Thursday, 15 October 2009

If things go wrong in threes...

..then why were there four on Tueday? Uh-oh... does that mean there's two more to come? Ulp!

Duchy Square Centre & Gallery

I took the triptych and a huge canvas of Fencing In The Dunes as the owner had said she wanted to see it. Before going in, I gave the pony triptych a quick flick down and noticed a small fleck next to one of the pony muzzles. Darn, it was under the glass not on top. So I stressed briefly about it (I'm a virgoan, so it's always a bit of a battle trying not to be a perfectionist!) before ignoring it and taking it in.

I pointed it out to Philippa and we were about to decide to go with it, when we spotted a small piece of bluetac under the glass. Ok, that was the decider—and in a way I was relieved.

So, on with the canvas. Philippa loved it right away and we filled out the paperwork for it on the spot. Embarrassment number two (and a lesson for us all - check everything before taking to the gallery for hanging!): she called me back and pointed out some dark markings on the white canvas border.

It was pristine when I hung it at Park Art and it's been in bubble-wrap ever since. How those marks got there, I can't figure. One of the other artists in the centre (thanks Amanda, lovely lady!) dug out some putty-eraser and we tried that but to no avail.



Later, when I got it back to base, I found that a damp white cloth gently applied, cleaned off whatever it was on the canvas border. There's a tip I'll never forget!

So, that's two of the four things that went wrong.

I won my own prize

..or that's the way it seemed! A prize from my September draw that I posted to Melania a few days ago was delivered back to me.

I'm a canny Scotsman (we have a reputation for being "careful" with money) and this combines well with being green... so I re-use packing material when I can. On the back of the parcel was my delivery address, all printed and barcoded - with a big cross through the lot before I posted it. On the front was the right address, postage stamp, customs declaration etc.

I guess a post-office scanning machine was still able to read the barcode on my crossed out address, so promptly had it delivered to me! So, lesson two learned: obliterate any barcodes from previous address labels still showing on the parcel). Anyway, it's re-posted now (sorry Melania!)

And number four

I've sorted out burning DVDs with the youtube video that my friend Gordon put together. I've even worked out how to avoid creating the dreadful DVD menu that I put on the first few DVDs.

So I spent ages designing some graphics for a label for the DVD and then getting it to align with the cutouts on the DVD labels for my inkjet.

So I burnt the first couple of DVDs, checked they were ok and then cracked on with the rest (18), printing and sticking the labels onto the DVDs. OK, so I'm new to the DVD burning s/w and didn't realise I'd changed a setting after the first two. When the last one was done, I popped it back in to check, just for belt and braces. I'm glad I did!

The last 18 were all weird files and not actual DVD videos. Aaaaaargh! and I'd used up all the labels—double aaaaargh!!

Still, looking at the positive, at least two were ok!

On a brighter note

...I went to an evening event in aid of breast cancer at Martin Bush's Studio Gallery in Royal William Yard. I was really pleased to again meet Eliot Siegel, a well-known photographer, who had donated his time to taking portraits of anyone willing to hand over some readies for the charity. I seem to remember offering to be his gofer in return for some tips on lighting! Two glasses of pink (sorry, rosé) wine and I'm anyone's!

A delightful young lady (doing a degree at Plymouth College of Art) and her boyfriend were helping Eliot and she said she loved my work and did I need any assistance? I was flattered and gave her my card. Let's see if that turns into something concrete.

There was a fair amount of interest in my work amongst the guests and I answered questions and had some interesting discussions with a number of them. "Thank you, ladies (and gents!) for stopping by and chatting."

One lady had her first posting as a new WPC at the Court House when it was a police station and she gave me an idea of where things like the scenes of crime room etc were, also how they used a very early version of video conferencing for their area updates, before the term was coined. See, we're ground-breakers in using new technology here in relaxed Devon.



And for my part, I donated Caught By The Surf for the raffle and one delighted winner and husband went home over the moon.






comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Monday, 20 April 2009

Network timeout - problem source

After months of hassle, getting slowly worse over the last few weeks until it became unbearable, I got to the root of my browsing difficulties.

It's my broadband router firewall. It's not the whole problem, as I still experience issues when using mobile broadband, but it's definitely a huge problem.

With my prodigious browsing activity during recent weeks, my router's firewall has got it into its head that my laptop is the source of denial-of-service type of activity and purposely "holds back" such activity. The sorts of items in my routers log that were at fault were apparently these things:
**SYN Flood to Host** 1xx.1xx.2.2, 2388->> 209.85.227.99, 80 (from ATM1 Outbound)
**TCP FIN Scan** 1xx.1xx.2.2, 2876->> 216.239.59.118, 80 (from ATM1 Outbound)


Digging around in its innards like this, I can see that what it's holding back are just ordinary browser requests to the places I'm browsing. Switching off the relevant bits of the router firewall cures the problem.

I'm also using Zone Alarm security suite (belt and braces never hurt!) so I've go a firewall on my laptop too.

Ok, it's not good to switch off bits of a firewall and leave them left off - but with Zone Alarm in place too, I was willing to risk it.

I've emailed the router manufacturer's support dept for advice on changing the settings, so ordinary browsing doesn't trigger this behaviour - it shouldn't be long before this is finally sorted.

Hooray!

UPDATE: I was brave enough to try changing some settings myself and it seems to have worked ok. Gawd, I hate this dark side of technology!

Oh, didn't hear back from the manufacturers yet but don't care now.

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Saturday, 14 March 2009

Mutter, mutter....

Aw heck, found out today my blog's feed had gone screwy. Sorted now.

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Thursday, 3 April 2008

What a waste of time...

Darn the PhotoBox photobook creation software! I use PhotoBox for all my on-line photo-based fulfilment but not for their photobooks after tonight!

After uploading the best 40 images from my Urban Ugly photo essay (which took a good couple of hours over broadband! - It was 220 MB or so, though...) I then proceeded to create a photobook.

First I chose the design and template, then I chose to arrange all the images in the sequence I wanted to place them. So far so good. Then I changed the layout of all the pages to a single "aperture" (i.e. one photo per page). I then saved, logged off and had a cuppa.

When I logged back on and selected to edit my new photobook, the photos ready for placement were no longer in the order I spent so long deciding on before saving!!

Ok, so I persevered. I put them back into about the same order (another 30 mins or so!) and then placed them all. I didn't care that all the pages were laid out in landscape format and some photos were portrait orientation - I'd sort that out later.

Ok, did that and as I dropped them into place I kept getting an image in place of mine as an error message that said mine was not available ....so I ignored these messages and assumed all was working behind the scenes, and pressed on.

Once I'd placed them all (error message or not) I saved my work, logged off, logged back on again and then into editing the book again.

Sure enough, all images were placed where I'd put them, the "unavailable" ones were actually ok. So I then proceeded to edit the pages for the portrait images so they used a portrait-orientation "aperture".

Then I noticed the killer... The "apertures" in which you drop your pictures are a fixed aspect ratio. And if your images' aspect ratios are different (as mine are - they're pretty much all 6 x 4) then it behaves inconsistently in how it fits them within the aperture.

This is mostly ok for landscape orientation - the full width is displayed in most cases, and then the image height doesn't quite reach the top of the aperture. For some though, and this I haven't figured out, the full height is displayed and you get to choose whether to to have the left or the right (or both) cropped by dragging the image horizontally.

It's far worse in portrait though. It always displays the full width and, with 6 x 4 aspect ratio you're forced to crop huge amounts off the top or bottom.

I'll phone them tomorrow to see if there is any way of changing the aspect ratios of the apertures or some other way of shrinking the image so that the long edge is always fully displayed ...but I'm not getting my hopes up!

I'll still use PhotoBox for standard prints and canvases but it looks like I need an alternative for the photobook.

PhotoBox currently have a great deal on at the moment - they have 25% off their canvas prints and a 2-for-1 offer on mugs...

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