LookIt

Help me find the mystery artist

Mystery solved: see below
This lovely painting has been in my family for as long as I can remember. It was my grandparents', and it was passed on to me. It is one of my favorite paintings. (You can also see a full image (400K)). Most people visiting my house are taken aback by it; "intense" is an often-used description.

It is signed "L. Currall" on the front, and simply says "CURRALL" on the back. I would love to find the artist. The story as I remember it is that the painting won first prize in a Palo Alto art contest in the early 1950's and my grandparents bought it; that story could be wildly off. (And it turns out that my grandfather didn't like it after it hung in their living room for 30-odd years.)

Google is failing me here because all searches for "Currall" and "artist" or "painting" lead to Alan Currall who is much too young (but apparently a photographer of quite some note).

Does this image look like something you recognize? Does anyone know an artist named Currall in their sixties or seventies who painted like this?

Update Found the artist, through her parents. The story was off by about 15 years (she graduated high school around 1970), but the rest of the story was correct. Her parents still live in the Bay Area, so I'll bring them the painting next week.

Staying here

Heard this yesterday, reminded me how much I need to work on patience. Love's Recovery by the Indigo Girls, live from 1990 (4.8 meg).

Old geek books

Dan at Flutterby asks whether or not to save old computer books that might have historical value. I keep old how-to books because you never know when they'll be useful. I know that I have referred to a 15-year-old book on WordStar in the not-distant future.

The gist of his question is whether or not these books will be of value to future geeks. In that category, I only have a few. An original APL: An Interactive Approach, Discover FORTH a copy of Computer Lib,copies of the September 1966 and September 1977 Scientific American, and so on. I have, unfortunately, lent out (apparently permanently) my 1979 CompuServe users manuals.

A note to Palm

My brother is an avid Palm user who is in the market for a new one. The old one didn't break, he just wants a new one because it's been a few years. In other words, he is a Palm marketer's dream. But he has a problem: the new models have smaller buttons and smaller screens. He says:

I think these phones with microscopic keyboards are really useless, just a fad. The PDA keyboards aren't much bigger. If someone really wants to get some word-processing done on a PDA, they might as well hook it up to a keyboard. Maybe i am having some macular degeneration, but even with my reading glasses these small windows and small buttons are just too small. I think the industry is going in the wrong direction with this.

Pissing off current customers by making your system harder to use is a a typical American company trait, but a bad one.

All about airlines

The Airchive is an incredibly nerdy site that documents the history of many airlines and how we used to fly. It's full of old route tables, aircraft lore, and juicy bits of trivia about the system that shrank the world.

Another one bites the dust (soon)

The widely-blogged death of eMusic is really sad. They had a great idea, got a bunch of subscribers, then did nothing with the site. Instead, they sold the site to someone who thought that they would be smart change the basic model to be one like lots of other failing sites. Whoopee.

The original idea (all-you-can-download from minor record labels with lots of variety) let folks experiment with music. Heard of a band but didn't know their work? Download one of their CDs for nothing other than your not-too-cheap monthly subscription fee. The new model: pay for music, just like at Apple and the rest of them. Yes, eMusic is cheaper, but the music on eMusic is much more obscure.

We like eMusic because we could experiment. The new company should be dead within a year. Fortunately, I had cancelled my subscription about a month ago and grabbed a few nuggets before it ran out. Overall, I was mediumly-happy with the experience, but would never consider their new model.

Moving forward with internationalization of the Internet

Workwise, I have put out a bunch of new versions of some of the standards on which I work. The more interesting ones are for IDNs (internationalized domain names), which are already Proposed Standards in the IETF. In a nutshell, IDNs are domain names that allow any character from any writing script to be used. So you might have a domain name like www.pröpér.com, or something with Japanese characters, and so on. I just ran an interoperability event for IDNs called IDNConnect a few weeks ago, and people are starting to use the somewhat extensive testbed I developed for the event to test their software.

The authors of the four IDN standard documents (RFCs 3454, 3490, 3491, and 3492) are updating them to make them clearer, although the protocols themselves remain the same. The new documents have the nerdy names draft-hoffman-rfc3454bis, draft-hoffman-rfc3490bis, draft-hoffman-rfc3491bis, and draft-costello-rfc3492bis. (I didn't co-author the last one, but it's part of the same gang.)

At the same time, I'm co-authoring a somewhat-related protocol called IMAA (Internationalizing Mail Addresses in Applications). The basic idea is that if you have IDNs, you will probably want to have email addresses that also international characters on the left side of the "@". IMAA works a lot like the IDN standards, and is getting fairly close to done. There will possibly be a discussion about it at the next IETF meeting, and then maybe we'll wrap it up.

The big picture is that everyone should be able to have domain names and email addresses in their own languages in their own writing system. We're getting close.

Strange

For some reason, Arnold becoming governor of my fair state made me think of the Doors' song People Are Strange. This is a live (very live) version, not from an album, recorded 35 years ago.

Comment there

I don't want to manage comments on this blog; I still haven't figured out what seems both reasonable and useful. But, if you are an irate Californian, Jason wants to hear from you.

Living in California, starting today

Jeanne at Body and Soul says a lot about the election. She hits it perfectly near the end with: What I want to hear now aren't the voices of politicians, but the voices of women. All of them. The ones who put up with a jerk who had a lot more power than the assistant manager of a coffee shop. I don't want any more political machinations. I just want to hear the truth.

There are a lot of truths that we need to start hearing about. We need to hear from the women who, knowing that Arnold was an active sexual harrasser, voted for him anyway. We need to hear from the men who voted for him because they want someone "like him" in office, even though those same men have wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers.

We need to listen without wincing, without responding by shouting "shut the fuck up, you stupid idiot!". We have the chance to learn about the majority who voted for our new governor, even though those lessons are probably going to hurt.