2012: Eye Must Be Upgraded!

"2012: You Must Be Upgraded", freehand marker on brown butcher paper by Syd Stevens.

12/01/2012 Saturday - Well I'm coming down from a Wayne Coyne buzz and I'm crashing in various ways. This should be no surprise as a system crash is in order pending the end of the Mayan Long Count. I'm quite familiar with the ancient icon as Eye Painted it on leather many years ago.

"Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" opening night party at La Jolla Playhouse. Left to right: Joan Newhouse, Jeni Cheung, Wayne Coyne, Syd Stevens, Jenny Fajerman.

After several months of working as a props painter on the production of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, I am currently unemployed and looking for an upgrade. I just enrolled in San Diego Mesa College with a focus on web design (CSS) and graphic arts. I have Adobe CS 5.5 and I want to upgrade to the Adobe Cloud subscription. Enrollment in school and the educational version of Creative Suite both had due dates of November 30th. I thought I was able to meet both, but due to an address error with my credit card, I may have missed out on the Adobe deal before it expired. I will try on Monday with customer service to get the $19.99/month student version. Fortunately, I'm still eligible for the $29.99/month 40% discount upgrade.

Hey, I'm not rich. I'm an artist... and activist. Yesterday I had the pleasure of walking with three Buddhist monks from Dana Point to San Clemente. While taking lots of pictures and video, someone asked me, "Where will these be posted?". I quickly realized I had no real space to put them, so that is why I'm starting this blog today and Eye will post those pictures soon.

My other upgrade problem is Windows 8. As part of my convergence to the cloud, I bought the 64bit OEM Pro version for my latest custom built PC. Upon installation tonight, I was analyzing disk space available using diskmgmt.msc when Windows 7 crashed and now my boot drive, which is a solid state hard drive (SSD), is not recognized by the BIOS. In layman's terms, my high power computer workstation is dead. Because I built the system for myself, I am my own customer service. At least I have my trusty standby Vista/XP dual boot system to produce from. (My favorite operating system is still XP-shhh!)

Here is a live video version of The Flaming Lips song, "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)":
http://vimeo.com/44874662
("unofficial" original album version featuring Ke$ha and Biz Markie from The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends:: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNLw2TtrZBU)
Enjoy!

Syd Stevens