And I'm back
So I just mapped my personal domain dylanfareed.com to my Arlo/Artists account. The content here is still a bit sketchy (need to spend some time editing/organizing images for the portfolios) but the site looks good enough to my eye.
I am going to use this site for images, notes, code snippets, and such that fall outside of the domains of Arlo, Artlog, & I Am Still Alive.
Oh and Nish and I are now doing business as Ay Are Tee. So Arlo and Artlog are now services provided by Ay Are Tee.
Fire escape garden
I missed the little vegetable and herb garden I had in Brooklyn. So a few weeks back I went to the nursery in Berkeley with the Kibbeys. In Brooklyn I went overboard with peppers, cucumbers, lettuce and more. This time I kept it simple and got heirloom tomatoes – ‘Tomato Ananas Noir’ from Sweetwater Nursery and ‘Tomato One’ from Fred Hempel at Flatland Flower Farm – and italian large-leaf basil. It’s not a whole lot of tonnage but working the watering can is an enjoyable morning ritual.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews 'Free' by Chris Anderson
Gladwell makes some interesting points in the New Yorker about the idea that technological innovation is forcing prices down towards free for idea-based products (like music or software).
“an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is ‘close enough to free to round down,’ ‘close enough to free’ multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars…YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.”
It’s a good read and struck a chord with me given that Nish and I have been working out various pricing plans for Arlo/Artists over the past few weeks. We’ve settled, I hope, on a simple yearly flat fee of $100. That comes to eight dollars and change each month.
That’s less than simple hosting typically and pretty affordable – a deal even – for the utility built into the system, but it’s been interesting getting feedback from beta testers. The majority of folks do think it’s a great value, but there have a been a few ‘What?! It’s not free? You don’t even have a free plan? Have you heard of Gmail? Or Tumblr? This is the web, how can you get away with that?’ Our reasoning is pragmatic in this case and relates largely to the fact that my time is scarce. I am trying to do a lot here in days that seem altogether too short. Building Arlo on my own these last several months, I’ve been focused on producing a great tool and don’t want to spend really any time crippling the system to accommodate folks unwilling to shell out $100 dollars to properly manage and present their work for a year. Sure, a free plan could lead to more people giving Arlo/Artists a test drive and more people paying for it in the end, but my time is still limited and I doubt we’d be able to provide any kind of support for paying customers if we were being expected to provide that same support for freegans. And plainly stated we don’t have any desire to clutter the interface with adverts or something to subsidize the free plans.
Also, I’d like to be able to afford to eat.
At this point, we are better off pointing those folks towards tumblr or wordpress or another free service and wishing them luck.
A barrier on 30th St
I saw this about a month ago when I was in New York for a friend’s wedding. I mean to make no statement about the delicate balancing act depicted in the photo and marriage in general or specifically in this case.
Jeremy Jay - Airwalker
I still get hipped to most of the new music I find myself listening to on the one and only project.ion.ist – possibly the second ever ‘tumblelog’ and arguably, if such matters are worth arguing over, the first that really defined what a tumbelog is (as far as I can recall).
The track, ‘Airwalker’ by Jeremy Jay (towards the bottom of the linked-to page), is obscenely backwards-looking but really great for Jay’s willingness to go there fully and to do it seriously. It clearly references a particular aesthetic but it comes off as a bit more sincere than something like a Devendra Banhart track (which usually feel coy and shallow to me). What’s more is that Jay keeps it really spare sonically. He manages here to be both allusive and elusive at the same time.
ActsAsList & ActsAsTree with multiple scopes
I’ve been coding web projects pretty much exclusively in Ruby since late 2004. The landscape of the Ruby community has witnessed major tectonic shifts from then to now. The quality of open-source and otherwise publicly available projects/plugins/gems hasn’t really changed, tho – that is to say it’s still really good. I’ve long ascribed to Jamis’ ‘never use a plugin you would not be able to write yourself’ philosophy, but I would suggest that there isn’t really a better way to learn ruby and rails best practices than to comb through other people code (“you down with OPC? yeah you know me”).
I reckon I’ll periodically write posts like this one with brief tips and links to interesting projects that I use (cf. John Nunemaker’s railstips.org).
So first tip is a pretty basic one. I had a frustrating few minutes getting acts_as_tree and acts_as_list with multiple scopes to play nicely together on Arlo.
Martha Carr Fareed
Over the last several years, my dad spent a lot of time shooting images of my grandmother’s prints, paintings and drawings. I put them in an Arlo/Artist portfolio last weekend for a small father’s day gift.
My grandmother passed away in 1985, but she spent many years of her life in front of a canvas with a brush in her hand I am told. She showed a bit stateside and in Europe, I believe – my folks have posters from a couple of those shows and a catalogue at their place in Los Angeles.
There isn’t as far as I know any kind of market for her work, but these are objects that my immediate family, aunts, uncles and cousins have lived with and have dug for a long time. They mean different things to all of us.
I have one of her paintings here in my new apartment in San Francisco. In her work that I’ve seen she moves between a number styles and those styles are very much of their time, but for me the meaning exists largely outside of aesthetics – I know my family in many ways through her art and through the legacy of her approach to artmaking.
Numerous times, I have watched an old video recording of myself, my sister Lara and my folks sitting for sketches in my grandmother’s studio in Los Angeles. In that video, she’s elegant and inspiring. I think she had cancer at the time of the filming and she was somewhere in the middle of her treatment then, but soft-spoken she takes great care to put all of us at ease. She patiently and directly talks to myself and my sister – two toddlers otherwise running around babbling nonsense – as though we were capable of seeing beyond ourselves. She speaks French to my mom who is still adjusting to life in the US and far from her own family. And she tolerates my dad filming which is something we’ve all learned to do, but she does it naturally; honestly I am not sure how to characterize my dad’s relationship with my grandmother – but I know from him that they shared an important connection beyond the formalities of family and that bond is tangible in the video.
Well, I see in her art (and possibly project into it) those admirable qualities of her character and her personal elegance. There’s quite a lot of work to see on the site. Have a look if you’re curious.
The New Whip
Much to my mom’s chagrin, I got a bike last week at The Freewheel Bike Shop on Valencia. Eric Lumblo was really helpful and talked me through it. It’s a Giant Defy 1 road bike with an aluminum frame and it has already changed how I explore San Francisco – much more efficiently/willingly.
It’s the first bike I’ve owned since I had one stolen the first year I lived in Brooklyn, which was the first one I had owned since I had one stolen the first year I was at Wesleyan.
Is this thing still on?
Having settled into new digs here in San Francisco, I am redoubling work on Arlo. I haven’t set up a proper office here in the city and my presses are wasting away in storage in Los Angeles for the time being, but Arlo is coming together. We’re entering the final phases of beta testing for the Arlo/Artists back-end & I am gonna spend a couple weeks on polishing the front end templates.