An art history BA was doing this graphite pencil sketch in a street-side coffee shop cafe, and I had to stop and take the picture. Many passers by were stopping to look.
A graphite pencil sketch in a coffee shop cafe
Monthly Archives: September 2009
A healthy vegetable sandwich on high fiber bread
The picture below shows a sandwich that I made about a half a year ago. (I am a bit slow in getting some of my photography published.) The sandwich is on high fiber bread and I poured vegetable oil on the bread instead of butter. This is about the healthiest oil that you can get. Then there are a few leaves of raw but washed Kale. This is high in lutein and is good for the eyes. Then I sliced an onion and put on some sliced cucumbers and put on some alfalfa sprouts. This is about the best sandwich I have ever made. I normally do not eat this well. The pickles are making my mouth water now as I write this and I bought them on sale.
The olive oil adds a nice taste. The sandwich is quite tasty and very healthy.
Ironically after eating a super healthy meal like this, the next day one finds oneself eating a cheesy pizza and it almost nulls out the health effects.
Pretty flower arrangement
The farmer’s market in Madison has many pretty flower displays. This flower is from the Zimmerman display and is a beautiful arrangement. It’s also a nice photograph.
(Click on the image to see much higher resolution. Note that this is copyrighted.)
So far blogging using WordPress is fantastic plus other blog and web generation comments
A short analysis comparing a blog to an auto-generation system
WordPress is far better than I thought. It is making internet writing much more pleasant and easy. Last night I worked for hours doing some posts and I found my efficiency to be greatly increased. Normally it can take me 2 hours to publish one daily photo using my old (and very clumsy) system (see more below). WordPress cuts this time by about a factor of 10. This is fantastic.
My old system required images to be uploaded, links to be updated, writing to be done, pages to be validated, programs to be run, etc. All said, about 5-10 pages/files needed to be edited. Then several scripts and programs need to be run. Using a blog, most of these functions are done automatically. In most respects the blog is therefore much better. I can publish one or two photos very quickly now.
I might write up some detailed notes about my old system, which is centered around a tool called qwp (quick web pages). It does use a web page auto-generation tool that I created and it is fancy in some respects. It gives me a little more control but it costs 10 times the time and effort. It takes the html and combines any included files along with any embedded J-script into a template, and then translates it into all J-script. Then that J-script program is compiled into an executable program. The executable program is then run, and its output produces the web page. Other pre-translation steps can involve xslt and markdown translation phases, so included portions can be in xml, markdown, or html. So there are many levels of translation in my old system. My daily photo pictures for the last 2-3 years have been auto-generated using this system. For example, this photo page is auto-generated. It’s fancy, very hard to use, and the web pages don’t look good (- unless I use a better template). But here, WordPress is 10 times faster and easier, and the results look a lot better.
The ajax based front end is pretty fancy and is equivalent to using a simple Microsoft Word to create your writing. This writing is wysiwyg (what you see is what you get).
I am finally catching on to blogging. Many people have blogged for years.
Uncle George’s fine arts colored pencil and oil pastel stick art studio
A portion of my art studio is shown below. Colored pencil and oil pastel are fantastic media, even better when combined. Some of these images may eventually appear in other of my writings.
A September omelet with greens and peppers
I don’t eat eggs really a lot but some eggs are probably considered healthy, and eggs can supply a form of lutein which is good for the eyes. Other ingredients here, such as the green “leafy” Swiss chard, is also good for the eyes. When I eat eggs I try to work out hard on my bike. I think cholesterol is a lot like putting “nitro” in a car engine: If you put it in your system, you should not just drive to church at 5 mph, but should try to push it a bit. I don’t know if I am right about this.
The ingredients were all obtained at the Madison farmer’s market.
The dish, pictorially depicted below, is an omelet that I made sometime in September 2009. I chopped some onions, jalapeno peppers, and some Swiss chard, and then pan fried in olive oil. It is really colorful and it a nice photo! Then mix in three eggs. The omelet was really good.
Students on Bascom Hill
A chili with chopped vegetables
This post begins a series on fine arts. I plan on publishing photos and techniques for some of my cooking.
Here is a chili I made recently.
Begin with some Swiss chard, two jalapeno banana peppers, some green stem onions, and mushrooms. Chop them as shown and fry them in olive oil in a pan. Then fry some hamburger. Mix in some chili beans and a tomato pasta sauce, and you have a wonderful chili. The jalapeno peppers add a nice spicy zing to the dish. The photos below tell part of the story.
The peppers were bought at the local farmer’s market. (Madison’s farmer’s market is one of the best in the nation.) They are organic, so I included the seeds with the chopped peppers. This makes the dish warm to hot. You can feel the slight burn of the peppers on your hands after you have finished eating!
The final meal was fantastic! I like hamburger and there is a lot you can do with it.
View up State Street
This image is from 2005. Those were the good old days when I was a good photographer. State Street, in autumn, looks so nice. Now State Street doesn’t seem to look as good as it used to. Why?
My blog is up – first entry
WordPress is quite nice.
My blog is just up on Friday.
– george
