Here’s a link to a do-it-yourself steadicam project—for $14 you can build a pretty professional camera stabilization rig and shoot DV like the pros. (via boing boing)
Whiplash. So much for moving furniture today. My neck, which was giving me aches and pains yesterday, feels like it’s going to give way completely and let the rest of my head fall off the back of my shoulders. This morning we moved the doctor’s oak desk, one file cabinet, and my IKEA table into the office before Jen (the Voice Of Reason) told me we were stopping. I don’t know what I did to myself, or why it feels so friggin’ bad right now, but I can’t turn my head in any direction without the sensation of having a ballpeen hammer hitting directly on my spine. Just great.
Flashback. One year ago today, I was on a boat bobbing in the Bahamas, diving on coral reefs for a project at work that has since been cancelled and will most likely never come back.
Anybody who needs a pretty wedding dress to wear for your special day, or just for going to the grocery store, please look here: Ebay item 2896753380.
Here’s something to look at participating in next week: Photo Friday. I haven’t been snapping a lot of shots lately (evidenced by the lack of entries for 2004 over there on the left), but with the advent of spring and an assignment, I think I can get out of the funk and start shooting again…
Music for working by: Boards of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children. Mellow, driving, melodic stuff that won’t distract you.
Huh. Y’know, I feel that I’m a pretty up-to-the-minute guy, but I had no idea that Baltimore had its own Craigslist.
Maybe I’m totally self-absorbed here, but I think that Dave may be calling me out on my link and comment yesterday about voting Democrat. Let me talk a little more about it, and if I’ve missed his point, feel free to comment below and tell me. What I’m asking for is not a simple knee-jerk reaction to the current administration, but a course of direct action against it. Would I enjoy and support a viable three-party system in this country? Sure. (Will I vote for Nader? I don’t think he’s a viable candidate this year.) Do I think that Democrats are just as wishy-washy, underhanded and slimy as Republicans? Of course. But I also think that anybody who believes our current president is doing anything besides promoting the agenda of a few very wealthy organizations is kidding themselves. Say what you will about the previous Democratic administration—they had progressive foreign, economic, and environmental policies, and for all their warts, I believe they made my life better. I don’t see anything like that with the current administration—I see lies, fear, and fascism in the guise of “Homeland Security” and patriotism.
Would I like to see a fresh crop of idealistic public servants reshape our government? Of course. Will that ever happen? Read your history books. In the meantime, I’ll take the next best thing.
This morning Jen and I stumbled around the house trying to get ready for work, still stuck in the lazy patterns of vacation established at my sister’s house, where we got used to rising after 9:30, sipping coffee until noon and then venturing out into the freakishly warm upstate New York weather. (Really—60 degrees in January up there is a bit like snow in Jamaica. There are whole regions of Siberia that are warmer in the wintertime.) Five cats who had grown accustomed to having our house to themselves dodged between feet while I attempted to make two cups of coffee out of half a tablespoon of beans. Jen was out the door early to tackle a big project at work, leaving me squinting at the latest BG&E bill while listening to the weatherdork predict a week of sub-freezing nightly temperatures. Oh, and the county decided to re-assess our property—for an extra hundred thousand dollars.
I broke down and bought an iTrip for the iPod before we left (the rental only had a CD player) and I have good news to report. With the exception of changing stations, the unit worked flawlessly. We were even able to transmit Motown to Renie’s stereo receiver during dinner on Friday night.
The macro lens for the G3 works exceptionally well; I may break down later on and buy the fisheye lens for it now that I have the adapter ring, but for the time being this one will capture my attention and hold it.
I’ve been sort of on house hiatus since the Thanksgiving push. In the four weeks leading up to Turkey Day, both Jen and I were running at a fill-tilt boogie trying to make the house look like something other than postwar Berlin, and ever since the driveway emptied I’ve been ignoring the projects upstairs like a fart in church. Home Depot’s monthly sales are down at least 5% because I haven’t been averaging three visits a day—this is a place where they just hand me an orange apron when I walk in the door. Yesterday I picked up another gallon of polyurethane and started sanding the blue room with the Packers game on. I sanded the floor down to a baby-smooth sheen, and this morning put the poly down, taking advantage of the warm weather to open the windows and air it out.
This Boring Life. I love taking pictures of urban landscapes, city archaeology, and historical architecture. Unfortunately, my commute to and from work requires a 20-minute stint on the Beltway, where the only things I see are the brake lights in front of me and the sound walls on either side of the highway. Now that I’m a country mouse I don’t get to see the same subjects I did before, so it was with great happiness that I found Satan’s Laundromat, a photoblog from Brooklyn, where I can live vicariously through the lens of another person.
Love Is: a woman who isn’t happy to see a Scout sitting rusting in our driveway, but who still calls me in from the other room to tell me she sees one on TV.
I’m filling out the music library this afternoon with a few gems: Ozzy’s Crazy Train, G & R’s It’s so Easy, and ZZ Top’s Cheap Sunglasses. Ahh, bringing back the old days.
I put up some pictures of our trip to my folks’ house this morning: Enjoy.
(Nervously eyeing the latest reports on unemployment and economic news) The house update is that we’re on track for a late August closing date, barring any bizarre finds in the inspections. Hopefully each house will pass muster.
Science project of the week: I’m rebuilding a 3Com SuperStack II, which I found laying in the garbage here at work. Unable to pass up a choice bit of technology, I fished it out and pulled it apart to find two fried cooler fans. A quick stop at a cooling fan site, $10.40 later, and I should have two identical fans by Friday.
. . .
I’m happy to answer the door, even when I don’t know who you are. I’m happy to come outside and move my truck, because it’s in front of your house, and you want to bring in a dumpster to begin gutting it. I’m happy to make small talk with you. I’m happy to tell you that I’ve just gone to contract on my house.
I’m not happy when you ask me how much I sold my house for, when you’ve never once said hello to me in the three years you’ve lived on the block, and you don’t know what my name is, and you don’t bother to ask. It’s none of your business. Read it in the fucking paper.
This Sunday we drove down to Silver Spring to meet up with Nate and Kristen, who graciously offered to help us shoot a bunch of Jen’s work for her portfolio. Nate slept in, so the three of us got the first setup worked out and found that my G3 is not set up to take pictures of paper. Kristen took us in to a seperate room where her company’s digital Leaf camera was housed, and we found out why the camera is worth more than a new car. WOW. After we got the basic layout and lighting problems solved, the process became academic, with the only issue being how to arrange each group of material. Kristen was cheerful and understanding throughout, even when Jen and I were contradictory or indecisive. Nate stopped by later on to spin the tunes and provide moral support, and we took them out for drinks and dinner for their trouble. Thanks, guys, you’re the best.
And let me just say, that camera is incredible. It was great fun to be in a photography studio with so much great equipment to play with.
Todd was sitting next to me before lunch jamming out to something on the headphones that I couldn’t hear. When I asked him what it was, his clue was “the official song of sixth grade.” I correctly deduced Back In Black by AC/DC. I’m pretty proud of that.
comet, 6.2.03
Huh. I had a boss who bragged that he had done this a few years before September 11. I thought it was an asshole move then and it’s an even bigger asshole move now.
I called my realtor yesterday to begin the process of selling and buying a house. Talking to her was great (She’s the friend of an old friend, and did a fantastic job for me last time) and I’m excited to see what she can do for us now. Hanging up the phone, however, I began to realize just how much work there is left to do to sell my house. I bought an Idiot’s book on buying and selling houses, and I have to read that (I don’t have time to wade through mountains of books on this—just give me the important stuff) as well as get with my bank (not the original bank, but the bank that merged with the bank that bought the bank that bought the loan from my bank, which reminds me, I should be getting another new masthead on my mortgage statements soon) to set up a bridge loan and pre-approval. Big fun!
I realized that I’ve got a backlog of photos featured on the home page stored away, so I set up a quick & dirty page with all of them accompanied by a brief description. You can find it here, if you’re interested.
Whew. Sorry about the delay in writing, folks. It’s been a mighty busy week.
I decided to try out another of Apple’s services today and order photos through iPhoto; they are printed on Kodak paper and delivered to your doorstep. The ordering process was easy, although my 400mhz Powerbook had to sit and think about the entire archive of photos I’ve got (1.25GB, currently) on this drive. Once it chugged through them all, it was a very easy process to select and order photos using my Apple ID. I ordered about eight photos and with shipping, the total should be somewhere around $10. I hope they come out well.
backyard, mid-august 2002
Jen and I had a very, very good weekend.
The backyard is further along; the brick is down, the sand is in, the planters are full awaiting plants, and there are a number of hearty survivors from last year poking their heads above the soil: sage, tarragon, lavender, zinnias, and both crepe myrtles.
Jen was kind enough to pick up two rolls of 620 film I had developed from the antique cameras I bought last year; the results were mixed, mostly because of my limited skill in composing pictures. One roll was four for twelve and the other was seven for twelve. One of the shots is above: the south planter before we had to tear it up. The results are remarkable when you consider that the glass in these lenses was ground fifty years ago and made for much grainier stock film. The trick seems to be not to attempt any interior shots, period.
There is a new radio station here in Baltimore, a relic of a lost age, attempting to fill a void that is perhaps larger than the universe itself: a free-form college radio station spinning a mixture of eclectic and non-mainstream music (I have to use these dopey adjectives because the “alternative” moniker, as you know, has been co-opted by the Man.) This morning, flipping through the stations, I settled on the new single by Radiohead, and that was followed immediately by “Fight Test” by the Flaming Lips. God help you, WTMD; you’re a rookie welterweight stepping into a ring full of old, bloated Rocky Balboas. I hope you stick around for a while. And I’ll be pledging money to keep you going.
Apple has released the new iTunes, with a pay-for-music service integrated into the player, so people like me who don’t want to use file-swapping can actually pay a reasonable price for the songs we like on demand. Right on. Funny how the music business couldn’t figure out how to do this themselves.
Jason hooked me up with Dreamweaver MX, which is a fancy upgrade from 4.0 for OSX. Very nice; let’s see how it fits in with my workflow.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve heard about the superior quality of Nikon digital cameras, and when I was in the market for a new camera, they were my first choice. Having tried several of their cameras, I was quick to recommend one to my Dad, who bought a Coolpix 955 and loves it. Recently, I was corralled by the COO of my company, who took me to Best Buy to pick up a camera in time for a business trip the next day. I hadn’t had time to do the research, but I pointed to the Coolpix 4500 and recommended it based on the performance of previous models. Little did I know what a mistake that was.
The camera worked fine on idiot mode out of the box, but it turned out that the camera interface had been radically altered from the 9XX series so that most of the advanced features were accessible only by finger-numbing button combinations. The “icons” on the camera only serve to frustrate and obfuscate what should be an intuitive operation: manually adjusting the shutter speed and aperture settings. Now, I’m a pretty smart guy, so I figured I’d read the manual to learn how to operate the camera. Problem is, I don’t speak Spanish, which is the only language the manual came in. No big deal, you say: Just order an English manual, Bill. Well, I did. Two months ago. Apparently their printer was wiped out in a hurricane, or ran out of ink or something, because the frickin’ manual is still on backorder. And I don’t get word one from Nikon about that via email—we’re sorry; the manual you ordered hasn’t come in yet… Now, usually this isn’t a problem, because you can find a PDF of the manual on the manufacturer’s site somewhere, right? Wrong. Nikon doesn’t make their manuals downloadable to the public, or they don’t believe in PDFs or something, because I can’t get one online and the dipshits at the call center can’t email me one. (They can’t even bother to put the bong down to talk to me, from what it sounds like over the phone.)
So goodbye, Nikon. You lost me somewhere at Guía de usario de la cámera, and I’m on backorder from here on out. I recommended to my company that we sell this brick of a camera on Ebay and move to Canon, whose cameras work as advertised, who ship their cameras with the correct manuals, and who take the time to capitalize the C and S in Customer Service.