I am back in North Adams with Dan for the holidays. spending quality time and checking out the amazing Sol LeWitt retrospective at Mass MoCA. The combination of downtime, photography and the new year inspired me to upgrade my computer with some new useful tools. Searching them out, installing them and figuring out how they work isn’t all that easy (am I really getting that old?) … but I am hoping that a little internet-style elbow grease will save time down the road. Here’s a shortlist for those of you trying to minimize your computer time in 2009:

WordPress 2.7: Actually, Dan upgraded my blog to the new version. So far, so good. Haven’t had much time to check it out yet, but if installing widgets is easier, I may give it a try and mess up the design (!). Wordpress also has an iphone app. Still trying to convince Dan to use his superior talents to design a blog for SOMArts.

RSS Readers: I am surprised that many of my contemporaries and older colleagues still don’t use an rss reader. For me, it saves a lot of time that used to be spent navigating from site to site looking for updates.

I still use Netvibes as a home for all my rss feeds, but am no longer sure this is the best option for me. In Connecticut, I was trying to “keep tabs” on arts activity and friends’ blogs around the state. Now that I am in San Francisco my internet habits involve more “search & explore” activity. I am trying Delicious as a way to categorize things until I figure out what updates and blogs are truly of use.

Plug-ins: When I had an academic discount through Wesleyan, I splurged on the photo editing and organizing software Aperture, then didn’t use it because Green Street had lots of wonderful volunteers who took great photos. Now that I am at SOMArts I am again taking photos, and have discovered a few plug-ins that make the process of uploading and emailing them WAY more efficient.

Plug-ins literally plug in to your existing applications to increase their usefulness and efficiency. The first plug-in I installed referred to a folder in my library that didn’t exist, but I simply created a new folder and it worked fine. Here are a few pics and pans:

-Flickr Uploadr: The first uploader I tried. Uploads large batches of photos to Flickr. Warning to arts organizations—there is a defect in this program which marks the photos as private no matter what public option you try to select. This means people cannot see your photos without logging on to Flickr. Very annoying.

-Aperture2Gmail & FlickrExport. Self-explanatory plug-ins which allow the user to export photos directly from Aperture to flickr and gmail. No doubt similar plug-ins are available for other photo editing programs … but until I had these I had to export my photos to the desktop then email them or upload them, then create all new sets and descriptions. Redundant, not to mention time consuming.

-Since I am not an IT person or particularly tech savvy, I am not sure if the Flickr app for Facebook or Amazon’s Universal Wish List are technically plug-ins. But I am all for uploading SOMArts photos once (to Flickr) and then linking them to the SOMArts Facebook page (rather than uploading photos twice). Also … I can see the Amazon wishlist becoming a helpful budgeting tool, allowing organizations to easily compare and contrast prices from many websites for, say, office equipment, with more info at their fingertips than there would be on a spreadsheet.

Of course, all my saved time will be wasted if I then use it to blog about saving time. It is very hard to get a sense of what is new and what’s already outdated. If you have any suggestions to share, please do.

I’ve committed the cardinal sin of blogging by disappearing for weeks with no warning, but for good reason. Since October 20, I’ve been hard at work as the new Executive Director of SomArts Cultural Center. SomArts had a lot going on this month—a Day of the Dead exhibition with more than 40 altars, followed by an exhibition of avatars and virtual realities in the main gallery and on Second Life.

SomArts staff member and artist Katie Gilmartin hosted the Chrysalis Printmaking Studio Show (see video here), and Rene Yanez—who oversees special projects at SomArts and curated our Day of the Dead show with his son Rio—was honored at the annual Day of the Dead procession in the Mission. Carlos Loarca and Betsie Miller-Kusz, two other artists on our staff, joined Katie, Rene and Rio to participate in ArtSpan’s Open Studios.

SomArts’s own exhibitions only made up a part of the center’s activity this month—because we have some of the most affordable “big space” in town, we are home to many benefits and fundraisers. This month is no exception … Visual Aid’s Big Deal was here last week, and tonight was NaNoWriMo’s Write-a-Thon.

All the SomArts activity hasn’t prevented me from exploring some of San Francisco’s many galleries and performance spaces, including the African American Cultural Complex, Intersection for the Arts, Galeria de la Raza, the Red Poppy Art House, the SFAC Gallery, Yerba Buena, SFMoMA, 826 Valencia, the Garage, 111 Minna and Chronicle Books. I am trying to carry a video or still camera around to catch some of the action as I discover SomArts and also the community it serves. The photo above was taken during Open Studios at SomArts and is posted on the SomArts Flickr group. We are also on Facebook.

Since this is my personal blog, I’ll probably continue reporting on SomArts discoveries through the organization’s website, perhaps even set up a blog there. For now, the best way to get in touch with me about SomArts is by calling or stopping by (rather than posting here on this blog).

And … now that I’m settling in, I’ll try to get back to updating this with interesting articles, arts policy news and short posts about the people, organizations and ideas that inspire me. Thanks for checking in!