7 Color Lagoon

Doesn’t that sound great? Apple could announce their new addition to the attempts to design the digital alternative to our beloved books, newspapers and magazines that are held in the lap, folded into subway squares and tossed away into the street, used to wrap fish or, trust the British, wrapped around fish and chips. But Steve Jobs hasn’t tackled the project. At least so far.

So I made my own.

Or, rather, I found something wonderful to do with my (now) slow iBook 900 ghz G3 computer. It was my first and stood up to my errors and ignorance when I first bought it in 2003. It still hums along minus its built-in 56K modem which was blown out by some power surge from the wondrous quality of Mexican utilities — CFE (the state electric company) or Telmex (Carlos Slim’s monopoly telecommunications giant). It has been replaced by the new MacBook Pro 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo I bought last January which is even more perfect. The G3 seemed slow and its screen is both smaller and reproduces less well.

It was still too disloyal and wasteful to treat it as a doorstop but too foreign (Mexico is still enmeshed in Windows systems with HP and Dell high on the list of appliances in use) to sell here. So I was keeping it charged and its software up to date but not finding a lot to do with it that I wouldn’t rather do on the MacBook Pro.

Now that I upgraded its Panther system (10.3.9) to Tiger (10.4.11) it is even slower but much more useful. The recent Java updates made the screen images far more satisfying than I thought they could be. I began to look for what my old friend would do well that didn’t require blazing speed or state of the art technology.

Then I opened a pdf book and downloaded Adobe’s Digital Editions reader. They both work and require no massive speed. ITunes works fine and Apple has kept iTunes and QuickTime up to date for Panther and Tiger systems. So my old friend can show me books and present audio recordings (with headphones since the built-in speakers are laughably bad). It will even play a movie. The screen may not equal the MBP but it doesn’t have to to play, for instance, the free and legal downloads in the public domain from the Internet Archive.

It found its job and now hangs out on the table where a book used to be propped on something to be read when passing by or eating alone. Since my eyes have deteriorated badly in old age and both had cataracts removed in the past year, it does something all those lovely books can’t — changes text size at will. It can be set to show text at a height that I can read it from across the table, across the room. OK. It isn’t wireless (but neither is Mexico) and it is the model with a 14 inch screen. The 12“ would have been a bit better for this and fit more easily in the lap but it is the one I have.

An old Apple is not a bad Apple. Don’t contaminate the environment with old computers thrown out; put them to good use. Read a digital book today.
It is possible to find great uses for aging digital appliances.

Following a recent request that made me realize I should have hand-outs available for the house, I made a simple poster in English to leave at some hotels where would-be buyers visit.  A Spanish version will be coming shortly.

Since there is a new downloading plug-in on this blog it seemed a good time to play with it for the first time.

The single-page pdf suitable for printing or showing on a computer screen is in my DOWNLOAD FILE.

The days here should be lazy and free, swinging hammocks and tropical drinks. Here, on the edge of the jungle, a toucan flew by me yesterday as I swam. Never had I seen one here but, now that I began reading about them, they are the national bird of Belize and Belize is 20 minutes from here, perhaps 25 miles. The bird doesn’t have to go through the hassles of the Belizean border inspection and cross-examination.

The toucan had a less colorful beak but it is hard to not notice that beak preceding the bird itself. Parrots often flap by squawking as they go. I am not a birder and know nothing of them. They are, instead, friends and dwellers in this harsh land.

Creature comforts elude me. The house is beautiful, the lagoon a spectacular view but the furnishings sparse, the windows bare. It has been a difficult year and many things suffered, wore out. As I plan for some move when the house is sold I begin to think about making a more elegant nest more suitable for the 21st century.

This house has a terrazzo tile, flecks of stone embedded in a tile-like surface. In Mèrida the homes often have beautiful (or fascinatingly ugly) tile floors in the Colonial tradition. Mexican colors and Moorish design swirl together.

Rugs here are area rugs. Carpeting would just give the lizards, the geckos more places to play and hide.

Shopping on the ‘Net has been fascinating me. My life here seems to have been put on hold so I can look at pictures of apartments I could rent in Miami if I was there and houses in Mèrida if I was there. Now I have begun to look at furnishings, lights, designs so I can make up a dream life and furnish it well.

Retail shopping for larger items like rugs over the ‘Net is new. For someone far away from home it is a strange but tempting thing. The rug dealer, Superior Rugs.com, offers some amazingly traditional designs in silk with a 15 year guarantee and free shipping. On-line businesses can also be judged on their web site. This one has great pictures of the rugs — large, sharp, clear, lighted. It helps.

I began a little blog off to the side a bit, back on Blogger, about the process of preparing the house for sale and the emotional twists of the decision.

Today yet another would-be tenant appeared. She seemed to be appropriate although I still prefer my privacy. However, I slipped getting out of the pool today and thought about the fact that, living alone, it could be a good portion of time before anyone came to my rescue. There are limitations to life alone in the torrid zone.

There are also contemporary rugs available like this one:

This game that seems as if it would go so quickly and seldom does lets me post a photo in a more elegant manner, more often. The HPOD today is a recent shot of a rainbow. There were others to be seen here and on the gallery of my house on the market for sale that were less rainbow-ish. This one at this point in time made the perfect arch for me underneath the Mayan sun, near the water and filled with hope and absolution.

It is mounted in a gallery page to itself at HPOD: RAINBOW.

An update of the Page for a Gallery Menu is due since these Picture of the Day galleries and adding up until I find a better alternative.

Photo © Howard Dratch, 2007.

The view is from the terrace of my home on the shore of the Lagoon.  It is now, formally, on the market.  Real estate agencies are listing and featuring it and presenting it as an excellent choice for a Bed&Breakfast.  Given the advances being made on the highway down from Tulum, Playa del Carmen and Cancun (which has already been finished from Chetumal and Belize up to Bacalar and then to Limones which is the turn-off to the Costa Maya and Xcalak Peninsula; developers and investors have already made an appearance.  The real estate “bubble” here has just begun to inflate unlike Miami, Tampa and the other over-built cities in the midst of the housing/credit crisis.

Contact me at hfd@7colorlagoon.com for more information or follow the links to the trusted agencies that are offering the property: Mexico International 

and Mexico Caribbean.

I have been taken over by the vicissitudes of the stock market and have been riding its volatile waves for a time. It seemed a necessity to by more active and aggressive but the fact of the matter is that it is no place for a man with a weakened heart. Especially not recently.

It is time to take care of pictures and words as well and even to make myself something less of a hermit. That part is difficult in Mexico but there are pictures to be made and places left to explore.

Don’t forget the gallery of recent digital pictures

Plus a few more from cruising from Miami to Mexico. I indulged in an encyclopedic start of work vessels — living near a port would be fun — a design game with the cruise ship accoutrements and mechanisms and a shot of yet another condo project still under construction in Miami which is one of the top 10 cities for foreclosures with a highly over-built housing stock. Which should help for renting or buying there as the mortgage crisis begins to hit bottom sometime in the next year or so.

There was also the great display of work vessels while leaving Miami Harbor. They are just as much fun as the years of shooting everything that moved on New York highways.

WordPress has been updated to 2.3 “Dexter”.  It was time-consuming but not terrible.  Everything was backed up 3 ways until Sunday — since it is Sunday.  It was relatively painless with the use of the plug-in WordPress Automatic Plug-in which is a great help.

Note that Lifehacker today had a great link to a BBC questionnaire about sleep habits that returns a personalized response.  I tried it and was fascinated and reassured by its response.  My “insane” sleep patterns, they said, were really not so bad, unhealthy or crazy.  It is definitely worth a 10 minute visit.

Seen on my first excursion with a camera for a week of intense post-surgical pain — the radicals are not all hiding from the current paranoia of a tense nation.  The management does not necessarily endorse the contents of other people’s bumper stickers.

Chapter the first. Looking for America.

It is travel time, journey time and time to cruise and wander. This man who has so little energy relaxes with his damaged heart at the end of the world on the edge of the jungle. Now he has broken loose and headed toward Miami. What will come in the land of the free?

The trip, this non-Kerouac ramble from jungle-Mexico up to tourist-Mexico, on-board a cruise ship toward Miami, then New York, Tampa and then into surgeons’ hands is moving along. This is not the journey of Jack, Mrs. Kerouac’s son nor his roll of paper to document the journey of his head, the journey across the land. This is not Robert Frank’s pictured-trek across the landscape of American people and faces, waitresses and signs, the landscape of hope and despair. They are the icons of America. The describers of the land and the story-tellers of the stories of America found in a sign, a mirror, a lunch counter and its waitress’ resignation. This trip is to be written on the electron-roll of scrolling weblog, blogging on.

“The same”, you say with an exclamation point! Oh yes, the same, the blog rolls out in its time-reversed way as it rolls down the screen for a time and only then stops at a footer down at the bottom of the header.

This hurricane Dean, who so recently came to call on me, came rolling down my driveway to roar its hollow roar from the empty eye that blindly punished our jungle village. It made it easier to leave my home, my swimming, my garden and comfort because it left it hot and humid, dark or noisy with the snarl of the generator that makes my head swim. It filled my swimming pool with the banana tree that should have been cheerfully standing beside it and robbed my garden of most of its flowers and its bougainvillea fence. The flowers blew away in the wind and the trained arch was lost. The jungle will help. Things grow fast. Things grow big. Critters and pests grow fast, grow big. Big wasps, big grasshoppers (called “<i>langosta</i> or lobster) which are eaten in Mexico so why not call them lobsters. I hear they don’t taste the same and, by the way, the Caribbean lobster from the sea can’t hold a mollusk to a Maine lobster.

So I left home, left it behind with the guard against waves of robbers and the current tsunami of post-hurricane looting of big, coast homes. Their Mexican owners come during the August vacaciones (now over) and then for Easter. The poor are poorer, their homes devastated or their roof gone, their chickens flown the coop and the pig running around the neighborhood.

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The last “little” upgrade of the Wordpress blogging platform left me blog-less, frustrated through a week of trying to find it in the shambles of the files for the beast and vowing only to upgrade again for the most dire reasons or tempting changes. The developer of Wordpress also had the audacity to suggest blogging about the experience and how easy it was.

“Hah”, thought I, “not very likely.”

I had just written an article for Blogcritics Magazine as a satire on the complexity and problems of running even the smallest site. Even there I had to admit to the seductive beauty of WP all pimped out and tweaked with her shiny ebony skin.

Who was I to rock the boat to go from 2.2 to 2.2.2 in one fell swoop? What would happen if the whole site was lost no matter how many backups I made? I made lots.

Then I found the plugin, Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, made by Keith Dsouza. The man is flirting with genius: it worked.

Instead of the hours on hours of mistakes, repetitions and worry of the last time when I followed WP instructions line-by-line and still had problems; this time the whole process took about 15 minutes. That is not counting the extra backup(s) I did beforehand just in case it did not do as promised and backup my database and all my WP files automatically.

With the magick of the Little People this plugin not only did the deed of the upgrade but my blog seems to function better. Perhaps Keith’s program was far better than my first attempts to upload a Wordpress package?  We shall see how she works.

So I have now ended up doing just what was suggested: sitting back to congratulate myself on a job well-done and blogging about it to try out the old WPware freshly minted.

The apple and orange debate over the status of citizen journalists who have appeared out of the Blogosphere, has been decided. The final arbiter of all things political (the spooks are the ones with the real power, after all), the Central Intelligence Agency, has publicly declared the blogging community (or “popular” parts of it) as “journalists” with rights to the “special treatment once reserved for old-school reporters,” according to a report by ABC News.

The twin secret agencies lodged in the shadows of Washington have decided to take blogging seriously. Other government agencies are “actively reaching out to the blogosphere.” The CIA has changed its policies. Requests by some bloggers for unclassified papers under the Freedom of Information Act will be accorded “special treatment” that had been the province of established journalists only. The same proof is offered in reverse by the directive issued by the NSA last August for its workers to blow whitles when they discover leaks of classified information “to the media” which now includes blogs.

When I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was being tried on perjury charges that had come from the leak of a CIA spook’s undercover identity (Scooter had been a Cheney aide, Scooter was) a pool of bloggers were allowed to cover the trial along with media representatives.

‘The press’ has been expanded,” said New York University journalism
professor (and blogger) Jay Rosen. “It’s not fundamentally different
than other moments in earlier eras,” Rosen explained. “Radio reporters
had to be added to newspaper reporters, which were originally ‘the
press.’ Public institutions had to make accommodations for television
cameras when they became part of ‘the press.’

Technorati Tags: Politics, Journalism, Media, Blogging, CIA, News

Sexy Blogware Seeks Driven Blogger For Matrimony

Please help a blogger who lost his way. I have dallied with more than one piece of blogware, shamelessly used a few blog editors, and taken a web host. Do I need blogger absolution or can I learn to live with the situaltion?

I was seduced. Some pretty blogware wagged its back end at me and my mind numbed. My fingers took over and stroked those keys as if words could be coaxed from them. I admit it. I lost control. Pretty, sexy, amenable to change, she posed prettily with all her 3 columns of goodness just running over. Now she has become teasingly difficult, hard to handle, prone to tantrums, stubborn and, I fear, slower and fatter than I would have liked. There is still something about her I love but blogging with her has its drawbacks.

The foreplay to this tragic tale of being drawn like a moth to the gentle, embracing light of the computer display is that first rush of pride that the words people read, the pictures they look at, the thoughts and feelings exposed are the self-caress of my psyche. The hidden exhibitionist cries, “Look at me, world.” WordPress took me away with her into the depths of blogospherical depravity. What would I not do for a sweet, pretty, amenable, friendly and all-embracing blog system to expose for the world to see?

Blogging caught me up with my first computer a few years ago. Like my past life where newspapers, magazines, annual reports and books published my work; blogging seemed like self-publishing. Is a web log vanity-publishing or just vanity? I push “publish” therefore I am published. Or is it just another self-caress brought to us by the magic of the Internet?

I lived with Blogger for years and played around with more than one Blogger Blog and Blogger Betas searingly hot off the press. I tweaked them and pimped them, asked much and they returned my lusty exhibitionism with placid restraint and engaging loyalty.

Oh, Miss Lonelyblogs, I did not give them the respect they deserved. So now I keep some Blogger blogs in a harem. Am I a bigamist or blogamist? (more…)