Rob Ray

Super super SUPER psyched to be a part of the Temporary Services Designated Drivers touring exhibit.

20 artists and groups were invited to contribute up to 4GB of writing, software, images, PDFs, drawings all freely available to anyone that shows up with their own storage device or computer. Check out more info on the TS Current Services page and the Half Letter Press Tumblr!

Woo Hoo! The new Drunken Boat out! Lots of great stuff in this issue.

As the visual arts editor for Drunken Boat I'm particularly excited about the Visual Arts folio!

Check out some great work by Tanyth Berkeley, William Lamson, Jeff McLane, Michael K. Meyers, Brandon Nickell, Pocho Research Society, Poemedia, Stephanie Rigsby, Singing by Numbers, Zoe Strauss, Tod Seelie, Dan Tesene.

Also, there is some great writing in the Fiction/Short Shorts, First Peoples, Plural, Non Fiction, Poetics, and Slant/Sex/ folios!

Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network – M.A.R.I.N. – will organize two one month long residencies during June and August 2011 around the Baltic Sea. We invite proposals by artists, scientists or collaborative initiatives to attend either for June or August 2011.

Artists and researchers will be selected based on the proposals. While we are open to many ideas, we hope to get research-oriented proposals that relate with the marine environment. Also projects that look at alternative energy in a nomadic camp, environmental sensors, low power computing are on our wish-list. (In other words, no poetic videos contemplating the sea!) The June residency themed Sensing the Baltic Sea (June 1st-30th) will be situated on three Baltic Sea islands in Finland and end in Tallinn, Estonia. On each island there are basic facilities, and we will set up our own camp using wind and solar power.

The August residency, themed Cartography and Everyday at Sea (August 1st-31st) will start in Stavanger in Norway, shift to an island in Sweden and finish on a beautiful peninsula in Lithuania.

Thanks Ken for passing this along!

Head on collision test performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

I'm finally getting around to watching Century of the Self after about a million of people have told me I should check it out (especially after they find out I worked in advertising).

I'm taking my first shot making ice cream in my plug-in ice cream maker. I feel like a sellout after making my own failed ice cream maker out of a cordless drill and two coffee cans. I guess I'll have to eat the pain away.!

Recipe courtesy of the mighty Marcia Hofer - an amazing chef and amazing person!

Ingredients
1 c. sugar, caramelized (see below)
2 1/2 c. heavy cream
3/4 c. milk
1/2 t sea salt
1/2 t vanilla

Instructions
Heat sugar in a heavy saucepan. When it is caramelized to a dark brown, remove from heat and add half of cream, already warmed. Mixture will foam up and sugar will seize. Stir, over low heat if needed, until caramel melts. Heat rest of cream and milk to boiling, add to sugar mixture, along with salt and vanilla. chill well and freeze in ice cream maker.

This is a very soft ice cream, and can be served right from the freezer.

Woo hoo! We're psyched to be playing Chicago Feb 2nd!

- - - - - -
8PM; FEBRUARY 2, 2011
at the Nightingale Theater
1084 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL 60642
http://nightingaletheatre.org/

A recent study found that Groundhogs successfully predict the future only 37% of the time. At 8PM on February 2, 2011, at the Nightingale Theater, the Chicago realtime audio/video group I Love Presets will offer a much more accurate prediction of the impending future. Through the manipulation of home-brew gear, glitch-ware, and mangled samples, I Love Presets will forecast more than just weather. Shadow or no-shadow, Rob Ray, Jon Satrom, and Jason Soliday will hack the dark-fiber of the future, break the crystal ball, and unleash a fury of realtime audio/video prognostication.
http://ilovepresets.net

A stunning Kool Keith freestyle.

Whoa. http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/ requires a beta browser (FF4 Beta, Chrome Beta, a Webkit nightly build, etc.) but is awesome. I got the latest Chromium browser (direct OSX link) becuase I use FF for a lot of dev work and didn't want to break anything.

"Google Body is a detailed 3D model of the human body. You can peel back anatomical layers, zoom in, click to identify anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more. You can also share the exact scene you are viewing by copying and pasting the URL."

Jamming this Surgeon mix today. Whew! It jumps right off into the deep end!

Surgeon Live @ The Forum, Sydney, Australia - 23-10-2010 by R_co

If you ever need to check your outbound port status the Firebind is pretty good. If you have inbound port issues Canyouseeme.org and whatsmyip.org/ports/ are pretty good.

Apologies to the people who read the blog and don't give a crap about this stuff.

First Thoughts.

• It's no Wordpress install but it is much better than Drupal6 installer. The installer has a bit more polish than Drupal-6 but no significant look and feel differences.
• I had to install the php-xml extension as it is now an installation requirement. The installer error message says the "PHP dom extension is missing." This is going to throw off a good many people. Dom is part of the php-xml package. There is no extension called "dom." This installer error should give you that info.
• At first I was freaked by the "Site e-mail address" field and couldn't figure out how or why this was different from the Site Maintenance Account's "E-mail address" field it was asking me for 2 form fields down. Then I realized that this is a feature I've been wanting for a long time – a different email address for the site than the admin! I have a feeling us Drupal 5/6 people are going to need therapy in order to use Drupal 7. We've gotten to used to all of the workarounds.
• Those familiar with doing Drupal installs know they need to go to the settings page right afterwards. Drupal 7 is no different. A few suprises though. PECL uploadprogress or APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is a reccomended install so upload progress can be reported. PECL uploadprogress is a bit of a pain to install. I had to

1. yum install php-pear
2. wget the latest version and tar -xf the file.
3. run phpize, ./configure, make, make install in the folder. 
4. add extension=uploadprogress.so to my /etc/php.ini
5. then restart apache.

• Moving on.... I'm kind of suprised a dependancy on cron is still a part of Drupal7. It is super useful but so many large company IT departments and hosting providers hate on this. UPDATE: Oh! Huh. So I looked at my reports and saw that cron has run even though I never setup a cron job for this site. Upon further reading, Drupal 7 has 'poor mans cron' style functionality built in, turned on and set to run every 3 hrs by default! Yay! So as long as something hits one of your pages every three hours, cron tasks will be run. A regular old Drupal-6-style cron job can be setup as well if you need more reliable execution of cron tasks.
• Also, the typical flipping of settings.php permissions back to "non-writeable" is required (for a good reason).

Things I plan on being attentive to in 2011

1. There's a pretty good chance I'm at least partly wrong.

2. Sundays are office and shop cleaning days. It make's Monday much cooler.

3. My To Do list could be "Find fresh water, find a meal, don't get killed." It isn't – so I've got nothing to fear.

Use Art for Airports to spread David Wojnarowicz's art!

Yep. Surely you've heard the news by now. Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered the removal of Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1987) from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" show after the incoming House leader John Boehner and Republican Whip Eric Cantor, warned that the NPG's budget would  face "tough scrutiny" next year if they didn't take down the show.

Tyler Green recently posted on his Modern Art Notes blog that P·P·O·W Gallery in Miami has made a PDF of David Wojnarowicz's Untitled (One day this kid…) available to anyone who wants to distribute it and they are encouraging people to take photos, upload to them Flickr and tag them with "onedaythiskid"!

I just realized that my new project Art for Airports is a great way to help spread David's ideas! Check out more on the Art for Airports site.

Dylan Drazen - Deep Cover (Studio DJ Set) by Dylan Drazen