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Saturday, May 30, 2009
Conquistadors
BLDG BLOG has (yet another) great post with an interview with Richard Mosse, who ran around taking photos of U.S. troops in Saddam's old palaces. The photographer makes what to me is a very interesting point:
The most interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam's palaces in the first place. If you're trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with.
Perhaps instead we should have taken his advice, but I have to admit it was a thoroughly satisfying feeling to see Saddam's shoddy, ridiculous palaces turned into U.S. garrisons. Then again, they are going through the process of giving them back to Iraq (finally), and that does threaten the possibility that the photographer will ever get a chance to photograph all of the palaces (he visited six out of the eighty one palaces).

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posted by Steve @ 6:24 PM   1 comments
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Mandatory New Years' Resolution Post
Will Take Work on a Daily Basis
  • Finish organizing my photo collection (~17,000 photos). Get at least 1/4 of the way through tagging, rating, and eliminating duplicates.
  • Get a real start on organizing my old design/writing work files.
  • Create a good organizational system for ITP work files.
  • Rate 40 days worth of music.
  • Average one blog post every 3 days.
  • Stay on-budget every month.
  • Make some babies~!
  • Use my 'power tower' (ugh hate the name) Christmas gift. I have yet to determine actual numbered goals. Get more sexy! This involves about 45 minutes of workout per day in 10, 10, and 25 minute sections.
  • Eat well (almost no corn syrum, limited sweets, good snacks like carrots and nuts, more but smaller meals, drinking 2.5 litres of water a day).
  • Take 4,000 photographs, including 400 5-star photos. Post the best to Facebook/Flickr.
  • Consistently shoot 80% on freethrows.
Will Take Work on a Weekly Basis
  • Create a home inventory for insurance purposes, including all photos, reciepts and serial numbers.
  • Finish Ignition. This means professionally mastered and with a new website to promote it.
  • Start re-learning piano and/or theory (haven't set up specific goals for this yet).
  • Go on at least 25 hikes or other outdoor excursions.
  • Consistently (at least 2x a month) do little things for my wife that would make her want to date me if we weren't married.
  • Stay connected to friends via Facebook. Use it to get together with friends while we're still young and sexy.
  • Get a good, highly-productive routine going at work that encourages me to take carpal-tunnel saving breaks and keeps me alert through the day (this relates to the eating and exercising).
Will Take Work on a Monthly Basis
  • Begin to learn PHP in depth, preferably through classes that work pays for...
  • Set up a long series of doctor's appointments to check for just about everything one can be checked for, to deal with any problems I might have before they're problems. That is - abuse the fact that I have a job with semi-decent medical care.
  • Work on some way of respectfully resolving some core differences of belief between me and the in-laws.
  • Get out of town 8 times (including at least 5 to family).
  • Read a book a month.
  • Reaquaint myself with all the outdoors knowledge I had as a Boy Scout.
  • Learn to properly tune up my car.

One-Time Events:

Winter:
  • Pay taxes by Valentine's Day.
  • Visit my co-workers in San Francisco (I work from home 700 miles away and have yet to meet them).
  • Use our new toboggan.
Spring:
  • For the Prius: Replace scratched rear turn signal assembly.
  • Redo my homepage/portfolio again in such a way that it all actually works.
  • Create "A Ninja Wedding"
  • Create the Impulse Nine TF2 frag video
Summer:
  • Get to a water park.
  • Write a short (20-page) religous-political treatise.
VW Work:
  • January: Scrape off all the tar board from the floors and put down rust-preventing primer. Install aluminum side panels.
  • February: Install floor drains. Put down floor lining. Install side brush bars. Install larger brake fluid reservoir.
  • March: Create map pocket and cup holder in side panels. Install fire extinguisher holder.
  • April: Install Dynamat (weather permitting).
  • May: Buffer time.
  • June: Begin working with simple fiberglassing by making rear trunk covers.
  • July: Replace all the wiring with Jordan, adding circuits for all the new stuff to be installed later. Add gravel guards. Replace turn signal. Install air horn.
  • August: Powdercoat rims, bumpers, brush bars, gravel guards, and door panels.
  • September: Buffer time.
  • October: Replace rims and tires. Raise rear suspension.
  • November: Install new headlight system.
  • December: Replace door and window rubber.

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posted by Steve @ 9:38 PM   0 comments
Monday, November 10, 2008
1,001
Yesterday and today, I took exactly 1,001 photos.

I was a part of two vastly different events – the Dia de Los Muertos parade, and a hike up on Mt. Lemmon.

The Dia de Los Muertos parade is an annual community event that is a wonderful combination of community participation and organized event-making. The actual parade is made of citizens of Tucson, who create fantastic and often monstrous costumes. Some are lighthearted – such as the large paper mache VW bus filled with grateful dead. Others were more morbid – effigies and odes to passed friends and family. The procession wanders along the downtown Tucson streets and ends in an empty lot with a low concrete stage.

And there, every year, some old magic’s made.

A giant paper cauldron, at least 15 feet in diameter, is filled with the wishes, fears, and desires of the thousands of gathered revelers in the field, raised high in the air with a crane, and lit for all to see. Another crane held a dancing troop hundreds of feet in the air. All of this is in addition to the dancing, fire dancers, stilt-walkers and other ceremonial touches.

It’s wild, primal, and very fiery.

Today’s hike was with Nyssa and Rhys and couldn’t have felt more different but still yielded some great photos. As a lifetime resident of Phoenix or Tucson, the notion of leaves that change color, snow, and, well leaves is rather a novel one. So walking through the brisk fall air with the falling leaves on the top of Mount Lemmon was fantastic and fertile photographic territory.

I’m also getting less shy about taking photos of people, although Nyssa is every bit as shy about being photographed as I used to be about photographing others. I admit I do like how sunsets don’t check their hair, though.

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posted by Steve @ 1:56 AM   0 comments
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Obamaficated
Slate had a funny take on how every word seems to have an Obamafication - my favorite is Barock Star.

Here's my contribution to the madness:

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posted by Steve @ 2:43 AM   0 comments
Saturday, January 05, 2008
McCain braves New Hampshire


You know, whatever one believes about the candidates, it must stink to go through this kind of thing in early January in New Hampshire.

It's also a Secret Service nightmare. Is that lady giving him an aneurysm-inducing bearhug, or did she just shove a shiv made of a sharpened toothbrush through his ribcage?

This being John McCain, of course, he wouldn't suffer long-term problems from either, because he is JOHN MCCAIN, former POW.

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posted by Steve @ 7:51 PM   0 comments
Monday, December 03, 2007
Things that really are awesome
Most third graders are familiar with what I'll call shopper's ennui: the sense that what you bought can't possibly live up to the fantastic ideal that it's been built up to.

I realized this when as a twelve-year-old boy, I convinced my Dad to buy a $60 (that's six-zero point zero zero dollars, people) remote control car. It was fast, had a pair of tracks instead of wheels, and lasted for exactly fifteen minutes per five-hour charge.

Trouble with that being, of course, that I could use it at most twice a day, since I couldn't see it at night.

I did enjoy that little remote control car enough to remember it a decade and a half later. I also remember that it took me about three weeks to get sick of waiting for the damn thing to charge. It was effectively destroyed within a few months from pretty reckless (though awesome) driving, most of which involved making ramps and launching it in ways that one day, God willing, I'll do with my Volkswagen.

---

Anyway, the reason I bring up the remote control car is that it was, for about a year, the Thing I Coveted Most. A few years later, it relinquished that title to kissing and/or sex with girls, but at the time I recognized the feeling and the risk: few things are as good as you think they'll be. I figured kissing and sex would be an exception, but even then I correctly came to the conclusion that buyer's ennui was a real thing.

So in light of the holiday season ramping up its machine, here's a list of things that I bought that were every last bit as awesome as I had hoped they might be:

1. Dating and marrying Rachel. We have our dumb moments, usually caused by myopia or general illness, but I really can't imagine being really happy with anyone else because there is literally nothing I would really want to change. Not even the things that irritate me; those are usually the only things that keep me improving as a person.

2. My VW Beetle. Sure, it has had more repair problems than Chernobyl, but it's every last bit as rewarding as I think having a car can be. I suppose you can say that how awesome something is has little to do with how perfect, practical, or popular it is.

3. The Ampeg 8x10" bass amp I bought. I can feel my brain vibrating uncomfortably when I turn the Gallien-Krueger head past the "5" on the volume dial. It is wonderful being able to play a note that is remorsefully gentle and understated ...and still be 110 dB.

4. My Black & Decker power drill. An odd thing for this list, but it was so amazingly useful when we were pretty much building everything in our apartment, had ridiculously-long battery life and just did things it shouldn't have been able to for longer than I had a right to ask of it.

5. Radiohead's OK Computer, which I bought when it came out without knowing anything about the band, at all. I just liked the cover art a lot. Few things in the history of mankind have exceeded expectations like that purchase. U2's Achtung Baby also ended up being my favorite album, but the magnitude of the difference between expectation and reality were what set OK Computer apart.

6. My trip to Tokyo in 2001 with my family. It went about as well as any family trip can possibly go. We had fun, I slept very little, had about fifteen million great memories, and took some amazing pictures to help reminisce, which in turn really got me into becoming a photographer.

7. The book U2 at the End of the World, which I read at the height of my U2philism, was about as good a rock bio as has ever been written. I remember finding it in the Phoenix Main Library, and thinking, "there's no way this is going to be better than I hope it's going to be" -- but it was. You should read it. There's a part about a giant snake and hookers in Tokyo.

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posted by Steve @ 9:56 PM   0 comments
Friday, September 07, 2007
250 lbs. of weeds
That's about right.
I had two hundred and fifty pounds of weed in a 20' x 20' area to the side of my place. Tomorrow, I get to pull up a similar amount on the side of the fence. Hooray.

Despite that, though, I would like to sing the praises of what's called the hula-hoe, which is not a derogatory term for a girl from Hawaii. No, it's a weeding tool that, on gravel, is amazing at digging up weeds. It just digs in under the gravel and pulls up weeds with the roots (usually). It was still a bloody ton of work, but doing that on my knees by hand would've taken an eternity.

My hula-hoe was a gift from my Aunt and I'm suddenly forever grateful.

I also got a chance to really use my camera's time-delay function to make a movie of the reaping of the weed forest. You can see the headlights of the truck dying, and eventually I had to quit just shy of being actually finished (will do that tomorrow), but it's still pretty cool, especially with the nighttime clouds going by. It was taken at a 10-second interval, which makes things go by pretty darn quickly when the frame rate is 24 per second. It means that every second in the movie is four minutes of work:

Weeding movie
0:17 (1MB QuickTime movie)

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posted by Steve @ 1:02 AM   0 comments
Friday, August 17, 2007
Into the Flow
I actually made a flow chart because I couldn't mentally picture my creative work flow.

Basically, it came down to a decision of where to put what. The upshot of all of it is that...

I'm considering ditching MySpace for Facebook, mostly because of spam.
I've started re-designing the blog. Obviously.

For photographs:
I decided to start using Flickr as an online photo gallery, in addition to the portfolio (i.e., the very best) on my homepage.
Adobe Lightroom is being used to sort, tag, and process all of my photos.
MySpace/Facebook will have more photos than the gallery, but less than Flickr.

For writing:
Everything gets posted onto the blog, then the best stuff gets filtered into parts of the homepage.

For music:
Demos go on the blog, with a few really, really good ones making appearances on the main page.

I also decided on the home inventory program I'll be using (Home Inventory Deluxe). It has the ability to attach images to objects, which is important because I'm going to start scanning receipts and taking pictures of stuff. I want to know that if anything's ever stolen or dies with a warranty, I'm gonna get it replaced without having to screw around.

It stands next to Microsoft Money (finances), Mp3BookHelper (.mp3 file tagging), my Treo 755p and MS Outlook (to-do, calendars, phone, mp3 player) in my efforts to get and stay organized.

Theoretically, I'm going to start using CarCare, but I'm waiting until we get moved in properly (and I have all my paperwork ready to enter), and I get a massive tune-up on the Bug so that I can reset all the maintenance reminders to zero.

I am still looking for a good groceries-and-recipes program, though I'm not sure either Rachel or I are ready to start cooking, really. I also hope Winamp has a better media library next time around (and I'll be plenty upset if they don't keep my ratings).

I have so much organizing to do... stuff to write... before I have kids and so on, you know?

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posted by Steve @ 12:35 AM   0 comments
Friday, August 10, 2007
No, really, next week. I swear.
This week's been pretty productive on the settling-in front, so maybe, just maybe, next week I can settle into the 'routine' Rachel and I agreed on - not to bore with the details, but it allows time for me to work on regular work, freelance work, working out, and working on my album. A lot of work, but it's all gotta get done.

So far, it has been foiled by school, summer school, the truck, and moving - formidable forces, really.

Of course, now we have the party (parties) we're planning, and the place isn't really finished - it's just inhabitable. But it's now or never, really...

I've also just about finished consolidating all of my old MySpace blogs onto here. Once they've been reformatted and updated, I'll link to my old Okinawa journals on my homepage as well. Most of my 'let's update the homepage' boredom/energy has been directed towards back-filling this blog, so hopefully I'll make my photo gallery on the homepage next

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posted by Steve @ 1:30 AM   0 comments
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Endings and Beginnings
I had a lovely 27th birthday party, and have come to understand that my favorite kind of get-together/party involves about 3-10 of my friends. I'll have to remember that when we have our housewarming party in about 3 weeks.

A beginning: our time here in this apartment is coming to an end, and we're doing it the right way: giving ourselves a week and a half to move. The new place is a duplex with covered parking right outside the door, and enough room for a basketball hoop and a garden in the back yard. It also has laundry machines, thank God.

An end: I picked up the seventh and final Harry Potter book at midnight on my birthday. I didn't go to sleep - I stayed up until about 10am reading, slept for four hours, and woke up to finish the book. I'm still recovering, a bit, but my impression is favorable. Before judging it properly, though, I'm going to re-read the entire series once we've moved (the other books are packed up already).

A beginning: I bought an expensive PDA/phone, the Treo 755p. It replaces my old phone, a Sanyo SCO-7200, which I will honestly miss (still have to donate it to a recycling service). It was a beast, and survived more falls than I care to think about. I'll have to be much more careful with my new phone. The idea with the new phone is that I will be able to keep myself organized, and also have directions on me while traveling (it has Google maps).

An end: we're not slackin' anymore, and finally starting to keep proper records. We're going to take an inventory of everything we have for our insurance. Believe me, it's amazing how much stuff one has, especially all the ancillary stuff. Imagine how much it would cost to replace just the stuff you use in the bathroom (razors, shampoo, scrubber, toothbrush, toothpaste, etc.). This also involves keeping track of important receipts and warranties.

A beginning: I'm about halfway through organizing my photo archive. Once I'm finished, I'll be posting them onto various stock photo websites and hopefully I'll make a couple bucks here and there.

An ending: the process of getting the truck all fixed up is basically over, now that it's re-wired, if Saguaro Auto gets the thing to pass emissions (we'll find out tomorrow). At this point, we've pretty much redone everything. Of course, there's a lot of glaring problems: the passenger door doesn't lock, the dash is completely torn apart, and it needs to have the rust blasted out of the bed. But these things don't have any effect on how it runs, and that makes me very happy. Or it will, if it passes emissions...

A beginning: Rachel and I now have full insurance (dental, visual, medical) and an active 401k from Bookman's. It's the first time I've had that since I was a military dependent, and even then, because I had no car, I never took advantage of it because I couldn't get clear across town. I'll be getting a physical soon, and go to the first dental appointment I've had in ages.

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posted by Steve @ 11:26 PM   0 comments
Monday, June 11, 2007
Proposition 301
Summer school in the computer lab at Eastpointe High School is winding down to our few, last students. Craig (the self-describe curmudgeonly English teacher) and I are finishing up the day, and my boss comes up with the kind of envelope normally associated with a paycheck.

Payday isn't until Friday.

He tells me that it's my Prop 301 money, and smiles. He's always a good boss, but he's showing up with random, unplanned income. That makes him a great boss.

Anyway, unbeknown to me, Proposition 301 passed in 2000 in Arizona. It called for a pool fund for teachers, drawn from a 0.06% increase in sales tax. It's distributed annually, based on the population and performance of Arizona schools.

Now, Eastpointe is a relatively small school which caters to "at-risk" kids - kids that need help with everything in life, not to mention school. Fortunately for the number-crunching, there were very few teachers at the school - 8, including myself.

Also, it helps that I have a good boss. Apparently, Tucson Unified School District promised a 3-year raise plan for their teachers. The first two went ahead as planned, but the district very illegally used the 301 money to fund the third raise. Of course, it was supposed to be distributed in addition to the raise, but through some seriously questionably conspiratorial lobbying, they got away with it. As for the previous two years' 301 checks, I hear that $400 was unusually good.

I knew nothing of any of this, of course, but I was still elated to find this on the check: $1,925.24

So. Two grand in unplanned income. I'm spending roughly half on Rachel's truck - which went unsurprisingly over-budget with its new carburetor install and a new camera. After months of deliberation and surfing the web (especially dpreview), I decided on the Ricoh GX100. I'll be ordering from PopFlash.

Words fail to describe how awesome this is. The other half of the check will act as a buffer for the bank account while I figure out how to do my taxes for my newly-official business, but hopefully will go into my first stock purchase...

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posted by Steve @ 1:02 PM   0 comments
 
About Me


Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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