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.
Had a great breakfast to celebrate 9 months with Melissa. I cut two ears of corn, included leftovers from last night’s curried cauliflower with tomatoes and onion and garlic, threw in a couple of eggs, and served it with Trader Joe’s Lavash bread, toasted. I threw a pearl of mozzarella on at the end to add a bit of salty, creamy fun. All told, breakfast was about 350 calories! We each had half and really enjoyed the buttery texture, creamy consistency, mix of sweet and spicy, and bright yellow color. She said it might be her best breakfast ever. Delicious, just like Melissa.
On June 26th, 2012, John LeMasney will be speaking to the Princeton PC Users Group (PPCUG) about two open source media management tools, Miro, and VLC, and their related projects, VLC editor and Miro Video Transcoder.
With these free (free as in freedom as well as free as in free pizza) tools, you’ll be able to manage, enjoy, and share the media free of proprietary restrictions you might find in other media managers and players.
John will also talk about online media managers, including Google music and Spotify.
John LeMasney is a father who lives and works in and around central New Jersey. He is the Manager of Educational Technology Training and Outreach at Princeton University since 2011. He had worked from 1998-2011 at Rider University as the Manager of Technology Training. He was recently awarded a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership with honors from Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture with honors from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
He is a designer, artist, writer, poet, technologist, consultant, open web advocate and open source evangelist. He is most interested in helping people to use technology to make their lives, work, and world better.
I had my 39th birthday yesterday. It was a very good one.
I’m on my way to physio-mental health. Evidence of the physical part is above, but let me explain the physio-mental part here.
In the time between March 2011 and March 2012, a lot happened. I had several overlapping personal crises, not resolved or resolving:
I had cataracts last year. I had surgery to remove them. Towards the end of my time with these protein deposits in my eyes, unofficially associated with smoking and drinking, and seldom seen before old age, I was driving, working, and doing all the things that I normally do, but I should not have been. It was nearly impossible to read, a major part of my work as a technologist. I almost hit a police officer who was directing traffic during church services in a spot I did not expect. He had lights flashing, an orange vest, and a lit flashlight. It was broad daylight. He screamed at me. I was lucky not to lose my license, but I probably should have. I had to fight and argue that my cataracts were bad enough to call for the surgery. My belief is that the healthcare system in this country is self-serving and broken. I also induced a concussion falling down the stairs my first week I was at my job at Princeton, which I had just begun, at the beginning of March. I could not see the steps. Removing the cataracts was one of the most rewarding and freeing life experiences I’ve ever had. I will never, ever, again be inconsiderate to those suffering with visual issues.
I separated from my wife and ended a marriage of 12 years. Mostly due to my drinking, and the perspective that drinking to excess provided me. I won’t say much else here but that I am happy now; I’m on the road to recovery with my children, Jack and David. They are my life, and I will do everything in my power to give them my life back.
I stopped drinking. After a 6 year run of binge drinking almost every night, after having sobriety between the ages of 19 and 33, I am 9 weeks clean of alcohol. I will help anyone who wants to do this, because I feel that personally, it was the key to the rest of these issues manifesting. For me personally, alcohol is a poison, slow killing, and painfully life debilitating. Others are able to live with it, but all it ever brought me was sadness, change to the negative, and a veiled view of living. Never again, I hope and work for, every day.
I moved out of my house into a studio apartment. I will be paying for both the house and the apartment for the foreseeable future.
I regained almost all of my lost weight from a 100+ pound loss (305 to 195) that I had at the age of 36, mostly due to the perspective and lackadaisical attitude provided by abuse of drinking. After quitting drinking, I’ve lost 39 pounds, from 295 lbs down to 256 pounds as of the time of this post. I plan to reach 200 pounds again as a goal with exercise, nutritional sense, and support.
Other things have happened, but none I’m ready to share here, but stay tuned, you never know.
So, things are looking up. I’m better for surviving the crises, and on my way to recovery. Thanks for your support in that.
Urban Empire by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #stormtrooper #starwars
Select a livelihood that reflects your ethics by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
Tonight, I returned to the BCUG Graphics focused sub-group, for maybe the 4th time. I always enjoy the professionalism, humor, and attentiveness of this very special group and its memorable members. In the past, I’ve talked about open source concepts, Picasa, Sketchup, Inkscape, and other technologies.
In this visit, I came to talk about two great open source video projects, VideoLan Client (VLC) and Miro Media Player. VLC is a swiss army knife of video tools. You can play almost any codec out of the box, transcode videos from one format to another, clip portions of videos to new files, create playlists, stream video to others on your network and elsewhere, and all in a simple, configurable interface. I described VLC as being for geeks and tweakers, but it would also be apropos to say that it is a video geek’s heaven. I demonstrated a few of its more useful features, and also introduced VLC’s side project, a video editor (VLC Movie Maker) which by their own admission is pre-alpha, and not highly usable yet, but the work that they’ve done so far is amazing and delicious. I can not wait until this tool is more well-developed, so I can stop using WIndows Media and Quicktime based tools. VideoLAN is an amazing project, and I love what they do.
I also demonstrated Miro. Miro is a video player too, but a whole lot more than that. Miro is based on VLC, and so it has all of those features and then some. With Miro, you have a built in torrenting client, podcatcher, RSS manager, auto-transcoder, music cataloging, video cataloging, and video search with configurable search engines. When you do a search, you have the ability to save the search as a podcast, e.g. auto-downloaded video set. Miro also has a side project that I showed called Miro Video Transcoder. This tool is a simple one window interface that allows you to drag a pile of files onto it, and have it save them all in a format that you choose. The list of available formats is long and it does quick work.
I hope that my sharing has helped the folks at BCUG Graphics workshop to enjoy their video half as much as I enjoyed myself tonight.
I had the honor of speaking at a retreat for the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS) at Princeton University on the topic of using social media to better communicate with students and potential students. It was a lively discussion on assumptions, practices, standards, authority, authenticity, and locality. Here is my minimalist slide deck for the 2 hour-long talk.
So I had a great hand-made veggieburger at work the other day, with fresh toppings and a juicy orange as a side. Then, tonight, I had eggs on flatbread with fresh mozzarella, with corn on the side. Also, a delicious press pot of coffee!
