August 2, 2010

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Here's my outside office. It's off in the west corner of the garden under a grape arbor. That's one of the vines in the middle of the picture. There's a big blue patio umbrella above which says Samuel Adams, a local patriot and brewer. I'm working on a drawing and reading Albert Murray, who I just don't get. My camera bag is in the background. The view (to the right) looks across the river, over the reeds and through the trees to the towers of Back Bay. Such a poetic, peaceful place.

Photographed a Vietnamese wedding party in front of St. Kevin's yesterday. There were two photographers, a videographer (I guess you call them), someone taking pictures with a small digital and me. For like four people. I was cracking up so hard I just snapped a single frame of the whole funny scene and split fast.

3:00 AM. My favorite time. Crickets and cats own the night, both singing their sex songs. And something distant that I can't quite place. The restless hum of civilization? Moon sailing through cloudy skies, pulled westward by a bright planet. Email from Fred, such a love.



Quote of the Day
Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.
Plautus

Image ... Outside office.

Driving with Dashboard Widgets . 1

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Dashboard is where widgets park in Apple OS X (pronounced X, as in Malcolm X, not Malcolm 10). It's a transparent layer which floats over all other windows when called with a function key or clicking its icon in the Dock.

Widgets are like a Smart Cars - compact, cute and basic - small apps, or computer applications, that usually perform one specific, simple function. Most work over the Web, acting as their own dedicated browsers. They offer many useful services - checking the weather, tweeting on Twitter, note taking, playing the radio, collecting voice mail and looking up widget on Wikipedia or in the dictionary.

It's very handy to have all these functions gathered together into one piece of screen real estate that can be summoned and dismissed like a genie. Plus widgets are speedy and stable with clean, simple interfaces. Within their intended limited focus, they are also often very deep and powerful tools. And almost addictive.

Apple offers nearly 4,000 Dashboard widgets for downloading, almost all of them for free. Of those, 3,975 are of no general interest, useless, mediocre, unstable or don't work. After extensive testing - admittedly avoiding maybe a thousand Homer Simpson quote machines - we've chosen a Top Ten. Click on any title to go to its download page.

1 - NotePad ... A real notebook, actually.
2 - Dictionary ... The Oxford American (bundled)
3 - Wikipedia ... Now with 10 million encyclopedia entries.
4 - Google ... The premier search engine.
5 - Gmail ... Google's great free email.
6 - AccuWeather ... Weather forecasts (bundled)
7 - RadioTuner ... A Web radio streamer.
8 - Chirp ... To access your Twitter account.
9 - Epicurious ... Recipe search of many sources.
10 - Armillary ... A real-time planetarium.

We'll look at each of our top ten widgets in detail, then discuss downloading and installing them.

... To be continued.