Given some of the conversations I’ve been having lately, I’m not at all confident that a significant portion of people who might be reading this will have actually read H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine,” however it might be helpful if you have as I really feel as if I must write about some realizations to which I’ve recently come that are themselves derived from the book, though I read it quite a while ago. For all the times I’ve had to hear a Marxist criticism of a work of literature, this is one of the few times where I thought that a Marxist reading was not only appropriate, but intended by the author, Wells being a well known Socialist.
Typically, I would refute the whole book as Communist tripe and move on with it but for the fact that this work resonates with me particularly closely. My long-held fears of becoming a corporate IT drone, as well as generally a slave to technology, really are manifested in the Morlocks of the book. That’s not to say that the end-stage of the Eloi is any more attractive a picture, but at least the intervening steps in evolution are more pleasant.
If you’re not familiar with the story, a man builds a time machine and travels about 800,000 years into the future. Prior to the journey, the narrator and several of his associates were talking and it comes up the supposition that far into the future then man should have finally reached the final, end goal of Communism which is the perfect, classless, stateless society. Of course, what is actually discovered is a a world in which the enforced separation of the upper and lower classes along purely sociological lines has acted as an artificial selector towards divergent speciation — basically, the fact that the upper and lower classes didn’t mix or intermarry, and that there was no mobility between social strata, meant that the two populations became completely separated and moved towards the extremes, until the upper classes were physically unable to do anything but eat fruit that fell off of trees and lay around on couches (As opposed to the aristocracy of the day who merely wished that’s all they had to do), and the workers became dark, brutish things which lived in caves and mines and never ventured out but at night, and then only for the most unsavory purposes.
The morlocks were originally the mechanics and engineers and miners and other workers, and even nearly a million years on in their evolution still kept to fixing and tinkering with machines from throughout the ages. This is the thing that I fear, though perhaps its not really deserved in our current situation.
America isn’t as bad off as 19th century England. We have generally available public education and social mobility. We have a fairly good-sized middle class and through education and hard work, it really has been possible for people in this country to rise from very little to achieve a great deal. But in the psychological sense, one has but to hang around websites like Slashdot, or your local comic book store, to realize that the type of people who would become morlocks self-select their association for those traits anyway, then engage in behaviours typical of the fictional race: sleeping all day and being up all night, dwelling in caves (from server rooms to their mom’s basement), etc.
Even if we don’t necessarily need to fear the exaggerated consequences of an unchecked 19th century capitalism anymore, this is still a cautionary tale for today’s “nerd” — or at least goes a long way to helping explain why I fear more, more than anything, that despite my family background, my education and my general proclivities, that I might anyway end up one of the cave dwellers myself out of necessity to pay the bills.
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with technical work, and in fact the use of technology (and here I meant its directed use to solve actual problems and not just using it to use it) is one of things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. However, as IT jobs become more and more blue collar and less and less a profession, regardless of whether you have a BS in Computer Science and are ostensibly of the “educated” classes, then there is the danger that you become just another cable puller, rail tie driver or steam engine mechanic and your prospects for life and love are therefor limited to those appropriate for your standing.
In the future we’ll have a geek class and a non-geek class, just as we do today, but it will be more pronounced and it will be due to stupid self-selection just as much as it will be due to external sociological and economic pressures. And while I’m not going to abandon the use of technology, and I’m not looking to run away from the work I do any time soon, I’m keeping in mind my plans and goals that I have laid out for the next 1-2 years and I’m not going to waver or get side-tracked. I don’t intend to be a cable puller, joint welder or floor sweeper any more than I intend to be as useless and frivolous as the Queen.
So, typically I hang out in Richmond on weekends — no news there — and that’s what I had originally planned to do this weekend, however there were those with other plans for me. It was a joint birthday party for 2 friends and former co-workers back up in NoVA and so I gave in to many, many requests for me to go up there for the event, which mostly had to do with Famous Dave’s out on US1 in Alexandria, then into Arlington to the Clarendon Ballroom for drinks and whatnot afterwards, though we lost a good many of the people that we had at dinner and the further festivities were thus more distilled.
However, the major excitement for me happened on the way up there before I even got to Woodbridge. My friend Marie first noticed the sound and brought it to my attention as we were at mile 144 going north on I95. I’m really not good with cars or noticing when things are possibly bad sounding, but I know enough to know when something is totally not right. Luckily, we were already off in the right side, so I scooted off onto the shoulder and got out to check on the right front tire which was pretty obviously flat based on the way the car was pitching.
Flat doesn’t even begin to describe it — it was pretty much shredding itself to death and would have likely popped off entirely if I’d gone any further at all than I already had. There were many laceration marks running radially on the wall of the tire, and honestly I really cant account for it at all. By the time the AAA guy got there to help out about 30 minutes after I called, the thing was still smoking and the bottom of the tire was melted flat.
After we got the spare on, which is hardly more than a donut, we had to drive up to Qunatico then turn around to go back a mile from where we originally had to stop and then find a shop to buy a new tire and get that put on. Fortunately, that just took about an hour then we were on our way again.
The rest of the trip was successful, though. Marie and Gerlad and I went into Old Town for a while to walk around a bit and I took a few photos, but it was pretty bitterly cold and so we bailed and went back to his house in Springfield to regroup before dinner.
Marie and I then went back to Richmond and got in about 3AM, so I crashed on the floor at her place then we went to breakfast at Village Cafe, which appears to be cleaning up its act and turning into a semi-respectable place. Frankly, we won’t stand for such a thing and will now need to find a new slum to hang out at. Then we went out to Short Pump, since I lost the lens cover for my Nikon in Williamsburg when we were there for the Crystal Carols deal. The Ritz Camera there was out of 52mm lens covers and sent us to another place that didn’t have any either. Apparently there is just some sort of terrible drought of 52mm lens caps in Richmond, which kind of pissed me off, but oh well.
To finish out the post, I’ll include a few of the photos that I took this weekend. The two of the pumpkin are on balcony of Marie’s apartment on Monument Ave in Richmond, while the gate and the ally were in Old Town Alexandria. Aside from some mild color correction in Adobe Lightroom, they are as shot (the two in Alexandria were shot in JPG using normal, default operating modes on the camera. For the two of the pumpkin, I popped it into NEF RAW formart with AdobeRGB color space.
I’ve mentioned here already having played with Apple’s Aperture 2 demo lately. I was pretty solid on its merits and thinking of buying it, however I decided to give Adobe’s Lightroom a swing first. Frankly, I’m glad that I did.
There are plenty of more in-depth reviews and comparisons between the two, so I’m not going to give it a very technical treatment, just my impressions which are really quite good.
First of all, I don’t always have my mouse or my Wacom tablet with me, so I rely pretty heavily on my touchpad. Thanks to the multi-touch features which I’ve become extremely accustomed to, I often use it even when at my desk with the mouse sitting right there and plugged in. Being able to zoom and rotate so smoothly is really extremely handy, and Adobe Lightroom makes use of this feature whereas Apple’s own product did not do so, which is puzzling to say the least.
Of course, it also integrates quite nicely with Photoshop itself, in this case CS4 in the Design Premium package. General modifications, such as modifying colour curves, applying lens correction, etc, can be made in Lightroom, then the photo can be edited in Photoshop, saved, and the altered version immediately displayed in the Lightroom gallery.
Separating the library into separate gallery collections is also easier in Lightroom than it is in Aperture, at least I found it to be more intuitive. Keep in mind that’s just my opinion and I’m sure plenty of people find Aperture to be better. However, for me the whole interface for Lightroom was better in general and was more suited to my personal way of wanting to work — everything from importing to exporting was more straight forward, and there were finer grain controls allowing me to come up with some pretty nice results, such as these:
The magnolia blossom was shot in 35mm with a Minolta SLR at Hollywood Cemetery and the maple tree was shot at Maymont with my Nikon D3000. The maple took more work, as I had to spot-correct out a Mexican dude who was standing by it and spoiling the shot in addition to the more aesthetic modifications. I think that they turned out more pleasant than the Japanese maple I did with Aperture turned out, of course a lot of that has to do with the nature of the subject and the general composition of the shot in the first place.
At any rate, I’m going to be sticking with Lightroom, but your milage my vary and like I said, I’d take a look at some of the other reviews and side-by-side comparisons out there.
So, it’s a new year and that means new plans, or old plans revisited. Sometimes its kind of hard to tell the difference, if there even really is one. However, I envision some major changes to come with regards to this site in order to get it back on track towards my original vision.
The few regular readers that I currently have may have noticed that I’ve made some changes lately, not only to the content of the types of posts that I’ve been putting up, but also with the links and whatnot over to the side there. I know have the categories more segregated and I’m adding more and different links to content that I feel is worth while and apropos to the new goal for the blog. I’m also going to be bringing on a few more contributors and opening this thing up a bit. Using it as my personal sounding board is going to be coming to an end in the near future.
Likewise, I’m going to be adding a forum component as well, which will likely get hosted on my FreeBSD server and not on this one, just to distribute the load. The forum, and the new blog format are going to be advertised in meat space as well, and I’m going to be commissioning some art from a friend who is a professional graphic designer for some posters that we’ll be putting up around Richmond to get the word out and to help build the community.
In the future, actual activities are going to take place in order to contribute to content generation, more trips are going to be made, more shows watched, more art produced, etc, and hopefully more people will come along for the ride. You’re invited, you’re wanted, and you’re encouraged, so let’s see if we can’t make this happen!
Hopefully next weekend I’ll have more movement towards the product I’m looking for after I get back up to Cap City and meet with the crew, as is currently my plan. However, to give a taste on what I’m hoping to have going in the future as far as the blog, we should have articles on:
- local artists, musicians, and writers
- vegetarian/vegan recipes and issues
- urban exploration
- culture, subculture and counter-culture
- more to come as things evolve
Of course, the forum that we’ll be setting up will be a place for users to drive content and discussion themselves, and that’s the democratic space. However, once the editorial staff is in place for the blog, then we can accept user-contributed content here, too, which would be nice.
Changes will be announced as they are implemented, however I do welcome public comment at this time as to how best to proceed, and volunteers are welcome also!
When I was 16, I had a band that I called ‘Something In Between’ with my friends Daniel (drums) and Lori (bass). We didn’t get very far with it, but I think we wrote like 3 or 4 songs together. That was mostly a learning experience, and I got a lot of other stuff out of it other than just the music aspect. I’m 25 now, and I’m still friends with the both of them.
At 17 I built my own electric guitar (shown here- pretty cool photo, slightly edited), which I’ve mentioned before, but I’m really proud of it. I made it with a Warmoth kit, but I did all the wiring and body finishing myself.
That’s two SD Jazz humbuckers at the neck and bridge with a Classic Stack in the middle.
There is a coil tap for the neck and bridge pickups and then a concentric volume/tone laid out in the standard Fender pattern, as its basically a Stratocaster body shape, but made of mahogany with a quilt maple top.
I love this guitar — it sings like a dream, really, and its gorgeous to boot. I used to have a bass that matched it pretty well, but I ended up having to let that go.
Later on, after I graduated college, I was in another band with my best friend Austin and our friend Ryan that started out being called Giant Sleep, but then we switched to Via Satellite for marketing purposes. That band did a bit more, we actually played in public and recorded some demo stuff which was pretty eclectic but really awesome.
The point of all this, though, is that I’ve been sifting through a whole lot on Jamendo and have come across some really cool stuff, including some which really exemplifies what I’ve always wanted to do as an artist, which is sort of a combination of music and slam poetry. I really dig on live Doors recordings for that sort of thing, when Jim Morrison would just sort of wonder off into la-la land reciting poetry while the band kept along in the background. That’s not really what I want to do, but its close. Closer still is if you’ve ever heard some of the Beat performances, like when Kerouac would recite and in between stanzas then they’d jam some jazz riffs.
I’d take a bit of a different approach to it though, cause I also like a lot of weird, experimental stuff like Incredible String Band or Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, etc. I found this today, and it was really cool:
Those are the creme of my discoveries so far. You should all go check them out — seriously.
You may have noticed that I have removed ‘Perl’ from the tagline and also photoshopped it out of the sidebar image. It’s not that I’ve given up coding: in fact, I have written a few automation scripts in Perl in the past couple of weeks just for stuff on my laptop. However, I’m not particularly interested in blogging about it anymore. Its not just Perl though, its tech stuff in general (nix, networking, etc) that I’m going to cut out of here.
I started this blog to give some balance to the fact that I was immersed in some hard-core Geek culture at work, but then geek stuff took over the blog and pretty much sucked up my life. Lately though I’ve been able to get more interesting (to me) stuff up and its made me realize just how little I actually have to add to discourse on technical topics and how little interest I even have in trying with regards to what goes on outside of work, so from now on I’m going to keep work-related stuff squarely at work and this is once again only for the stuff that really interests me which is art, literature, music, etc.
Of course, I’m probably going to lose readership over this, but its not like I had that much to begin with. Anyway, now on to something actually interesting which is also actually on the original topic: a new approach to content.
I actually want to talk about music for a while, which I haven’t on here before, and specifically how its delivered. Of course, iTunes “revolutionized” the music industry, or whatever it is that they say, audio mixing software that runs on home PC/Mac hardware and is affordable. As someone who’s played in bands and worked with others in the past, this is really sort of a big deal because it lets people make demos which aren’t just tape recorded and can actually be mixed and stuff.
Then, of course, there is the internet, which allows for the distribution and marketing of content independent of record labels, even “independent” ones such as SubPop that had previously been so instrumental in getting the word out about such acts as Nirvana, L7, Mudhoney, Pidgeonhead and a lot of other really cool bands. Now, you can record your record in your home, mix it on your iMac, post it on the internet, link your friends via Facebook, MySpace, etc. Eventually word spreads, and if you’re lucky, and if your music is any good, then you’ll get a wider following than you ever could just playing down at the local pub in the weekend in high school and hoping that an A&R guy is there one night, or mailing off tapes of suspect quality.
What really got me thinking about this though was checking out Jamendo tonight. If you haven’t heard of Jamendo, then you really need to go and check it out. I’d stream out of it in RythmBox on Gnome, but just randomly, and I haven’t listened to it in a while. There was no iTunes plugin, so I needed go and actually browse the site.
Let me just say, wow! It’s such a great way to be exposed to all kinds of music from all over the world, some familiar styles, some kind of weird. It’s all free for download, or stream, though you’re encouraged to donate to musicians that you like. A good bit of content is even under Creative Commons, which is sort of like the GPL for artistic content.
That’s what I mean by a new approach to content — artists can go straight to their audience from their garage, cutting out middle-men. Of course, you still better play live, but anyone whose ever picked up an instrument and really meant it would do that anyway, record or no 
… or my head out of the clouds? That’s where I like it, though!
Anyway I spent a lot of time before the holiday in a sort of listless, rootless way which had me feeling pretty spiritually sick. If you read this blog with any regularity, that’s not news. If you know me in person, then its probably news to you that there have been more than a few times when I *DID’T* feel that way, though. The art stuff (photography, writing, etc) helps, but only some.
After Christmas I got into a very long talk with my sister about a lot of things that have happened in our lives, mostly with a slant of I need to get things straight. She went back to being Catholic. I can’t really do that — I’m just not a believer. I tried the Buddhism thing for a right while, but then I got really busy and everything was all off balance. Of course, it occurs to me now that is when I needed Zen practice the most rather than to let it fall away as a casualty of a busy, modern life.
I got a copy of Siddhartha by Herman Hesse the other day and I’ve been reading on that. I’ve found it to be oddly comforting and its helped me realize that I do need some sort of spiritual practice in my life and that its something I absolutely need to get back into. I’m going to take the time out later on to actual sit zazen for the first time in a while, and hopefully that will be beneficial. It’s kind of hard to say, as hoping for it to be beneficial is hoping for an outcome. The thing is, doing zen is the point of zen, so I just need to do it for its own sake.
That sounds a little wankish and pointless, but its not, really. I’ve also been looking into group activities in the area. There is a Buddhist center in Norfolk that does classes on Wednesday evenings, of course I’m not sure if I can expect to actually make it there on time from my office on any regular basis. If there is anyone reading this in the Norfolk/VA Beach area that has any hints of something closer, that’d be nice.
Also, if anyone has any words of wisdom that they’d care to share, they’d be much appreciated. I’m rather in need of guidance at the moment.
So, a while back I went to Maymont after I got my new Nikon camera and I took a bunch of pictures, and some of them were pretty good but had stuff about them that I didn’t like and couldn’t really shoot around — for instance, fences and stuff. However, I’ve been playing with various software lately as previously noted, specifically I’m working on the 30-day trials of Photoshop Elements 8 and Aperture 2 right now to see if they’re worth the money. Frankly, I’m leaning hard towards the “yes” column after this evening’s project, which was done with virtually no experience with this sort of thing.
Using PSE8 I was able to get rid of the fence that was running around the back of the shot, then did a centre colour fade on it as well. I then imported it into Aperture 2 and adjusted some of the color balance to come out with a really beautiful result. Below are the original shot and then the final version:
Now that I know this isn’t as hard as I thought it was, I’ll be able to get over a psychological hurdle towards taking more pictures than I already do. I also got some books over break on better technique with regards to setting up shots in the first place so that I don’t have to rely on the computer to get the crap out of my way
If you’ve never been cooped up in the dark surrounded by whirring fans and blinking lights, the night illuminated by naught but the soft glow of rows of LCD monitors displaying Nagios, code editors, customer’s websites, and multiple SSH sessions, getting into arguments over what programming language or which Dr. Who was better in the bits of down-time that will from time-to-time present themselves, then I’m not sure you can fully appreciate the real, true human NEED for art and culture to rescue you and give some sort of depth to the cold and mechanistic modern world. (Although, there are likely other scenarios which are just as apt for the illustration).
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve not really had much to do for work, and I’ve been out and about in the daylight getting up to stuff which I’d missed terribly. In fact, my interaction with technology has been purely normal, other than a quick Perl script I hacked together (’cause shell scripting is for suckers) to run some mass conversions of flac files to mp3 through a directory structure obtained by torrent, but this was so that I could add the stuff to iTunes.
But, what I mean about “normal” computer interaction is, first of all this blog. Then, of course, there has been a lot of emailing going on and some instant messaging. But I’ve also been getting into the Macintosh-ier aspects of my new MacBook Pro, rather than just using it as a pleasant Unix machine. I finally got Mail to talk to this server (previously, it had refused over the self-signed nature of the SSL service certificate that I have for Exim). I’d been using Thunderbird up to this point, but now I don’t really see the purpose (I’ve never been a fan anyway), and I was using Firefox just to match (I’m a tad bit OCD like that), but I’ve moved over to Safari now. The only complaint I have with Safari is that it actually does less with the multi-touch, for instance, you can skip all the way to the top or bottom of a page in Firefox by swiping 3 fingers up or down on the trackpad, however that doesn’t work in Safari (which is weird, really — you’d think it’d be the other way around).
Of course, I’ve been doing more art stuff as well, not just changing my software habits. I love photography. I got my Minolta 35mm SLR for Christmas when I was 12 years old and I loved it. Now that I finally have my Nikon digital SLR, I’m trying to getb back into it in a more serious way. That’s led me to check out various software to help out. The iPhoto that came with my Mac is pretty sweet, but I’m looking for something a little more powerful. I downloaded the 30-day trial of Aperture 2 and I’ve been playing with that for a while. It seems pretty sweet so far – basically a combination of Adobe Light Room and Photoshop Elements (though more like Light Room) It’s a bit pricey, so it may be a while before I dive in and pick up a full copy, but so far what I’m seeing in the trial is pretty sweet.
I used to work in DC at a political non-profit and I did a lot of graphic design, page layout, etc, for them there. I really, really liked doing that stuff, and writing/editing copy as well. I just didn’t like who I was doing it for. I miss getting to be creative. The thing I’m most looking forward to in my new job is documentation writing, honestly. I don’t get enough chance to just put words down anymore, other than this blog and the occasional email.
In other news, I’m so over holidays its not even funny. When I get back to the Beach tomorrow, I’m going to charge my iPod to the brim and spend a long, long time in the gym. Then I’m going to bike my ass off. Seriously, I think I gained about 10lbs between the wedding and Christmas. It’s also going to be time to start looking into more regular and directed physical activity. I’ve had a renewed interest in picking up on judo lessons or something, as there is a place that teaches it right near my apartment. I think it’d be good for me to try that out.
At any rate, there are chores to be done and then my sister, her husband and our friends are going to go watch Sherlock Holmes, which hopefully won’t totally suck.
Yesterday I went with my sister, her husband and our parents to Williamsburg for the Crystal Carols show, which is Christmas carols and other tunes played on, among other things, one of the few modern Glass Armonicas (despite what Wikipedia says, I can assure you there is no ‘h’ in the word), which was an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklyn at about the same time as the piano, the only set of glass English handbells in the world, one of two working glass violins which were hand made by this group of artists in Japan, and a Cristal Baschet, which is a French-made instrument of sorts.
The musician who does the show is named Dean Shostak and he’s quite good, having played at Colonial Williamsburg since he was 14, starting out as a violinist (incidentally, the glass violin portion of the show was the best musically, I suppose due to his long-standing proficiency with the instrument, which despite having a glass body is played just the same as a normal violin would be).
Unfortunately, its somewhat difficult for me to describe in words, or even pictures, what the show is like. The acoustic properties of the glass instruments are really unique, even from each other, let along comparable instruments of traditional make, so its something you really need to hear for yourself in order to get a real feel for. It’s excellent though. As something of a musician, at least as someone able to hold their own on electric guitar and bass, I found it to be really interesting with the interspersed lecture on how each of the instruments was made and how they work, in addition to the concert set itself.
Shostack is also pretty good about allowing photography, although videography is not allowed, so I’ll include some photos I took as well:
I got some other goofy things of my sister and her husband, too, but those aren’t really worth posting to the main page. I may put up some stuff from the Big Sandwich Incident later though.
