Opus Unknown: An Exercise In Metadata Cultivation

Cinerama Camera In Action

Laurence Cook — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:07:10 +0000

The video below was posted on YouTube this morning (the thumbnail are pans of Black Rock City in 2003; o.k. not Cinerama, but they are stitched together and fun; close enough for this blog post at 11pm).

The video is a 15 minute documentary by Michael J. Cahill, that shows a Cinerama camera in action on Jan. 14, 2012, shooting footage for a new Cinerama film “In The Picture” produced/directed by Dave Strohmaier . The location is the Demille Lasky Barn at the Hollywood Heritage Museum, across from the Hollywood Bowl, which (according to Stan Taffel of Pro-Tek Vaults, who posted the video link to the Association of Moving Image Archivists listserv) was the original home of the Famous Players Lasky which later became Paramount Pictures.

Long Road

Laurence Cook — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:02:07 +0000

After getting this blog set up, I stepped back to let things settle a bit. Today, I made some adjustments (e.g., replaced the images first posted with new ones with watermarks, and tweaked the body code to drop the curved corners that were being blown out by the feature images).

Two weeks into the blog and the spam is starting to ramp up (rather dramatically today). The first spam posts started shortly after a friend posted the blog URL on Facebook (which is fine; that is how the process works). Notably, the blog is not linked from my home page yet. Fortunately, the posts can be moderated (which is an improvement over the cgi boards I used in the 90s that became spam magnets). I have set it up Captcha (for the moment disabled). However, Captcha only filters out the spambots (or at least tries), but not the human beings that have nothing better to do, or to lose in dumping their ads into comment forms.

In the meantime (and far more interesting), I have been setting up content for publication. Slow & steady.

A bit of perspective

Laurence Cook — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:45:08 +0000

Things have been a bit intense lately (well, at least for the last four or five millenia). And given the trends, it is going to be ever so much more so, in the near and midterm. So, it is a good thing to keep things in perspective.

Scale of the Universe by Cary Huang with technical support by Michael Huang

http://htwins.net/scale/index.html

Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn the scale of things along the way! Press left or right or drag the scroll bar to zoom in and out. Press down to toggle quality.

Exhibition of Art by Finley Fryer @ John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, CA

Laurence Cook — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:16:33 +0000

From January 4th through January 28th, 2012, the eclectic Northern California artist Finley Fryer will present an exhibition of his paintings and sculptures at the John Natsoulas Center for the Arts in Davis, CA. There will be an opening reception on Friday January 13th (7-9pm). Perhaps best known for his monumental sculptures, this exhibit will provide a rare opportunity to experience Finley’s large oil paintings in a appropriately large and properly lit space. They truly are breathtaking. The thumbnail above is of one of his recent paintings which will be part of the exhibition, “Souls of Lost Painters” (oil on canvas, 62″x62″, 2011)

Read the article, “Neo-Assemblage: The Creative Force of Finley Fryer” by PRWEB, Tuesday, Dec 6, 2011

John Natsoulas Center for the Arts
521 1st Street, Davis, CA 95616 / Phone: (530) 756-3938
Hours: Wed-Thurs 11am-5pm / Fri 11am-10pm / Sat-Sun Noon-5pm

Visit Finley Fryer’s website (which is very out of date): http://finleyfryer.com/

Currently, Finley’s well-known and loved monumental sculpture of steel and mosaic recycled plastic, “Stan: The Submerging Man” is installed on the street in front of the gallery. Stan is one of four monumental sculptures Finley installed at the Burning Man Festival between 1998-2002. Here are three videos of those installations:

Working out the kinks…

Laurence Cook — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:16:12 +0000

This template comes with a featured post/page slider on the home page. The template name is Aggregate and it comes from Elegant Themes (also see credit link on bottom of this page). I actually preferred the slider for the Evolution template, but have yet to fully crack the code for replacing one for the other. I have made a few custom modifications to the Aggregate template code. So far, so good.

A funny thing is that the Feature Slider will not actually work for one featured item (instead it appears to remain blank). So, this post will add a second. And then we will see if it works. In the meantime, it provides another opportunity to play with the posting form, and add links.

The accompanying photo is of the 25 Man Cycle (manned by 25 Shriners in the 2008 4th of July parade in Urbana, Illinois). Classic.

Another interesting item about the template, is that the image area is 960 x 340 pixels, with a 1 pixel border that actually drops the required image size to 958 pixels. Most of my images that are ready to go are set for the web at 900 x 600, which when loaded into the template’s media library is fine for the Gallery, but results in a white space on the right side of the image to make up for the missing 58 pixels when posted to the Feature-Slider. Oh, well… adaptation is required.

And so it begins……

Laurence Cook — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 01:33:20 +0000

Greetings!

This is my initial post to this blog – Opus Unknown. This blog serves a number of purposes, including: 1) I have large backlog of digital and non-digital content to publish; 2) Experimentation in working with WordPress and WordPress templates; and 3) An exercise in the use of metadata categories, tags, excerpts and content for search & retrieval (both within the blog and through search engine harvesting)

So, there it is.