autumn tactics

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、♪(*´∀｀*)

Tonight I didn’t get started on processing as early as I hoped, but I managed to get one old collection into Gallery.

Though in preparing my website for graduation from Carnegie Mellon (and thus some sort of recruitment), I had prepared a small photo page off of my site, I had never really assembled decent-sized photographs for the web. Using my primitive Casio EXILIM and a copy of Photoshop 7, I put together some heavily processed shots of Tokyo. Though the primary motivation for using heavy filtering and color balancing was to reduce the effect of CCD noise, it ended up providing some interesting results. In comparing this with the 31 days of snapshots that I just finished last December, the core elements of my style stand out, but the photographs are about as different as day and night.

The original collection complete with hackneyed rollover images can still be viewed here.

Around the end of February it seems that iPowerWeb decided to move my account to a different server. This caused all sorts of problems, as you have most certainly noticed, among them bounced mail to ichigoichie.org, ftp server troubles, and last week autumn tactics was knocked out of service (this seems to be a MySQL problem).

I’ve been running WordPress for three months now, and the mix of pros and cons hasn’t made me a fanatic yet, but with my slowly improving understanding of the system, I’m feeling more comfortable about it. I’m not sure what script generated over 50000 queries in an hour, but traffic was up recently and something did, and that’s what brought everything down. I know the sidebar is slow, I mean to look into it, but as you know I still haven’t updated the single post archive or the search functionality yet. Anything other than the top page is broken, and even that doesn’t look right as tabled and linked images don’t align or display borders properly. But, these are the things one has to deal with for increased configurability. I still don’t have a grasp on the concert of CSS and php, and I’m sorry that I haven’t fixed these things yet.

Gallery on the otherhand, is at first less configurable but far easier to use. I realized last weekend that my Gallery page was down, this is the result of the unannounced server move. However, I don’t think anyone really visited it that much so I suppose it’s not that big of a deal. However, I have since installed Gallery 2, which is much slicker looking and easier to use. I got it installed and imported my old albums in just over an hour.

I’ve been meaning to create photo collection pages for GEISAI 10 and the thirty-one days of photography from December, but obviously I’ve failed miserably on getting either of those up in any sort of timely manner. I have a Photoshop file for the Geisai site that I’ve been working with on and off since the move, but my technical skills are still throwing a wall up, preventing me from getting what I want. So, considering the volume with which I take photographs and my recent philosophy to “share the love”, I’m canning the custom collection page format for now, and just going to start making heavy use of Gallery. It’s quick to update, it’s spartan, and we can get a feedback loop going on with the images if you’re inclined to comment. It also supposedly dovetails nicely with WordPress, if I can get a better grasp on php.

So, please enjoy! Take a look at the old galleries from overseas trips. The GEISAI images are up, is last December’s photo special. In the next couple weeks, I’ll be putting up more of the Tokyo Bicycle Wanderings sets from the last several years. I think there is some support of IP management/watermarking that can be extended through Gallery. While not a perfect solution, enough of a deterrent to cull the lazy gankers. Hot-linking should also be disabled at this point. I’m toying with the idea of watermarks, perhaps a small embossing of the site url. For those interested, RSS is currently enabled. From the main gallery page, trick out the sidebar and follow the RSS link. That should cover all updates to any of the sub-albums.

I’m a little hung over from yesterday’s hanami party, so I’m not inclined to talk about why I take pictures right now, but I will say that in the future much more of my evolving work is going to be available for those interested. So I hope that you like it. It’s well-past time that I present my work at another exhibition; I have taken a couple good shots in the last month that I’d love to see on paper.

吸収　(kyushuu) is the Japanese word meaning, “absorb” or “assimilate”. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing this week. I don’t know what it is, but personal things have been getting progressively better as the year picks up speed, and it’s been helping my mood. Work being in a transitional phase with little in the way of deadlines and bugs is probably helping too. The upshot is, things are snowballing into a katamari of improvement and I’m sucking in ridiculous amounts of knowledge as a result. I’m becoming able to build considerable overlap with my study of physical theory and what I’m doing at the office, so I have a lot more structure and motivation during the day. I’ve been spending about as much time devouring Wikipedia as I have been sleeping, and this week I’ve run down close to a hundred articles on optics and music. It’s at the point where I’m reading so much I have to make notes as I go along so I don’t forget the material I’m consuming. If this starting to sound a lot like school, that’s probably why I’m so happy.

I’m standing up straighter, I’m more amiable when people come to me for questions, and I’ve been for the most part in less of a hurry, more relaxed. It would be great if I could maintain this kind of pace for the better part of the year. I’m sure I”ll run into some walls again, but for the near future I don’t see the format of my daily life changing much, so in the meantime I’m looking to make some considerable advances in craft this year. I already have a mile-long laundry list of techniques to experiment with at night when I get home to my tools (toys).

I think I’m going to take another break from gaming starting next month. I’m loaning my PS2 to a co-worker after GDC, so I’m kind of on a binge to finish Silent Hill 4 now. There’s nothing really wrong with playing games, it’s what I do. But an unfortunate disadvantage of games is they’re generally one dimensional; I consume them and that’s it. They don’t change me very much, I don’t produce anything in consuming them, so in the end they’re still just emotional snack food. I have a limited amount of time, in a lot of ways. How I spend that time is one of the most important decisions I can make in my life. One of the core tenets of my philosophy is that humans are not just consumers. We’re gifted enough to be much more than that; this is an important factor in dilleniating us from animals. My goal is to be as efficient a medium of life as possible, of converting as much of what I take in to something once again useful. Refine knowledge, refract life, be a thick lens for chemical energy. This is why time exploring, time studying, time creating, is time well spent. I’ll probably never give up hamburgers completely, but I’m sure going to try to make them a very small part of what I eat.

Nights, passed exits.
The self that waits in line doesn’t stand still.

This isn’t a cross, or a box, or a waiting room.
This is now.

This is what I will make of it, and so, I choose to have it be a remake of myself.

All I need is the fuel. Give me the fuel and I’ll run forever.

[A brief conversation on MSN Messenger, sometime last autumn (paraphrased)...]

B: Why don’t you put comments on your blog?
R: Because Blogger doesn’t handle them well, the interface is all clunky and doesn’t look right with my template.
B: Well, it’d be really helpful if you had them. There’re so many things that you write about that I want to reply to.
R: If I had the ability to comment on my blog, you’d really use it?
B: Of course.
R: Alright. It’ll probably be really tough, but I’ll make something happen.
B: Cool.