Bromeliad Blooms and Other Blather

When things get too hectic, stop to smell the bromeliads.

I guess I need to pay attention, don't I?  It's a case of having too many things happen at once.

I'm in the middle of reloading the PC.  A whole laundry list of things have to be decided.  I'm in there with all the Windows XP "expats" at the moment making those decisions.

Whether to go with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.  Why go with one over the other?  How to make one look like the other?

I went with Windows 8.1, and immediately got some spyware onto it. 

If you install Windows 8.1 and don't want "Ugly Block Land" to get in the way of your efficiency, you will need to install Classic Shell.   It's freeware but it also comes with some nasty spyware that you have to be very careful NOT to install.  It isn't very clear when you are installing and if you don't pay attention you will be where I was, and get some spyware on it.  Immediately.

I.
Mean.
Immediately.

Windows update was running, for the second time, and all the sudden I got ads.   Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm the fastest remote in the East.  When watching the TV, I have a 30 second skip button and I always, I mean ALWAYS watch TV via the DVR.

In other words, 30 minute shows last 21 minutes.   Commercials hit and I'm playing the skip button.  Someone tells me about this "great ad" they saw last night and I shrug and grunt.  "Iduhknow"

But Classic Shell will work for you and make Windows 8 and 8.1 look like Windows 7 while not removing your ability to play with ugly blocks in Microsoft's Ugly Block Land Interface.  That is if you don't get the ads on there.

It was then when I went to write about something else, my morning took a strange twist.

I didn't have a way to put text onto the picture I wanted to post.  Pretty Bromeliads, aren't they.   Windows 8.1 didn't want to install Photoshop, and I was getting frustrated.  Wanted some flowers.  Who does the computer guy ask when there's a problem on his computer.  Oooh More Bromeliads.  Photoshop installed?  Do we have "our" font?  Open the picture.  Ahhhh...

All that crap. 

I'll get my fonts off of my server, they're all open source and free so if you're looking for something distinctive I can let you know what I used.

So I can commiserate with you.  You Windows XPats.  They tell you your computer is now open to all sorts of viruses.   Mine was upgraded and I had to go through the same thing. 

Did you know the new Excel 2013 is butt ugly?   Purely flat and white?   You can change the white, but you have to find the thing that turns off the slide.  

The "slide"?

Yes.   When you move your cell from A1 to B1, it slides.   Someone at Microsoft needs to be slapped with a trout.   It is the Metroing and Creeping Smooth Scroll chaff that is coming everywhere.   You have a PC in your lap that could run the entire country of Jamaica's internal revenue service from the year 1983 and what does Microsoft do?   They make everything ugly, blocky, and slide-y.  It also takes some of your computer to make all that eye candy pop.  I really don't like that sort of thing.   Makes me impatient.

Windows 7 why did I forsake you?

Here's a Bromeliad to smooth your mood.  Let me type some nonsense in as a title, change the font to Gautami, add a pink stroke and some background glow.

There!  All Done!  Even if I did have to resort to installing Inkscape as a backup for today.

Now, where is my Photoshop CD?  I just might be able to finish that install.

I just don't see grandma figuring this stuff out.  But figure it out we will since this is the way things will go until Windows 9 happens in a couple months.   For now, just remember that Microsoft always needs three pitches to make a hit.  Four to make a home run.  Windows 8.1 is only Pitch Number two.  Windows 9, I am hoping, will be Pitch Number three.

A Field of Yellow Flowers

I have a secret.  Some days, I just walk out the door with the camera in hand thinking I may need this to jar my memory to write.

One of those mornings where I wake up way too early or way to late, and the mind just is clear.  Too clear.  A morning where clarity of thought is so strong that you can hear the winds whistle through the ears.

A mental dial tone of a day.

Stand up to make coffee and breakfast's first course, and realize that the sun is just now coming up.  Looking out at the pool it's beginning to rain for the first time in a week.

The dog wants a fish oil tablet as a treat, then the yogurt and cranberry that hasn't yet been pulled from the refrigerator.  Tea Kettle is whistling to make iced tea for later and coffee for now.

One ounce of grounds weighed, 18 ounces of water, two packets of sweetener, two level teaspoons of creamer yields one perfect mug of coffee.   Remember that kiddies!

By now, anyone who takes pictures regularly has a large library of memories.  A catalog of photography that serves to jar your memory of things that sometimes should be shared, and others that should not.  The trip to the beach where you climbed into the giant conch shell and couldn't get out easily but got a picture of it as you bent over to retrieve your right shoe comes to mind...

But there's this picture of little yellow flowers.  What to do with them?  They're really quite nice, but look like the white ones in the yard that you're always trying to pull since the seeds get caught in the dog's fur.  A nice innocuous native species that should be propagated because they do so well with so little care.

Still getting settled into the New-To-Me computer it's time to fire up Photoshop.  Oh great, the fonts got confused again.  No, using the official font for the road signs in Poland would not quite work with a "softer" picture like this one.  Instead of Drogowskaz, try MV Boli again, it is scripty but not Comic Sans.

Comic Sans.  Shudder.  Let's make the world look like 1996 again!

Ok, find my color for the stroke, and add the titling.   Hide the URL inside the photo just in case someone got slick and tried to borrow the thing commercially...

There we go, all nice and pretty.   Nice new shiny object for the blog.

They will never suspect that each of those beautiful yellow flowers are smaller than the size of their little pinky and that you managed to feed some more mosquitoes when you went out to take the photo.

Wet nose on the right arm and a wiggle says Pay Attention to Me!  After all, it is all about the dogs, right?

As Rack jolts my head out of the stream of consciousness, my mind jerks back to the present.  That, and the UPS guy just drove past.

Waiting on him... he's got the fan for my backup computer.  I'll have to take apart the laptop and do a photo shoot of that.   Most people never even considered that they can do repairs to a desktop, let alone a laptop computer.  That will have to wait for next week when the little box gets here with the smile on the side.  For now, I've got bigger fish to fry.  After all, that iced tea is calling and the dial tone just turned into a growler. 

The mind has been off the hook long enough, the stream of consciousness has broken.

M.E. DePalma Park is in Bloom

For 125 miles, from Jupiter in the North, to Florida City in the South, and around 25 miles wide at its widest, South Florida sprawls over some very tightly packed neighborhoods.  Include the Keys and you have another 125 miles although some of those Keys are land only because Flagler put it there building the railroad that was washed away in the Labor Day Hurricane in 1935.

South Florida can be a very unnatural landscape indeed.   Tract homes built in the 1950s and 1960s that are low slung to shelter from those storms, and the newer talller two story buildings that were built to accomodate larger rooms as well as higher profits. 

Imagine trying to sleep on a second or third floor with no air conditioning on a day that is 96F and no electricity to turn a fan.   Foolish.

Homes are build low slung in a hurricane zone for a reason.  Taller buildings are a target.

There are very few places that haven't been paved over in South Florida, at least in Dade and Broward Counties.  Until you get West, the parks are the only place where you see truly natural areas, and those are usually only natural in the margins where the lawn mower can not reach.

On the other hand I consider myself fortunate.  There, in M.E. DePalma Park,  is a small vest pocket area near me that has been planted with native species.  Orange Trees are not native, entertaining and yes, I have one, but not native.  A lawn is an ecological disaster of a "monoculture" that does not exist anywhere but in an artifice.  Yet we have them.

Parks like this one that are planted with native species show that natural can be beautiful places where butterflies dance on the breezes, the scent of blossoms on the air, and the splendor of flowers greet the eye.  They serve to educate us on the beauty that was pushed aside for that 2/1 on a small lot.  They do require care so that the Dragon Flies can dive bomb the Mosquitoes that would take up residence in a controlled landscape.  After all, entropy in a garden left untended would turn anything in the tropics into a riot of Virginia Creeper and stinkweed. 

At this point of the wet season where everything is growing rapidly, the effort needed to rip out all those annoying vines in my own garden is a necessary evil.  The other side of that coin is the beauty of the flowers that are there right now.  Walking by this plot of land results in being dive bombed by Dragon Flies and followed by flocks of butterflies.  Last night all of this happened while there was a double rainbow bright enough to show the seven colors plus the stripe for Ultraviolet.  Needless to say when there was a gap in the clouds, the flowers there gave a riot of color.

This being the wet season, these plants are happiest and thriving.  They are also on irrigation, so it is assumed that without that help in the dry season, most of these plants would end up being annuals.  After all, an empty lot in Broward County Florida tends to be very hit or miss with what can grow there.   Scrub Land unless it is adjacent to a spring or other water source.

Luckily, with a little cropping, the picture can allow the viewer to think they're in a vast tropical garden far away from all instead of standing on the edge of a smaller than usual plot of land planted cheek-to-jowl with these natives.  With a little more maturation, those trees and shrubs may grow tall enough to give a view of nature without interruption.  Until they do, a light crop results in what you see.

I take a retail approach to photography.  Take dozens of shots and see what the computer will give you when zoomed in.  I am fortunate to have scenes to take a picture of.  In this case, the original is now my background on this laptop replacing the bland corporate blue HP thing that came with the machine.

Sometimes, all you need are scissors - Picture

I've been working as a Campaign Volunteer for two local elections here in Wilton Manors.  I've produced two websites and I'm getting better at this.  I started out with a "Vector Graphics" tool by layering text and pictures on a blue background and then just posting the picture as the "content". 

Vector Graphics is a buzzword that means I draw lines to make a pretty picture.  You click on a button that looks like a star, click and drag and then all the sudden you have a big star on the screen.  Ooops too big... then you finesse it into place and alter the color and so forth.  If you like it you can copy that star all over the screen.

There are a lot of these tools, I'm using all Open Source Software - no licenses needed, it's free. 

I'm using Inkscape to do the vector graphics,  GIMP to edit pictures and take out the bits I don't like and lightly retouch them, and Irfan View to view them and crop the pictures.   I could use photoshop but that would force me to actually have to pay for a program when I am a volunteer - not going to happen.  All three programs are amazingly good at what they do.  

I have used Irfan View for more than 10 years now, and it takes the place of my Windows XP Picture Viewer.  It plays movies and music files, but I have other programs to do that.  A nice trick I am able to do with Irfan View is to look at a picture and then click-and-drag my mouse, then crop the picture.   For most people, if you have a picture that is all you need to do.  I have one picture of my Sister, brother in law, and my nephew in it where he did some finger sign to be "cute".  Sorry, Jonathan, but your finger gesture got cropped out years ago.  Don't bother. 

Gimp is used in some web development houses to do pixel level editing and the same things that Photoshop does, but it is free.  I've gotten good at using this one, and have repaired some old family photos and some posters that I had digitally, then reprinted them on heavy stock as gifts.   Interesting piece of software and very powerful.

The latest one I've used is Inkscape which will let you blend your pictures and text and the stars and other shapes to create objects. 

The point is that all that is great, but sometimes all you need is the upper right quarter of a picture.  I showed a client of mine how to do that and he's doing great with it.  View the picture in Irfan View then, ... I'm repeating myself aren't I?

For the most part, there are a lot of needs that people have that they never attempt because they don't know where to start.   The basics are all most folks need.  Tie together enough basics and you have something pretty interesting. 

Add Google Earth to the mix and you can put yourself standing back in front of your childhood home or on top of a Mountain somewhere.  Much easier than going down to the airport and actually having to deal with the evils of Air Travel isn't it?

That picture I have up at the top of this article was one of those pictures.  I thought the power lines in the foreground ruined a rather nice collection of sunset clouds and colors so I altered history and cut them out.  It took all of about 15 seconds.

GIMP and Photoshop Red Eye Reduction in Dog Pictures

Lettie the Superdog is shooting Laser Beams at you!  Oooooh!  She pays attention to me and does That Look frequently.  Sitting in the Poang means I'm at Dog's Eye Level and she gets attention when she wants it.

So I grab my camera since she came over to look to see what I was doing with it and take a picture.   While I wouldn't call myself A Photographer, I do take Better Than Average pictures.  Maybe a B or a B+ with the camera.  Occasional moments of genius just like everyone else.   Unfortunately the Red Eye Reduction on my camera doesn't cancel it out and I get glowing yellow Laser beams from Mrs Dog that I have to edit out in GIMP by coloring it in pixel by pixel.   Red Eye Removal doesn't work when you're not working with a Human, and you've got yellow glowy things. 

GIMP is an Free and Open Source project that allows you to do Just About Anything that the proprietary and costly Photoshop will do.   Its not exactly simple to use but it will do what you need when you learn how it wants to be used - you work with GIMP not use GIMP it seems.

Other than just coloring it out to black or charcoal or hitting delete, if anyone has a better idea, I'd welcome it.