A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

After reading articles about it like this one, I installed Instagram onto my iPhone, and I have to admit it's pretty fun.

It's surprising what a handful of simple, preset masks and color filters (and a fall-down-easy interface for applying them) can do to turn blah phone photos into cool little artsy pieces. Earlier today, for example, I snapped a self-portrait that turned out so remarkably well I've started using it as a personal userpic elseweb.

I have a few other fun photographs on my stream that I wanna show you, but now that I'm writing this post I realize that I have no idea how to share or even link to them after the fact. I get the impression that the Instagram people would consider this a feature; they really want to keep the whole experience on the iPhone as much as possible. Still, it's still a little surprising that I don't even have the option to save photos I like. Hrm. Well, it's, what, a month old? Give it time to breathe.

The elevator pitch that helped sell me on trying Instagram is "Twitter, except with images instead of words". I'm pretty sure that's what it wants to be, which is cool. It's not quite there, in a few ways; for one thing, the fact that you can't choose to hide comments from your feed makes following more popular users impractical, as each of their posts is followed by a dozen column-inches of insipid "Nice pic! <3" blurbs to scroll past. I'd rather just have a stream of visual tidbits from around the world, with minimal yapping. I hope they'll improve it.

I'm "JmacDotOrg" on there, if you end up on it as well.

If you're bored at work today, please consider suggesting the Diplomacy show (http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/09/episode-7---diplomacy.html) as a link du jour to Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html).

(Yes, cross-posting from twitter / facebook. I don't do this every day! I thank you for your patience, as well as any flogging of my links you can spare.)

Art-game designer and blogger Auntie Pixelante, who linked to The Gameshelf a few months ago, has found Jmac's Arcade, and has challenged me in public to get my act together and produce some more. I hear a lot that they're entertaining or touching, which is great, but being told that they help provide an oral history of a nearly vanished subculture is new to me.

This is a kick in the pants, all right. Despite everything going on, I am led to consider that it may indeed be a good change of creative scenery for me to try pulling another one of these together. The whole point of these is that, unlike Gameshelfs, they're things I can make all by myself.

Bah. Not gonna be able to sleep tonight.

I've been getting a lot of calls from tech recruiters. One caught me yesterday morning while I was still sipping coffee, and before I'd gotten started with anything important, and so I chatted with him for a few minutes. I learned that he found me by just Googling a few key terms, which led him to my resume on jmac.org. When I told him I wasn't available for work he joke-groaned with disappointment because I looked so perfect for the job. This is all a nice ego boost, but at the same time I don't need the extra interruptions, so I've just updated my resume with a mind to deflect them.

Was of two minds about splitting my most recent consulting period into two entries, with the formation of Appleseed as the split-point, but decided to go with a single entry and making it clear in the summary that I sell my expertise through the company now.

While I was in there I updated the jmac.org about page, which still had a lot of pre-millenial cruft on it. The opening paragraph used to suggest that my entire online presence was on jmac.org, when in fact it's been spread across a wide cloud of domains, just like with everyone else, for years now. I only use the domain for miscellany that doesn't fit anywhere else, now. So it says that now. Also admitted that I'm now using a commercial hosting service, after eight years of the server equivalent of couch-surfing.

My LinkedIn page is the second Google hit for [boston perl consultant]. (Number one is the LinkedIn of another local hacker who has been consulting for 17 years, so yeah.)

This blog is now on the first page of Google hits for [fuck msie]. (It is also the number-one hit for [msie fuck]. Ha.)

That last post reminded me:

For some time I've wanted to make a page on jmac.org about my freelance programming business, more than the front-page blurb and link to my resume that's there now. One element I'm missing from this is a nice photograph of myself, with a big fat alpha channel as a backdrop, letting me work it into any layout.

I am actually looking to lay down a little dough on getting a nice couple of smart-lookin studio-made portraits that I could bend to this sort of use. I have also run into multiple instances in the recent past where entities - conference applications, "professional" blogs, et cetry - have requested high-quality photos, and I've had nothing to offer (I attached a manky iSight photo to the ETech app).

Any of y'all have any recommendations of where I could make this happen locally? (This includes you yourself, possibly; I really have no idea.)

(Also held back from making the page by a basic hesitation to promote myself as a freelance programmer when my "real" job is being the president of Volity Games. But hell, if putting a lot of work into it would have a just-my-luck effect of causing Volity to suddenly get a million bucks, forcing me to abandon my freelance job? I wouldn't cry much.)

Heh heh, Mr. Burgund used a piece of the recording I made at his ICA sound booth for an audio pull-quote on a blog entry about the event.

I'll make you try to guess which one it is. (If you don't know my voice, it's the one where the speaker is describing a piece of functional sculpture that he owns.)

I just realized that the scab in my forehead where it looks like someone tried to brain me with a pen knife is where a blackhead used to be. So I guess the blackhead that I thought I'd have to live with forever has fallen out, taking a chunk of flesh with it. Who knows why this happened.

Assuming that this isn't a terrible omen that means I'll drop dead now.

Also assuming this scab will go away. A little scar on the cheek or brow is one thing; a bright red line smackdab in the middle of yo forehead is all my third eye is watching you. It's certainly way more visible than the late Mr. B. Head was.

In other news am done with a spot of strange business, so off to party. woo woo

I'm going to create some LJ posts for the existing episodes of The Gameshelf soon, which will serve for the time being as official episode guides. These will be linked from RSS file I am presently hand-carving, which I will then toss into the iTunes Music Store. Woo, exciting.

Telling you now so you don't wonder why I seem to be tooting my own horn about this project even more than usual.

Why don't you create a separate journal for this? Maybe I will later. For now, an exquisite blend of laziness and ego is to blame.