jeweled platypus

 

saturday, march 25, 2006
Exciting and scary things

I won’t have internet access from March 25th to April 1st, in case you’re wondering where I am. I leave for New Orleans in a few hours, where I will meet up with a few of my friends and the larger group of volunteers from UCSB. We’ll be cleaning Katrina-damaged houses during the day and sleeping in a giant warehouse (named “Light City”) at night. I’m not sure whether vegetarian food will be available, and I don’t know what to expect in general.

Yes, this is my idea of a good spring break.

I wish I could bring my camera, but it would probably get lost or stolen. I will draw pictures and write things in my moleskine, and I might tell you about the whole thing when I get back.

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wednesday, march 22, 2006
An interlude for a yellow flower

As part of an assignment for Malaise and Melancholy class, I went on a walk to the middle of nowhere, ostensibly to retrieve some of the things I made last quarter in the pottery shack — better known as West Campus Kilns (or so the hand-painted sign on the plywood says). The easiest way to get there is along the bike path to the Francisco Torres dorms, which does not have many pedestrians, or much at all except non-native plant species.

The first things I noticed as I walked along were the bunches of yellow wildflowers at my feet — the same ones my girl friend and I called “sour-root” when we were seven or eight because the end of a plucked flower tastes sour if you nibble on it. I demonstrated this to Max while we waited for the bus going to the Museum of Natural History one Saturday morning — he was suitably impressed, and then I put the flower in my hair, where it promptly wilted. The flower’s real name is the Bermuda Buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae), and it is actually a weed from South Africa.

It looks like this:

a picture of sour root

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monday, march 20, 2006
The stylesheet has changed

The Jeweled Platypus is left-aligned? Blasphemy! But I like it. I mean, the design hadn’t changed for I-don’t-know-how-many years. The weird (“innovative”) alignment was nice, but I think I’m over that. Pages might load faster now.

I may integrate my del.icio.us links as posts. That sidebar thingy isn’t really working.

You will complain if things look more broken than they were before.

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tuesday, march 14, 2006
The moviegoer goes to class

a projector and some lighting equipment

I have a fourth project for photography class. This one was going to be about the search for something, but I ended up liking pairs of colorful things better.

If that isn’t very articulate, I’ve been sort of sick for the past week and a half.

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thursday, march 02, 2006
Green and water and glass

It rains in Santa Barbara sometimes. Actually, I think it just started raining again. Pictures from a few days ago:

bits of sea glass on concrete

the great sea of sand

And the rain just stopped. Crazy.

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wednesday, march 01, 2006
Please error login

It’s time for the latest edition of snarky comments about dumb interface tricks. These are pretty old, so I don’t remember where most of them came from.

please tick this box
Please read the text in this image to see what I’m pointing out.

enter the login nmae into 'login'
This could only be better if it said “please”.

please confirm you are a human
I like the polite honesty, but “Error” might be construed as robot discrimination.

register using sign in dot net
This is what happens when you have stupid product names, Larry.

Other editions: college, silliness, original.

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I’m Britta Gustafson and this is my blog about projects and pretty pictures.

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