Diary Of An Artist In A New World

The Lost Year

It is almost a year since my last post, a very emotional year. Sometimes dealing with the ups and downs of life requires a little privacy, or in this case a lot of privacy. Hence my blogging has taken a back seat for a while. 

Not that it has been a year without good things. Some of them have been very good. I went on an extended holiday to Queensland with my boys in a mini-van so they could have Christmas with their grandparents. It was very special. It was also a big year for computer purchases with 2 computers for my boys, and an Axiotron Modbook for myself. There has also been the joy of the iPhone and most recently making iPhone videos to upload to YouTube. Over the next few weeks as I get back into making regular diary posts I will intersperse them with posts under the general heading of "The Lost Year" to detail some of the major happenings so we can catch up better.

Recently I returned to Facebook after an absence of several months. It was wonderful to catch up with all my friends. I know that this diary has a good readership so to all of you - it is a good feeling to be back. I love social media and the way it has revolutionized life. 

Computer Purgatory

Finally I can make posts on the Internet. It has been 2 days without a functional computer. It feels like I have been through the valley of death and while I am not entirely free of troubles yet, at least I can see the sun again finally.

I have a new computer. It is beautiful to use, but for a month it has been like setting up home in a new house. After what seemed like forever I was getting back to real work again making some pages for the web about my Sketch Club when disaster struck.

Suddenly I could no longer open Mail because I couldn't enter a password. Working out what was going on I soon discovered it was much worse than that. I had lost the use of my keyboard in my administrator account. It wasn't a hardware issue as I could log out and the keyboard worked fine in other accounts and I could log in by entering my password. Without the ability to enter a password one is cut off from life and work. It is a terrible feeling. I couldn't sleep through it all until I could see the solution in sight.

The Wait For The New Computer

Photographed in isolation like this it doesn't look like much does it but that is the new Penryn processor I was waiting for. It is the first of the new generation of processors made with the new 45 nanometer technology. I know some people find it hard to get excited about that but I find it fascinating that this chip now has 500 million transistors and that 100 of them could fit inside a human cell. 45 nanometers is small. Very small. The wavelength of red light is 700 nanometers, and the shortest light - violet is 400 nanometers. 45 nanometers is way smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The most powerful optical microscopes can see down to only a thousand nanometers. 45 nanometers is very very small.

So whats the big deal? Well besides more power from fitting on more transistors it is far more efficient and uses less power. That means more battery life. It seems like I hung out forever for these new processors to come along. Well they did - at the end of last month and the new Macbook Pro's included another option I was wanting - LED back-lit screens in the Hi-Res display I wanted. They also included a multi-touch track pad like on the Macbook Air, although that seems more gimmick than necessary.

Quest For A New Computer

My old eMac computer is groaning under the weight of all that I have on it. Sure I have a 160GB external hard drive but I need more than that. The old 1 GHz processor and just 1GB of RAM strains to keep up with what I ask it to do. I have been saving for a long time to get a replacement Mac.

Two New Easels

Needing two new easels I settled on the universal type (vertical mode plus watercolor mode) and small enough for easy storage. Those easels always have design faults, however. The legs tend to spread while you work for a start, so I made some improvements - chain stays for the legs and a cross brace for extra watercolor stability.

After centuries of making easels you would think the manufacturers could get something as basic as an easel right, but it seems not. I remember a story of Vincent going to a blacksmith to make an improved painting tool, so it seems to be a long term problem. The only easels I have that work well without modification are the eight I made myself about four years ago and my Stanright aluminium easel. Every wooden easel made in Italy or France that I have purchased has needed improving. The chain stays should be standard. They make the easel more user friendly without preventing the easel from folding up. Stability is especially important if I am going to trust putting my laptop on it.

Working And Drawing With Technology

Why would anyone volunteer for technosexuality? Or even want to be a technosexual? Why indeed? For me the answer is easy, but first I need to make a disclaimer: it is 9:20 in the morning. I haven't been to bed yet; I have spent the night drawing on the computer. The work was successful and I am feeling elated (as artwork that goes well always makes one feel) and I am having a couple of gins before bed (and as celebration)

There is a small reproduction of the drawing I have been doing. It is the sort of thing I like to do just now, marrying my classical skills with the computer. Not making a drawing in chalks and conté on paper, but doing it all with a Wacom tablet on the computer. It is something I started when the model was here on Tuesday night. I often draw like this just on paper, but this one sorted out some ideas I was wanting to translate to digital media, and printed - it looks great. It is something I want to do for my up coming exhibition. That exhibition will be the fruition of what I have been doing digitally. This small triumph this week is actually an important step along the way for me.

Another success with technology in the last few days lay in transfering this diary blog to a new domain. For ever more it will be known as www.diaryofanartist.com but it started life with a URL typical of a blog: www.kingscross.blogs.com/diary, a difficult to remember web address. To create its own domain was a ticklish matter which I had not attempted before, so while there are web experts out there who think nothing of playing with DNS records, for me this was a big deal. And fortunately I was able to figure it out without a hitch by doing sufficient research first and finding the answers I needed.

Technology has always interested me, but analog technology was always so frustrating in how little it gave back for vast investments in money and time. Now the digital world offers so much more. Yet for every successful step there is at least one other that frustrates. This week it took the form of some software for my phone. A dictionary - something one would assume is relatively straightforward. It would be if the software company's  decided to make things easy. For my Merriam-Webster dictionary the software company is one of those that doesn't understand the need to be clear and straight forward. So after some back and forward e-mails i still don't have a working copy on my phone. It will get straightened out eventually, but they unnecessarily make one jump through hoops to get there.

Many people cannot understand the success of the iPod - they think it is just marketing. What they do n ot understand is that when Apple came along MP3 players had lots of features but none of them worked very well. The iPod just works. So all those who complain that it does not have enough features don't realise the importance of things working well. The same thing is likely to happen with the iPhone. Lots of phones have lots of features, like my one, but lets face it, the software is often flaky. Lots of features, but they don't all work well. All Apple has to do is have a product that does what it does well and they will have a hit.

Technology when it works well is a delight. It can also value add to productivity. It has transformed me as an artist and opened the world to me. It has laid a new creative universe at my feet. I love it, but hate the unnecessary frustrations. Lets face it, so much of the stuff that is frustrating is just company's that don't know how to make things work right, or are so greedy they couldn't care about the users experience so long as they make money.

Conclusion: technology is wonderful, what i can do with it is wonderful, but the people who sell it - are mostly not so wonderful. Lets hope we can all survive them.

Frustrations Of The Web

I have had a terrible last couple of days. My hosting company appears to have disappeared for a time and along with it my e-mail and web sites. It is hard to imagine a greater disaster, my life is so entwined with the web these days. Then this morning, mysteriously, my e-mail and web sites are back on line. This blog remained online because it is with another company, but my e-mail has been down so I could not connect via e-mail. And the collection of photos for uploading has been growing steadily.

The most frustrating thing is that as soon as I get one set of technical problems solved, and I am feeling good, this happens - it's not fair.

The internet is such a wonderful place when it is working well, but a nightmare when things go wrong. There is also the emotional issue of feeling disconnected from life when my online identity through my web sites is compromised. The web has been life changing - being unplugged hurts.

Intro's Are Supposed to be happy, but...

It is 12:30am. I have just spent several hours trying to get e-mail to work as I want it to on my phone. Sure the customer care people from both Sony Ericsson and Vodafone find it easy to say just go on the net and use your hotmail account. Well, yes, up to a point, I can easily send text, but attaching images is proving far more difficult. I bought this phone because they assured me it is easy to blog images. Yet I am discovering that they don't use their phones for much more than hello to mates, otherwise they would know what it is like to be pulling my hair out right now and feeling like screaming.

It would all be much easier if Vodafone had sold me a phone as it had been manufactured. But unfortunately greed means that they disabled a function that means I cannot install ShoZu. It is all because they don't want me to buy anything that is not from Vodafone, especially games, so they removed the trusted certificate from Verisign for Java downloads. It means my phone does not do what they allowed me to believe it can. So this diary starts with technology frustrations. And frustrations with corporate stupidity. 

Yet on the other hand technology opens a new world. My new phone is  quite incredible. It is a Sony Ericsson K800i. It has a brilliant camera and was made with the ability to easily upload photos directly to a blog. It certainly can take beautiful photographs, the software works wonderfully. I can watch TV on it, search Wikipedia, make video phone calls, listen to music. It is a digital marvel that I find impossible not to love. Pity I have to virtually hack my own phone in order to get it to do something it is designed for.

So this then is the new world: part technological wonders, and part frustrations, and I as an artist somehow have to survive in the midst of all this. And somehow be creative. This is my diary.