Some video I took of a cool machine mounted on the back of a truck that was hauling 3″ thick old telephone copper wire bundle cable out of the ground and chopping it up into 4′ segments to be hauled away. They were then going to lay fiber optic cable in the hole where they pulled the copper out of.
It is glorious weather in St. Louis right now (this is one of about maybe 12 days a year where it is simply wonderful weather.) Soon it will be very hot and humid. Right now, delightful.
It’s been fun being able to take pictures of the cherry blossoms (sakura) and magnolia trees as they burst into color.
oil on canvas
by Robin Kibby
(c) 2006
4 in. x 4 in. (1.5 in. deep)
About the Highway Paintings:
This series celebrates my commute to and from the Oakland studio – landscapes created by layers of cement, Oakland shipyard, distant San Francisco, and the Marin Headlands. The highway undersides are from a part of Oakland that’s been recently redeveloped. A swath of roadway dubbed the Bay Trail passes right under an intersection of highways giving the Vespa rider (me) an impressive view of cement and metal overhead.The smallest Kibby Original Oil Painting offering to date!The petite size makes them very apartment-friendly. Can be hung on the wall or sit on a shelf – ideal for nooks in in need of sprucing, or office-desks in wont of color and pep.Each painting is finished with a light wax varnish, and a small hanger on the back for hanging.
Some customers of mine recently reported some suspicious behavior on one of their sites. I discovered, with dismay, that a number of months ago there was a nasty cPanel exploit that some evil hackers had used to insert a malicious line of code into the bottom of every HTML page on this server. After verifying that the cPanel installation had been fixed, I used grep to search through all the files on the server to see if any other files had been touched by the hackers. I found over 4,700 individual files that had malicious code added and knew that something needed to be done immediately to address this problem.
And my Twitter page, although I’m not sure how much I’ll really end up using it. Most of the people who care about what I’m doing have my cell number and can call me if they really need to know… ๐
I use an excellent free Open Source program called DiddleBug on my Palm Treo 700p for doing small black and white drawings. The latest version of DiddleBug creates 320×320 pixel size drawings. These are referred to on their site as “high-res” pictures instead of the 160×160 pixel size drawings that older versions of the software created.
Getting DiddleBug pictures off your Palm
I used to use a nice converter on my Windows laptop called WindleBug but wanted to be able to just use my Mac laptop by itself instead.
The DiddleBug FAQ mentions using a Perl script called Didcon on Windows, Linux and OS X which hadn’t been updated yet to extract the new 320×320 pixel sized images. When I ran the Didcon script for the first time, it saved out a 160×160 graphic that had weird lines running throughout it, due to the fact that it wasn’t reading out the data for a 320×320 pixel sized graphic.
After hacking at it for a little while, including researching how to correctly indicate the pixel size of an image in a Windows bitmap in the header of the file, I managed to get a working script that correctly outputs a 320×320 .bmp file.
This is the modified script, and I’m also including a second script that you can double-click in the Finder to run the extraction process.
I made this video with my new camera (Canon SD800-IS) tonight at the St. Louis Art Museum. There was a show called “Art in Bloom” going on and we went with Kathy for dinner and to see a jazz singer.