot of other products. But those paths are not what you’re going to find here.

First up… A Plan.

There are 4 parts to this dance.

1. Get all of the data out of Google.  I“ll need Gmail, Chats, Contacts, Calendars.
2. Prepare local machines with copies of Office 2010. [a]
3. Set up Office365. Microsoft’s cloud based Office product. [b]
4. Set up mobile devices to use the new Exchange based account. [c]

———-
Notes

[a]  There are lots of these machines. All except the one I’ll actually be using for email already have Office 2010 on them. Figures doesn’t it?

Office 2010 finally does conversation threading — the one thing I most desired in an email reader. And the biggest reason I haven’t switched before. It also allows back-dated entry in calendars. Something Google calendars doesn’t. I really need this. I track most things in a Moleskine, only transferring them to the electronic calendars at the end of the week. Moleskine’s only hold 6 months worth of stuff. I need at least a year’s worth at tax time, no?

[b] I’m only using the Exchange server. Office365 also offers Sharepoint (Magpie makes a hex warding sign) and an online meeting thing and other business stuff that I don’t use. Yet.

[c] I’ll miss my better-than-Apple’s-lame-version calendar app. Otherwise this is a no brainer. Follow the directions given in the setup menu.

Coming under the heading of Don’t Put Yourself in the Position to be Jealous.

I have a twitter stream full of authors whose work I adore, or whose way of working I admire. Every time one of them gets a good review, publishes a book, or places a story, I cheer. I love that the world is going to see more of their work.

But the ones whose stuff I think is mediocre and who I think have chosen to be mediocre. Um, no. I don’t have the time to spend with their psyches.

This week was all about the short stories. Many available free on the ‘net

From the World SF blog. The City of Silence by Ma Boyong. A little too easy update of 1984 for the web ruled city. I suspect that there is better material by the same writer.

The House of Aunts. Zen ChoTo at GigaNotoSaurus. I don’t usually read horror. I loved this one. A teenager hemmed in by a passel of nosy, interfering, undyingly loyal aunties. A girl’s first crush and a lot of humor.

I read a couple of stories written by someone I sort of know that disappointed me greatly. There is zero chance that he’d find this little post and yet… I can’t bring myself to point you all to an instructive example of flat writing. Conflict avoided by writing about the conflict rather than the stories — whew.

I’m reading a lot about the act (crime?) of writing. Mostly web stuff — mostly lost in space.

On the longer form front.

An Everlasting Meal — Tamar Adler. A cookbook worth reading for both the ideas and the prose. I’ve just started. Pleased with it.

Tons of stuff landing on the Kindle and in the post office box. A Dorothy Parker bio, Fran Lebowitz (smart ass girls — could it be a theme?) Osama — Lavie Tidhar (alternate present political), Palimpset — CV (how cities grow — folkloric.)  Samples of a handful of things.

It was a week for hunting and gathering and plundering other peoples’ reading lists. Next week — cooking and eating my haul.

Happy Friday my dears.

River of the Gods From Ian McDonald, whose Desolation Road and Ares Express I loved. Set in a near future India in all the messy loud colorful glory that promises. This is a much more hard-core sci-fi than the two Mars books. There is a vast cast of characters, some of whom I care about very much, some of whom I dislike very much, and some of whom I would simply avoid at  a party.

There are at least 6 subplots in here. Maybe he’s going to tie them all up into a neat  package at the end ala Gibson. But half way through I’m bored with 3 out of the 6 and 1 of the 3 that I was enjoying seems to have gone AWOL. I’m not sure if I’m going to finish this.

I’ve gotten further along in William Gibson’s Distrust that Particular Flavor. It remains a bit uneven, just what I’d expect of a collection of essays form a writer who doesn’t like to write essays. Still, there are a couple of very rewarding pieces. I’ll have more to say about it when I’m finished.

Rules for Virgins. A long short story from Amy Tam. Who we haven’t seen any fiction from in quite a while.  I forget between books how much I enjoy her carefully crafted style. She writes with her ears. Her language is the everyday sound of people, mostly women, as they wander through the day and the world and each others lives. There’s a bit of back story about how she came to be the first of Byliner’s fiction writers here.

I spend too much time in the world of science fiction where the language has increasingly reflects the frantic churning pace of creation and the epic page counts that so many authors find themselves caught in. Careful language is worth looking for ans taking the time to write. Or at least that’s my excuse for my glacial pace this week.

C Valente’s Orphan’s Tales concludes with In the Cities of Coin and Spice. Darker and more nightmarish that In the Night Garden. It loops through another set of nested tales that adds the other half to make the whole world and then circles back in an unexpected to me, but I sort of can’t believe I missed it, logical and satisfying ending.  My kind of fairytale.

Short version.  A switch from curation to creation.

Slightly longer version. Morning Linkage was  path to finding my way back into thinking about story telling. It is now time to start telling stories of my own again.

There’s an even longer version but that should probably stay between me, my therapist, and the happy band of weirdlings on the WW list.

What will you see here next? I’m still working on that. I hope it’s about stories and how they get built. Words, pictures, sounds, places, dirt, and stars.

Caren Alpert takes photographs of food through a microscope.

Here for example is a pineapple leaf.

pineapple leaf detail

Many more including sprinkles, a spooky sun-dried tomato, and chocolate cake.

via: feature shoot

Belgian ads advising you to “Take the Bus” done for the bus company De Lijn. Produced by Creative Conspiracy for the Duval Guillaume agency.

Ants:

Penguins:

via: PaperWalker (which you should look at just for the header art)

Cheeky smile of the day: Mr. McQueen’s Licence Internationale de Conduire. Trials and Scrambles.

would you trust this man with your motorcycle?

via: Gunslinger

A really lovely little sidecar rig. Honda CB550. The rebuild is appropriate for the era and the paint is so sweet.

little CB550 makes a great tug for this little chair

via: BikeEXIF

A look inside the mind of builder Dustin Kott. Cafe Racers from vintage Japanese bikes. By Benedict Campbell.

via: Return of the Cafe Racers

From Emily Carrol who does dreamlike comics and stories. a tale of silvery hair and a covetous crow. Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter.

Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter

Cut paper, pop-up books, and projected lights & images, bring Ice Book to chilling life. This video gives you an idea of what the piece looks like in person and how it is created. Davy and Kristin McGuire.

via: Coilhouse

Villagers! vikings! Castles, swords, and … dinosaurs? Dinosaur Battle Town, Eddie West’s 4th year project will thrill the 4 year-old boy in everyone.Yeah, it reminded me of Howl’s Moving Castle just a little too.

The effectiveness of simple materials used in a clever way. Paper, pens, scissors. Not to mention the charming not quite English of its creator.

Every cup of coffee contains its own soul, extracted from your feeling today.every cup of coffee is like a magic show containing different journey and bringing the unending imagination and surprises.With a sip of coffee, you not only taste your own story, but also change your perspective of the world.

Stop motion essence of coffee :)

Sara Burgess

More papery wonderfulness, insects, leaves, and very special 3-D forms. Sara Burgess works with white paper and an x-acto knife.

via: Oh So Beautiful Paper

Talented dancer, composer, and film-maker. Daniel  (cloud) Campos. “Music Box’  about finding the perfect apartment, the vid featured at the moment will make you smile.

If you can bring yourself to watch “Rain Dodger” you’ll get a giggle but it may be too much for many considering the ridiculous rain we’re having right now.

More environmental sound. A giant xylophone created in the woods by Drill Inc. A slow rolling ball and a gentle incline pick out a familiar tune. Images from the shoot.

Robot happiness. Well used, retro style toys by Cris Rose.

Extreme camera geekiness, with the Girl DP. How to make very custom bokeh filters. hearts, stars, moons, and *words* in dazzling fuzzy light.

… do not read below this line …

And completely, irredeemably, unnecessary: a My Little Pony/Dark Knight mashup. Worthwhile comments on the daily what.

you were warned.

Transportation

I’m not a fan of choppers — it’s a style I just don’t get. But ZZ Chop is true to his roots and does graphics with a distinctive chopper ethos. Great, grungy, retro work.

Making a scrambler out of an older BMW RT is cool. Though I wonder a little about bashing through the woods on anything with that kind of width :) The quote from the Cycle Magazine explaining the 70’s BWM nomenclature and the relationship between the various bikes in the line is priceless.

Planes and bikes. A lovely little blue and white piper cub and an equally sweet blue and white Passport. (Yeah it’s just a nice pic. Soothing even.)

Science

Gyrodactylids. Parasitic flat worms living on fish. Cut paper animation and nesting dolls? As always Creature Cast shows you something you wouldn’t come across in your daily reading of the news. (And provides great examples of amateur animation used as a learning tool.)

Art, Images, and Design

Faces in objects, found and enhanced by Flix. Bright mecha-man goodness.

Swoon is an American girl in Paris and she takes us on a night-time ramble to install one of her wheat paste posters. Her life-size images of people stand up well to the background noise of Paris.

Snippets (SFW) of classical paintings enlarged and pasted into new but entirely appropriate contexts. Zilda.  More (some NSFW.)

Large scale, partial images, hints of a story yet untold. Mesa works up some faces on a ruined wall somewhere in rural Spain.

keep calm and carry on