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This past Friday was the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising/FIDM "3 Days of Fashion" finale day in the main Downtown L.A. campus. As part of my "3 Days of Fashion 2013" tour, I have already been to the FIDM Orange County and FIDM San Francisco campuses, and this time it was L.A.'s big day. Being that it is the main campus and Los Angeles, it's always one of the biggest events--in terms of the attendance and scope of the final day. There were an estimated 280+ attendees and I was honored to be the Final Day "Guest Star". The weather here in L.A. was HOT; about 90+ degrees Fahrenheit hot. So, I decided to give a "Summer Casual yet Still Sassy" look and wore a shorts outfit--consisting of a white Top Man dress shirt, lilac-colored Top Man jacket and pink shorts. Oh, and yes, a dark fuchsia bow tie and Etro pocket hankie. I kind of looked as if I was going to The Kentucky Derby!






I also brought some of my NV Nick Verreos and NIKOLAKI dresses and gowns for the appearance and fashion presentation to be worn by two of L.A.'s most fabulous models--Amber Lindauer and Amanda Fields, both with L.A. Models.










Say Cheese LA: Upon arriving, this above was what greeted me! A tent-full audience of students and parents, eager to see me, my "FIDM 3 Days of Fashion" presentation and see some of my fashions (I hope!)--FIDM Los Angeles "3 Days of Fashion 2013"





Runway Boy: I began my appearance by doing my traditional "FIDM Runway Blessing" walk. As a bonus, I also decided to find out if there were any Dads "in the house". Only ONE man raised his hand (there were more Dads, but they were hiding!).




Runway King: Here's the one Dad who worked the FIDM L.A. "3 Days of Fashion" runway and got a HUGE applause from the almost 300 people in attendance. I love that he tried to mimic my hands on the high-hips pose that I had done in my runway walk beforehand. I did that as an example of what he should do. I didn't realize he would actually do it!



Then it was time to show some of my "NV Nick Verreos" dresses as part of my presentation:


































































Cheetah Haute: One of the attendees at this year's FIDM Los Angeles "3 Days of Fashion" was a young man by the name of Dylan. He was from Utah and he bought some FAB Cheetah-print booties (yes, HE bought them while on one of the FIDM Los Angeles "3Days of Fashion 2013" shopping trips--and in fact, he wore them onstage). Above are the booties--and Dylan Rae (second from left), along with myself, model Amanda Fields (far left) and another FIDM Los Angeles "3 Days of Fashion 2013" attendee (far right).







Final Pic:





***Up Next: SAN DIEGO!!!! The FIDM San Diego "3 Days of Fashion 2013"

"Reader is dead," says Mihai Parparita, one of the former Google Reader engineers. You still have 2-3 days to use Google Reader, but the best thing you can do is to export your data.

Google Takeout lets you export some of your Reader data, but not everything: your subscriptions, your notes, starred items, shared items, liked items, the list of followers and the people you were following, the items shared by the people you were following. Mihai Parparita wrote some Python scripts that download everything from your Google Reader accounts, including the entire content of the posts from your subscriptions. You need Python 2.7, some basic command-line skills and a lot of free storage: my backup has more than 5 GB for about 250 feeds (vs 125 MB for the uncompressed Takeout backup).


Here are some tips for running the script in Windows 7/8:

- install Python from here (Python 2.7.5 Windows Installer)
- download Mihai's zip file and extract the files
- open the folder in Windows Explorer and you should see a list of subfolders like "base", "bin", "feed_archive".


- Shift + right-click below the folders and select "open command-line window here".
- copy this code, paste it in the command-line window and press Enter (I assumed that Python's folder is c:\python27):

set PYTHONPATH=%cd%
c:\python27\python reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output=download

- a web page will open in your favorite browser and you'll need to click "Accept", copy the authorization code and paste it in the command-line window.
- wait until the script downloads all the files.

Mihai also started to write a script that lets you browse your archive. It's a work in progress, probably because the script for downloading your data is more important right now.

There's also a script for downloading a feed's archive. "Google Reader has (for the most part) a copy of all blog posts and other feed items published since its launch in late 2005 (assuming that at least one Reader user subscribed to the feed). This makes it an invaluable resource for sites that disappear, can serve as a backup mechanism and enables tools to be created." My post from 2007 provides another way to download the history of a feed. You can also upload your OPML file to this site, which preserves hitorical feed data.

"I don't fault Google for providing only partial data via Takeout. Exporting all 612,599 read items in my account (and a few hundred thousand more from subscriptions, recommendations, etc.) results in almost 4 GB of data. Even if I'm in the 99th percentile for Reader users (I've got the badge to prove it), providing hundreds of megabytes of data per user would not be feasible. I'm actually happy that Takeout support happened at all, since my understanding is that it was all during 20% time," says Mihai Parparita, who spent 5 years working on Google Reader.

If you're curious to know which Reader alternative gets a thumb up from Mihai, his answer is "a toss-up between NewsBlur and Digg Reader."

"In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a placeholder text (filler text) commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout, by removing the distraction of meaningful content. The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added, and removed that make it nonsensical and not proper Latin". (Wikipedia)

What happens when you use Google Translate to find the English translation of one of the many lorem ipsum texts? You get this:


"We will be sure to post a comment. Add tomato sauce, no tank or a traditional or online. Until outdoor environment, and not just any competition, reduce overall pain. Cisco Security, they set up in the throat develop the market beds of Cura; Employment silently churn-class by our union, very beginner himenaeos. Monday gate information. How long before any meaningful development. Until mandatory functional requirements to developers. But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook. The show was shot. Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured. Information that is no corporate Japan."

Well, Google Translate for Latin is still in alpha and the text is nonsensical. There are many actual mistakes in Google Translate. Statistical machine translation sometimes produces humorous results.

{ via waxy.org }