monday, may 31, 2004
LA, not at its worst
I took two rolls of film with my old analog camera. Mister Kyle and I walked to the photo place, waited for a while, and paid $15 to develop them. Out of all that, I only like one or two pictures.
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Highland Park, USC and Fry’s
My camera is home, and it’s all repaired and lovely. I celebrated with a hundred pictures yesterday.
Smog, graffiti, high gas prices, and palm trees: LA at its finest.
A broken exit sign (taken by Mister Kyle, since I wasn’t tall enough).
The panoply of expired parking passes in Mister Kyle’s car.
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friday, may 28, 2004
most of my life, in one shot
anyway, i hadn’t posted a picture of my cat for a while.
taken with my dad’s girlfriend’s camera. i can’t wait for mine.
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thursday, may 27, 2004
uno & hackysack
i’m doing a photo essay about break-time games and sports at my school. these are a couple of the rejects.
the essay’s for our little newspaper. i’m the editor. weee! we only started a few weeks ago, so there will only be one issue this year.
one problem: nobody is turning in their stuff. crap. i might end up writing half of the paper.
i took those with the school yearbook’s camera, but mine should be coming in the mail—all repaired!—any day now. :)
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monday, may 24, 2004
single listeners searching msnbc for plastic pee
partial screenshots that have been collecting for weeks in a folder on my desktop.
- that’s a pretty wide variety of artists. i can’t remember whose itms page this was on.
- aren’t all searches custom? this was from some housing-search site.
- “gallium m. smack” is a terrific spammer name.
- quite an unorthodox set of categories.
- the itms said “pee sessions”! teehee.
- doesn’t rob look like he’s made out of plastic? that’s from the banner-ad version of those ubiquitous harry potter movie ads.
- reminds me of “the man in the coon-skin cap / in the big pen / wants eleven dollar bills / but you only got ten”, from “subterranean homesick blues” by bob dylan. it’s part of some banner ad for a dating site.
- a rectangle of very high-density geekiness. the article itself.
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tuesday, may 18, 2004
dividing line ran through
looking through a big old window on the 20th floor of a minor skyscraper in downtown los angeles is naturally rather interesting. you can see the shiny brown-gold sun set over the hills. the sunset! it’s usually hidden by a zillion buildings (unless i’m standing on a specific scrubby hill in pasadena). i guess you can see the sunset at the beach too, but mister kyle and i tend to be there when it’s already dark.
yeah. there’s the endless cars crawling along the freeway as if they were boxy grains of triclosan in some transparent hand lotion poured down the asphalt. below my skyscraper, a brick building has trees and canvas umbrellas on the roof — somebody said it’s the jonathan club. the smaller roof next to it has a tiny basketball court. i attempt to spy, but i can’t see anyone there.
at this altitude, the other skyscrapers are even more impressive. i like those giant clunky obelisks, covered in all their tricksy reflective glass. i imagine they’d make super-great mirrorproject shots, except that the reflective surfaces are thousands of feet away.
volunteer at kusc and you too can stuff envelopes for two hours and then, on your way out, stare through a lovely window.
i took photographs but they need to be developed.
update 5/31/04: a photo.
it is strange to take photos with my old film camera. first of all, i have to buy film. weird! you mean photos cost money? that’s like saying i have to pay $7 for a small pile of new text files. wait, that’s a notebook. anyway, the camera makes a noise when you snap a picture. i wish i could switch that off; i like to take pictures inconspicuously. then, there’s no little lcd preview screen, so i have no idea what i’m doing. not to mention that i have to pay more money before i can see the results, and then i have to scan them.
mister kyle and i visited the central library this weekend. afterwards, we walked around downtown, but i forgot to bring my camera.
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better stay away from those
five things i’ve read and watched recently, and some of the ways in which they relate to each other.
i want to keep a running diagram like this. everything i read and watch should go on it. it would be huge and sprawling and quite interesting.
i wish omnigraffle’s demo mode let you use more than 20 items.
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wednesday, may 12, 2004
a can of paint it fell on my head
i spent several hours this afternoon fixing the id tags of my itunes library. yeah, that’s my favorite unproductive thing to do when i’m rather stressed from school and stuff.
amazon’s popular music search is the only true source of cover art and release years. it’s also good for total track numbers. i’m not sure about its formatting of album titles, though — sometimes they’re slightly different from the cd’s “real” title. also, i wish it let me search by song title, so i could easily see all the albums that a song is on.
ieatbrainz was somewhat helpful for identifying the albums and track numbers of some songs, but i already have most of my music painstakingly identified. i imagine this would be really good if half your music was “track 8 - unknown” or something.
gracenote’s cddb has a pretty complete set of song/album/artist information. some of its suggested album titles, however, are hopelessly obscure, and sometimes the data is incorrect. amazon is better for most of that, except for when you don’t know what album a song belongs to.
the itunes music store is perfect for figuring out those pesky genres. the chosen categorization isn’t my favorite, but it is fairly consistent. just insert the album into “search” and note the genre.
of course, it doesn’t have some particular specimens of super-awesome music, but you can guess on those genres.
hey wait, it now has the latest album! woohoo!
now i will go listen to 30-second previews on repeat for half an hour, because (alas!) the songs are too new to be well-distributed on file-sharing networks. i have a birthday in a month. maybe i will buy it.
