They itunes app stores had a new app that allows me to blog from my iPhone. So this is a test to see how well it works.

So I had a week off in between in house assignments at Future. I have been using that time to get a bunch of projects off my to do someday list. One of those projects was to redo and update the gallery section of my portfolio site. And of course then I started thinking “I should really rebuild this site from scratch.” I love Dreamweaver because it let’s you pretend you are using Indesign and design a site like you would layout a magazine page. Or at least like I would layout a magazine page. But of course the code that it generates is messy and strange. So I started rebuilding, and working out problems, and calling my brother for help when I couldn’t problem solve.

The redesign let me add my sadly small web design gallery, which I am interested in growing. If anyone reading this needs a site build, I am still working cheap/free for clips right now. And it also let me put up some of my photography, which I am really enjoying, but have huge amounts of growing to do. I have had some luck shots, including this one of my little mermaid friend, Kimzey.

After spending too much time away from writing CSS code, and I swear that all of the knowledge dribbles out of my ear in the downtime, I plunged back into web design again. I decided to start with something that should be really easy–a temporary place holder splash page for my friend Bryn’s website, www.truespirithealingarts.com. I designed it first with Dreamweaver’s layout tools, but after fighting to get the simple site to behave correctly I called my brother, Ian. With Ian’s help I was able to rebuild it from scratch with pure CSS code. I am very happy with how it turned out, especially the photo that I took at Bryn’s which is the focus of the site. She had that gorgeous Kwan Yin and the flickering candle light casts the most beautiful glow. So here is the photo in question.

Just watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It’s free and on the web, so please check it out. It is so worth it.

I loved “Once More with Feeling”, the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only problem with “Once More” was that the only way you could truly appreciate it was if you watched all 5 1/2 previous seasons of Buffy. And while I encourage everyone to watch Buffy from the beginning, it’s not that sort of thing I can show my non-Buffy fans and say “get it?” Dr. Horrible goes straight to the musical—and Neil Patrick Harris starring as the titular evil genius and he just nails it to the wall. He is so funny, I am so happy that he has got his own back after being out of the spotlight for so long. Nathan Fillion as the oafish hero hams the hell out of the roll, just as it should be.

The only down side is there seems to be some problems buying the video on itunes, but hopefully that will be solved, soon.

This was just too cool not to play with and post about. I just found wordle, which lets you make “word clouds” of text or feeds from RSS enable sites or blogs. There is a bunch of customizing that you can do, or let it randomize. I am sure might be a little different if I had been blogging more, but being a designer with a love of typography, I just love it. So here are two examples of my blog as word art. What does your blog look like?

When the iPhone first came out I thought it was very cool, but didn’t have a need to have one. I get that need feeling far to often, and we refer to it as gadget lust. My husband, Dan, is very supportive and understanding, which I think is due to his own gadget lust. I tend to jump into being an early adopter on too many things, sometimes that is very good: like TiVo and Palm Pilots.

But for what ever reason the iPhone 1 didn’t grab me that strongly. Then in a surprising twist, my mom got the iPod Touch. I got a chance to play with it in December when I visited home, when I could steal it from my brother Ian’s clutches. I was hooked on the interface. Ian was waiting for the next gen for the iPhone, and I agreed. Faster internets and possible GPS? Yes, please! And in the mean time, I was feeling chained to my computer waiting for email and files from clients. I desperately wanted to be able to move around the house and even leave the house (gasp) without feeling that I was missing valuable work time at home.

So I was so ready for July 11th to roll around. But should a camp out? Our household has done this several times, but always for game systems. Dan, who is the camp out expert, said “Your being silly, they are going to have plenty.” Yes, but I want to make sure I get a 16 gig one, and hopefully, in black. So I decided to get there early. I ended up going to bed much later that I wanted to—1:30am. I was too keyed up to sleep well, since I was planning on getting up at 5am. So I laid in bed, super aware of all the sounds in our neighborhood. Is it like this all the time? How in the hell do I sleep through in normally?

By 4:20, it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to sleep, so I got dressed and left for the store. I took two chairs, and Dan would join me in line by 7am. When I got to our local AT&T store, I was 20th in line, next to a couple who brought sleeping bags. I sat down and read my Kindle while waiting for the morning to arrive.

At 5:50 am my phone rang, Journey of the Sorcerer—Ian’s ring tone. “Your calling from an iPhone aren’t you?” I said answering my soon to be obsolete razer. “Yep” he answered smugly. He had gotten to the Webster, NY AT&T store at the same time (well, 3 hours earlier) and had been 5th in his line.

When Dan finally got there at 7am, he stared open-mouthed at the line that now snaked around the parking lot. “Do you ever get tired of being right?” He asked. I have to say, no, I don’t. AT&Ts computers were slow, and then the iTunes server crashed, so you needed to take your phone home in order to activate it. Dan needed to leave for a business trip, so he had to go to LA without a phone. I was able to get it up and running after several hours and several failed attempts.

And then I spent far too long downloading apps, but useful and silly. And making ringtones—sadly there will be no return of Journey of the Sorcerer, since it is not ringtone enabled. My email and contacts are all set up, and I am tracking down photos of all my friends so there will photos when they call me. I feel so connected, it’s just insane! So I am going to spend so quality time will me new best friend!

There is this new website called animoto making the rounds of my friends. You upload photos and music and it automatically creates a music video, with all kinda of special effects and stuff. So I thought about it, and while a Fast Times homage is definitely coming, I thought what do I have lots of photos of…

9/9/95

Yep, that was my wedding. And that is my parent’s 15 acre backyard outside of Rochester, NY–the house were I was raised and they still live. It was an extremely homemade affair, this was before medieval weddings were popular, so we had to figure everything out ourselves. Now there are magazines and website completely devoted to creating a medieval wedding. My mom and I made all the all the clothes for the wedding party and for the serving wenches, who were my brothers’ old girlfriends. Including my dress, which is actually two dresses–a gold under dress and the white/gold brocade overdress. The overdress was split to the arm pits on the side, and laced to the hips. It looked wonderful when I danced. Honestly my mom was responsible for it, cause she was much brave that I with the $60 a yard fabric. Since the dress had no pattern, and we were cobbling together 3 or 4 patterns to get the dress I wanted, I think it was brilliant success! My wedding ring and circlet were handmade too. The circlet was a wedding gift, and is a full circle matched to my head.

My dad build the gazebo, my mom grew the flowers, with the lone exception of the yellow roses in my bouquet, and made all the bouquets on the morning of the wedding. One of my favorite mom memories is of her getting out the Martha Stewart Weddings book at 6am that day, the kitchen filled with flowers and reading it fully for the first time. “Of course you won’t actually try to create your bouquet your self, but here’s how to it works for fun…Oh Crap!”

We asked everyone to dress in costume, and a longtime friend of the family came as a dragon. The food was a pig roast on site by friends of the family, dressed as viking, and they pressed fresh cider on site as well. We had a maypole, and since Dan and I were the only ones that new the pattern, we danced every dance. My mom’s quartet sang “Tomorrow is my Dancing Day”-which is a song I love. My mom broke out in to tears every 10 seconds, which made it hard for the others to keep signing, but they pulled through. We had an archery range with a custom Target my dad drew–Dan’s face! Dan juggled with his old partner, and best man, Ted Varga.

I was a princess. It was perfect.

So many of you have heard this story by this time, but I figure I should just get it out there, and write it down before I forget.

In December of 2004 I was dancing with Big Burlesque, a full-figured burlesque company. Heather, the company founder, offered the dancers a chance to be part of a photo shoot that recreate some famous nude supermodel images of the 1990s. Heather told us the photographer’s name was Leonard Nimoy, and all I could think about was how much it would have to suck having that name. I found out later that I wasn’t the only one of the models that missed that it was THAT Leonard Nimoy. I wasn’t that nervous about doing the shoot, my parents are both artists, and I wasn’t raised to think that there was anything shameful about the human body. And of course this was art, not porn. And the likely hood that anyone I knew would see these pictures was so remote, why worry?

The shoot was at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. We used a small storage room to change and get made up. The photographer arrived while we were changing–a tall, thin man. I hadn’t seen any recent pictures of Nimoy in years. And I remember shaking his hand and thinking, wow, he kinda looks like the other Nimoy, too. And then it clicked. Leonard left the room and all of us looked at Heather and said “Is he THE Leonard Nimoy?” and Heather said “Of course, what did you think?” And we all freaked, for a minute.

The crew was very small, just Leonard, his very sweet wife, Susan, and photo assistant. We were shooting around extremely expensive art, and in a room that had a fragile wall of mud that we needed to tread carefully around. Leonard did pose with us for a picture, while we were still clothed.

Afterwards, life went on. In March of 2005, Nimoy started to get press for the exhibitions of the photos, called Maximum Beauty. It stirred interested, mainly because it was him, and also because naked fat people are taboo! Some people did see it at that point, but not most. I didn’t really tell a lot of people because, well, I was naked in them. And while I completely believe in the message, having my male friends in particular see it kinda weirded me out. (So guys, please don’t feel like you have to look the photo or book up, and if you do, don’t feel you need to tell me about it.)

In 2007, the book Full Body Project came out. It was compiled from 3 photo shoots, and yes, I am one of the cover girls! The press was huge, more people recognized me, people who barely knew me! I got a call from a friend(thanks Bryn!) on Valentine’s Day 2008 telling me that I am naked on the Colbert Show. Freaked me out, but great interview with Nimoy.

So there it is, I have come clean, and I am proud to part of that book. I don’t want anyone to feel like they need to seek out the book (or buy it) to support me–unless it’s your thing. I will say that it has meant a lot to many people, and has touched some people profoundly, and I am very glad for that.

Live long and prosper!

For a long time now I have been trying to find a way to keep track of all the skills and habits that I want to form. I will tell myself that I need to spend time practicing piano or bass, or that I need to make sure I get all the water I need or take my herbs. But I loose track of things, and the whole system crumbles to the ground. I always thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a program that would help me track this info, because I am at my core a tech-loving girl with extreme cases of gadget lust (Oh 3G iPhone–you will soon be mine!). After poking around for a while with no luck, I found joesgoals.com, which lets me do exactly what I want to do. It’s extremely customizable, and FREE! And now you all can see how good or bad I am being, right there in the left column. Here is hoping that it helps make a change. I think I will make posting to my blog a goal!

Being a dancer at heart, and more specifically a choreographer, I am thrilled that dance shows seem to be the new “it” show. But honestly, So You Think You Can Dance is the best by far, with America’s Best Dance Crew running in second. The only downside to SYTYCD is judge Mary Murphy, who while knowledgeable and a decent choreographer is annoying beyond belief.

But aside from Murphy’s inane screams about the Hot Tamale train, the program showcase truly great dancers and makes the public aware of the great choreographers. The video below is my current favorite couple dancing a Mia Michaels routine. I mostly really like her stuff, although sometimes I think she is too contrived. This is a perfect example–the dance is brilliant, and then the rose petals start flying. For the love of any deity you wish, Mia, why be so literal! I started to get distracted watching them get the rose petals I lost the emotion! But it’s still a great dance, and well done.