ninja mode

So so haven’t posted anything in a really long time. Life has been a little ridiculous and crazy over the past few months.

I don’t (or haven’t) had the time or energy to write here like I used to, and that bothers me a bit because it’s kind of nice to look back on and see what I was doing or thinking months ago. And I’ve been at this since high school, so why should I give up now? I think I might start photoblogging or something. I’ve been traveling a lot in the past year or so and taking a lot more pictures, so that’s an idea.

At some point I’ll post more, but for now that’s all I’ve got.

I’ve been looking for a Mac application that does this exact thing for about a year now. Calaboration is a little application that (sort of) syncs Google Calendar stuff with iCal, which is super handy since I tend to jump between several computers several times a day and being able to access all that at any time helps.

It’s the end of the semester and I’ve been doing a bunch of work for that lately, among other projects. One big one is a series of illustrations for a children’s book in Spanish called “Chico el Lagartijito,” which may or may not be in print someday.

chico el lagartijito

For whatever reason I’ve been learning a lot about Illustrator lately, which is odd, since I’ve used it for years and have always felt that I had a pretty good grip on it. Mostly it’s been the realization that a lot of tricks that work in Photoshop also work in Illustrator, like sketching on a layer and locking it so I can vector on top of it. Why this never occurred to me sooner, I’ll never know.

One image from a series I worked on several years ago has seen a lot of interesting action lately.

net neutrality poster by ~bugbyte on deviantART

The poster from my net neutrality campaign has been making the rounds of the internet, turning up on various blogs from all over the world if you google it. I get more comments and notes about that design than anything else. (Granted, most of the stuff I put up on deviantart is sketchy and just for fun anyway.) But most excitingly, I got an email a little over a month ago from a publisher who wanted to use it in a couple of college textbooks, specifically in a chapter about internet law. That’s neat in and of itself, but it feels good to know that I made something that is in some way socially and culturally relevant.

The semester is ending shortly, and I’m already diving headfirst into getting application stuff together for grad school. It was around this time last year that I started to seriously outline all my plans for all this. And a year or so before that that I actually decided to go through with this. It hardly seems like it’s been that long at all.

So the semester is really finally over. It’s technically been over for a few weeks, but it never really feels over until you have grades in hand, and as of yesterday, I do. Nothing much worth disclosing on that other than I am pleased with what I got; hard work is never for nothing.

I think the best part of all this is having free time again and not feeling guilty about not applying every spare moment to the project of the week. Sleeping in a little, going to work all day, getting things done. Sometimes even things I want to get done rather than have to get done. Life is satisfying, as breaks (particularly summer) tend to be.

I put together my schedule for the fall, and came to several conclusions about that. After the fall semester, I’ll technically be “finished” and I could just be done right there, but I think I’m going to stick around until June. It will be another semester in which I can hang onto my job, take a couple of classes I’ve always wished I’d had time for, and get things in order. Besides that, and this is the least important reason, I think it would just feel very odd to be done with school in the winter. It just doesn’t seem right. So I guess we’ll see where things go from there.

Other than that, not much has been going on. Work, sleep, relax, repeat.

According to oldcomputers.net, the original Macs had all the signatures of the designers cast into the inside of the case.

I have one of those. I’m sort of tempted to crack it open and see.

I’m not sure if this is a just a PowerPC Mac thing, or a Mac thing in general, but it seems that they do not play nice with USB webcams. Not that I’m a webcam fiend or anything, but I have one, and it’s occasionally fun for taking goofy pictures with. It’s a Logitech Quickcam Chat, the older blue and white version. (The one in the link is not the exact one I have, but it has the same name so I’ll assume it’s an updated version. It’s very similar to mine, though.)

Anyway, I decided that there HAD to be some kind of solution to this since I have Leopard now, and Leopard has Photobooth, and Photobooth is all kinds of ridiculous fun. So I went on a Google hunt. And after much Google hunting, I got it going.

Here’s what I did:

1. Download macam: macam is an independently-created USB webcam driver for OSX. Grab yourself the proper version for your version of OSX and install. It’s easy. After that, open up the macam application and test it out. If it works, great. If not, I have no idea what your setup is and I can’t help you.

2. Download iChatUSBCam: iChatUSBCam is another USB webcam driver for OSX, but this one is specifically for iChat. It’s shareware, and I’m still on the trial. Now, I didn’t do very extensive testing or experimentation here, so I’m not sure if it affected anything other than iChat (which was the problem I was trying to solve since I basically never use iChat anyway) but I know it works for iChat, at the very least.

3. Start Skitch: This one, I can’t help you with. Skitch is still in an invitation-only beta, so do what you have to to get your hands on it. It has a function built in which allows you to capture from your webcam (which is terrific if you have a shiny MacBook) which also works after you install macam/iChatUSBCam.

4. Start Photobooth: Photobooth is OSX’s built-in camera-grabbing application. It works just like those silly photo booths you find in malls – hit a button and in 3 seconds it snaps a picture. From what I have read, Photobooth doesn’t support USB cameras, and initially, I couldn’t get my camera going in Photobooth, but if I start Skitch first, then start Photobooth, then close Skitch, Photobooth magically starts working. I cannot explain why this is since it’s well outside my realm of knowledge (for now), but I know that it works.

Here are the (ridiculous) results:

Someday, when I am a famous Rock Star, this one is going to be my cd cover.

That’s right, I’m suspicious. Suspicious OF YOU.

And after my first cd, this will be the cover for my second cd. Creepy looking. I think it will be like a “Meg Unplugged” album where I wail depressing songs to an acoustic guitar. It’ll sell millions.

No, I absolutely have no plans on becoming an actual Rock Star someday, but it’s kind of fun to think about. I haven’t got a musical bone in my body.

…then again, neither do a lot of actual rock stars.

I overheard (more than participated in) a conversation today among some people I know about how “modern art is stupid,” after discussing the installation of an unusual (but temporary) sculpture installation in Founder’s Plaza at UB. (pictured above; photo from UB News Center)

Liking or disliking the sculpture is really a matter of opinion, and that’s that, but to make broad generalizations about the whole of “modern art” on a set of incorrect facts annoys me. I mean, I guess I can’t blame most people for not understanding the term since it seems to be perpetuated incorrectly in society, but no one uses it correctly, and no one understands it, and sometimes I am fairly certain that no one cares. There is actually a difference: modern art is basically art made between the early 19th century up until the 1970’s, and that’s it. After that, it becomes postmodern art – something entirely different. It’s “contemporary,” something that talks in some way about our time, in the language of our time. I can’t really fault people for not understanding the subtleties of art, as there are quite a good many others delineating modern and postmodern, but it bothers me all the same. (Oddly enough, when I started at UB I never thought I’d understand the difference myself, or why it even mattered.)

They debated a bit about the point of the sculpture and passed it off as “ridiculous” because they haven’t taken the time to understand it. Is it ridiculous? Maybe it is. It’s certainly strange and a definite break from the typical setting. But to blow off an entire era in art history as a result makes little sense.

I piped in at this point; isn’t the sculpture possibly about motion? Wind? It’s temporary, and that’s certainly the direction the wind blows from on Founder’s Plaza.

Oh wait, it actually is.

I got three or four blank stares. I mean, discussion of modern and postmodern and generalizations aside, I just don’t understand why people can’t pause a moment to just look at something for what it is or what it means. These sculptures are unusual. I’m not saying I like or dislike them, I actually feel pretty indifferent to their presence. But they still are an effort to make a representation of something – in this case, the Lake Erie winds. Understanding the meaning or presence of an artwork takes a bit of time, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes lifetimes, but regardless, it is worth the time. It’s pointless to be frustrated about this, but there are times I wish that more people could stop and look at these things – art in general – from a different perspective. Take a moment to pause and look and discourse. I’ve quoted her here somewhere before, but one of my favorite quotes with regard to this particular subject is one by Georgia O’Keefe:

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time – and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.

Art is important and powerful. People don’t really realize this. Throughout history, it’s always been a commonplace practice to wipe out the artwork of another nation when you invade them. Almost everyone remembers when the statue(s) of Saddam Hussein were torn down most recently in Iraq, only a couple of years ago. If you’re trying to demoralize and destroy a particular people, you first annihilate their artwork. Think about all the art taken and destroyed by the Nazis during World War II. Art is a physical manifestation of culture. If you take language and image and spoken word and every other bit of ephemera associated with a particular culture and boil it down, you will ultimately arrive at the artwork of those given people. Art is power.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that these strange wind sculptures are a manifestation of our culture as part of the UB community, or as Western New Yorkers, New Yorkers in general, or even Americans, but it’s undoubtedly something that is part of our culture as a whole, although it is one small fragment. Treating this with such blatant disregard and simply not taking the time to understand before forming an opinion bothers me. I’m not saying you have to love and cherish it, but I believe you should at least have some idea of what you are hating before you hate it.

I’m not a coffee fan, and I’m even less a fan of Starbuck’s, but I got a Dark Chocolate-Peppermint Frappuccino out of the vending machine today and. Oh. Oh yum.

I think if my car tasted like something, this is what my car would taste like.

Yes, her name is Peppermint.

I felt the urge to continue on the same subject as my previous post. We watched the video above in one of my classes earlier this week, and I feel like it explains fairly well part of what I was getting at with my other post, as well as hypothesizing where we’re going with all this. History follows patterns, and it’s interesting to see how they start and end, and wonder where we will fit into the next one. If I were to guess, I would say that we’re on the leading edge of the next revolution; we have come from the most primitive tech of the early internet, have gotten a grasp on how to improve it for the masses, and learned a few new tricks about what to do with it. Like the initial print revolution in the 15th-16th centuries, we’ve had our start, and now we’re refining and expanding. We’re not quite in the thick of it just yet, but we’re getting there.

From this video, I also picked up a new word: prosumer. At first I thought it was just a concept created by the video’s creator, but then out of curiosity I wiki’ed it, and lo and behold, it’s a real term. Sorta. One of my classmates brought up an interesting example of prosumerism in real life: the Google Image Tagging Game. Here, “players” have the fun of playing a competitve game against another human “opponent,” creating new content (image tags) while Google reaps the benefits of free labor and new content for their use. It’s an interesting model.

This has really been a good semester for thought-provoking discussion, Tuesdays and Thursdays in particular. I come out of at least two classes on those days wanting to write about everything I’ve picked up in class, just to get it out of my head. It is wonderful, and always makes me glad that I transferred.

I had planned an entire entry about the education system in America, but I think I’ll save that one for another day.