Gallery daze

I belong to Lowell's Loading Dock Gallery, the only playwright among more than 40 visual artists. The artists are inspiring and challenging, as much for their supportive and encouraging attitude as for what they produce. As I write this, the group is going over needful left-brain stuff like budgets and blog maintenance...artists are notoriously bad at tasks like marketing and suchlike, but so far nobody has crumpled up the agenda and flung it at anyone. If course, for a playwright, having more angst to observe might be useful...

Just one last feature to add...

So I'm working on this application called Dotty, and it is almost ready to go. There's just this one last tiny feature I have to throw in, a feature that isn't even needed at the start of the application's use. Should be no trouble at all.

So this afternoon I sketched out the feature's flow, and made notes about the various functions I'll have to write to support it. Came out like this:



Someone please remind me next time about the perils of 'feature creep'...preferably with a whack to the head.

Blog on hand

Google has released its Android Blogger gadget and I threw it onto my cute new Android phone right away. Watch for new posts arriving from traffic jams, movie queues, and the back row of groups enduring a PowerPoint assault,

A Canadian validation

So I wanted to switch the name on the billing account for our cottage electricity in Nova Scotia. Had a surprisingly-pleasant customer-service experience with Nicole at NS Power. We chatted about her new office on Water Street in Halifax, where the noisy old power station used to be (back in the 1970's they would open the big windows on the power station at around 3 am on summer nights to reduce the heat on the machines, also letting out the bang-bang-bang sound effects that would galvanize us out of bed, one block over on Barrington Street).

Nicole just sent an email confirming the various changes we made, and adding this note: 'I have waived the $24.00 standard connection charge as a courtesy, basically because you were such a pleasant person to deal with!'

Oh, Canada...

A Dotty Prezi

I endure a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and my heart goes out to the people who make them, and have to try to make them interesting and eye-catching, but still readable. I mean, how many legitimate things can you do with a title and a stack of bullet points?

So I was delighted to stumble upon Prezi, an alternative method for making engaging presentations. In half an hour I whipped up this not-yet-finished presentation on Dotty, the application I am building:

How to empty a storage unit on Prezi

This is a lot of fun! I'll be making more of these things...

going dotty

The problem: we have two storage units full of stuff from my mother's house. She is now in an assisted-living facility, and there is no chance she will need the stuff in the storage units again. There are five of us siblings, and among us we have 11 children, and we don't all live in close proximity to the stored stuff. So how are we going to get the stuff divided out, with a minimum of hassles, so everyone is as happy as the circumstances allow?

I have been working on a solution, called Dotty. It's an online tool that lets each of us log in, review the stuff from storage, and put colored dots (a different dot for each of us) on the things we would like in our households. I have just opened the site for testing with a couple of my sisters, and still have a few bells and whistles to hook up; but overall I am very happy with the app. I built in in FlashBuilder, using Flex 4, with ColdFusion 8 pages to provide access to the MySQL database--and it could hardly have worked better.

I will post a movie soon of Dotty in action. Nice addition to the old portfolio...

Odd props

A few months ago I noted that I had a script in progress that had been stuck at a certain point for months and months. I am happy to report that that play, and two others, got themselves finished by October and had their first reading at a playwrights' crit group in November. I am a slower writer than I would wish to be, dawdling and delaying for weeks and then turning out page after page in unexpected writing surges. If I could harness them...I guess I would be a different person than I am.

One of these new plays takes place on a stalled Ferris wheel, with a couple rocking in each of the cars we can see and a repair man clambering over the structure of the wheel. Another is the famous police-lineup play, in a town too small to have enough people for a lineup. I tend to put ordinary people in proximity to odd props or odd situations, and often good plays come out of it.

For the next couple of months I am concentrating on some software projects I am building, little apps for tiny niche audiences. But if they work out they will make nice additions to my resume. For sure, I am learning all the ways in which Flex 4 is different from Flex 3...

But rustling at the back of my mind there are a couple more script ideas. I have the idea backlog of a member of the leisure class, and at the end of a long day of not-leisure work I can barely stand the sight of all those little nuggets of inspiration. Until I can't stand not to work on them, and we are off to the races again.