Glasswork, Copyright Talk, and Mike Johnson Has Left the Building!

I've been steadily adding to my stained glass inventory in my Etsy store. I've had a few sales along the way but it's been slow, which I expected. Still, I'm enjoying more than ever this hobby of mine and if I make a few sales along the way, all the better. The photo to the left is a collection of my available pieces.

I'm beginning to build a network of other glass artists as well as those who appreciate glass art on an Instagram account where my focus is on my glasswork rather than a mix of that and life in general; I have another account for that. It's interesting to see what others around the globe are doing with their art. I've made quite a few connections with Russian and Chinese artists, which I find interesting. I'm encouraged by the comments I'm receiving there. It's a nice community of people.

I've spent the past couple days going through my blog and reconstituting dozens of broken links to videos that were deleted when I lost my Vimeo account a little more than a year ago due to some Adele concert videos I'd uploaded 5 years earlier. Yes, dumb on my part. Vimeo was my go-to platform to host videos I'd put together of my cycling adventures because they seemed less stringent in their policing of videos with copyrighted background music (the kind I like to upload). I'd mostly relegated myself to using music from sites such as Free Music Archives. Fortunately, I'd kept copies of nearly all of my video creations on a hard-drive so all was not lost when my Vimeo account went dark.

It turns out that while I was content to use Vimeo for years, YouTube was diligently working behind the scenes with artists and their promoters to allow for more copyrighted music to be used in the way I like to use it with no penalty to a user's account. So, rather than a strike against a person's account, what seems to be more common now is that a user will instead receive an email notification that a video they'd recently uploaded contains copyrighted material and that ads may appear with the video, but not to worry and that there's no need to delete it (provided the artist is agreeable to this). Expand the image to the left to see an example. I like this a lot. I'd have been happy to pony up a dollar or two to use a song but this works, too.

So how does one know if a song is acceptable? It's also now possible to upload a video with accompanying copyrighted music and get a good idea to see which way the copyright winds are blowing with respect to its use on YouTube without incurring a dreaded strike against your account, because who doesn't like to have some nice music to listen to while watching a boring cycling video?

In the last few months, Toby has become nearly impossible for Tammy to either bath or groom. He moans like he's got a cat living inside him and he struggles to break free. We called a groomer last week to see if they would be willing to try and work with him but they politely declined. We made an appointment with our veterinarian and she prescribed a sedative to see if that would help. It did. Tammy was able to groom him with no difficulty at all. We've learned that this sort of behavior isn't uncommon with older dogs.

I've been getting them out on their daily walks again now that the temps have moderated and the big melt is underway. A year ago at this time, we had no snow whatsoever. Not so this year.

I made it to Celts Pub in Farmington yesterday to meet up with the guys from the salt mine, both active and retired. They get together each Wednesday at 2:30 but I suck at making it there more than once every couple of months. Yesterday was a sendoff for Mike Johnson who had signed his retirement paperwork earlier in the day. I worked with Mike for the first dozen years of his career and was either his 1st or 2nd radar trainer (we couldn't quite puzzle it together all these years later as we tried to recall). Mike was one of the better storytellers I worked with. He has more funny stories than anyone else I can think of. It was nice seeing him and the many others who were there. I need to make a reminder prompt on my phone and do a better job of showing up.

I got out Tuesday morning for what may have been my last romp in the snow for the season. I had a blast and by the time I made it back to my car I was one whipped boy! Four hours on a fat-bike will do that to you!

And speaking of boring cycling videos with cool music!