Clear Air

The hunt is on. We continue to seek out apartments and cool places to see. We've found a couple places that are really good looking. They're on the pricey side, but nothing we can't handle. One is in a more urban setting, walking distance to restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. It is complete with hardwood floors, lots of windows, and all utilities are included. It's a bit of a hike to the school Mandy will be attending, so that's a concern.

The other place is a townhouse. It's beautiful, spacious, clean, and right near her school. It's more expensive than the first, which probably puts it out of the running. The other catch is it's in really suburban area. Chain restaurants, malls, and auto places are on every corner. It's right next to the mountains, and it really laid out nicely. It's a tough call either way.

We're trying to find more places to check out today, but we're not getting many responses from people. Hopefully, we'll have our decision made this afternoon and have our appliation and deposit off to the place we want to stay.

Here are a few pictures of the city.

(View of the Rockies to the west)


(One of the many beautiful homes downtown Denver)


(Driving into Denver)

The other great thing about the area is what's going on. There are so many events, nature trails, and festivals, it's been hard for us to pick which ones to check out. For example; there's a Breckenridge Film Festival tonight. This is a seasonal event where local filmmakers get together to watch films... in the beer gardens behind a microbrewery. There are little mini-magazine I've picked up that just show what's playing in the many locals film houses. The print edition of The Onion is free, it's everywhere.

The trick is going to be making enough money that we don't have to always be dipping into our savings to pay for rent and other necessities. With all the opportunity in this area, those prospects are looking good. More to come...

Maybe the sun will shine today...

Good news on all fronts!

Last night, Athena returned to Mandy's parent's place. A portion of tuna fish was left on their doorstep while her dad looked on from the windows. She came back around 3:30 in the morning and he snatched her up and locked her in a safe in the basement. Crazy thanks go out to the Sterk parents for an entire day of hunting for the little bugger. Good job, and thanks again!

With Athena back in custody, we were able to turn our thoughts to other things. Namely: How, what, and where we're planning to spend the next two years.

We flew out of Cincinnati this morning on an express United Skywest flight. The flight was mostly crap. There are bands of storms raging across the planes states and flew through all of them. Anticipating my hatred of flying in a tiny Canadair 700 and its tendency to be tossed about like so much salad, I popped a zanax prescribed my doctor a year or so ago. It worked like a charm. It really is a bizarre drug. When I sat down to fly, I felt tense, fidgety, and keyed up. About 10 minutes after taking it, the plane could've smashed into a mountain and I doubt I would've noticed. It's especially strange because it didn't really do anything to deal my mental side, just the physical. I still had my paranoid thoughts, its just there was no physical reaction to them. For about 45 minutes, I let the plane's constant buffeting turbulence lull me to sleep. Very strange.

We arrived about 10:30AM (MDT) and proceeded to check out a house and an apartment. The house was sub-ghetto. Complete with low-hung ceilings and a neighborhood of houses beset with all manner of gates, bars, and alarm systems. The landlady seemed nice, but the cost, house, and neighborhood just didn't add up to anything promising.

The apartment we checked out was in really cool neighborhood. Near a huge park, lots of little shops, bars, and restaurants. We could fully flex our hipster legs in such a place... if it weren't so friggen small. It was about 600 sq/ft and only one bedroom. We are planning to downsize our belongings and go back to in-college mode for a while, but I'm not sure how we could happily pare down to this size. We'll see.

Tomorrow we have an appointment to check out a property at 10:00AM MDT (that's 8:00AM EST), another at 3:30PM and a couple that we can show up to look at anytime we please. We're hoping to see either a neighborhood or apartment/house that we can concentrate on on Thursday, leaving us Friday to drive out to Rocky Mountains or some such.

I'm writing from a business-center PC, so I'll have to post pics tomorrow when I can get my laptop connected to another network.

From Denver, with much love.

"Well I'm going out west where the wind blow tall..." -Tom Waits

(Denver at Twilight)

Mandy and I are flying out tomorrow morning. We should arrive in Denver around 10:00AM MDT. Our hotel provides an internet connection for $9.99 a day, which totally sucks. I'll try to keep this updated at the various free WiFi spots I can find peppered throughout the city.

I'll post some pics and thoughts as they come about.

On a sad note, our cat Athena has escaped from Mandy's parent's house and is lost somewhere in their neighborhood. The little bugger loves to dart out of open doors, run away, and hide. Our guess is she's hiding somewhere in the neighborhood right now. It's really crappy timing considering how we have to concentrate on our apartment hunting, but now we're totally distracted by the missing cat. Ah life. So full of little twisty turns.

We'll keep everyone updated on both the trip and Athena.

"And I'll be high as a kite by then." -Elton John

Reject Wii Games

I really don't have any to add. It's hilarious. My personal favorite is "Seal Hunter." I'd play that.

Contract Done - Testing Over

This past Friday I finished out the contract with my client. My hope is that will about wrap it up for me and testing. With our impending move to Denver, I hope the three fates will shine on my job hunt and provide me with a lovely video job. My only concern about leaving the testing profession behind is money, and with Mandy heading back to school full-time, there may be a compelling reason to head back to the dark side. We'll do everything we can to stay away from that, since one of the goals of heading to Denver is for both of us to get into careers we actually enjoy.

Here's me saying goodbye to my work nameplate:

It's official: Denver, CO for 2+ years

We're moving to Denver, CO. Here's the tentative plan:

1. Matt finish work 06/01
2. Mandy finish work 06/08
3. Fly to Denver 06/18
4. Explore city, look for place to live, eat food 06/18 – 06/22
5. Fly back to CinCity 06/22
6. Pack 06/22 – 06/27
7. Drive to Denver with all possessions 06/27 – 06/28
8. Unpack, return trailer, sleep 06/29 – 06/30
9. Drive to Grand Rapids 07/01 – 07/02
10. Chill in Grand Rapids 07/02 – 07/12
11. Drive back to Denver 07/12 – 07/13
12. Stay in Denver until Thanksgiving while working, entertaining guests, and going to school. Maybe get a dog.

Obviously, these dates are subject to change, but that's our tentative schedule. The big question mark in all of

this is how / if we're going to get back to Grand Rapids for the 4^th of July celebrations. We may or may not, it really depends on how burnt out we are from traveling, packing, and driving around with two half-drugged, screaming cats. We're really going to try to make it down around then to see everyone, because it will likely be months before we fly back East.

Next week, I'll write more on the impetus for the move as well as some personal reflections on my time spent in CinCity and what I hope to accomplish over the next couple of years. I'm hoping Mandy will do the same.

For now: Denver dreamin' on such a summer's day…

(Ugh, all these damn formatting issues. This is what happens when you compose posts in Word.)

Treat for Voters

Thanks to everyone who voted. The voting closed about 6 hours before the late email told me it would, so who knows what they're doing at Discover Magazine. I love the magazine but, man, this contest has sucked in terms of how it was run and even the submissions. I really didn't like our entry, mostly because we finished it about three hours instead of taking the neccessary time to make it good, but I go into more detail about that in the previous post. Thankfully, the best entry, in my opinion, had the most votes and I do hope they've won. I'll post more when I hear from them, if I hear from them.

Here's a treat for everyone who voted. I have a soft-spot for really hard to contextualize video clips. My favorite is still the black and white film footage of the German midget laughing at a camel as seen here. Below you'll find a clip from a Bollywood knock-off of Superman. It has to be seen to be believed.

This link comes from the never tiring, always amazing BoingBoing.

String Theory Vote! DO IT! DO IT NOW!!!

Everyone,
In a previous post, I mentioned that I had been selected as a finalist for Discover Magazine's "String Theory in Two Minutes or Less." In addition to noted physicist Brian Greene selecting the winner, there is also a viewer's choice award. I was never alerted that this was happening, or even notified that the video had been made available until this afternoon when I received an email letting me know that voting is ending tomorrow at midnight. So, please go here and vote for an entry. Mine is called "Mass Through Strings," vote for it if you like it the best.

This voting has been going on for about a month, it seems, and I'm second from last (sigh). I have no idea why I wasn't even informed the voting was happening. Anger.

Go vote and tell your friends!

Future Shock

I have a feeling that the world is no longer progressing towards something, more that it's just changing without direction. I think the common definition of the future is that it is the place we are going, as a culture and as individuals. The future is a point in time ahead of now, where things will be better. It's an intrinsic part of the dominant American ideology that we progress and improve in so doing. Keep in mind that for most of human history, the future really didn't exist as a positive, cohesive place we were traveling towards. It was commonly held that if tomorrow was different than today, things were going wrong.

In a recent interview, Cory Doctorow made the point that if one were to compare stone axes from 15,000BC to 10,000BC, they would not be able to detect any noticeable differences. For 5,000 years humans never thought to change the ax or make better tools. It worked as an ax, and our ancestors evidently thought, "Ax hack wood. Ax chop head. Ax good. Screw improvements."

In ancient Egyptian times, one of the most exalted gods was called Mi'at. This was both a god and an expected state of affairs. One of the chief charges of the office of Pharaoh was to maintain Mi'at. Mi'at could be roughly translated into a term like "status quo" or "make sure tomorrow is exactly like today." Even in the East, the primary role of the Chinese Emperor was to maintain peace and stability—to keep things unchanging and constant. In the West, throughout the Middle Ages, humans thought about the future in very similar terms. All of the great truths about mathematics, philosophy, and art had been revealed by Aristotle and his bearded, bare-chested ilk. Answers for questions concerning government, social order and spirituality were codified in the Bible. Different kings ruled, empires rose and fell, things changed but did not change into anything other than more change. The concept of future, as we now think of it, hadn't been invented yet.

The Copernican Revolution, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the Modern Project and the idea of a future was born as a result (I realize this is a totally unqualified statement, but, oh well). Things started to get "better." We could look at generations past and say, with confidence, "Boy, I'm sure glad I don't live way back then. It's so much better now." History became important. For much of our past, we really weren't interested in knowing much about the generations before us, because, after all, they very similar. With Modernity, we became increasingly interested in how humanity organized and reorganized itself. Whether change came upon a culture suddenly or gradually. Logically, for humanity to have a collective future to progress towards it needed a cohesive past to recede from.

The moved-towards-future concept is still powerful today, but I think it's take on shades of plasticity and change without direction. These changes fall broadly under the Post Modern school of thinking, but I think they have more broad implications. I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing. I've heard compelling arguments made for either case. One thing, however, that gives me pause, is camel racing.

Now the camels have robot jockeys. Robot jockeys! I remember Robot Jox. I saw it at Showcase Cinemas the week it came out. My friend Jesse and I went. I can still remember my amazement at how empty the theater was. Where were all the people, I thought. This is Robot Jox! It was so awesome. Giant, stop-motion mechs sawing the hell out of each other in a post-apocalyptic war zone with Gary Graham, the dude from Alien Nation, as the protagonist! Can it get any more awesome than that? Check out the clip below and revel in the ball-flattening awesomeatuude:

And now, robot jocks are a reality. Observe the picture below:

(RoboCamel)

Notice anything strange? For me, it's the fact that in one picture there are so many strange, contradictory, and flat-out scary implications it makes my head spin. The world is changing, but I don't think it's progressing any more. I think people have given up on the idea of the future, and are instead reveling in the absolute unpredictability of now. A digital picture of robots riding camels while people wearing millennia's old religious garb should be proof enough for anyone that we are well and beyond the looking glass.

Moving Report

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

Mandy and I are heading into flux territory again. The wheels of life begin to grind once more and a great evil looms in the East.

Our lease is up at the end of June. So, between then and now we have to decide the following:

1) Where we're going to move
2) What school Mandy can get into to finish her degree
3) Where we can work
4) How/if I can find work that relates in any way to video

We have about six weeks to figure all of this out. While we are on our way to getting a number of these things nailed down, there's still work to be done. My posts will remain sporadic for the next month and a half as we work our way through the big Decisions. I will try to keep the blog updated with details about our job situations, where we're moving, and what we're planning.

So, to start, I am 15 calendar days away from not working at my current job. I tendered my two week resignation this past Wednesday. My last day will be June 1st. My plan is to use the month of June to finish Sue and Casey's travel dvd, help pack up all of our belongings, travel to the new city and find an apartment, and move. Our current thinking is Mandy will be done with her job one week after I am done with mine, so we both can travel to the city to check out apartments and neighborhoods.

This strategy carries some obvious risk, but such is the case with anything worth doing. A career change on both our parts, medical and video, will not come about without sacrifice and work. I think we're both in a much better position financially and emotionally for the change due in large part to our hiatus to CinCity. We both feel the project was a success and are eager to move on to the next thing.

An example of something I've recently had to reassess is my rubber band ball strategy. My work environment is beset with rubber bands of all shapes, sizes, and colors. They gather in dimly lit corners in small, dusty piles. They find their way into cups of coffee, between printouts, and even into shoes. To help with this problem, many of my co-workers have begun to capture the stretchy strings and wind them into rubber band balls of various sizes. Some are monstrous; the har labor of many years. Others are dainty and colorful, the fruits of a passing interest. My goal was to create three fist-sized rubber balls I could juggle. However, my resignation has forced my face up to the fact that this an impossibility. I had only created one complete ball and had just started a second. I realized that the average volume of rubber bands that come my way is not enough to complete the project before I would be leaving. So, this morning, while watching scripts run on my computer, I unwound the smaller ball and merged the bands with the larger ball; my thinking being, one large ball is easier to keep track of than two smaller ones.

(This is two of me pushing both of the balls together)

Go speed racer, go!

This weekend, Mandy competed in her third River Bank Run 5K in Grand Rapids. She placed seven in her class and did a bang-up job. Despite being slightly injured she pulled off a respectable 10 minute per mile average. Angie also competed and did an amazing job. Congrats to all!

I can say I was little jealous to see everyone running and standing at the sidelines as I had the first year. I am going to run the Buck Creek Run in July, so keep an eye on the obituaries that week.

Here's a little video I shot of Angie and Mandy running past the turn just before the 2 mile mark. Sadly, I was only able to capture a few seconds for each person, so I padded the video with a little extra content to make it a watchable length. Even now, it's still pretty unwatchable. Please forgive me.

(Sad, sad little video camera.)

You Can't put the Smoke Back In

The saga of my sad PC continues. Tonight, I replaced my old power supply with one Kleiner-One-Niner gave me (what a guy). I unplugged all the cables on my old one, unscrewed it, and yanked it out. I fastened the new one to the case, plugged all the cable back in, and hit the power button. Crackling sounds and smoke began to pour out of the case. I yanked the plug from the back and inspected the damage.

It turns out, I plugged a cable in the wrong way. It was a small, four-pin power cable that ran to my front-side sound panel. Normally, these plugs have guide wings that force the inattentive user to plug in the cable one way only. Sadly, this card doesn't have any and I was the inattentive user. When I plugged the cable in, I was off by one pin... and that one pin apparently didn't like being left out.

The worst part about all this is the power supply doesn't fix the problem I was having. The computer still randomly reboots and sometimes won't even post when being powered on. More investigation is necessary...

The damage:

(Click for a close look)

Response to "Dont't pump gas on May 15" Email Virus

Now that summer is upon us again, and the seasonal gas additives are being additted, it seems the "Let's not pump gas on a certain date" virus has started its relentless march across the internet. Several people have forwarded this email to me over the past few years, and now I am bored enough to write a response to it. Below is a step-by-step breakdown of how nearly every statistic, point, and conclusion found in the email is wrong.

The original email will be formatted this like this. My comments will be formatted like this. Also note that I haven't changed the original email in any way. All the misspellings and grammar mistakes are preserved for your amusement.

Original email begins here:

I say its worth a try!!

Ø NO GAS...On May 15 2005

Body: Don't pump gas on may 15th

Body: ...in April 1997, there was a "gas out" conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight.

::There is no record of this happening. This claim has absolutely no evidence to support it. There are plenty of sources that list that is NOT true. This statement is false. However, there is some evidence that this has happened in 1999, and throughout the 2000s. Ironically, as a result of these later boycotts, most gas stations saw an overnight price spike, not a drop. So, if anything, boycotting gas stations for one day causes the price to go up, not down.

::Since the premise is flawed, any deductions are equally flawed, QED. There was no "Gas-out in April 1997." Even if there was, the date of the gas-out is not supplied, so there is no way to tell when the overnight price drop of $0.30 would've occured. Even if we did know the date (we don't) and we did see a price drop (we didn't), there is no way to make a causal relationship between people not going to the pumps and the gas price dropping. We don't know how many people didn't go to the gas pumps.

On May 15th 2007, all internet users are to not go to a gas station in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

::Assumptions galore! Who said gas is "$3.00 a gallon in most places"? This is a completly unqualified statement. Again, we have to assume it's true for any of this to work. Secondly, the phrase "high gas prices" is completely arbitrary. People in England would be happy to pay $3.00 for a gallon of gas as would people in Canada.

It's also import to note that the price we see on the local Shell Station marquee is not the actual price of gas. It's a subsidized price. The way it works in America is the goverment collects taxes from its citizens, then uses some of the money to pay oil companies to keep the price down. It's called oil subsidization. Americans are actually paying close to the same amount for gas as people in other countries, it's just that we pay part of the price at the pumps and part of the price in taxes that come out of our income.

Due to this fact, people can't make very effective comparisons between gas and other non-subsidized goods. We have to look at the true cost of a good to make a comparison, otherwise it's apples and oranges.

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up.

1. People are not members of the internet. They might use it, but they can't join it like some kind of fan-club.

2. The average car may take $30 - $50 to fill up from empty, but the point the email is making is that every person who uses the internet also owns a car. Of course, this is preposterous. Many non-driving-age children, people who ride bikes, use public transportation, and millions of other people use the internet yet don't buy gas.

3. The most current CIA statistics for Americans who've used the internet once in the past month is 205 million. So, that static is also wrong.

If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000,000.00 (that's almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companys pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the Middle Eastern oil industry for at least one day.

::Okay. There are so many grammatical, logical, and statistical problems with this run-on sentence, I'll have go step-by-step.

1. We've already established that not everyone who uses the internet owns a vehicle (let alone a car) or is responsible for filling the vehicle, so any conclusions being deduced from that premise are, by definition, wrong. But, just for laughs, let's see where this hypothetical argument takes us.

2. Assuming the above numbers and conclusions are correct, this scheme still wouldn't work. It certainly wouldn't be keeping much money out of oil companies pockets since much of the cost of the gas we buy at the pumps isn't a direct result of the crude oil prices alone. 25% of the price comes from local and state taxes. 9% comes from distribution and marketing of the gas. So, if this happened, people would actually be depriving their AMERICAN communities and AMERICAN-run gas stations and trucking services of money, in addition to a Middle Eastern oil company. As a result of the boycott, these AMERICAN companies would suffer the greatest harm.

Here's a good report from the Council on Foreign Relations that explains the where the high cost of consumer bought gas prices comes from. This is backed by, you know, evidence.

3. Most importantly, the email just asks people to not buy gas on that day. So what happens on May 16th? When we do run out of gas, where are we going to purchase it? The gas stations. At the end of any given week, even if everyone skipped a day, the sales would still be the same. The reason this seems so appetizing is because it's a quick fix. Even in principle, the only way to affect gas prices at the pumps is by changing your gas consumption habits over a long period of time. Come May 16 ^th, everyone would still have to fill up somewhere.

If you agree (which I can't see why you wouldn't) resend this to all your contact list. With it saying, ''Don't pump gas on May 15th"

::The email claims to not understand how anyone would not want to do this. It's easy to understand why: This is email is riddled with half-truths and lies. It attempts to make its arguments be appealing to emotion, not fact. If something seems too simple and good to be true, it is.

This "no gas" email is a well-documented internet virus. These are commonly called social engineering viruses because they are spread not by security problems with email applications, but by exploiting weaknesses in people's understanding of security. This is A) An appeal to emotion B) An idea that seems very simple. It is not, however, anything anyone could put any stock in due to being riddled with logical, economic, and grammatical horrors.

Before re-forwarding emails that have been forwarded to you, check out Snopes.com. It's a clearinghouse for these kinds of urban myths and social engineering email viruses. Here's the link for a more thorough dissection of the "No Gas" virus that has been spreading.

For you are my rock and my fortress;therefore,for your name's sake. Lead me and guide me. Ps.31:3

::What does this passage have to do with oil? I mean, come on! It's not even remotely related. A quick note: If someone invokes the bible to make their point, it's probably an appeal to emotion, not reason.

Warning!

(This guy kept forwarding these emails. Look what happened to him.)

Mac Reflections #4: Boot Camp Pt. 1

Mac Reflections #3: Boot Camp Works!

A warning to readers: In terms of a past posts, this one is long, highly geeky, and more technical than usual. Swim at your own risk.

A couple weekends ago I was able to get Windows XP to run on the new Mac Pro. I used the beta of Boot Camp with virtually no problems. First, I had to slipstream Service Pack 2 into Windows XP to get it to install and went through the setup process. I also ran some benchmarks to test the performance and stability under stress. These updates will come in a later post.

A quick note before considering trying any of this: You have to be running the latest version of OS X and you must run the latest firmware updates. Check the official Boot Camp page to make sure you're running the right firmware and OS X updates for the version of Boot Camp you're about to install. I've read absolute horror stories of people killing their hard drives and ruining the BIOS on their Macs by not having done this. If the term "Flashing the BIOS" is unknown to you, don't try this at home.

Step 1) Get your legally purchased and fully authentic copy of Windows XP (Service Pack 2) out of the vault.

This was the first hurdle. My copy of Windows XP Pro is old. To run at all, Boot Camp requires the copy of Windows XP being used to be at least to the Service Pack 2 level. This is tricky since the way it usually goes is A) Install Windows B) Run the Service Pack 2 update. I needed to update the Windows files to Service Pack 2 before I even installed it.

To get my old version of Windows up to the Service Pack 2 level, I had to slipstream the update into the installation disk. I followed this guy's tutorial, and it worked like a snap. It took a couple hours of downloading, running, and burning but it worked like a charm.

Step 2) Install a new hard drive.

While this isn't technically necessary, it is really helpful. I try to keep like-purposed files on different physical drives when I am able. It's an old habit hearkening back to the days when the operating system had so much processing overhead, that it was smart to keep the media files on a separate drive to speed things up and add a little insurance. Wait a minute! Have you seen the system reqs for Windows Vista? 1GB to recommended just to run the OS? What kind of madness is that?

I purchased a 320GB SATA-II (3gb/sec) hard drive for $79 through Tiger Direct. I installed it via the amazingly simple process detailed in a previous post. I formatted it to run just like any normal hard drive on the Mac. I rule.

Step 3) Download Boot Camp

Boot Camp is a basic boot loader that lets the user, on boot, choose which OS they would like to load. In addition to a raw boot loader, Boot Camp also comes with a simple installation wizard that takes the pain out of building cross-platform driver disks, partitioning / formatting drives, and what to do once you begin the installation process. While I found it to be incredibly stable, Boot Camp is still in beta, so be warned. Beta just means that it's not officially released yet: If you have any problems with it, Apple will not provide support. A quote from the Boot Camp webpage summarizes it as, "We do not sell or support Windows. Duh." As an aside, the new version of OS X, Leopard, will come with the full, gold version of Boot Camp already installed and, by default, supported by Apple. By October (when Leopard is not reported to be released) they'll have worked out most of the bugs. So, if you're the paranoid type, wait until then.

Boot Camp can be downloaded right here.

Step 4) Install and run Boot Camp

The installation process is the same as any other Mac app. Unpack the .dmg file, browse to the mounted virtual drive and copy the .app file to the application directory. Run the app. Bonus!

Boot Camp will prompt you to do two things before you can install Windows. It will make you print a copy of the instructions and burn a disk of Windows drivers. I got around wasting the paper and ink by copying the instructions to our laptop via a handy 2GB thumb drive Mandy's parents gave me for my birthday (thanks!). Either way, you need to have access to the directions some other way than through the Mac box. You do have to burn the driver disk, however. The driver disk becomes vital in step 6.

The last thing it will do is prompt the you to choose the drive and partition size you where you want to install Windows. I chose the new hard drive I had installed and told it to split the drive in half, allowing 150GB of space to install Windows and 150GB for use as either storage in OS X or a Linux installation some point down the road. After the drive had been partitioned and formatted, it prompted me to put the Windows XP disk in the drive, reboot the computer and pray.

Step 5) Install Windows

Windows installs just like always. The terminal-looking blue screen, complete with the bad Courier font has the warm, nurturing feel of an iron pipe to the face. I followed the Windows on-screen instructions and the Boot Camp provided .pdf on the laptop until Windows was fully installed.

During this phase, Mandy read film trivia questions out of a book I received from my sister-in-law. I got every one of them wrong. Good thing I spent all those thousands of dollars on a film criticism degree.

Step 6) Configure Windows to recognize Mac peripherals

After several reboots and an hour of running the Windows installer, I was presented with the XP Desktop. The first thing you'll notice is the resolution is horrible, there is no audio, and the eject button doesn't work. This is because Windows doesn't come with the drivers necessary to run the hardware peripherals built into the Mac Pro box natively. This is where the driver disk Boot Camp forced you to burn in Step 4 comes in handy.

Simply pop open the disk drive and run the disk. Of course, the eject button on the upper-left corner of the Mac keyboard won't work. Windows doesn't recognize the keyboard layout, remember? To open the disk drive you have double click on My Computer > Right-Click on the DVD drive > Select Eject. Once the driver disk is inserted and the drive closed, Windows will run the driver package on the disk and force the system to reboot. Again.

If all goes well with the driver installation, the next thing you'll hear is the creepiest sound ever to come out of a Mac: The Windows Startup Fanfare. I literally felt a shiver run down my spine when I heard it played through the internal speaker.

And there it is: A Mac booting to, not emulating, Windows XP. To choose the operating system I want to boot to, I just hold down the Option key when the computer is starting up, and it will ask me to pick.

I will post some final thoughts and benchmarking figures in a couple days.

Hawking Floats and Beams

This is a great picture of Steven Hawking floating around in "Vomit Commit" airplane that simulates microgravity by flying through a series of parabolic diving maneuvers. Here's a quick video on how the a aircraft of this kind works:



And here is the man who held the same seat in mathematics as Einstein and Newton:

(I grin, therefore I am.)

Watch what you say….

Last week I was driving into work when I caught the end of a story that has since made it big – Alec Baldwin had a personal phone call to his daughter blasted over air waves all over the world. Yes, he was angry and called her names, but I think the scary point of this whole media story has been missed. He made a PERSONAL phone call and left a PERSONAL message, which someone in turn used to discredit him.

I don’t know how many websites that I have been to in the past few days where they were berating him and his abusive language to his child. Yeah, I don’t agree that a kid should be talked to like that but c’mon!! Do we not care about our personal rights at all? I don't know about you, but I like to have the "luxury" of my private calls being private.

Are we so content to live a life of cattle where anyone at anytime can take our PERSONAL calls and use it against us. We are giving the US government an extra hand for tapping our phone lines…they don’t have to do it anymore our neighbors will.

Deeplightmedia.com Online!

After many delays and much cursing, my demo reel / portfolio site is chugging away in the cyber-ether.

www.deeplightmedia.com

Here’s a quick summary for anyone interested: A demo reel acts as a video resume for film/video peeps. Or, as it is in my case, film/video wannabes. Very often, when applying for video work, I have to submit a resume and a reel. The resume is the same as any regular resume. It details my work history, education, and skill set. However, unlike the resume, the reel is what has the power to actually get me the job. It has to be short, fast-paced, and catchy. The goal of a good reel is convince the person watching that A) I have talent and B) They have a strong desire to call me in for an interview.

In its present state, the reel is admittedly rough around the edges. It has flow problems, some of the clips can be improved or dropped altogether, and a few of the animations need to be reworked. I opted to put up an imperfect reel in lieu of spending the time retooling it to perfection. Reels are always a work-in-progress if the video person is working on new projects (I am). To me, an incomplete reel does more good than no reel at all.

In the not-too-distant future, I will have the full flash version of the site running. Non-flash adopters, and there are many and for good reason, will be directed to static HTML page. Those of the more artistic, flamboyant, and non-web standards compliant persuasion who have opted to install flash, will be directed to the flashy, noisy page. I want to make the content as accessible as possible, and I think the simplistic layout of the static page does the job nicely for the time being, but I am trying to persuade artsy people to hire me. I think the flash adds a nice flare to the content.

Special thanks on the static site goes to comrades Mark and Mandy for their help. Mark designed the sweet, swirling graphics that can found throughout the site. It’s funny, actually, I think this is first time he and I have tried to collaborate on a project that has been 100% successful. In the past, we’ve always had large bureaucracies (i.e. Mark threatening to sue to Public Museum for lack of payment) get in the way. This creative process has been a further testament to how liberating it is to the have tools of production in the hands of the proletariat. As Marx wrote, “The workers control the means of video production!”

Mandy spent a good chunk of her Saturday reworking the code to get the video embedded and the image maps to correctly align. She also helped with the formatting and aligning of the fields on the Contact form, as well as numerous code tweaks. This insane attention to detail is something I have never quite mastered, and I’m endlessly grateful that she has helped out. Thanks again!

As previously written, reels are works in progress. As I take on and complete future projects, I will be dropping out weaker segments of the reel and replacing them with newer, better content. I will also develop different reels that appeal to specific clients and audiences. For instance, I may have a reel that just highlights commercial content, while another focuses more directly on cinematography or motion animation.

To help with the evolution of this reel, I’m asking everyone to take a look at it and email me their comments and critiques. When critiquing, try to act the part of someone determining whether to interview me based on the strength of the reel. In other words, be as (constructively) critical as possible. I really need to know where the weak parts are so I can know what to modify and what to drop. Thanks!

Podcast Review: Hooting Yard - Frank Key

Hooting Yard – Frank Key
Podcast Review

"There was no hat or cap on the shriveled head I took from the sack, just a few strands of filthy, matted hair. I sat on the grass and took a pair of snippy butcher's scissors out of my pocket and gave the shriveled head a much-needed haircut."

I've been listening to a podcast called "Hooting Yard" for only a couple of weeks, but in that short time I have grown quite fond of it. Frank Key, whom I discovered through his narration of various stories on possibly the greatest ongoing podcast of all time, 'Escape Pod', writes each week's episode. Keys is a dour Brit who's voice never fails to conjure up images of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a fascinating listening experience since the works are so surrealist and patently strange, they often have no plot at all. The material he reads and writes is not only absolutely hilarious but often has a thin vein of malice and puck-like mischievousness running throughout it. Each episode is in some way related to a warped, fun-house mirror reflection of our own world. This place, Hooting Yard, has reoccurring characters, places, and a rich mythology. While it's sometimes difficult to even understand what he's talking about, the more I listen to it, the more I come to recognize the world. It's really cool stuff.

The full effect is akin to combining the humor of the Guide, the surrealism of Dali's paintings, and the hallucinogenic quality of some strong drug—in a free, easily downloaded format.

As a quick aside, my favorite surrealist short story is Harlan Ellison's "The Mouse Circus." Unfortunately, the only way to procure a copy is to get your hands on the amazing and expensive "Essential Ellison" omnibus.

New Reviews and Podcasting, GO!!!

I'm going to start putting up more reviews of things I like and dislike. I miss writing for Mindsplint. I've found reviewing things is a good way organize my thoughts and help me test my conclusions. Written reviews are easily critiqued and logical gaps can be pointed out because the words are not dynamic like a conversation. I'm going to try to stay away from doing formal critiques of things because they are too much work, and I spent the last two years of my life writing them and being judged by them for school. I just want the Ebert luxury of determining how good something is with my thumb and eschew literature reviews and formal declarations of intent. Bleh.

My first review is going to be about a podcast. If you're new to the podcasting thing, check out this informative link on Wikipedia.org and read my summary below. If you know about podcasting, stop reading. It will only bore and confuse you. The actual review will show up soon (probably tomorrow).

My executive summary of podcasting is as follows: Podcasting is the common vernacular for a RSS (Really Simple Syndication) web feed that points a client application to content (usually audio or video) somewhere on the internet. It does this according to a schedule defined by the content provider. For example, I record myself yodeling and put it on the 'net. The next time you boot your computer a program running on it checks to see if there is a new song. If it determines there is a new yodeling song on the 'net you have not downloaded, it downloads it for you. Not only will the song be downloaded, it will be automatically moved to whatever portable music player you have attached to your computer. The upshot of all this is all you have to do is turn on your computer and, optionally, attach a portable music device to get new content. Once you've signed-up for a podcast, it's totally hands-free.

In the case of audio podcasts, people use a podcatcher, such as iTunes or WinAmp, to subscribe to and download them. Once downloaded, podcasts can be played on a computer, moved to a portable device like an iPod, Rio, or Zen, or be burned to a CD for use on a car trip.

In the sense that there isn't a direct and immediate cost to download a podcast, this is all free. However, as open source pioneer Richard Stallman famously put it, "It's not free as in free beer. It's free as in liberated." Liberation and no cost are two very different concepts, but English uses the same word (free) to describe both. People spend time and money to produce these 'free' podcasts, so many of them rely on donations to continue to operate. I've donated to a few of the podcasts that I love because A) I love the work they are doing and want them keep producing and B) Nothing is free.

You don't need an iPod to get into podcasting. You can find podcasts that cover nearly any topic you can imagine. The podcasts are free. Hop to it already!

Black Market on the 3rd Floor!

I've discovered an underground market thriving on the third floor!

I work in an office building. It has all the edifices you would come to expect from such a place. Cubicles, bathrooms, buzzing fluorescent lights are as common here as they are in most suburban office buildings. The building also sports a cafeteria complete with (free) soup and salad bar, tables and chairs, and coin-op vending machines. Most basic lunch or breakfast items can be procured from said vending machines. Apples, bad sandwiches, and V8 are enclosed within a sliding-door, carousel styled machines while pop and candy bars are available from the more common chute machines. While these items are marked up a good 10-20%, I would not argue that the items are not too egregiously priced. Especially considering the trouble that goes into stocking and maintaining said machines.

On the sly, a co-worker snuck out of our pod, disappeared for about five minutes, and reappeared with a bag of peanuts. I looked at the peanuts with a sense of awe and confusion. How did she get peanuts, I asked myself. The vending machines never have them and the direction she snuck off in was opposite of the caferteria. Something was afoot.

"So, where'd you gets the nuts?" I asked.
"Oh… you know." She said, gesturing wildly.
"No, I don't. I want nuts."
"There is a place… on the third floor… many things for sale."

So, it turns out, I discovered there is black market thriving on the third floor. It turns out this market offers candy, muffins, oatmeal and even bags of popcorn for $0.50 a piece! Colorfully decorated kiosks sports edible food items of all make, variety, and sweetness. Astounding! I find it fascinating this cultural phenomena can spring up in such a small sampling of people. This small, self-contained sample of humanity a black market has sprung up to meet a need that the polished, beeping vending machines are not meeting. I investigated.

I think I could successfully argue that this kind of behavior is Marxist in its origin, and perhaps not a market based on the acquisition of capital at all. The goods offered at the third floor market are sold at, what appears, to be no profit at all. I don't have access to the trade organizer, to confirm this however. My inquires have resulted in reports of mystery and intrigue concerning one Hilda VonBruglezot, I have been advised to drop my line of investigation.

I have, however, looked into the employee handbook to determine if my purchasing a poppy-seed muffin or a Kalashnikov rifle from one of the many dilapidated kiosks could be considered grounds for dismal, but the section on "Black Markets" is also mysteriously missing. Could it be that Hilda is involved? More investigation is necessary. However, I did discover that while the company has strict policy against facial hair of any kind, you can sport a beard for religious reasons. Sometimes it's nice to be a contractor. I can sport my rebellious and unruly goatee without having to convert to Judaism.