Per MickyFin’s request, I have now have a Subscribe to this Blog by Email option in the sidebar in the “Subscribe” section.
Enjoy!
Posts Tagged: email
David Hockney and Mail Art for the iPad Age
From yesterday’s Sunday LA Times Art & Books section, David Hockney’s friends in art: the iPad and iPhone:
“What fascinates me is not just technology but the technology of picture-making,” says Hockney. “I spend more time painting, of course, but I treat the iPad as a serious tool. The iPad is influencing the paintings now with its boldness and speed.”
One discovery feeds the next. From photography he moved onto photo collages and experiments with office copy machines — cameras of another kind. His fax art allowed him to send exhibition artworks over telephone lines much as he recently e-mailed an exhibition worth of iPhone and iPad drawings to an art gallery at Paris’ Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent (where “David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches” is on view until Jan. 30.) “Who would have thought the telephone could bring back drawing?” Hockney asks in the Paris show’s catalog.
Hockney’s iPhone art began in 2008. A rotating group of about 30 friends, curators, dealers and writers regularly receive his e-mailed artworks, and the artist even urged his friends first to get iPhones, then iPads to archive the continuing e-mails. According to Gonçalves de Lima, Hockney has already sent out nearly 400 e-mail drawings on his iPhone and 300 more on his iPad.
“I had to get an iPad so I could receive the drawings on the same platform he used to make them,” observes Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Barron, who has already curated three major Hockney shows for the museum, printed out about 20 iPad drawings for her office walls and often uses them as screensavers.
One wonders what would have happened if Ray Johnson had an iPad in the 1960s Mail Art scene, or maybe that is what Hockney and others are creating now.
Blackberry Storm 2 : Video Talk with my brother Joe about his new Crackberry
Sun 01.10.10 – I went over to my brother’s house today and he showed me the Blackberry Storm 2 that he got this week at his new job. He has had the original Blackberry Storm for the last 12 months and I knew that he had many frustrations with the original Storm, so I asked him if he would do a quick video interview to compare the two Storms.
In this video, Joe talks about the software and OS improvements that Blackberry made to make the Storm 2 the phone that they should have released last year. We also talk about the experience of having a pure touchscreen with no qwerty or alphanumeric T-9 keyboard.
Overall, Joe is much happier with the Storm 2 than with the original, but the other folks at work are still sticking to their qwerty keyboard Blackberrys and Joe is the only one who chose the touchscreen Storm 2.
The video was filmed by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.
The Video in Which I Demo & Explain Google Wave to the Tuttle Club LA Folk
Fri 06.05.09 – At Tuttle Club LA (really LB) this morning, I demo’d the Google Wave Sandbox to those assembled. Vaughan Risher video’d my demo/spiel. Ernie Hsiung and Kyle Ford were kind enough to be logged into the Wave Sandbox and participate in the three of us producing a Wave to demo to the Tuttle folk. It was fun.
Vaughan wrote the following to accompany the video on Vimeo:
“Jenifer Hanen (@msjen) got to go to the Google IO conference this week! She showed us Google Wave up close and personal. I was literally 2 feet away from a computer that was actually connected to it. Crazy.
People you see in the video – Jenifer Hanen, Jeb Brilliant, Al Pavangkanan, and myself. You’ll also hear the indomitable Geoff Hickman’s voice in the background.”
The best part is the preview has me in classic family photography mode – eyes closed. ;o)
SpinVox, Let Me List All the Ways I Love You…
1) No more voicemail.
2) SpinVox converts all my voicemail messages into text form or as an email.
3) Did I mention no more listening to voicemail?
I won’t continue to tell you how excited I am that I have not had to listen to voicemail the last month… But I am excited and going to tell you about it. SpinVox, I love you.
Anyone who knows me spent a few years in the mid-2000s remembers being very frustrated with me, as I had my voicemail turned off completely. Yes, I flummoxed some poor defenseless AT&T Wireless employee by calling to request that my voicemail be completely turned off. It took about 15 minutes for me to convince him I was serious and that I wanted it completely deactivated. Turned off.
I happily lived from 2003 to 2006 with no voicemail on my mobile phone. I did have an answering machine at home that I would listen to when I was ready, which was usually at the end of the night & I would return calls the next day. And folks could text me on my mobile or send an email which I check multiple times a day from my computer & mobile. I have had an email enabled mobile since 2003.
Why did I do this? I really love asynchronous technologies and methods of communication. By asynchronous, I mean that the technology or communication that does not require instant response but allows the person receiving to read, process, and to return the communication when ready. Many have written about the stresses of always being on and plugged in, my way of dealing with the expectation that some folks have that one will always be available NOW is to set boundaries as to when I am available.
No, I will not pick up a phone call after 10pm or before 10am, unless it was prearranged. No, I don’t pick up the phone when I am in a store or in a meeting or when having dinner. Etc.
Thus voicemails pile up. Some of them are important communiques that one needs the info fairly immediately, some are just “Hi! Was thinking about you!”, some are long funny ramblings, and some are random who the heck are you. By the time one has dialed up the voicemail, listened to the messages, wrote down the important bits, deleted the rest, and hung up, I am frustrated by the inefficiency of the whole process.
Thus the genius of SpinVox. Our new best friends at SpinVox have a nice set of computers that record the voicemail from the caller when you can’t answer your calls, the nice computers then use voice recognition software to translate the voicemail to a text and/or email, and within 1-4 minutes a nice text arrives at one’s phone and a nice email comes down the pike as well.
One never has to listen to one’s voicemail ever again. Thank the deities of voice recognition software!
Example a client called me the other day, when I was trying to talk to the Auto folks at the Toyota service area and I could not pick up. Before I finished my conversation with the Toyota service rep, I already had a set of texts waiting for me with my client’s message. So, efficient. So nice.
Receiving texts and/or emails with the voicemails transcribed is particularly when folks are giving details that you would otherwise need to write down, like directions or phone numbers, as they arrive already written down.
I have chosen to receive both text to my mobile and emails to my gmail, I have been saving every voicemail to email for later reference. Why? Well, some of them are darned funny as the voice recognition does not get every detail right and does its best to compensate, its translations can be darned funny.
SpinVox does save all the actual voicemails for you if you want to listen to them or if it did not get all the important bits. The parts that the software can’t recognize and transcribe is rendered as ________ and SpinVox gives you a reference number for that message. A reference number? Yep, so rather than listening to every danged voicemail to get to the one you want, when you call in the SpinVox system will ask which message you want to listen to. Fabulous!
SpinVox also allows you to verbally blog to your website, as well as send messages and other services, but I am still so excited about SpinVox converting voicemails into text form that I have yet to explore their other services.
My only complaint about SpinVox is that it took me months to get signed up as when one goes to their website it appears from the front page that the service is only for the UK and folks who have UK based mobile carriers. I was under this impression until May of this year when James Whatley, SpinVox’s evangelist, corrected my error and let me know it was also for the US and many other countries. It is not until one clicks on the “SpinVox for You” menu item that one sees that one can choose a country other than the UK. The country options should be on the front page so that SpinVox does not lose business.
SpinVox, thanks for the great product and user experience. Y’all rock.
Why I Hate SMS (Texting)…
To start, I will let my Tweets from tonight speak:
“Ever since living in Ireland 2005-06, I have hated text messages. My hate grows worse here in SoCal. Don’t send 5 texts when you could call!”
“I won’t text back if folks are using it for extensive details rather than calling or email. Officially old & grumpy. Text is for short msgs”
“I wish one could opt out of receiving texts with one’s carrier. I would. I don’t see why I should be charged to be irritated. F*(ked up.”
More of an explanation:
When I went to grad school in Ireland, 2005-2006, it was really expensive to make calls on one’s mobile phone but comparatively cheap to text, thus everyone I knew in Dublin texted like mad and never called.
To help the average American understand, my monthly Vodafone.ie contract allowed for a multitude of texts but only 50 minutes of phone calls per month for approx. $74. The worst insult was that I could only get 6 mb of data a month for an extra $30. Every one, young and old, in Ireland texted.
In contrast, my contract with AT&T here in the States gives me 650 daytime minutes of calls a month, unlimited AT&T to AT&T customer anytime minutes, and free nights & weekends. All of this phone call bounty for $39.99 a month. I also have unlimited data and email on my mobile for $24.99 a month. But to send a text it costs me $0.15 a text and to receive it is $0.10 a text.
What this means is that I can send and receive unlimited emails from my phone for no extra charge, but each text – incoming or outgoing – costs.
Also, because it is more important for me to have the best camera available on my phone, I don’t have a mobile with a QWERTY keyboard. Thus, texting more than one short message is a pain in the thumb and a pain in the wallet.
I could join the Century of the Anchovy and get a big fat ‘ole text plan with 1000 messages or something, but then I would have to start actually texting back and forth to conduct a conversation.
What it boils down to is that for information beyond one idea or detail where one really does need to convey complexity and / or subtly, I will be be calling or emailing. Text (SMS) is my least favorite way to communicate.
Sigh…
It is Alex’s night tonight (read : noisecoregrungemetalsludge) and I am sitting at the door taking money, trying to make a multiple page php form that I coded last night work.
While Alex and I’s musically tastes do overlap about 70% of the time, there is the other 30% that has no overlap. As a team who brings bands into the venue it makes for some interesting debates during office hours and more interesting complaints the night of.
Tonight I am not complaining of the music (blech) but of my lack of ability to find a good tutorial or a post on how to take a php form and make it print (echo) the screen first for viewing/approval and then hit another button to submit it to email. I am finding tutorials on simple how to email forms (got that working) and really complex arrays (don’t need that) but nothing in the beginning to intermediate level of stringing two forms together…. bugger. (If you know of a tutorial or info on this, let me know.)
Whilst perusing Webdesign-L for php help, I found a post by a designer who did this site for Flamenco dancers (Producciones Sonakay), and the design made me gasp. Most XHTML/CSS sites are very boxy and a bit boring, but I love the big S that breaks up the form and the images for navigation. Christoph, thank you for the delightful eye candy!
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