Posts

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Trapeze Practice

Finished tweaking my first iMovie. It’s pretty limited software compared even to personalStudio, not to mention Final Cut Pro, etc. But what it does well, it does really well, and it’s not hard to get quality results. Would be nice if it output MPEG, but it does support a huge number of QT output options, and is way easy to learn and work in. But personalStudio spoiled me for real-time everything and 10 layers. Maybe someday…

In early 2000, before I got married, I went down to Santa Monica and spent a day on the flying trapeze, in the back yard of a guy who does stunts in Hollywood. We shot some video that day, and that’s what I used as stock for the iMovie experiments.

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Here Is New York

The J-School hosted the California exhibition of Here Is New York – photographs by people and journalists who were there on the front lines of ground zero. They’re selling copies around the country for $25.00 each and giving the proceeds to relief efforts. The show is so moving, so amazing. We also had photogs from the NY Times and NY Daily News who came out and showed slides and recounted their ground zero experiences.

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OSX Guide

Have been corresponding a lot with Rob Griffiths of www.macosxhints.com. We set ourselves up as sister sites (his site and betips.net). He’s working feverishly on a 60-page power guide to OSX, with tons of information I never would come across just surfing around. I’ve been one of his editors, giving regular feedback on drafts as they roll in. Have learned a ton in the process. He plans to start selling it in PDF format to help support the site, which is ad-free. Should be around $4. Y’all should get a copy when it’s released, which will be soon.

This has taken me away from working on the OSX piece I’m writing for Eugenia, but it’s time well spent.

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Bind

Amy doing her hair in the bathroom mirror:

She: “I’m binding my hair.”

Me: “Why don’t you bind your feet while you’re at it?”

She: “Why don’t you bind your mouth while you’re at it?”

We have this kind of exchange all the time. Simple inversion humor in funny voices. I dunno, maybe it reads wrong on the page, but in real life, these are the gems of daily conversation that keep our relationship continuously surprising, entertaining. It’s all in love.

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Time Travelers, Please Help!

Hoo boy… disturbing spam. Disturbing because it seems so totally sincere.

Subject: Time Travelers PLEASE HELP!! ..

If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

Also if you are from any of the following planets and can help me as mentioned please reply:
Vadikar,Nefarious,Tralfamadore,Valnator,Travers,Edenad

I come to you for help, and need a way of doing this in the following way exactly in such a way
that there will be little or no danger. I come to you in peace. Trust and honesty is an absolutely must!!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed.
I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!
I need to be able to:

Travel physically back in time.

Rewind my life (including my age).

Be able to (remember what I know now) so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with
again after I go back.

I am in great danger and need this immediately!

Only if you are a time traveler or nice alien and have this technology please send me a
(separate) email to:

xxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks

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Simple Life

“If you’re so fond of the simple life, why is there an anti-matter reactor in your basement?”

– Archer

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Battlebots

Went to see Battlebots live at Treasure Island (halfway between Oakland and San Francisco, at the nexus of the Bay Bridge – a former naval station) with . This was just the prelims, so they didn’t use the hammers or saws or pistons coming out of the floor, which deadened the excitement level a bit. Only about half an hour of really exciting stuff out of a five hour event. Amazing how fragile a lot of the bots are – non-starters, quick-quitters, radio control problems, wheels out of alignment… but the strong survive.

It didn’t get really good until the end, when the best of the heavyweights competed. Then we really started to see shit fly. The best offense is heavy stuff that spins fast, like hammers on armatures or chains. The best defense is still the wedge. But plain wedge designs are such cop-outs – just a “try to survive” strategy, which works as far as far as it goes, but isn’t really in the spirit of the game.

How many years before we’re watching human-piloted bots, or cyborgs doing battle? How long before we’re taking our kids to android soccer matches?

Ate too much kettle corn. I have no self control where popcorn is concerned.

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Brilliant Careers

Just discovered this vast archive at Salon called Brilliant Careers . Tons of very well-written profiles of lots of people I admire… or at least dig. Like this one on Robert Crumb. There’s a good one on David Lynch too.

I really should buy a subscription to Salon. I admire what they do.

One person I don’t admire anymore is Ellen Degeneres because she came out at the Emmies wearing a swan dress like the one Bjork wore at the Oscars and pretended to be all awkward and uncomfortable in it, and basically incited the audience to laugh at her, but at Bjork’s expense. Not that anyone is beyond teasing, but that dress was so incredible and Bjork rocked in it. Of all the people to make fun of… why not J-Lo?

Oh, hey, Salon has a BC piece on Bjork, too.

Also worth checking out is the piece Beck wrote for Vanity Fair, talking about his 50 favorite album covers of all time. It’s in the November issue. He tries to talk about them as purely visual, divorced from the music and the eras of his life that music marked. Which is of course impossible. I miss album covers.

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iTunes Needs Streaming

Have changed my mind about iTunes. Was using Audion, but iTunes2 fixes a lot, and I’ve gotta say – it’s playlist manager is really great. It’s as meticulous about ID3 tags as I am, and its search makes it super easy to create custom playlists like I did in BFS with queries on any criteria. Most impressive though is that you can rename files in the filesystem and the playlist references don’t break – must be something like Tracker’s node monitoring going on, sending apple events to itunes. Very nice. But OSX is seriously lacking something like Live Encoder and/or HTTPUI for BeOS. Want to listen to my home collection at work, but have 128kbps upstream. Most of my music is 160 and 192kbps, so it has to be dowsampled before broadcast. Can’t find a single tool for OSX that can downsample before broadcasting. Installed the mp3_mod apache module and it works, but it doesn’t downsample either. Would kill for a LiveEncoder plugin for itunes right now. Tried to get set up with the mpg123 | lame | icecast trio but can’t figure out how to get icecast to take stdout from lame. Anyone?

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Waking Life

I have no words for this movie. I only know I feel restored, and that it does something good for my faith in the union of art and technology, which so often fails to actually accomplish anything.

Ditto the 10-minute Bjork video (Pagan Poetry) before the movie.

Coming out of the theater, encountered some drunk teens in shoddy, half-baked halloween costumes and spiked goth hair walking down Shattuck, one (probably faking it) in a wheelchair. A girl among them asked me for two dollars. No. A dollar. No. A cigarette. No. “PUSSY!” she yelled at me. Then she spun around in a circle and fell on her ass.

No bin Ladens for halloween. But there were some cute little fire fighters and fairy princesses. Even a queen (Queen Esther, she called herself).