Rusty's Blog

If you want some cheap entertainment, drive around to local antiques stores and look for boxes of old postcards like the one Amber and I went through at Avondale Antiques this past weekend. Sometimes the cards themselves have neat photos or artwork on them. Sometimes they’ll have something interesting written on them. You can usually buy them for a dollar or two if you feel guilty about standing there and reading without buying something else.

Atlanta Postcard from 1945

The most interesting part of this card to me is it appears as though the Stone Mountain monument is drawn on it in the second A and maybe the second T. The idea of the Stone Mountain monument goes as far back as 1912, but work on carving it didn’t start until 1964. Maybe there was something else that just looked like Stone Mountain? What else could it be?

(Update 1:51 p.m. – I misread the Wikipedia entry. The carving started sometime in or after 1916, stopped in 1928, and was resumed in the 1964. However, it still appears the card is based on artists’ conceptions of what would be there, and not what was actually there at the time. So it’s still strange. See this postcard on eBay that Greg linked to in the comments. Thanks Greg!)

Click through to the full version of this post card to read a note from Carolyn to Eddie written on March 8, 1945. Note also the “give to the war fund” post mark.

Inman Park Festival Postcard from 1980

Here’s the 1980 description of the Inman Park Festival found on this post card:

Stately Inman Park, Atlanta’s first suburb (c. 1890), hasn’t been the same since “urban pioneers” began rescuing its Victorian homes from slum lords in the 1970s. Each April the locals celebrate the neighborhood’s revival with one of the Southeast’s more offbeat festivals. It includes an elegant tour of homes, a bizarre parade, arts and crafts show, flea market, live music, and a host of jugglers, clowns and mimes. Y’all come.

I feel cheated that I never saw any jugglers when I went a couple of years ago.

The artist credited with the card’s design is James Flournoy Holmes, who is also notable for art on several Southern rock albums, including The Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach and The Marshall Tucker Band’s first self-titled album.

Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau Postcard from the 1980s

Click through to the full version and check out CNN’s archaic computers, the Fox Theatre’s pre-digital marquee, and the Hawks’ awesome Dominique Wilkins-era uniforms. What I really want to know is what the hell is that structure in picture on the bottom row, second from the left?

Postcard from The Wren’s Nest

I don’t think this postcard is all that old. I’m guessing 1990s. Lain, do you have any idea?

(Update 2:30 p.m. – Lain thinks it’s pre-1985, but not much earlier. Read his comment for a full explanation.)

(Update 2:21 p.m. – I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Atlanta Time Machine’s awesome collection of Atlanta postcards. Just wait until after business hours to check them out. If you’re like me, you’ll get sucked in and spend hours there.)

Lots of people are remaking their avatars for various social networks with a green tint to show their support for the Iranian election protests. This is awesome, but it also causes people’s icons to be visually difficult to distinguish. I get that some people may feel like that’s the point (we’re all together, one voice, etc.), but I find it distracting in practice. So I decided to make my avatar with a green border instead:

If you like this approach, it’s easy to use Flickr’s photo editing tools to make a similar avatar. Here are the steps:

1. Upload an avatar to Flickr and navigate to its page. Take note of the image’s original width and height.
2. Click the ‘Edit Photo’ link
3. When Picnik opens, click the ‘Create’ tab
4. Click the ‘Frames’ option on the row of links immediately below the ‘Create’ tab
5. Click the ‘Border’ option on the left hand row of options
6. Click the box next to ‘Outer Color’ and paste in ‘00C100′ without quotes where ‘000000′ is
7. Adjust the ‘Outer Thickness’ slider to whatever thickness you prefer (for my 80×80 icon, I set it to 8 )
8. Adjust the ‘Inner Thickness’ slider to 0
9. Click ‘Apply’
10. Click the ‘Edit’ tab near the top of the page
11. Click the ‘Resize’ button under the ‘Edit’ tab
12. Enter the image’s original dimensions, then click ‘OK’
13. In the upper righthand corner of the screen, click Save.
14. In the ‘Save this photo’ pop-up window, click ‘Save’ again.
15. From the photo’s page, click ‘All Sizes’
16. If it is not displaying the ‘Original’ size, click the ‘Original’ link.
17. Right click on the image and save it to your hard drive.

If you don’t like my approach and would prefer to do it the way everyone else is, that’s ok too. You can visit helpiranelection.com and add a green tint to your avatar. In one or two steps.

With the economy in the crapper, there are going to be a lot of online services folding or cutting corners to survive. This is a good time to make sure you are keeping local copies of any work that is important to you.

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First, this note was posted in our apartment complex this morning:

Click through to read the full text of the note, it’s hilarious. We have a neighbor who lives on our floor who lets his stupid dog go on bathroom breaks without supervision. This is problematic because he’s breaking leash laws and illegally not cleaning up the dog’s pooh, but is even more problematic because the dog has gotten lazy and no longer walks all the way to the grassy area in the parking lot before dropping a bomb. I’m amazed I haven’t stepped in a pile already.

Next, we saw this license plate on our drive to work today:

That’s going to look pretty stupid if Obama loses. Like getting a Microsoft Zune tatoo. For more fun with license plates, see this thread at Drifting Through The Grift.

And finally, my Florida-Tennessee tickets arrived today!

I wrote some about this game over at Rocky Top Talk.

If you need game tickets, you should buy them from Larry at Take Me Out Tickets. I priced these out at Stubhub as well, and the overall price was $35-40 cheaper for equivalent tickets since Stubhub has extra fees and you pay shipping. Plus he’s local and a lot of you already know him, so you’ll get better customer service. And no, I didn’t receive anything to plug the site.