Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

It's been a while, but I'm back (bitching as usual). Let's start with....Artificial Intelligence generated art! 1. The first thing to remember is this is the new Bright Shiny Object. LIke the camera once was. Upon seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), declared: “From today, painting is dead.” He was a little premature. And there will continue to be be more Bright Shiny Objects that will grab everyone’s attention and cause gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. 2. It’s also version .01 of this Bright Shiny Object. What we’re currently seeing is essentially demo reels: “See what I can do!!” Interesting but not *that* interesting. Once the excitement wears off it will be just another tool, used badly by some, used well by others. The camera did not replace painting, but it opened the eyes of artists to the possibilities of other forms. 3. Where Does the Artificial End and the Artist Begin? in my mind this situation is th...

 A friend of mine recently took exception when I mocked people (mostly conservative) who tossed around the term "Cancel Culture." It seems in the opinions of many some (mostly conservative), it's a freedom of speech issue. Not really. And it's not a First Amendment issue either, when Facebook or Twitter cancels your account for praising white supremacists, or neo-fascists, or other right-wing dickheads. " Cancel Culture ," which, according to Wikipedia, was originally an outgrowth of the "MeToo" movement, (so not so much about speech as calling out behavior - specifically against women) has morphed now into the latest right-wing NewSpeak  term for "I'm being punished for expressing my opinion."  Dig a little deeper though and you'll find the issue is not so much about "free speech," as "consequence-free speech." I mean...if you are going to be an opinionated ass, at least have enough self-respect not to be a w...

 I just checked and the last time I updated this thing was in October 2017. Why was I gone so long? Call me lazy, or a coward, or just not willing to shout outrage into the shitstorm thunderstorm that America under our previous grifter-in-chief had become. A man could go permanently hoarse yelling that much. It was a mental health decision on my part, okay? But now I'm back. Things still suck a lot (<cough>Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell</cough>) but they don't suck as much as they did last year. Plus I retired from Sisyphean Corp last year after 20 years of whining and having a steady income, and God only knows there's nothing the Internet needs more than another old white guy with too much time on his hands pissing and moaning about what's wrong with the world on his blog. So don't expect much.  I've given up the world of IT and resumed my past life as a painter, which is fun. If you know anything about me In Real Life, you can probably find...

I'm normally not one to make snap judgments, but I have found that if you use the following phrases in your conversation or in your online opining, it's a sure bet you are an asshole . These should  be so self-evident they need no further discussion but since some disputatious dick-weed is probably composing a response already... Brietbart ( as a source ) - if you have reposted even once, just go fuck yourself. Fake News - the favored insult of a certain serial liar, serial sexual predator, serial bankrupt artist, when hearing something about himself that displeases him. Fox News ( as a source ) - see remarks under Brietbart Gay Agenda - code for "please go back into the closet where you belong, sodomite." MAGA / Make America Great Again - code for "make America white again." Don't even try to deny it, cracker. MSM / Mainstream Media - translated: a bunch of socialist, America-hating, eastern elitists. Second amendment rights - used by ...

Just a quick reminder, since a number of right-thinking Americans have become concerned over disrespecting the US Flag (from http://www.usflag.org/uscode36.html) § 176 . Respect for flag No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing. Regimental colors, State flags, and organization or institutional flags are to be dipped as a mark of honor. (a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. (b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise. (c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free. (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged ...

I just looked and it's been almost a year since I've posted anything to this blog. I can't remember when I last posted as Dr Ralph on Facebook (and in my other guise I mostly share pictures of recent paintings from Instagram). Twitter? Bah. Most social media has become anti-social and I'm sick of it. Even for stuff that normally I would have some natural affinity for. It's tiresome and I'm tired. I no longer feel up to joining the army of angry voices out there, even though I find myself alternately pissed off and horrified. My most optimistic opinion about current events is that we, as Americans, have been stricken with a bout of temporary insanity, although truth be told, I don't think that insanity is ours alone. I don't think trying to shout louder than the folks I disagree with is going to make the situation any better. So I've decided to shut the fuck up. Mostly, anyway. I've got several friends and more than a few relatives t...

I have so far restrained myself from offering any opinions on this year's presidential race. It hardly seems necessary. I'll say this much: I had a choice of watching the debate or indulging in a martini on the porch with a good friend who doesn't share my political views. Guess which I took.

I've known I was going to be writing this post for about 6 months now, and not looking forward to it. I learned yesterday evening that my old friend, debating partner, guitar playing buddy Allen Patterson - AKA, the Whited Sepulchre - has gone to that place where we all eventually go. Allen was diagnosed with a brain tumor about 6 months ago. After the initial shock, he dealt with it with his usual blend of wit and mockery. We should all face death with such an attitude. One of the things that as I get older I find I dislike about Facebook is that you learn all sorts of life-changing news there scattered among the cat videos and Candy Crush ads. So it was that I first that Allen had passed - on Facebook. He might have been delighted -  he regularly delighted in turning around people's perceptions of  the "proper" way of doing things. I knew the diagnosis was terminal, but I wasn't ready for him to leave us, dammit. I last saw him at a celebration of h...

PaaS stands for "Platform as a Service;" it's one of several classes of cloud computing services. Compare this to Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), DBaas (Database as a Service) and CFaaS (cluster...well you get the idea). Here's an update on some PaaS services that have free (as in no money) tiers. I've left off any that are free trial periods. It's annoying to have to keep checking the calendar.  I'm also averse to listing any that require a credit card to get into the door. This list was thrown together quickly, mostly so I didn't have to bookmark all these and remember the details. I went over some of these when I wrote about cloud services in general  last year.  And now, in no particular order.... https://www.openshift.com My current favorite. You can run up to 3 small applications (they call them "gears") for nothing, nada, zip. You can even set up a custom domain. How cool is that?  T...

I just learned today that my old friend and occasional debating partner, The Whited Sepulchre  has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor of some type, and is scheduled to undergo brain surgery on Friday. From what he and others have said on Facebook (I hate that Facebook is now a venue for this sort of thing) the prognosis isn't particularly rosy, but I refuse to reflect on what that could mean. I saw him last Sunday after church from across the sanctuary; I hadn't seen him there in quite some time so I pushed through the exiting throng to say hello. It struck me at the time that he didn't seem quite himself...a little more subdued than usual. He mentioned a writing project he was thinking about starting then we agreed that we needed to get together and do some pickin' and grinnin' again in the near future and then parted. Today I saw a friend post something about his upcoming surgery and I was struck dumb. We didn't always agree (read: rarely)  but we alw...

Well, it's been a while. Life here at Sisyphean Corp has always been a grind, but in the past it always had a modicum of amusement value, as well as the opportunity to do slightly interesting things with the support of a string of pretty good supervisors. I worked hard and had fun. That changed about a year ago. January 2, 2014, I had a new boss. It didn't take me long to figure out the good times were over. My second or third one-on-one meeting she said, "I'm not sure I understand exactly what you do, but you seem to have a lot less on your plate than everyone else." It's gone downhill from from there. It occurred to me the best way for her to find out what I did was to quit, but I need the money. So last year was pretty depressing. I'll spare you the boring details but I've been in a bit of a funk, to the point where I've rarely felt like writing. Why depress you, too? I did talk to a couple of recruiters, and even flew to Seattle for an intervie...

When it came time to  upgrade my old iPhone 3GS a couple of years ago, I wavered between the new iPhone 5 and some flavor of Android phone. For a variety of reasons, not all very well thought out, I ended up with the iPhone 5. I had an iPad, and a small investment in apps, so it seemed the way to go. About 9 months ago, around the time of one of the iOS 7 updates, I found my phone would often (as in "constantly") turn itself off and show it needed to be charged when the meter showed about 30% charge remaining. A quick Google showed I was not alone in this annoying behavior. I'd plug the phone in to charge it and it would instantly show as having 35%+ charge remaining. Sometimes doing a hard reset by pressing and holding both the Sleep and Home button would temporarily remind my phone it did indeed have juice, but not always. "Miscalibration," was the term I saw bandied about. I tried backing up my phone and restoring it. No dice. This got worse and worse...

...But then I saw this on my Google+ feed and thought about my old friend, The Whited Sepulchre, who loves weiner dogs. After watching it, I decided the world would be a better place if we all talked less about politics and did this instead. Enjoy...there's time enough for arguing later...

Okay - I'll admit it: it doesn't take much to buy me off. I've bitched about buying and downloading mp3's to Linux machines and Amazon's non-support for a while - in fact those posts are some of the most visited on my site. But still I stick with Amazon. It's like some trailer park relationship. But now I'm willing to kiss and make up because now Amazon Prime memberships get FREE MUSIC STREAMING! (I'm doing the happy dance). I signed up for Prime around Christmas because (I told myself) I needed a package in a hurry. While normally I might have just popped for the extra shipping, the fact that Prime accounts get free 2 day shipping AND video streaming was enough to get me to fork over the cost of a Prime membership. You can do a free one month trial, so why not?  I don't watch a lot of stuff, but I watch some, and it's a nice deal. I even bought myself a Roku device (from Amazon!) for Father's Day this year to make it easier. But fr...

These days, The Cloud is all the rage in the computer world. Cloud storage is probably as far as most folks want (or need) to go - think Box.com, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive/Docs...the list goes on. You can collect quite a bit of free off-site storage if you're of a mind to.  These are all examples of  SaaS - Software as a Service . PaaS - Platform as a Service - gives you a specific pre-configured platform to build applications or services. Finally there is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is virtualized hardware: CPUs, hard drives, networking, firewalls and the like. A little background:  at my day job at Sisyphean Corp, I manage hosting for a couple dozen big websites (I lose count sometimes).When I first took this on, we were on physical hardware. Trouble with this is once you make your decisions about the hardware, you're sort of stuck with it for a while. If you've predicted your needs poorly, or they change, well... I migrated one o...

There are basically two reasons for viewing a remote desktop: attending online meetings and running applications on (and/or administering) a remote machine. There's a little crossover since some meeting-type software will allow remote control of the presenting machine. As part of my daily grind, I frequently either host or attend online meetings, and assist end users. My employer, Sisyphean Corp, uses Webex for external meetings (with vendors, consultants or other folks not on our network, and - of late - Microsoft Lynx for internal meetings. There's always Windows Remote Desktop, but it's not well-suited to connecting to machines behind firewalls across the internet, and while it's fine at controlling, it's not designed for presentations. So, what do you do if you are not part of a huge, monolithic corporation? I was curious and found the following free alternatives in no particular order (you can thank me later).  Webex - I was slightly surprised to discov...

Call me an old curmudgeon, but I find a lot of what passes for new music boring in the extreme: manufactured pop, pseudo-country, and studio produced crap. There are a few things interesting that I've chanced upon - most of it stuff my offspring have turned me on to - but not a lot. Lately I've been supplementing my (ahem) legally purchased music from Amazon (yes - as awful as they are , I still patronize them) with a new source - Archive.org . Archive.org , in case you've never been there, bills itself rather cumbersomely as "Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music and Wayback Machine." While accurate, it's a bit of a mouthful. I could write several posts on this amazing site and barely scratch the surface. If you've never visited it, just do it. Just. Do. It. You won't be sorry. Some basics about me: I love music - especially old music. The funkier the better. Growing up, my dad had numerous Spike Jones 78's, which we listened to endle...

Years later I worked with a guy who was a couple of years older than me who said he never dated anyone who couldn't tell him where they were when Kennedy was assassinated - they were, he opined, either too young or too out of it. As for me, my family had moved from Fort Worth to the Chicago suburbs the summer I turned nine. The elementary school I attended in Park Forest was close enough that I used to walk home for lunch. That Friday 50 years ago, my brother and I had come home as usual and were watching Bozo's Circus on WGN when the station broke away for news flashes that President Kennedy had been shot. I wasn't sure what to think other than it seemed shocking - impossible to believe. But I'd seen it on television. My class had introduced to the idea of  "current events" that year. We were supposed to tell something we'd heard or read about in the news. This seemed like the ultimate current event. I headed back to my classroom (I have no recoll...

It's heresy, I  know. I've used Windows for a while, usually grudgingly, and I'll admit: I've been a hater. I won't bore you with a laundry list of  objections I've had over the years.  "The triumph of marketing over technology," sums up my feelings. After sticking with Windows XP's bubble gum look and feel (it puts a whole new spin on "gooey interface") I finally made the jump to Windows 7, after skipping the over-hyped and under-performing Vista, and thought it was....not bad. Being an IT geek I of course had to try out the new Windows 8 prereleases, featuring the new Metro Interface. I thought: this sucks. But a funny thing happened. I picked up a copy of Windows 8 on the cheap (for a while you could snag a legit copy from Microsoft for $15 if you knew how to game the system) and installed it on a new Zotac ZBOX microcomputer that doubles as a video server. There are several add-ons one can install that bring back the St...

In a delicious bit of irony (at least from where I sit) the Internet is teaching Ron Paul a thing or two about free enterprise in the Net Economy. It seems a collection of his fans registered the domain "RonPaul.com" a while back and have amassed quite a mailing list through it:  170,000+  email addresses. Ron Paul now wants to buy it, but considers their asking price much too high. They generously offered him "RonPaul.org" for free, but he wants the .com version. Such is the nature of supply and demand, Dr. Paul. Refusing the free offer of RonPaul.org, and unwilling to pony up the $250,000 the current holders are asking for RonPaul.com, the libertarian icon is filing his case with the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, demanding the current holders turn over *both* domains to him. This is, of course, the very same U.N. he was referring to in 1998, when he said: The choice is very clear: we either follow the Constitution or submi...