Marie-Lynn Richard

December 9, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Lady’s Work Inspired by Ladies

J’ai maintenant un site en français!

I spent years trying to preserve and regain mobility by doing embroidery. I favor decorating felt hearts and then making them into ornaments. They are simple decorative items I give as gifts to people I love and appreciate. As it turns out, they are usually well-received and preserved preciously. It seems like a better equation than buying easily breakable gadgets made in China in an arbitrary price range that does not allow for anything of true quality. What is quite interesting though is that my life has become permeated in love and it’s quite pleasant. So just to be on the safe side, I suggest you take up little heart embroidery as well :)

Most of my work is inspired by what I am watching on TV. When I heard Gary V. said “Stop Watching F*$king Lost!“, I finally felt that there is light at the end of the tunnel of doing stuff that I’m passionate about. Okay so having my embroidery featured in magazines or books doesn’t keep the lights on but I continue to passionately build web products and preparing my return to full-time Web work next summer when my daughter finishes primary school and I can live, work and travel where and when I want.

This little piece is inspired by Violet, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham. If you are not yet familiar with Maggie Smith’s role in Downton Abbey, here’s a primer. I am more of a Winston Wolfe, but I aspire to grow up and become a Violet! All the other little hearts are, obviously, secret!

December 1, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Oh no, I broke a nail! Here’s an invisible fix for a chipped nail

Oh no, I broke a nail! Even though the best thing to do at this point would be to shorten my nails, I decided to photograph how I go about mending a broken nail. I did not invent this, I saw a tip a while back that said ‘fix your torn nail with crazy glue and a teabag’. Turns out it works better than expected letting me fix huge gaps! There is a bit of a trick to it so hopefully this little tutorial will get you good at it on the first try.

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November 26, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Fixing Facebook: Highlighting Original Content

So I thought that, instead of writing about yet another Facebook ‘unintentional feature‘ I would write a simple improvement suggestion.

I have a lot of friends (393) even though I try to keep that number as low as I can, I cannot possibly be glued to Facebook all day long to see what is posted by all of these people. When I do an audit of what news I saw vs what news was posted individually by a sample of friends, I can see that I missed a lot of stuff… A lot. Facebook lets you tag some people as close friends so you can see everything they are up to. There are only 4 people in my close friends and those are people whom I spend most of my actual real life time with or schedule a lot of things with. When the shit hits their fan, I want to know immediately.

However, what is most interesting to me is original thought. Really, I couldn’t care less about all those miss-attributed and supposedly witty quotes or the fake Facebook intellectual property/IPO nonsense. Sure, it helps me judge who amongst my contacts is most gullible but other than that it’s useless and repetitive. Really, I just want to be able to zero in on all the new news in my friend’s life.

Facebook has a fancy secret way of deciding what it shows me on the front page. They have decided that ‘Most Recent’ and ‘Most Popular’ is the only two ways to go. I say bullshit.

Here is a filter I would like to see that highlight content from my friends.

Original Content

Status updates
They are the only true original content on Facebook.

Mobile posts
Everything that is posted from a mobile is likely to be personal content. Usually it is topical, unusual, funny, time sensitive and most likely original.

New Shares
If I share something from my blog, I am likely one of the first people to do so and Facebook knows that because my URL is new-ish to the Facebook content parser.

Photos
Pictures are usually original to the poster and if someone is tagged in a photo, it’s even more likely that it is original.

Facebook, you made your life easier by asking people to tag ‘Life Events’ but there are so many ‘soft’ ways to denote original content. These types of posts seem easy to discern programatically!

November 22, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Here’s my pitch for the prequel trilogy for The Matrix

I don’t watch that many movies anymore. Sure, I am going to see Skyfall even though in my head the Bond trilogy has long been replaced by a fantastic prequel that stars M as a total badass… Today I don’t feel like playing Scrabble to get my brain going so I’ll do this instead.

Here’s my pitch for the prequel trilogy for The Matrix.

Building The Matrix follows the motley crew of humans who labored tirelessly to build all the systems that run The Matrix. It is set in the late 20th and early 21st century.

One is a NASA and Univac alum who eventually founded an anti-virus software company. He eventually accrued a personal fortune over $100M. His true passion was seamless human-computer interface that could be installed biologically by taking advantage of how a biological virus connects to a human cell. His strategy? Mad drugs! After being suspected of running a Meth lab he moved to a seemingly corrupt central American country beloved by shady expatriates where he continued his work. When a neighbor turned up dead, he fled again.

Another is the first person to ever develop a computer interface that had humans willingly stare at it for hours on end on a daily basis. He successfully co-opted basic but strategically important human functions such as indicating enjoyment and befriending all-the-while making social interactions deceptively simple. By 2020, the entire population of the planet was addicted to his universal interface.

Another group of influential founders provided the technology that would make Non-playing character inhabitants of The Matrix feel real with amazing language technology. They accomplished this by logging every single two-sided conversations humans had about mundane things for decades. Having to keep a copy on the entire Internet as written by humans required impressive advances in data center building and cloud computing. The goal was not to reach an impressive system based on artificial intelligence but rather properly synthesize verbal diarrhea by meticulously dissecting human mediocrity.

Perhaps one of the most mysterious yet public figure of the founders is a scion of the fossil fuel industry who got his start as an intern during the Nixon administration. He is credited for the immense growth of the Military Industrial Complex, a feat he conveniently accomplished by heading both the companies that benefited from war and the administrations that declared the wars in convenient rotation. So powerful he was that a man he shot in the face convened a press conference to apologize to him. He was able to continue his work by having every piece of his body replaced by a machine starting with his heart. This is how he met the people who would eventually pioneer permanent man-machine connections.

Obviously there are many more…

One of the most interesting aspects of story writing is making storylines fit. That is, making characters meet to conveniently accomplish something together in a way that seems serendipitous. A convenient challenge is to do this with real people who already have a documented biography of real life events and rumors. This is what I call creative conspiracy theorizing. Most of what I write is about my own life. It is conveniently full of unbelievable events both awesome and awful. However, I am not necessarily interested in writing my biography, I would much rather use my immense body of formative life experiences to spice up the stories of characters I invent. Since I tend to see myself as an escapee from the future who came back in time to be conveniently adopted by a physicist and a nun and hack the shit out of my present life, I like my characters to travel through time as well in search of loved ones, missed opportunities or different life experiences. (I am not joking, I did mysteriously appear out of thin air to be adopted by a staggeringly brilliant autistic physicist and a recently defrocked nun with borderline personality disorder. These are the people who attempted to raise me. That experiment failed, I left home at 16 and now do not associate with them anymore.)

This post is dedicated to Lana Wachowski a truly a funny lady.

November 19, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Hey Sexy Gentlemen! It’s Vintage Style Part II

As promised, here are more knits from my favorite vintage knitting magazine of the 70s. The gentlemen knits are quite cheeky.

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October 27, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Bagatelles Everywhere!

I started collecting bagatelles in 1997. I found three in an antique shop priced at 20$ each. Over the course of the next 5 years I bought over 100. Each of my bagatelles comes from a different seller somewhere across North America. I have kept the waybills for most because I still dream of making a book about them. In 1998, I started negotiating with a New York collector so he would help me build my online database of bagatelles. But since he was my biggest competitor (also he had unlimited funds so I could only buy the bagatelles he did not want) this collaboration never materialized. What I love about bagatelles is that they are flat and can be conveniently hung on the walls. I love thematic vintage bagatelles that represent trends and changing ideas from the 1960s-1980s. I have a few epic ones such as the David Hasselhoff Knight Rider bagatelle and the Pac Man bagatelle. Such plastic toys are hard to display because they are oddly shaped and have no obvious features to use as hooks. I decided to add a loop in the back using picture hanging wire and hot glue. As it turns out, the result is tidy and secure. I plan on using this technique for other tin toys and trays that require being hung.

This week I took a bit of time to hang my space age bagatelle collection. I put them in a corner in my bedroom. Again I am sorry about the lack of quality in those pictures, the light in my basement apartment is awful.

Here are some other pictures of my bagatelles.

Older bagatelles are quite large.

Newer bagatelles can be quite small.

October 18, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Nail that first dollar to the wall :)

In 1999 I discovered myself a way to monetize all those personal interest sites that I was obsessively building. One of them was about those bundles of instant gratification that are Amarillys bulbs. I used to have tons of them and enjoyed taking pictures. I discovered affiliate marketing and for about 5 years built a whole lot of affiliate sites, mostly aimed at women consumers like my epic ‘Catalog of Everything’ which contained over 40,000 products. I later decided to coach other people to build sites that can be monetized with relevant, discreet and contextual affiliate links. I also built a few systems to automate the collection of such information (and banish copy-paste forever!)

I recently found this picture of my first affiliate check. It can stay here, posted on my virtual wall :)

October 16, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Mary Roach: Helping us consider the scientific minutia of big endeavors

Mary Roach is a funny author who writes lighthearted books about popular science. A few of her books are: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008) are Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010). Notice how they all have the word CURIOUS in them. And while the word is used in those circumstances to describes something odd, what Roach does in writing her entertaining books is display an incredible amount of scientific curiosity. She has launched me on many adventures of reading more about the myriads of topics in her books. She has also broached subjects that were taboo such as women’s sexual pleasure with her TED talk about the scientific side of Orgasm. Thank you Mary Roach.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day.

It is also my daughter’s birthday.

Marie-Tangerine is the adorable space suited spawn of two hackers
and, 12 years ago today, she surprised us two weeks early with her arrival.

October 13, 2012
by Marie-Lynn Richard

Hey Sexy Lady! It’s Vintage Style Part I

I see that boot cuffs are all the rage these days and am working on a few pairs of my own. Being that I do a lot of crafts with vintage sweaters I have a lot of sleeves left and that is what I have used to make colorful boot cuffs. But they are not done yet so in the meantime, here is some sexy vintage knitting eye candy!

I collect vintage knitting magazines. Some are very old. These sexy shots come from my favorite one! Enjoy these lovely ladies sporting 70s styles for all occasions! They are so cheeky!

If you fall in love and MUST have one of the patterns, I will consider making them available. Just add a comment citing your interest and I will e-mail you the ordering instructions as soon as possible.

Launch the large Flickr slideshow.

What no zexy gents? And here is a preview of Part II!