12.31.05

Three Drawings, Two Auctions, A Pier and an Ex

I unearthed some drawings I did in Moustiers in 2000 and put them up for sale on the painting site:

They're $90 each. I'd been reluctant to part with these guys, but for some myseterious reason I find myself growing progressively less sentimental towards the end of each calendar month.

As an experiment, I've also decided to try putting up a pair of pictures on eBay. Let's see what the invisible hand has to say:

And finally, two oil sketches I hadn't displayed online before:

12.20.05

Return of Languid

The statistical language identifier at languid.cantbedone.org should be working again; let me know if you experience any problems. Note that you may need to update your bookmarklet or API link, if you use either.

Several people have contacted me about the software that runs the service. I should have been more clear on the languid page - it's an open-source Perl module anyone can download. I've put a download link on the front page to demystify the situation.

12.20.05

Pasta Back; LOAF Risen

Thanks to Greg Knauss I've been able to get some services working again.

The website for LOAF, the peer-to-peer social network, should now be accessible. We are still looking for someone to help implement LOAF on a mail client real people use. Get in on the ground floor of this exciting Web 2.0pportunity.

Pasta, the text-pasting service for del.icio.us, is alive now, too. Pasta auto-generates minimalist web pages for things you paste in and submits them to your del.icio.us account, so you can bookmark snippets of text without having to find your way to a web server.

I'm still working on recovering data previously saved in Pasta. Right now it's a blank slate.

12.19.05

For Hire

I've put up an updated resumé in hopes of attracting some freelance work in the New Year. I'm looking for writing jobs, Perl jobs, any kind of web development work, or translation projects from French and Russian into English. For geographical reasons (see below) I can only work off-site, but I will at least be living in a reasonable time zone. Many thanks to anyone who can serve as matchmaker.

12.15.05

Moving to Argentina

In early January I'm going move to Buenos Aires for a bit. I want to paint, eat beef, swim in the River Plate and enjoy a substantially lower cost of living while I wait for the New York winter to go away. This will fulfill my long-time fantasy of switching hemispheres rather than enduring another four months of cold and dark, something I used to scheme about up in Vermont. I hope it will also mean some new articles for my dear readers.

I'm in the middle of collecting ideas for places to see and try to write about. So far the tentative list includes:

• Montevideo
• Rosario
• Cordoba
• Cape Horn
• Welsh gauchos
• The Patagonian Lake District
• Penguins!
• Iguazu Falls/ Hydroelectric Dam
• Stalking Witold Gombrowicz

If any of you live in Argentina, or have recently traveled there, I'd be curious to hear from you. Let me know where to snoop around!

12.12.05

Site Updates

I've added a kind of archive page organized by topic to help those of you who are very bored at work. This holds most of the interesting and some of the non-interesting posts from this site, starting in 2002.

I've also added a sorted price list page to the painting site, so you can see everything that's available in one place. Remember, nothing says 'Merry Christmas' quite like an obsessively detailed oil painting.

12.05.05

Il'f and Petrov - The Golden Calf

The cold and dark has arrived, and to fill the gaps between paintings I've started working on a translation project with my friend Peter Gadjokov. When we lived together last year, Peter had yelled at me for not reading Il'f and Petrov's The Golden Calf, a book that had been gathering dust on my shelf, and it brightened many a morning on my way to the Mellon coal mines before Peter liberated it into the New York subway system.

The Golden Calf is the kind of book you don't expect to exist. It's funny, irreverent, deeply subversive, beautifully written and somehow got itself officialy published in the Soviet Union just as the rest of Russian literature was going into the Stalinist deep freeze. Even more remarkable, it's a joint effort by two authors whose working method was to sit at a typewriter together, smoke, and argue over each sentence as they wrote it (XP programmers take note). Both men were good writers, but when they joined forces they transformed into a comedy Voltron. Many of the catchphrases in The Golden Calf and its prequel, The Twelve Chairs have entered the vernacular language, and both books remain massively popular seventy five years after their publication.

The Twelve Chairs is freely available in English translation (including a free online version), but for some reason The Golden Calf, an even funnier book, is not. Peter and I thought this was a shame, and operating on the theory that even a rough English translation would be better than none, we decided to give it a shot.

I studied Russian in college and can read it reasonably well; Peter (in a tour de force of ethnicity) is a California Austrian from Bulgaria who grew up speaking Russian at home. When neither he nor I can figure out what is going on in the text, we post questions to a LiveJournal (or zhivoj zhurnal, as the locals call it) that has proven enormously helpful. The Russians are skeptical of our ability to do the text justice, but in the hopes that anything is better than nothing, we're making our initial draft available online as we proceed. For the moment, I've set up a homepage for the novel and put up a rough draft of the first three chapters:

1. How Panikovski Broke the Treaty
2. Lieutenant Schmidt's Thirty Sons
3. Your Gas — Our Ideas

Other chapters will go up as we machete our way further into the text. Right now we are in the vicinity of chapter 19; the procedure is that I do a very rough cut, Peter fills in the major potholes, the LiveJournalers clear up areas of serious doubt and argue with each other, and we make an initial attempt to make the writing sound like English. When we've gotten a rough draft of the whole book, we'll go back and edit for style and flow; you'll find the text in this rough draft a little foreign sounding, but hopefully accurate.

Please feel free to write in if you find any major solecisms. I will post links here to new chapters as they go up, and hope you end up enjoying this book as much as I did. You may also get a kick out of the great online exhibition (in English) from Il'f and Petrov's 1936 trip through America.

Because the work is so time-consuming, I've also set up a little donations link on the homepage. I don't normally like to put the hat out, but any money interested readers donate will allow us to spend more time on the book and less time hacking and painting.

12.04.05

They Tried To Silence Me And Failed!

Well, not exactly. I had been using a charity server at my old job in Vermont and its power supply got called home by Internet Jesus. Luckily thanks to John Gruber and the nice people at Textdrive I can continue boldly pushing at the frontiers of whatever it is I am out at the frontiers of.

Special thanks to Jason, for publishing my appeal for help, and to the surprising number of people who wrote in with offers of server space and bandwidth. Someday I will be able to just buy a vanilla hosting plan like a regular mortal; in the interim I'm grateful to all of you for the helping hand.

Please let me know if things are missing or broken on the site. The projects at cantbedone.org (pasta, language identifier, LOAF) should be up in a day or two, and I will post an announcement when that happens.