Leesa Leva :: Blog

The blog is dead! Long live the new blog!

The blog has moved! In the process I split my personal blog from updates/news so here are the new links:

News about new prints, orders, new work and other updates:
www.leesaleva.com/news

and here’s my blog:
leesa’ new blog

If you want the same jumble of important stuff mixed up with my random preoccupations you can subscribe to them both, if you’d like. Needless to say I won’t be updating this blog anymore so you’ll want to change your bookmarks/feeds.

Thanks! and bye bye wordpress, its been swell.

Ok, so I’ve been crazy busy lately. If you’ve emailed me about anything that isn’t code red I’ll be emailing you back soon, promise.

I just wrapped up a bunch of frazzling work stuff and I’ve been taking a few days off from anything art related to hit the reset button. Unlike most of my friends, computer tinkering and site maintenance isn’t a necessary burden, its how I relax. Looking at lines of code is a freaking spa day for my head. I dunno, maybe its that digital questions have absolute answers. So I’ve been off in computer tweaky land.

I redid the site for one thing. I was sick of the old layout but I’d been procrastinating, trying to decide if I could really bring myself to do frames, or maybe hassle with handcoding every page (I don’t use DW, just TextEdit), or use sidebar includes with ugly URLs instead. Didn’t do any of it, I installed Indexhibit. This beautiful thing solved about 20 ongoing site frustrations in one go.

And I finally got around to upgrading to FF3… which utterly sucked until I realized it was my old profile, bloated with years of mods and the remnants of long deleted extensions, that needed to piss off. So I made a new one and now its super peachy. I’ve been tweaking the usercss, about:config, and digging in the FF addons section playing with shiny new toys- one of which is Ubiquty (a command line FF plugin). Its got a long way to go but I love what it’s going to eventually be. It got me jonsing to get Quicksilver and Growl back on my system. I ditched them with Leopard, don’t know why I never put them back. Now I can’t figure out how I lived without them. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts- I decided to try Google’s Experimental Keyboard Shortcuts. Now I can use basic GReader shortcuts in searches. awesome.

All this new FF goodness has lead to me futzing around with a zillion online services I’d been totally ignoring forever. Oh, and rewriting someone’s abandoned WP dashboard widget for quick text posts but now I don’t even know if I want to hassle with WP anymore…

I’m seriously considering switching the blog back to Tumblr. I love WP and all but the backend is sooo slow, posting is too laborious, not fun, and I just found out that the new quick post (Press It) feature they rolled out in 2.6 actually hotlinks to images you post about instead of uploading them to your server. That’s just awesome guys, way to encourage millions of WP users to pick up shitty, lazy web habits.

soooo, stay tuned- I might be switching the blog to a new url and rss feed soon.

Then its back to painting and putting up the new work.

what aaron does for his wife when she’s poopie. i’m a lucky girl.

via flickr

Lookie what I got! I’ve been wanting a fish for a while to keep me company at my desk and calm my nerves when I’m having a bad day. So I went and got this pretty pink thing and I’m happier already. I named him Azuki because he looks like a little swirl of red bean ice cream.

He likes to hide in his stand of plastic trees. Or maybe he’s just resting.

He gets very interested when he sees me working and comes over to stare at me. And when I put my finger in the tank he likes to nibble at it. I’m totally smitten.

Zoinks, I want this!

“Your Healing Gadget Pet USB Adorable Owl”
from Strapya World

Also! this Ghost Detector!
From the description:
Despite of the internal complexity, Baketan has a pretty simple looking and is perfectly easy-to-use. You just push a button at a site where you feel discomfort. Baketan starts a detection analysis in the field. It gets over in a few second and Baketan tells you the search result. If a Baketan detects a ghost, it flashes in red and makes beep alarm.

Some helpful hints:
1. Ghost likes to be near water.
2. and the place with poor ventilation,
without fresh air.
3. Ghost can move up-and-down.

Ha!

Eeee! Masks from the super awesome animation studio PandaPanther

We were talking about the new Hulk movie and it made me think about the massive crush I used to have on Bill Bixby. I used to love that show, for reals.

I was a little conflicted because I used to also wish the guy was my dad. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father theme song still makes me slightly weepy.

Instructable for making cute Munny speakers.

by fungus amungus

So we were boozing it up at the beach house a few months ago, playing an old version of Trivial Pursuit and Sunday asks me this question:

What two performers tied for the 1968 best actress Oscar?

She generously asks me if I need a hint… and in total exhausted frustration I blurted out, “Barbara Streisand and Katharine Hepburn”. Absolutely no idea how I guessed it. None.

She was looking at me like I was working some dark evil mojo… but if I was ever going to psychically pull some info out of the ether it would be lottery numbers, not Bab’s greatest moments.

Greatest. Trivial Pursuit moment. Ever.

This was the cake I got Aaron for his birthday the other day. I was going to post the after picture but the gutted little dragon with forks sticking out of him was just too sad.