autumn tactics

Though I’m not sure I deserve it given the amount of diligence I’ve been putting into practicising lately, I bought it. Oh well, we’ll see what happens…

I bought a new Canon 50mm USM lens for the 5D. The zoom that came with the kit was always limiting at f/4, so this prime should hold its own in handheld, low-light situations. Just in time for the company Christmas party!

I have a new keyboard. This keyboard’s space key should work 100% of the time. The last keyboard’s did not. You can imagine how no space key would impede writing. Japanese was especially frustrating because the conversion key from kana to kanji is the space bar. Oh yes, it was most impossible to do any sort of writing at home.

Mail, blogs, chat, GOOGLE!

Time after time again I had to CTRL+C a space from some random web page and then CTRL+V it between every word. Maddening. Yes.

But I’m back. Slightly crazed, but back. Expect much more writing (tonight I want to get at least three posts in.) This again is a good time to recommend the RSS, because these entries are dated retroactively. A feed will inform you of them nonetheless.

Huzzah for space bars.

Come on, my star is fading
And I swerve out of control
If I, if I’d only waited
I’d not be stuck here in this hole
Come here my star is fading
And I swerve out of control
And I swear I waited and waited
I’ve got to get out of this hole

Stuck on the end of this ball and chain
And I’m on my way back down again
Stood on a bridge, tied to the noose
Sick to the stomach
You can say what you mean
But it won’t change a thing
I’m sick of the secrets
Stood on the edge, tied to a noose
You came along and you cut me loose
–Coldplay

Missing the War

All is quiet, his tired eyes
See figures jotted down
And clothes all strewn around the bedroom floor
Now nothing’s adding up
And nothing’s making sense
She’s sleeping like a baby
She doesn’t know he wasn’t meant for this
I’m missing the war
I’m missing the war, all night
Missing the war
I’m missing the war

So much time so little to say
-Ben Folds

Work has reverted to the Saturday/Sunday combo mode again temporarily, so most of my plans this weekend were squashed. However I did manage to leave on Sunday around 4:30 so I could visit my friend Daisuke’s restaurant in Edogawabashi. He’s in the process of renovating the new building for business, and selling excess dishware in the process.

I met some new people and made friends. It’s hard for me to remember names off the bat until I get someone’s personality lodged in my mind, so I try to associate faces with kanji (brother 聖也、sister 麻衣、father 弘).

I’ve been planning it for a while, but a few days ago I finally decided to set aside the time for a trip to Vietnam. I took a couple days off of work and arranged a flight to the nation occupied so much of the American conscience in the late 1960s. Since our countries are still not the best of friends politically, an application for a tourist visa is required from the sleepy embassy in Moto-Yoyogi. Yesterday I did just that.

(This photograph was taken with my new 8-megapixel camera phone, not too shabby visual quality. I didn’t even have to apply any of my curve and sharpening Photoshop actions.)

I chose Hanoi over Ho Chi Minh (Saigon), as the city experiences 80mm less rain on average in September, though still technically the tail end of the rainy season. I’m just beginning to sift through the information on Wikitravel, but already it seems I have taxi scams, motorbike versus pedestrian, diarrhea, and cobra blood wine all waiting for less than three dollars. Hedging my bets, I’ve already starting digging up travelogues of vegetarian backpackers.

Oh Heart of Asia…

Woken up in the morning, there was a fragrance hanging on. There was a painting hung in my heart and a melody strung around my head. I’d be asleep for so long, I’d nearly forgotten it. But the sunshine and the flowers were calling, and I ran outside barefoot to meet them.

They were sitting
They were sitting on the strawberry swing
Every moment was so precious

Could be blue
I don’t mind
Without you it’s a waste of time
– Coldplay

Today marks the first time I’ve had two consecutive days off in roughly two months. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have made a full recovery, my spirits are much higher and there’s a spring in my step that hasn’t been there for a while. I awaken with no difficulty, fatigue, or dread in my heart. I am happy to rise, and when walking down the street I am driven to song. As the bird says, “I’m not singing because I am happy, I’m happy because I sing”.

Yesterday I managed finally getting the winter coats and blankets into the vacuum compressed bags, as well as my grand recabling done. Dust bunnies have been relocated to the slums of Dubai and many a zip strip keeps the myriad of wires behind my AV setup manageable.

Today I will finish migration of my phone address book and tomorrow be rid of the accursed Willcom. I also will repair the steering column damage done to my green cruiser bicycle, in addition to finishing cleaning. I have prepared meals for myself two days in a row! I know this is your standard (well duh, you’re out of college, fool) terrority for those single age twenty-nine and over, but you have to understand how complete lethargy from overwork drives away all motivation to not only prepare food, but eat it as well.

Yesterday I had a three hard-boiled eggs and a bowl of natto rice for breakfast. Today I took the preparation a step further and made miso, carrot, and boned salmon soup from the last unfurried ingredients in the refridgerator. It was quite nice actually. And my rice got a power-up as well from today’s serving of white and brown with five grain mix added for good measure. I even brewed up a pot of my classic spearmint tea.

I am counting the days until I remove television from my life completely. Once I assemble a plan for a filing system for prints and negatives, I will make the switch and my dear Toshiba will be reallocated for resale/recycling. Huzzah for books and music.

Last night I also managed to visit the darkroom for the first time in about three months. I am getting better, in terms of technique. It’s more a matter of patience and thinking before moving on (duh), but still I am pleased to have far less pictures stuck together or developer burns from poor washing. It bothers my conscience how much water and chemicals are used for my hobby, however.

In any case, I would show you the prints but as you know the monitor is an inferior medium for displaying images when compared to paper, so you’ll just have to visit me and come see my albums.

Speaking of albums, I upgraded Gallery to 2.3, the only change you’ll really notice though are the slideshows are far nicer than before, thanks to Piclens. Now if only the Gallery integration worked with WordPress properly…

Now that my workstation is nearly set up, I can start the DAM workflow I’ve been planning for months. Remaining big ticket items are raising the monitors to my eye-level, and a 64-bit copy of Photoshop to go with Windows 7.

…slowly, but surely, growing.

For the children of the world, happiness means Christmas. For the game publishers of the world, Christmas means autumn sales, and so, for the game devlopers of the world, autumn sales means kiss your summer goodbye.

This is the second year in a row that I’ve observed this phenomenon. The weeks tick by with scores of events I would normally focus on, all blossoming to evaporate without me ever being aware of their existence. I haven’t been to photo class, much less the darkroom, in over five weeks.

So in amidst the constant waves of management, tech ramp up and lock down, there are but a few points worth mentioning in my life. Here they are presented in coarse, unprocessed snapshot format, for I have less than four brain cells not running in degraded mode.

This is my teikaku. Essentially the national government’s plan to shore up the flagging economy: give every working man, woman, and child 12000 yen (about 120 dollars) to stimulate consumer spending. Kind of like a tiny tax refund with the suggestion you use it to save the sagging market by purchasing domestic beer.

This is a very classicly inspired Rusty photograph. It’s got virtually all of the elements that first enchanted me about Japan… blue sky, fish scale clouds, tall evergreens and a lattice of man-made cables around a lower quadrant of the frame.

One day last week I came outside and discovered some unseen prism was casting a near perfect gradient of visible light into the stairwell.

When I came home that same night, I met this frog in the driveway. His name is Carl.

Only fraternal love keeps game devs from choking each other to death during the march towards ZBR.

And only a panoplly of the finest ingredients an Asakusabashi sushi-chef can collect from around the country can sustain my haggard body.

Since I have no time to go outdoors I’ve been entertaining the idea of synthetic melanin stimulation.

After six and a half dutiful years of service, Eilonwy, my WinBook J4 has died (the coroner has reported a confluence of excessive dust intake and old age as the cause). This has motivated me to move up my schedule for building a PC capable of meeting my needs for high-bandwidth photographic and audio processing.

Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz/FSB1333MHz/L2cache 6MB)
ASUSTeK P5Q PRO
4GB PC8500 DDR2 1066MHz JE
HighPoint RocketRAID 2640×4
2x OCZ Vertex 120GB SSDs w/ 64MB cache paired in RAID-0
Hitachi/IBM 1TB HDD w/ 16MB cache
NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT (DVI×2/HDTV)
BUFFALO 8x Blu-ray drive

Ungodly fast, and currently running Windows 7 RC1 with aplomb. I have named her Cheyenne, in honor of my long-since deceased laptop which carried me through undergrad.

This is the view looking down my street to the west. Depending on the time of year and weather, the sun gets low enough to cut through all the air pollution and make a glorious golden light, which reflects at just the right angle off of the sound-dampening panels on the outside of the highway. In person it’s actually much, much, more beautiful, and much, much brighter; so bright that you’re nearly blinded by the reflection. But the computer monitor is a poor medium for portraying such majesty, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

And the cold, and the rain, and it means nothing. There is so little of weather in malaise. A haircut and a shave, a new bed and some tools. But fingernails still grow and there is no satisfying quiet.

I haven’t put up many pictures yet demonstrating the MC Zenitar 16mm lens I bought for the Fujica last autumn. It provides interesting shots if you’re unfamiliar with fisheyes, but the gimmick of the distortion is a bit of a handicap; it can easily destroy a shot. Another element to manipulate.

So all of the blog-synching and photo-adjusting madness is finished. As you’d expect, going through and touching up hundreds of Venetian photographs was as monotonous and stressful as scanning them. I could very well have made many more interesting photographs out of the material with the right adjustments, but in the end it was too repetitive and too much tedium. In any case, a so-so batch of seventy-nine shots are in the gallery.

Here is the equally dry set of journal entries from the second leg of my European trip, mostly for record-keeping purposes:

Ah, Venice
Uneventful
Old, new, and always the music
The islands
Stalling
A little bit of everything
Pensive; tea
Phony
Picky
Recap
In Soviet Russia, beard grows you
In Soviet Russia, security go through you