All of the Matthew-related posts have been moved to matthewsperry.org, which was set up just after his death. All further memorial information on Matthew will be posted there. If you are looking for the original announcement with the hundreds of amazing comments remembering Matthew, it now lives here (and is still accepting new comments).
Mirror Writing
Unplug the mouse from the right side of your keyboard and into the left (or vice versa). Use it. Not just for 30 seconds but all day long. Shocking how difficult this, like mirror writing. Start by feeling like you’re stumbling across the surface of the moon. Then move on to more subtle annoyances, like wishing scrollbars were on the other side of windows. Overall, it’s a realization of just how lopsided your brain/body patterns have become with time (I’ll wager this experiment is harder the longer you’ve been using computers).
Creeping pain in forearms/elbows has me looking for ways to minimize onset of RSI difficulties.
Music: The 5th Dimension :: One Less Bell To Answer
Mass Encoding
Beginning to plan for the move, and decided it was time to do something about all the CDs in this house. If we listened to one CD a day, we wouldn’t repeat a song for about four years. I like having lots of music at my fingertips, but the space sacrifice for all these CDs is silly. Now that Amy is comfortable with the SliMP3, and now that I have the Wiebetech for large-scale backup, and now that iTunes has lifted the 32,000 track limit, decided to get serious about digitizing and selling off discs. The initial goal is to get rid of 1/3 the CDs in the house, which means a miniature emotional battle fought over each one – I’m very good at justifying why any particular disc I haven’t heard for five years is still important. Nevertheless, making good progress. This will get harder after cherry-picking the low-hanging fruit (nicely mangled metaphor). Sticking with 192kbps for almost everything, dipping to 160 for pre-1960s low-fi stuff.
Music: The Three Suns :: Smoke
EMFs
Some initial concern about high-voltage power lines near our new house and associated possible cancer risks from electromagnetic fields. This was a hot topic in the mid 90s, then died down by the late 90s. People probably got tired of results being so inconclusive.
The National Cancer Institute produced its own epidemiological study in 1997 which found no association between childhood leukemia and measured magnetic fields. As a follow-up to this report, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of this study along with an editorial calling for an end to wasting money on EMF research.
Today our home inspector went back and took some readings:
Magnetic Field readings in milligauss on my TriField Meter – 5/25/03
1 at my desk, 2 feet from computer screen, 4 feet away from 3 florescent bulbs.
10 touching my computer screen.
100 about 6 inches from the center of a florescent bulb.
100 about 3 feet away from the high-voltage power lines on the outside of the power pole.
100 where you turn off from Moeser into the Safeway parking lot.
10-20 on the sidewalk along the side of the house on Richmond
20 driving up Moeser under the high voltage power lines.
Music: Ron Carter And M.C. Solaar :: Un Ange En Danger
Phew
J-School conference over. These things are always so exhausting. A week of 14-hour days. We pack so much into such a short period of time — training mid-career journalists in Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut, Pro Tools, DreamWeaver, and putting it all together, on top of all the live events. Always a grueling process, but always satisfying. We’re rapidly becoming a well-oiled machine. I’ll never again take conferences for granted – SO much goes into them behind the scenes.
Music: Godley & Creme :: Cry
Kite Day
In the middle of the conference, had the good fortune to be invited out with a video crew to interview professor Charles Benton and his giant kites (I posted about Kite Aeriel Photography a couple weeks ago). Unfortunately almost zero wind today. “The kite always goes up,” Charlie said. And it was true, the kites went up despite seemingly still air. 14′ wingspan on one of them — though it weighed only two pounds — carbon fiber and sheer dakron. But couldn’t get enough lift to get a camera more than 15′ off the ground… just wouldn’t happen, apparently a rarity. Didn’t matter though — he was fascinating to be around — observations on architecture intertwined with his kite love. A man with eyes on stalks. Someday I’m going to hang a camera from a kite with Miles…
We were flying from Memorial Grove, to the side of the Campanile. Charles pointed out this incredible fly-around QuickTime (38MBs) by Paul Debevec. You always see and hear about how the cinematic techniques used in The Matrix changed the face of action flicks; now you can see where those techniques originated. I ride by The Campanile on my to work each morning, will never see it quite the same way.
Music: Ray Anderson :: Cape Horn
Too Many Variables (Another Exhausting Conference)
In the midst of the season’s 2nd big multimedia training conference for mid-career journalists at the J-School, and once again we’re webcasting the heck out of it. Lots of good stuff on charging for online content, putting multimedia into practice, etc. And another thrilling week of 12-14 hr days for me.
Off to a great start this morning — a fiber cut chopped our connectivity half the weekend and into late today, air conditioning failed (it’s hot!), Final Cut wouldn’t launch on some machines (video driver issues), a guest speaker cancelled at the last minute… but all the major crises now extinguished and we’re rolling. Forgive me if I don’t answer mail for a while….
Music: Palace Brothers :: (Thou Without) Partner
Beet
It seems like Amy has photographed mostly Miles for the past eight months, but lately she’s been returning to her art more frequently. Now she’s working digitally rather than analog (we converted her darkroom into Miles’ bedroom a year ago). She was shooting this beet last night.
(When I narrated this to her just now she thought I said “She was shooting speed last night.“)
Music: Jack Johnson :: Rodeo Clowns
Wind Turbines and Bird Deaths
Spinning off recent solar conversations, I became interested in the question of whether energy-generating wind turbines actually contribute measurably to bird deaths. Solar Dude had told me straight up that there were only two confirmed bird kills at Altamont Pass. Meanwhile, commentators on the right have called wind turbines “Cuisinarts of the Sky” and worse. Looking for some actual data, came up with a fairly comprehensive research piece (PDF) at Home Power Magazine.
Summary: Solar Dude lied. There had been 183 bird deaths at Altamont at the time the article was written. But Altamont is apparently unique among wind farms. Most wind farms report ZERO bird deaths. The Altamont paradox is a black eye (and merits continued research), but it is not an argument against wind power in general. Now take this in:
… automobiles are responsible for some 57 million bird deaths every year … More than 97 million birds die by flying into plate glass every year … And about 1.5 million birds die from collisions with structures (such as towers, stacks, bridges, buildings) every year. … Viewed in this context, the 183 bird deaths in the Altamont Pass over a two year period of time is a small number indeed. It will take wind turbines in the Altamont Pass 500 to 1000 years to kill as many birds as the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Music: Gilgamesh :: Lady & Friend
FAT Arrogance
OK, so maybe it was silly of a student to think he could connect one of our HFS+ FireWire drives to a Windows machine w/1394 card. But the fact that Windows dealt with the incompatibility by overwriting the drive’s file allocation table, rendering the volume unusable on the Mac, is unconscionable.