autumn tactics

So, various factors of things changing at home have seen my writing take a dent in the last several months. I have posts, they’re just not migrated yet. I thought the WordPress Android app would solve all of this, but there’s a bug in the version that my phone uses that prevents me from signing in. In any case I’ll retroactively add those posts back ASAP, so follow the RSS. In the meantime, I now have a Google+ page where I also post my photography as close to daily as possible, so please follow. I will be making a David Ventura Photography fan page in Facebook soon as well, but for now I’ve cobbled together a working stopgap for the top page, which has been stripped down and is eventually going to target mobile, but it doesn’t look good in the Android browser yet.

Thanks for keeping up, and if you enjoy my writing or photography, follow me or subscribe with Google Reader!

Cheers!

At the beginning of my first serious foray into online presence, I had three things: a portfolio to get a job, a blog, and a Friendster account. The first became largely irrelevant after I was hired and moved out to Tokyo two weeks from graduation, and the latter was fraught with a lack of relevance and style, which quickly led it to obscurity. However, the blog, is something that I’ve more or less kept at faithfully for the better part of eight years. I began writing of my explorations in this fantastic land, and quickly supplemented that with the angst of trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be. If it was one thing you could count on it was my endless stream of diatribes yearning for import.

Over time I began to find my place, through the kindness of others and the occasional burst of learning from my own stubborn demands that the world fit my narrow-minded vision of right and wrong. I moved from writing about stray cats and working on weekends to endless, repeated praise for trance music and what I quaintly cherished as community. Then at some point I decided to start doing something public with my photography, whether people recognized me for it or not, and thus we arrived at end of the decade. In the time since ubiquitous computing (to use a word that was en vogue with SIGCHI when I was in college), the fragmentation of platforms, portals, and people has made it harder and harder to be noticed, with each microtransaction of communication becoming far and far less meaningful, any rare original thought swallowed in a sea of chaff.

Sheepishly I now realize that I’ve probably driven away the three or four actual people I had reading this public journal with the advent of my adoption of that watered-down sinkhole of information exchange Facebook. I say so much more often so much less, that it leads me to wonder in twenty years’ time will my children find interest in reading my journal or my tweets? The answer is probably neither, but just the same I’m glad I took the time to sit down and actually think about what I was doing before six months went by and I was scratching my head why 2011 felt so much more empty than any of the other years in recent past.

It’s most likely not a coincidence that the speed and density of my current background music, The Plateaux of Mirror, is likely nearly half that of the floor-rattling trance I usually have on at this time of night. Thank you Mr. Eno for helping me collect my thoughts and appreciate the last forty minutes a little more.

Now the real irony is I started this entry meaning to write about love… but there we have it, the attention span of mankind pared to a millisecond.

こんにちは！ブログがもっと機能するように徐々に第三者の観点から利用してるつもりです。今日気付いたのはコメントするために、当ブログのアカウントが必要です。簡単言うとそれは僕しかないので、意味ない！昔はそうじゃなかったけど、恐らくアップグレードはどこかでそうなちゃった。とにかく、今日ルールと設定調整したら、誰でもコメントをかけるようになったので、ぜひ好きな写真とかあれば、何でも軽くフィードバックしてください。何か問題があったらお手数ですが、メールください。

よろしくお願いします。

写真のギャラリーを復活しました。サーバー上にの問題だったけど、壊れてたのが今日気づいただけ。自動的にその通知がほしいけど、なんだろう。とにかく、またギャラリーを見えなかった教えて貰えば助かります。迷惑を掛けましてすみませんでした。

The gallery is back online. There was a server-side problem with one of the database tables being crashed, though I just realized it today. I suppose it may have been down for several weeks. Ideally, I’d like to receive some automated notice when it goes down…hmm. Anyway, sorry for the trouble, if you have trouble getting into the gallery or the random image on the sidebar again, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. Thanks.

This afternoon I was mucking about in FL Studio, but I kept getting distracted because I’ve had it in my mind to streamline my footprint, both physical and digital. I have plans to collapse the site as it is and fold it back to something much more basic. Right now I’m just thinking photography, the blog, and the wiki. No more college-era neophyte attempts at creation. That past has long since outlived its usefulness and now it’s more of an eyesore than anything else.

I brushed up a very few minor parts of the blog template. Headers should be uniform more or less through all category and monthly archives. I think I’ve figured out a way to fix 90% of the broken image links in the history, I just need to risk a global search-and-replace on the DB. The older blogger titles will have to be done by hand, unfortunately. There’s four hundred and eighty-some to deal with.

I put the search form back, it should work all right, though it’ll bring a harsh light onto all of those stupid blogger title entries. Once I get the older posts all marked up with titles, categories, and slugs I’ll add the most dense category labels to the sidebar.

Yesterday I took a one-day course in dark room printing. It was pretty interesting, though as you’d expect quite frustrating at first. There are so many steps in manual printing that are handled for you digitally, mostly alignment-related things. I have a couple of discount coupons to go again in the next few months, though, so I’m looking forward to that.

WordPress has been updated to 2.6.3. Maybe now WPG2 will actually work so I can stop making custom-sized images for posts with Gallery content. [Notice the sidebar image block is NOT working anymore...sigh.]

馬鹿のは、WordPressのアップグレード手順で、configに新規定数を追加するべきが書いてあるが、DBが既にUTF-8なので、Latin以外表示できなくなった。その他のヘルプに、「新規定数を追加するべきではない」って。アホ。

I have decided to make my blog public again, for various reasons. I’d like to make things more readable and improve the presentation, but rather than wait for a grand overhaul, I’ll just tweak it piece-by-piece. The first part of this is the replacement of the background image, which I’ve used for the first five years of the blog. We’ll see how it goes.

Entries from last November to now will be migrated in, dated retroactively over the next couple of weeks. If you’re really interested in catching them all, I recommend again the RSS feed, or obsessive daily checking and scrolling back to catch entries just before this one.

Peace, happy 2008.

There are a number of train stations scattered on the outskirts of central Tokyo, at one time probably unique but now more or less all convenient, well-lit clones of one another. Kawasaki. Omiya. Tachikawa. To the south, to the north, to the west.

This weekend I went to my third Gentenkaiki at Tamagawa Camp Village just inside of Yamanashi near Sagamiko. Recently I was talking about the evolution of raving from a challenge to a pasttime. These days I don’t fend off overly amorous advances from fellow man so much share handshakes and nods on the way in and out. Dancing is less of a tense, grinding shudder and more a coarsing river stalled on the occasional break of rocks when I stop to think about the now I foolishly believe in.

I look for something unique and burn through the cliche’, devouring the unfamiliar in short order, separating custom while at the same time absorbing it. The beats, pauses, breaks, and glides assemble themselves fifteen feet ahead of my soul, an organic glass driveway crystallizing through space. The smiles come easier, I wean myself from the supplements, and fabricate karma just inside my left breast. The highs are longer and sustained, not a personal side effect but an on-ramp springboard into the stream. We manifest the fever in different ways, but unmistakably it boils through every crevice between our teeth.

A few more testaments to the fidelity of Portra and Super Presto are up in Gallery (the feedback loop is shrinking, mhmm, yes…).

This is the road I was born off of and migrated onto with manhood. Never alone, I’m always moving forward, slip like fish in a school on into the blue.

Just a short note to say that this morning I processed and got another album up in Gallery. This time the subject is my walking trip of Kyoto during last New Year’s. A number of interesting posts came out of the trip, so you may enjoy reading them again while watching a slideshow of the photos in the background.

Cheers!

Recently, every time it’s been sunny outside I’ve had the almost overpowering urge to climb on the Enjoy, ride around with a couple of rolls of Super Gold, and get a crackle-cold bin beer at the peak of my adventure. This is most assuredly the natural romantic in me augmented by my swollen loathing of computers. However, as nice as it generating gigabytes of data to archive, it creates a disproportional amount of back stock which may never see the light of day.

You are probably thinking, “Rusty, I haven’t gotten any pings from your Gallery RSS in months. I see a fair number of shots in your blog, but it’s just a tiny sliver from what you’ve been up to with little frame of reference.”

Yes, yes, you’re right. If I don’t improve my skills on the post-shutter click side of things, I’ll never get anything better for the shows. The truth is, I have enough material to produce years’ worth of similarly-assembled appearances at Geisai and Design Festa. But, there are three major problems with it all:

1) it’s unprocessed
2) it’s all unrelated (aside from the relation of my mundane current style, which draws jaded criticism in its own right)
3) the presentation medium is sparse, fragmented, and high school level

So, today despite it being one of the last few hot glorious days of summer, I stayed in this morning and put together two new albums for Gallery. One is touristy (thusly in Travel), and another slightly more artistic (in Tokyo Bicycle Wanderings).

The former is my trip to Seoul which happened only three weeks ago! That’s a pretty good turnaround for me. The latter is a trip to the Arakawa in July. Of particular interest to shutterbugs is that this set is a mix of the A-1 and 5D, and some similar shots are set up around the river, so you can see the differences in the medium and my current mastery of the formats. It’s not very scientific, the comparison factor was probably just in the back of my mind. So keeping this in mind, Ken, have a look and let me know what you think (provided I ever get the damn comments working again.)

So, anyone bored of the past week looking for us has most certainly noticed that at, as well as the gallery, have been offline. This is what non-dedicated hosting gets you, I suppose. I’ve been with iPowerWeb for a little over two years and have been moved to a different server once every seven months or so; sometimes with warning, sometimes without. At all times data has fallen on the floor someplace and mail has gone out for a while. However, as far as I can tell, this time the only thing not working right now is the gallery (which I hope to have working before bed).

I don’t know how long it’ll last, but this should remedy the MySql timeout problems for a while; at least until this server fills up with 566 other accounts who hammer the query proxy a lot rougher than we do. And then?

I picked up a guitar for the first time in ten years last weekend. I played “Country Roads” and remembered how much beginners hate F. I wish I had my own house with thick walls, but I don’t, so I need to hang out in the park during odd hours of the week. Like I said when I borrowed the dusty Takamine, “Nothing will come of it.” But still, it felt good, if just for a moment. Last weekend was a strange rosary made from calming moments of transparent enjoyment.

This is a short post just so the two or three of you still subscribing to the RSS feed and using IE can read the page on the site again. As pitiful as it is, I have not made major progress in revising the theme for the five months I’ve been on WordPress. I’m very, very, sorry. This is a stopgap measure, for who knows how long. But at least my mother can read my writing again.

Very sorry. Please let me know if something like this ever happens again, ok? Thanks. ^^;;

I am very, very, very sorry. I have a degree in Computer Science, and I have not looked at my blog in Internet Explorer in over five months.

This is a CSS thing. I will fix it very soon.

Until then, use Firefox, please.

五月末まで色々な目標がありますが、成功のために第一の目的は「効率的に時間管理を行う」です。それから、毎日06:00-06:30位に起きて、素晴らしい良い一日を作ると頑張っています。昨夜00:30にもっと遊びたかったけど、ちゃんとはしごを上ってロフトに寝ました。ちょっとびっくりした、自然に06:00に目が覚めた。神道式とか、よく分からないけど、私は一人前の男になるように儀式が行いました。もっとおかしいは起きたすぐ腹が減った。とっても珍しいです。普通に、起きたから一時間が立ってないと食べられない。

とにかく、早朝起きて、色々なことを出来ました。作品としてあまり新しくないけど、写真棚卸をした時に、一番古いデジカメ写真を見つかりました。2002年の夏に秋葉でCasio EXILIMを買って、魅力的で新規（私には初めて）日本を撮りました。映像質はかなり低いですが、色が濃くて感動的と思います。この写真はトップページの「フォトグラフィー」したに載っていますが、ちょっと小さいから、GALLERYで是非ご覧下さい。

I have a lot of goals to accomplish by the end of May, but I’m not going to accomplish very many if I don’t first succeed in managing my time well. I’m shooting for getting out of bed between 6:00 and 6:30 each day. Last night I was motivated to keep messing around at 12:30, but instead I was a good boy and climbed up into the loft and actually took a little while getting to sleep. Suprisingly, I woke up on my own at six after having some sort of dream about participating in some traditional coming of age ceremony. I was also hungry immediately after waking up, which is even weirder, since it always takes me about an hour to “wake up” and stop feeling groggy/queasy enough to feel hungry.

In any case, I woke up in a good mood and got a bunch of things done. I didn’t really make anything new, but while digging through my photo archive I decided to make a collection out of my summer 2002 photos. These are my first shots from a digital camera, and first work with Photoshop. When I first came to Japan four years ago, I bought a little camera in Akihabara and spent the summer in awe taking pictures of an incredibly new and intense country. The image quality is pretty bad, but the colors are thick and punchy; I think you may get some idea of the way I felt when I first got here. Small samples have always lived on my top site on the “Photography” page, but these may be a little easier to appreciate.

最近、まあ最近と言うのは、今年日本語で全然日記を書いてないからです。すいません。引越しが大変だと言い訳を言いたいけど、引越しはもう二ヶ月前に終わったんだ。もう素敵な友達がいっぱい小さな都心の自宅に来てくれました。とにかく、日本語技術が落ちてしまっている気もします。もっと勉強しないと、

近来あまり勉強のチャンスがなさそうだけど、もっと丁寧に連絡のコツを調査中です。まだこのブログは日本語サポートは少なくて、きっとお客さんはあまり深く調べていないでしょう。その気持ちがよく分かります。＾＾；；このサイトはかなり古臭いな。壊れているリンクが多くて、まだ検索の機能は出来ていない。

しかし、写真展示サイト「GALLERY」が段々向上されています。

とりあえず、海外の写真「パリ、バンコク、上海、ソウル」があって、さらに国内の名所もあります「秋田、仙台、足立区」。特別な写真コレクションも載っています。公開写真も、ネット専用もあります。この季節週刊写真セットをGALLERYに追加します。さらに、コメントや評価機能など段々増えていますから、是非ご覧下さい。ご意見をお聞かせてください。それから、もっともっと美しい物をキャプチャーして公開出来ます。

よかったら、日記RSS（サイトの更新情報）を活用して下さい。

では、♪(*´∀｀*)