Apparently Jane’s Addiction is putting out a retrospective video to celebrate Ritual De Lo Habitual sometime this year. Two years ago, on the actual anniversary, Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro did a track by track run through of the album, which was interesting from their perspective, and another take from the producer, who has a different view on how things happened.
It’s low-resolution because uploads are throttled at work for some reason. A longer version will appear later tonight.
Update: New version posted. Be sure to click anywhere in the video and move around.
Today I ticked off about ten things on this summer’s giant to-do list, starting with getting my ladder back from the brother-in-law. He’s had it since last fall when they were having some gutter issues, and I didn’t need it until I saw buckets of water coming down from the center section of our atrium gutter and knew I needed to get up there to clean them out.
But first, in the morning I loaded up the Scout with 6 months’ worth of crap for a dump run and got in and out of there in 20 minutes flat. This cleared out the garbage can area by the garage and a pile of brush that’s been sitting next to the driveway since last fall. Then Finley and I took a drive to the Home Depot to get a replacement canopy and some other small items for scraping windows.
Up on the ladder I got the gutters cleaned pretty quickly and then started washing and scraping the windows that are staying (5 out of 7). That got finished pretty quick, and I was about to bust out the primer when a friend stopped by so that I could shoot her headshot for LinkedIn. I’d brought home the Canon portrait rig from work and with a piece of illustration board as a light bounce we got some good shots of her, Jen and Finley in no time.
After that was done I headed over to the neighbors’ to help him finish splitting wood. I worked for about 2 hours in the sun and we got a couple of big rounds split and stacked, then called it a day.
Having flown my Phantom 2 a bunch of times in the past couple of weeks, I can say I’m getting the hang of it, but I’m seeing some of the limitations of a 3-year-old product. The video monitor it came with is an odd variant of a DVD monitor with no inputs other than an antenna. I can’t dig up technical information on it and no manual exists online. It’s good but I’d love an HD monitor instead (this is a pitiful 800×480), with a stronger signal. The camera gimbal it came with is specific to the GoPro Hero 3, which is a fine unit, but doesn’t shoot at anything above 30FPS. I’ve read that the key to smooth video is shooting at 60FPS, which the Hero 4 will do. A new gimbal mount is $200. This is all stuff I don’t need to spend money on, but I’d love to tinker with it more.
Finley and I took it out for another spin on Sunday night and soon had attracted a crowd of local kids. Finley, who is always happy to invite total strangers to her birthday party, ran right over and told them about the drone, then started inviting the kids to fly it. Which then meant I had to break the bad news to them. I’m getting the hang of how it flies, and although I’m not Chuck Yeager I’m beginning to make it do what I want.
Meanwhile at work, my boss went to a networking function where a woman gave a presentation on 360˚ immersive video. He was enthralled, and thus I am playing with a Samsung Gear 360 this weekend. It’s a pretty nice little gadget, but because it’s Samsung and they want to try and play Apple’s game of keeping users within their ecosystem, their iOS app is isn’t as robust as the Samsung version, but I’m working out some of the bugs and learning about (if there’s a) production workflow.
I love Death Cab for Cutie, and I loved Soundgarden. Here’s a cover of Fell On Black Days by DCFC where Ben Gibbard just barely pulls off the high end of Chris Cornell’s insane high range, and their version is arranged perfectly for acoustic instruments and piano.
This is a website dedicated to a 1:350-scale model of the Titanic that is pretty much hand-built from stem to stern. It took the builder 13+ years to finish. It is absolutely amazing.
Quote of the day (yesterday) goes to Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) at Betsy DeVos’s appearance before Congress on the 2018 Education Department budget:
Education is not mayonnaise, and, frankly, the day we start treating the education of our children like we do the marketing of a condiment is the day we have given up on our kids.
This was in response to a Republican Senator’s (R-La.) comment that choosing a school should be like going to the store to choose from six kinds of mayonnaise. Louisiana was ranked #46 out of 50 states in USNews’ 2017 report and last in an independent 2016 study.
Our friend Christopher is in town this weekend, so we took a trip to the American Visionary Art Museum on Saturday afternoon for some brunch on the roof and then a tour through the exhibits. As usual, there’s an astounding selection of work there, and I think Finley enjoyed seeing the show.
We then returned home and I took the drone out for a spin in the ballfield with Chris and Finley, and got some stick time in with propeller guards installed. I wound up dumping it on its side anyway, and one of the blades hit the guard and shattered but the drone itself was fine. Then we wandered down to Jennings’ Cafe for a late dinner and called it an early night.
In my office this afternoon, about 2/3 of my colleagues gathered in the conference center to watch a live feed of Trump announcing that he was withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. I watched the first 10 minutes or so and then went back to my desk, as I’d heard enough bullshit by that point.
One of the first projects I worked on at WRI was an infographic explaining IPCC climate models and what they meant for the health of the planet; the takeaway is that we’re locked into a global 2˚ increase no matter what we do, but it’s most likely going to be 4˚ and we’ll keep getting hotter unless dramatic change is made. The Paris Agreement was the beginning of that dramatic change, and this shitstain just torpedoed it in the name of…coal? Business? I don’t even know what the fuck he was talking about because all of his talking points were half-science.
WRI was intimately involved in the Paris Agreement, from helping write the language of the actual document to shepherding individual countries through the talks to writing the actual protocol that countries use to measure greenhouse gases. We did excellent work there and it sucks to see this administration dismantle it to make a small bunch of xenophobic billionaires happy.