Likely my only “political” post of the year but I couldn’t resist given the overwhelming deluge of Obama posters that borrow heavily from the 20th Century School of Socialist Design and her incredibly serious visage.
Here’s the original that inspired this insipidity.
The move went somewhat smoothly, with the database backup needing a minor tweak as I am running MySQL 5.0 at home and 1and1 is running 4.0.whatever. The biggest headache has been migrating all the old uploads and themes which for whatever reason was causing piles of permissions errors. Because of that odd snag I’ve decided to start with a fresh coat of CSS which explains the fugly. Bear with me while I try and get things looking nice again. 
But I’m in the process of tweaking the layout back to a two-column layout. Three is too much for this boy to handle.
[edit]
All cleaned up!
Management is taking a music appreciation class this semester and one of the assignments this week was to design a promotional poster for an opera. She chose Madame Butterfly, a truly tear-jerking one if there ever was one, and after we sat and sketched out her ideas I plunked myself down in front of the old laptop and fired up Gimp and Inkscape.
She wanted to get across Butterfly’s sense of hope, a hope tied deeply to a notion of renewal, so she decided that cherry blossoms would be the best representative object since they embody spring. We found this low resolution image…
For Butterfly herself, Management wanted get across the crushing sense of loss that has filled her life since she was a little child. The image of the butterfly was a little better…
With a handful of doodles and these images we worked to piece it together, finally arriving at this…
We used Inkscape to trace the base images to bitmaps and then proceeded to work them over for color, layering, and transparencies alternating between Gimp and Inkscape. The text was generated and layered in Inkscape. Considering neither of us have any graphic design training I’m pretty damn proud with how this came together.
Kind of bored with my theme. With it having been in service for nearly a year I’m feeling like it is time for something different but what. I would like to clean things up a little bit and have the extraneous content a little more focused and reflective of what I’m up to these days: last.fm, flickr, Candied Pop. This is where I scratch my head.
I’m a big fan of K2 and am a little loathe to leave it behind but I suppose I could hack it up to get something different. Maybe three column (Bharath Kumar has a nice one) or a layout focused on the first post with a handful of others appearing in preview and the extraneous stuff crammed into the footer.
Stuff to chew on.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Voltaire
There are men - now in power in this country - who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.—John Lindsay
Working out the details for getting munin to watch Passenger. http://tinyurl.com/5nuydl #
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Nightfall (Bantam Spectra Book)
by Isaac Asimov
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein
