I eat my own home-baked bread every day, and decided to make a quick design to show the beautiful simplicity in bread. With some flour, water, yeast and salt, you can have a beautiful loaf of your own.
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Author: lemsy
John LeMasney (lemsy) is an artist, graphic designer, and technology creative. He is located in beautiful Nelson County, VA, but works remotely with ease. Contact him at: lemasney@gmail.com to discuss your next creative project.
Any of you who know me know very well that I am drinking the Goog-Aid. I believe in the company, give them the benefit of the doubt when they profess that they are not evil, and in general, agree with their business, technology, and work philosophy. Today, I thought I’d share why and how I came to this conclusion.
- Their stuff is free (as in free pizza). Google’s products, for the most part, are free. While there are usually optional upgrade costs, such as more storage, they usually offer the fully featured product at no cost to users. Their business model is advertising based, and so the more eyes that look at their products, the more money they get. I can get behind that, especially because it means that I can suggest a Google based solution to a client or colleague and not have to explain why they have to pay a fee. See also my support for Inkscape, GIMP, Open Office, and so on.
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Google Code (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Their support of open standards. When I work with others, it often means that I have to decide the best way to deal with them. Do we use the same applications, services, and methods, or do we need to find a bridge between us? With Google, their products often use and support open standards and methods, such as XML, HTML 5, SVG, ATOM, and others, meaning that as long as another product (even proprietary ones) can understand the standard, we are good to go.
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Open Source Logo (Photo credit: phradaka) Their support of open source. In answering the mobile platform question “Why do you love Android so much?” my first answer is always “Because it’s open source.” Many people wonder why I care so much about open source (the source code that is written and compiled into the binary application is distributed along with the application), especially since I’m more of a user than a developer with most application code. The answer is that because developers get access to open sourced code, screen it for flaws, integrate improvements and can shape the code themselves, they act on my behalf. We all benefit from the changes that developers make to open sourced code. With proprietary solutions, those same developers are often cut off from adding their own code, seeing how it works, or checking it for flaws. Google uses open source in many of its projects, and supports its distribution through Google Code.
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Music Beta by Google (aka Google Music) (Photo credit: pmsyyz) They offer portable music, documents, photos, and bookmarks, automatically backed up. I have a music collection of many, many gigabytes. It once was available on only one of my machines. When Google Music launched, it allowed me to upload all of my music to their service for streaming and download to any device that could visit their website, meaning every computer, phone, tablet, and set-top box I owned. They back up my music collection automatically, and make it available wherever internet access is present, which for me is nearly everywhere, anytime. Oh, and this goes for every photo I take with my phone, every document I write in Drive, and every presentation I’ve given for the last 5 years.
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Google Plus logo (Photo credit: Bruce Clay, Inc) Google Plus, Hangouts, and YouTube. Google launched Plus, a social layer for its services a little while back. The obvious suggestion by critics was that they were trying to oust Facebook as king of social, but they are doing something different. They are making it easy to unify their services, share the products you make with them, and house it all under one roof: Plus. One feature of Plus, in particular, stands out as a disruptor: Hangouts. Hangouts, the ability to have up to ten people collaborate on documents, video chat, and more, has an on-air feature, with which you can do a live broadcast to thousands, archive the broadcast, and share it with people via YouTube. 5 years ago, it took a technologist with system administration skills to do this. Today, you just click the Hangout button on Plus.
- They make it especially easy to share and collaborate. Because I use Gmail, and have for a very long time, practically everyone I’ve exchanged email with or gotten a business card from in the last ten years is part of Google Contacts. Anytime I want to share a photo, document, spreadsheet, music, or other item with any of them, Google offers their contact info from my contacts just by starting to type their name. In many cases, I can invite them to collaboratively, virtually meet and work on the item in real-time, with voice, video, and screen actions.
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Logo image created by Matt_Stang for the Android Open Source Project and XDA community. Source: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=545151 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The Android operating System. I’ll write on this at length in the future, but for now I’ll just say that excluding the Ubuntu mobile operating system, no other phone OS even begins to tempt me.
- The Chrome Operating System. I have a Chromebook. In fact, I have two. I bought them each used for $100. They both do only one thing: run the Chrome browser on a thin sheet of Linux. I can tell you from a lot of use that often that is all that you need to get work done.
- It extends my senses, my memory, and my ability. When I want to know more about a topic that came up in conversation, I Google what others concluded about it. When I want to see all the photos I’ve ever taken of myself, I open Picasa, and look at the photos that Picasa found my face in. When I want to read a book on any topic, I go to Google Play Books or Google Books, or Google Scholar to investigate it. When I sign into Google, I am just a few keystrokes away from learning, knowing, or remembering it all.
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Google Self Driving Car (Photo credit: loudtiger) The Glass project and self-driving cars. Glass is a wearable computing platform that heralds the next big change in computing. Many are already dismissing it as too weird for mainstream use, but if we can get used to Bluetooth headsets, I think that wireframes that look like glasses without the lenses but that give you a heads-up-display on the world with camera, mic, and sound (powered by Android) would be worth the average person’s cultural shift in visual acceptance. And of course, any company that allows a blind person to drive himself to the store is a company that I stand behind.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here for now. If you are interested in how I think you could begin to integrate the Googleverse into your business workflow, please give me a call. I’m at lemasney@gmail.com and 609-553-9498
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My food philosophy, revised.
So I wanted to talk a bit about how my food philosophy has changed most recently, and discuss how that has changed my grocery shopping habits.
Here are 7 things I try to do in making choices about food.
- I prefer local food over high carbon footprint, anonymously sourced food. I like to know who handles my food, thank them directly, and make sure that they are doing well for helping me be well. If everyone did this, we’d all be better off. If the food is not local, such as coffee or bananas, or tea, I try to make choices that benefit the grower directly, such as fair trade offerings. If food is available locally, I will choose it over a remotely sourced food.
- I prefer organic food to commercial farming methods. No one needs to eat pesticides or chemical fertilizers. The need for pesticide aggression in commercial farming is one of convenience and mass growing efforts, usually of monocrops where the pests evolve to resist less aggressive pesticides. Smaller farms can pay more attention to the crops, the soil, and the methods for their plants, and I want to support that effort.
- I prefer natural genetic evolution to Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). I’m saddened by the Obama Administration’s recent support of the efforts of GMO organizations.
- I prefer to cook and bake and brew my food rather than to pay for having it done for me. It usually tastes as good or better than the food I buy in a restaurant, I never get my order wrong, and I’m able to very tightly control my caloric intake. It is always, always, always cheaper.
- I prefer whole foods over processed foods. I like foods that Michael Pollan would approve of.
- I prefer to grow my food when possible. I live in a studio apartment, with very little spare space, but so far I have an herbal tea garden with German chamomile, basil, sage, and oregano, all delicious teas.
- I’m mostly vegetarian. I eat meat occasionally, usually as a condiment, usually in situations where the food is already prepared, like chicken broth based soup at a restaurant, or at a friend’s house.
What do I keep on hand?
So with all of this in mind, I have started to cut down the cans, boxes, and packages of processed foods in my cupboard, most of which I’ve not touched since my nutritional lifestyle change almost a year ago. I’ve had more than my share of Progresso soups lately, and I’m glad to see them go. I am replacing these past staples with new staples in my cupboard, fridge and freezer, and using most of them at least once each week.
- A variety of apples and Navel Oranges. I eat at least 3 of these a day.
- Seedless Grapes, cherries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and raisins and other dried fruits. I snack on these.
- Mixed nuts in shell: peanuts, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, and Macadamia nuts. I shell and blend these to make a mixed nut butter.
- Leafy greens, including spinach and kale. I use these in dinners and stir fry.
- Whole grain flour, barley, and corn meal or grits. I bake a loaf of bread each week, eating a quarter of it each day. I use the corn meal for polenta, corn bread, and as a texture in other dishes.
- Yeast, baking powder and baking soda. Who doesn’t like pancakes?
- Peas, String beans, lentils, chickpeas and legumes. Great protein.
- Cabbage and Brussels sprouts. Great texture and flavor.
- Asparagus. A treat.
- Bananas. One of my regrets. I really wish they could grow bananas in New Jersey.
- Tomatoes in many shapes sizes and colors.
- Potatoes, onions, garlic and carrots.
- Raw sugar and honey. I like it sweet.
- Olive and peanut oil. I like it umami.
- Corn and popcorn. Corn as a whole food is very good food.
- Granola mix. This varies, but I like a little toasty, crunchy, sweet mouthful.
- Peppers. I like it spicy.
- Rosemary, cilantro, parsley, basil, peppercorns, sea salt. I think that these items are what bring food from delicious to sublime.
- Eggs. I buy them locally, where I can see the chickens.
- Water. I drink 8 cups a day, usually in tea.
This is where I am at right now. I may change again, but it’s a process. I know this: I’m fit, content, satiated, and happy with my nutrition. I feel great. I challenge you to try this for a week or a month, and see what happens. You might love it like I do.
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- Top 10 excuses for Obama signing the Monsanto Protection Act (thedailysheeple.com)
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Library Pinterest Mashup: Using Pinterest to Gain a Visual Following
John LeMasney of LeMasney Technology and Design Consulting will discuss Pinterest, a visual social bookmarking system that is typically unfairly dismissed as a place for wedding photos and pictures of vegetarian recipes. Pinterest is a way to collect, curate, share and discuss photos of any kind, and this article will discuss 10 ways you can use it to engage patrons and other stakeholders in the visual brand, items, and topics at libraries. You can increase visibility of your programs & assets, and give people new ways to click-through to borrowing.
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It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.
In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.
A more visual web of content requires new skills.
As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.
You can learn how to make great images and videos.
There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.
You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.
With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.
I’d like to help you to gain these skills!
Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!
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In support of equal rights for humans in all matters. Let’s not stop at marriage. Let’s not stop at LGBTQ rights. We are all equal; It’s time to recognize it.
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