Story Pictures

“To appropriate the ideas of another for one’s own use is plagiarism;  to copy the ideas of two or more others is research” — forget where I heard that.  Must have been at least twice.

Plagiarismtoday.com published an article how to avoid plagiarism and reap the benefits of republishing — by Jonathon Bailey:

“EmbedArticle: YouTube-Style Embeds for Text“

“For copyright holders and content creators. [sic] one of the most difficult [sic] they face is finding ways to share their content while encouraging a symbiotic relationship with those who use it.”

You’re supposed to copy and insert this HTML:

<div id=’embedded_article’><p><b>Source:</b> <a href=”http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/03/15/embedarticle-youtube-style-embeds-for-text/”>www.plagiarismtoday.com</a></p><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://js.embedarticle.com/article/js_snip/4a9833f18d4df14d82cea81214c879541c4a3c86′></script></div>

However you also need to install a plug-in for WordPress blogs like this one to make the Embed work.   Gonna do that soon — stay tuned and see how this post changes.

First checkout Bailey’s critique then checkout the new fix for the publisher’s dilemma EmbedArticle.com .

You’ll be glad you did.

Here is a picture of the 26 volumes that I’ve accumulated (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu) since publication for the Meiji Centennial in 1968:

The four volumes I need to complete this set are:

• 8 Emakimono
• 23 Men to Sho Zo
• 24
• 26

Long, long ago, when I was going to school at Sophia University in Tokyo, the Monbusho subsidized publication of a 30-volume series (Genshoku Nihon no Bijutsu pub by Shogakukan). Many of these were further discounted through the bookstores in Jimbocho, where I picked up about 16 of them. 

Each time I visited Tokyo over the years I went through the Jimbocho bookstores, and finally got up to a total of 27 volumes.
One of my wife’s bone-headed friends spoiled No. 8 — so I’m back to 26 books.
Now, I’m looking for four non-sequential volumes to fill out the set of 30.

By the 1990’s the Jimbocho bookstores seemed to have exhausted their supply of these books.  So, even if I visited Jimbocho today, I doubt that I’d find any of this series at all — and very unlikely to find the 4 volumes I am seeking to complete the set.

The Deaths of Firenzi

By Peter Neibert

What we have here is a fear-gripping, white-knuckled, leg-crossing story of the Deaths of Firenzi.

The story is here, but the pictures aren’t ready yet.

I’m working on that – post them when I get to it.

You can read the story without the pictures, and no one will care if you move your lips.

TV Japan Rolls Out California Market

Author: peterneibert / Published: December 05, 2009 at 10:52 am

That’s what it looks like on Technorati.com.   Want to see more?  OK, here’s the code they sent me in an automated e-mail, just in case you asked:

TV Japan Rolls Out California Market

If you click on that, you’ll see the real deal on Technorati.com.

I was bored and a little bit sleepy on Thursday afternoon, so I decided to go for a walk — out to the mailbox.  There was actually mail in the mailbox, so I picked it up and abandoned the walk.

Mostly forgettable junk mail and supermarket ads.  But one had a lot of Japanese on the outside of the envelope.  Comcast was up to something.  It wasn’t addressed to me but I opened it anyway to find they were offering a free trial of Japanese language broadcasts beginning December 3rd.  A hurried investigation revealed Thursday was in fact December 3rd.

• Damn!  I had already missed most of the first day of the free trial. 
• To find out what happened next, go to Technorati.com.
• If you do go there, then click on things, Twitter retweet, digg, whatever else you have on your browser.

Social Media Makers of the world wide web will thank you.

If you use photos in your blogs, you need Windows Live Writer (combined text editor and photo editor for blogs) — keep reading.

If you use a Mac for blogging, it won’t work for you, stop reading.

What can you say about a text editor?  It edits text, sure enough, and it’s free, Oh, boy!  But you can say the same about many other text editors.

But Wait!  An integrated photo editor that’s free, easy to use and customizes high quality pictures for the blogger’s medium – well, that’s almost enough to make inveterate Microsoft-haters stop hating Microsoft (OK, nothing’s that good).

But Live Writer is so good, you can stop using Photoshop to edit pictures for your blog posts.

Anathema, you say?  Well, Ha!

Yes, you can work from jpg’s never touched by Photoshop.  The picture editing commands in Live Writer (they appear on the right side when you click on an image in your post) are intuitively obvious.  You can

• change how text wraps around a picture
• change margins and borders (for the pictures in this post I used a 1 pixel line, but there are other borders available with a single click, including the kitschy drop shadow, if that fits your taste).
• resize and crop (in this post, I  duplicated the main photo below and cropped from it the square image now at the top left – first time through the procedure took me about a minute, second time I needed less than 20 seconds, including placement in the post).
• adjust a picture’s brightness and contrast (oops – this really is anathema to Photoshop users, and I could not steel my sensibilities to use it).  If you have a really bad picture that you really must publish, then fix it in Photoshop with levels and curves.
• And then it has a bunch of simplified Photoshop like effects e.g. convert color photo to black and white or sepia, sharpen or add gaussian blur, adjust temperature – good stuff like that.

The photo below is enlarged in Windows Live Writer beyond its original size on my website.

If you right click on either of the images, you can see and read their Alt Text, which is readily facilitated by Windows Live Writer. Search engine crawlers read Alt Text; thus, it often affects the post’s SEO ranking and retrieval.

Live Writer seems to work as well with Firefox as with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is also said to work with many other blogging platforms, Movable Type, Blogger, and the like.

And, yes, it’s free.

Peter Neibert

I felt bad
Because I had no shoes,
Until I met a man
Who had no feet –
So, I took his shoes
And now I feel better.
– George Carlin

Shoe Tree for George Carlin

A Walk in the Park: Arches National Park, Moab

Bruce Berger’s The Telling Distance, essays on feeling the deserts of Sonora and the Colorado Plateau made me wonder What’s he doing now?
Still writing?
What?

So I Googled “bruce berger” and found his website, BruceBerger.net — full of desert stories, essays and pictures. I thought Let’s see what they cost now at Amazon.com: most of Berger’s “new” books were discounted deeply by Amazon, and also, there was a button for “used” books written by him priced from a penny each plus shipping and handling.

Well, impulse made me do it — I bought one for a penny plus shipping/handling for $3.99.
Immediately I felt this is no good: I’m screwing over Bruce Berger, great man of desert conservation.
And then I got the e-mail confirmation from Amazon. It identified the seller of record, shipper and handler is actually Goodwill Industries of San Francisco.

So what’s my question?.

Rocky - Senior Dog

I am Rocky. I’ve always been Rocky, and I don’t know where this “Senior Dog” thing comes from.
It’s been three years since I moved onto the Big Doghouse in the Sky.
No sooner was I out of the house than those people began calling me different things.
Things like Rocky Senior, Old Rocky and even Dead Rocky — and worst of all, Rocky1.
Where did that come from?
Well, yes, they went out and bought (with money) a new dog that was supposed to look like me. Of course it didn’t, not a bit. It was a tiny puppy, golden retriever — but money doesn’t get you very much. It was really really tiny. And it didn’t act like me either: wouldn’t go upstairs, chewed on furniture and shit all over the house — ok, maybe I did that… And that.

But get this: they named it Rocky2.

Wouldn’t even go upstairs and yet they named it after me. I used to go upstairs, even tripped the old man down the stairs and broke his leg. Remember that?  GOTCHA!
After that, they threatened to send me to dog school.

The ignominy.

Me, Posing in the Living Room for the camera thing

They sent Rocky2 to dog school. Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be my Replacement Dog, but even after three years he’s still smaller than I used to be.  There is no replacement for me.
A word of advice from the old dog: when you get to be fourteen years old, you’re feeling the punies and they want to take you to the vet, DON’T GO.

Your ashes will come back in a box, and they won’t know what to do with it. So, even three years later, it will just sit there on the chest in the living room.

GOTCHA!

The question you’ve got to ask yourself is
"Do you believe in jury trials?"

Well, pilgrim, do you?

The question you’ve got to ask yourself is
“Do you believe in jury trials?”

Well, pilgrim, do you?

Guard Tower San Quentin Prison (We're in the tower. Right?)