Technology: March 2004 Archives

I just spent a ridiculously long time analyzing the last month of search string statistics from my logs. They told me some really interesting things.

First of all, the subject areas that people are looking for when they find this site are almost evenly divided between art and wedding crap. With a slightly heavier leaning towards wedding crap, although that may just be because the wedding crap has been up there a lot longer than the art stuff.

152 people came looking for something art related. 56 of them wanted to see a picture of the Rietveld Schroeder House, and they didn't care how it is spelled. 42 were looking for the Stretto House, and they seem to know how to spell. A surprising number of people (38) were looking for information on linocuts, which is odd because while I do linocuts, I don't have much up here about how to do them.

Ah! But the wedding stuff is more impressive. 205 search referrers showed wedding-related terms. Of those, 39 were looking for invitation information, and most of those were looking on information on printing invitations at Kinko's. (I didn't print my invitations at Kinko's, by the way; I'm way too fussy to do that.) A large number of people were looking for a web page that told them how to draw a map. Lord, how lost brides can be! (If you don't know how to draw a map now, it is not a skill you can learn overnight to save some money on your wedding invitations.) 24 people wanted something related to wedding cake toppers -- three of them were looking for that incredibly tacky "groom running away" topper. The biggest category was tissue packets: 41 people were looking for instructions or something related to making little packets of tissues for weddings. I have my blow-by-blow account of making tissue packets up on this site, so there you have it.

The next largest category of searchers finding my site were people looking for tourist information. Most of them (48) were actually looking for tourist information for the Bay Area, which I do have on this site. 10 people were looking for tourist information for places like Japan or Russia. One was looking for information for the San Fernando Valley.

Some of the weird things people were searching for:

• ellis island pergola
• maritime futuristic travel
• panda pooping
• poop in a blue room
• set myself on fire
• physics of drowning

(I'm not sure how poop became such an intrinsic part of this site, but I blame the dog.)

And the vanity category: 24 people were searching on my name, and 7 were searching on the meaning of my name. Four were searching for other people I've mentioned on the site. One -- yes, one -- was searching for "the blue room."

I don't even want to discuss how long it took, and what I had to do to make it happen, but I managed to make my "What I'm Reading" page more interesting than just a list of books. Now it's the latest book I've written about. I generally have five to ten books going at once, so this is a much more managable form for the page, and less dull overall for your average reader.

I've been fascinated with the way people make minor tweaks to images that they post on their blogs. I very rarely do anything to the images I post, apart from resizing them and sometimes cropping them. So when I saw what Heather Armstrong does with images -- giving them that sort of soft, other-worldy feel that makes you forget that they were taken in Utah -- I felt compelled to figure out how she did that.

See:

I knew it was Photoshop. Well, that's wrong. At first I burrowed myself into a den of worry that somehow she was able to get such beautiful, soft photos using just a digital camera and natural talent. Then I thought for a bit and decided that the world doesn't just glow, even the world's most lovely baby doesn't just glow, and especially plaster and lath doesn't just glow, and I know that for certain, so she was probably doing something with Photoshop.

So I opened a picture in Photoshop and started mucking around with filters.

I rarely use filters on photos. I use them when I make digital collages, but it seems like cheating to use them on documentary photos like the ones of the house (although after seeing how lovely Heather's remodel looked, it's tempting). So I ran through the best suspects and played around with some things that seemed less likely but might work.

Here's the original photo I used:

I've long been a fan of the "watercolour" filter (which I used for my stylized picture of myself), so here's Rosie after being watercoloured:

Then I tried out blur and radial blur (I do like radial blur, though it makes me feel like puking):

Then I found Diffuse Glow under Distort. Bingo! I could make a photo of Rosie look a bit like a Dooce posting by applying blur, then diffuse glow.

After playing with it for a while, I decided that I like the filters, and how they make things so soft and ethereal, but I like crisp edges, too. On the other hand, some of the graffiti photos look great with diffuse glow, so maybe I will have to spend some time figuring out how to do that with a developing process.

The camera phone creates jpeg files that have some sort of error. An error that completely blows up Image::Magick, but doesn't even give Photoshop a moment of confusion. I have no idea how to work around this, but I'm sure that something will occur to me. Because not being able to post photos from the camera phone by e-mail will surely kill me.

And I love my new cell phone.

We'd been talking about getting me a new cell phone plan that I would share with Noel, because sometimes my bill is huge and sometimes it is merely large, owning to my being on some ridiculous "Loyal Starter" plan created when PacBell Wireless became Cingular (which has now become AT&T, I guess). This "Loyal Starter" plan has like 20 minutes included each month, so I guess if you were loyal you get to get shafted. But figuring out what we wanted was complex, and it had to mesh with what Noel could expense for work, so we put it off and put it off, and spent a lot of time talking about what features we needed and wanted to use, and what sort of phones we wanted (I wanted a camera phone and the ability to send text messages), and it seemed like nothing was going to get accomplished.

Then suddenly Noel got into gear on it, and called and set up the account and suddenly we had two fine new phones, Nokia 6820 camera phones that flip out to have a full QWERTY keyboard, with e-mail and text messages built in so we can contact each other voicelessly (useful when I'm at school and just want to get a quick piece of information to Noel, rather than have to have a conversation). He also got us new phone numbers, as my old cell number was in 408, and his was in 415, and we wanted to both be in 510 (which is the area code where we live). I asked him to get me a cool number, because I have been holding on to my old phone for years because it has an easy number to remember.

Noel's idea of a "cool" number and mine apparently do not intersect in many places. Where I think a cool number is one that is numerically interesting, and therefore easy to remember (like, say, pi, or a repeat), his idea was "a number that spells something." So he came home with two numbers that spelled something, not anything interesting, though, and therefore were a jumble of numbers that are hard to remember. And most of the time, when you give somebody your number, you want them to remember it.

I tried, for a whole day, to like my new number, but it wasn't working. So rather than make me suck it up and deal, even though I'd made him do all the work to get the plan and the phones in the first place, Noel called AT&T (our new provider) and spent nearly an hour on the phone getting me a cool new number that is a palindrome. (Kudos to Ken at AT&T, too, who was patient and helpful and didn't once yell at Noel that he's crazy and he should just slap his wife and tell her to like the number he got her the first time round.)

So now I have a shiny new camera phone that I have to learn how to use. The only thing that is sad is that it does not have my favourite game from the old phone (Memory). But owing to the screen on the old phone having gone all haywire almost a year ago, and completely given up the ghost four months ago, I'd already had to wean myself off playing it, anyway. And the new phone does have some new games which I might try out, or possibly there's a version of memory for this phone online. Plus it has a calendar, which should be mighty useful in helping me get over my ability to forget that I was supposed to be somewhere.

And I'm excited about the camera, which I have already used to take a picture of my obliging usual model. Now all I have to do is get my script to automatically take e-mail and turn it into photoblog posts to actually run, and I'll be a happy person. Or an even happier person. Did I mention that Noel got me a phone number that is a palindrome?