Huntington Beach: Reprocessed by ehpien

On Thursday, I (and my husband) be heading out for vacation and then the biggest librarian conference of the year, ALA Annual. Most of my pre-vacation chores are done- getting a housesitter, setting up hotel and car and printing out maps, checking and double checking flights and everything, laundry, etc. etc. etc. The big thing I have left to do is write a paper for school-it’s not due till the 30th, but I don’t really want to work on it while on vacation.

Vacations are exhausting. They’re even more exhausting when you mash business together with it, and the fact that I’m in a distance class to adds to it. Still, I’m looking forward to visiting museums, seeing old friends, going to the beach, and just loafing around. I’m trying to suppress me “OMG this trip is costing HOW much???” tendencies- after all, this is the first trip we’ve taken since 2004.

It’s not like I have been super active around here, but I probably won’t post much while on vacation. Then again, I just might. I will be armed with a camera and a laptop after all - that’s a bit of a change for me. I have never traveled with a laptop before. It will be interesting to see if I work it into the trip or just ignore it. It will, of course, be super useful when I make it to ALA Annual at the end of the trip. Though my liveblogging skills are no where near as good as some I might mention.

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800

Just execute that command in a folder full of jpg’s, and you’ll have an AVI movie suitable for… well whatever you want. I’ve been playing with the frame rate- I think 10 is a tad bit too fast, but 5 too slow. 7 or 8 seems like a good compromise.

So here are my first two experiments with stop motion photography.

This one is a series of photos I took in the winter (from the Sheldon Art Museum to my house), just by pressing the shutter button over and over and over. I understand that some Canon cameras have time lapse photography built into the firmware now- I’ll definitely be looking into that when it is time to buy a new camera.

This next one is a time lapse of me working on a painting. I have not yet decided what the painting will be- if it does not turn out, I will cut it up for smaller paintings.

To do the time lapse in the studio, I used the software that came with my Canon Digital Rebel- which is buggy and quits occasionally for no discernible reason. If I can find my old Ti-83 and connector, I will give this a try. Sounds pretty ideal. I’m also hoping to give this a try, when I get my Arduino at THAT Camp.

About once a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) I will give away a painting or drawing. Yup, totally free. I’m giving away small stuff, so postage is cheap and not that much $$$ went into making them. I have given away 6 paintings so far.

As for the why I am doing this: well, there’s two reasons. One, I just enjoy the process of it. Posting the image, getting a ‘winner,’ and mailing out the artwork is fun.

The other reason though, has to do with the funny inner workings of my brain. When I make artwork, if I have no idea where it will go, I end up kind of lost in the process. I have no desire to create a stockpile of art- in fact, I already have that, and it’s annoying. Art is made to be seen, and the art sitting in my attic- well, it’s not being seen. (It’s also too big to give away - shipping would be over $100.)

At the same time, I like making art. It’s fun, relaxing, and engages a part of my brain that doesn’t get a workout doing anything else. I enjoy the materials, I enjoy working and reworking something.

You may ask- why not just sell the art? well, that’s where it gets a bit dicey. Selling art is actually harder than you’d think. Even at a cheap price, people are fairly reluctant to buy art. If it is priced too low, people will think it is worthless, and if the price is too high, people can’t afford it. I’m not really interested in selling prints, either- if you want a print, just go to the Flickr set and print it out yourself. (By the way, you’ve seen those fancy “Giclée” art prints, right? That means inkjet print. Hopefully archival quality, but not always.)

The truth is, selling small artworks has a razor thin profit margin. And selling things, for me, takes a lot of the magic out of creating, I start thinking about paint costs and paper costs and the ratio of these costs to what I’m selling it for and whether this artwork is sellable, etc. The profit margin goes up as volume or price increases, but I have little time to devote to making prints or more artwork.

So, the solution I came up with was to give stuff away. This way, I don’t have to worry about the pressures of selling, but I still get to send the artwork away to someone who will (hopefully) appreciate it. It improves my mental state while painting. It also gives me a nice ego boost when people say nice things about my artwork.

Of course, I started doing all this when “free” is all the rage- see this Wired article for details. This isn’t a coincidence- a few years ago, I would have never dreamed of giving away artwork. It was simply unthinkable, an undervaluation of yourself as an artist AND other artists everywhere. However - for me, now, free is much better than cheap because I can imagine the value of the artwork to be anything I want. I get around the messiness of pricing artwork while still putting it in the hands of someone that will appreciate it. The idea of free is all around, I am just taking the idea and using it to my advantage.

I can’t, of course, make a living by giving away artwork. No, I have a day job for that, and this puts me firmly back into the “hobbyist” side of the art making world. Art as hobby is a sort of dirty word in art school. “The Hobbysist” is one who does paint by numbers, Bob Ross paintings, or knock offs of other paintings (none of which, I might add, I have a problem with-as long as one doesn’t sell the knockoffs.) But the hobbyist can also be someone who makes original works, but just doesn’t want to get into the art market- because they can make more money doing something else, or because they don’t want to be self employed, or some other reason entirely.

And that brings me to the final point of this post- I realize now that I don’t really want art to become my job. At least not right now. Again, this is probably because of the weird inner-workings of my brain- but once art making becomes my job, the way I feed myself, it loses a little bit of magic. I find it hard to separate the art making process from the act of selling it to make money. I once thought I could make art and sell art and keep the two seperate from each other. I now know can’t. At least, not right now.

There were a lot of little usability issues- menus in different places, etc., that were minor annoyances. But the reason I will be rolling back comes down to 2 issues:

Firefox 3 Beta

Don’t get me wrong, Firefox 3 looks nice and has great new functionality. But it doesn’t work with my extensions, and I REALLY need it to at least work with Zotero. I’ll wait to use Firefox 3 until it is officially released (in June, I think). I know I can patch extensions to run and all that, but I just don’t want to.

Synergy

As demoed in this crappy video, I use Synergy to move my mouse between my workstations. This has completely changed the way I work and I can’t live without it now. It’s great when one computer is being laggy or not behaving right, I just jump over to the other computer for a bit. Anyway, Synergy client isn’t working in Hardy Heron for me. I googled it, found this thread, which suggests running Synergy as root (sudo synergyc host) but that didn’t work for me either.

Rolling back

So I’m going to reinstall 7.10 tonight- not a big deal, my /home folder is on another partition so it shouldn’t be a problem, and I’ve already backed up the home folder just in case.

I realize that some of the problems might be solved if I did a clean install- obviously something went wrong with the system sometime Monday night. I have been running Hardy on my laptop for over a month without issue. The only thing I can think is that installing Inkscape somehow caused it, as that was the only change I remember making. That was weird, too, though- Monday, I went to use Inkscape and it was gone. Not in menus, not anywhere. That’s why I reinstalled.

Although I was annoyed with this turn of events, I was not nearly as frustrated I have been in the past when the gui breaks or other random things happen. I am comfortable enough in the command line now to at least back up my files, and I have home on its own partition. And since there are no annoying license issues with Ubuntu (unlike windows, which I always lose the key for) reinstalling is easy.

The above video is a video of a water balloon popping taken with a camera that will take 2000 frames per second.It reminds me of a painting by David Hockney:

David Hockney - A Bigger Splash 1967
acrylic on canvas, 243.8 x 243.8 cm, tate gallery, london

We take for granted the shape of the splash. When I first saw the painting, I thought “big deal.” But the splash is not what we see- it’s a painting of what we see when we look at a photograph of a splash. A frozen moment in time. Photography has now been around long enough that there isn’t a person alive that hasn’t grown up in a world where a machine can capture an image in an instant. The first Kodak camera was manufactured in 1888.

Muybridge pioneered high speed photography around 1880:

I can’t imagine not knowing what something looks like in stop motion. When I see a splash, I carry with me what water looks like frozen, thanks to the research of Harold Eugene Edgerton, who inspired the below photo.

For a long time, I was obsessed with the freezing of time. Hockney partially inspired it, but I also was influenced a lot by the work of Bill Viola, who uses special cameras (like the above, but ‘only’ 300 frames per second) and other methods to explore the stopping or slowing of time. One such artwork was called “The Greeting,” and was a recreation of a renaissance painting slowed down thanks to the use of technology to slow the motion down.

Another work that was very influential was The Reflecting Pool

This inspired a few paintings, none of which were very good.

I’m still interested in these new ways of seeing- ways that change what we see, how we think about things, and what we know about the world. I can’t go back to not knowing what a frozen drop of water or, now, a water balloon popping look like. I can’t imagine a world without stop motion photography, a world that I couldn’t freeze the action of anything I want simply by taking out my camera. It is technology that enables work like this - not just because computers are used in the creation of the artwork, but because before photography, we wouldn’t be so trained to see frozen time.

PS- you can see an interview with Bill Viola here.

photo credit: pavelrybin

Step 1. Get out of debt.

My husband had some credit card debt and got out of it pretty quickly by living well below his means and paying down the credit card in large chunks. Don’t fall for that “you deserve a plasma TV” crap advertising put out by credit card companies. You deserve to not give so much of your money to creditors.

Step 2. Save some money

The trick here is to make yourself believe you are poor. We do this by having automatic withdrawal into savings. We use the “we’re poor” excuse a lot - which isn’t strictly true. We’re not rich, but we’re no where near poor. But, we pay our savings first, and that is non negotiable. So we can honestly say that no, we don’t have the money to go out to dinner right now. We live on about 66% of our income. The big piece of advice I can give here is START SAVING AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE. Never, ever underestimate the power of compound interest.

How can I live on 66% of my income?

So there’s the super simple plan for getting rich. Sounds easy, huh? Well, of course, it’s always more complicated than it sounds. Your mileage may vary.

For one, living on 66% of your income is just not possible for many people. Our financial equation would be vastly different if we had kids or lived somewhere more expensive. Still, there are always things that can be cut. We used to spend $80 on cable a month, and don’t even miss it now. A good Netflix plan can keep you in more video than you should probably watch. We switched to Vonage for phone, which saved us about $30 a month. We live in a “bad” neighborhood (this is by Lincoln standards, it’s not really bad) which means a) our house was cheaper and b) we can walk to work. Probably the main thing we do to save money is live in the Midwest. Depending on your profession, you may be able to maintain a much higher standard of living for far less in Nebraska than on the coasts. Of course there are tradeoffs, and that’s a decision to make. I also decided to go to a cheaper school that’s not highly ranked- I learned that in my profession it doesn’t really matter.

The “live like a pauper for 5 years” plan

If at all possible, it may be worth it to live like a pauper while you are young. To explain why, I’ll lay out a savings plan below.

This sample savings plan is for a married couple who start saving at 28 and save till retirement at age 55. (I like the idea of early retirement). This is assuming an average return of 10%. For the first two years, one partner is in school and they can’t afford (as) much savings. (All figures are very approximate)

So at age 30, the couple is doing better financially (maybe making $70,000 a year combined) but still spend as if they had only $40,000. After that, at age 35, they start putting 10,000 a year away again, so they can buy a nicer house, travel more, maybe cut back on work a little or have kids. Because of that 5 years of living like paupers, there will be a pretty big chunk of change sitting around collecting interest. Actually, if they stopped putting any money in at age 34, they’d have 1,593,741.51 at age 55.

I got this “live like a pauper while young” idea because it’s a lot easier to live cheaply while young. Your health expenses are generally lower. If you don’t have kids yet, that’s one big expense missing. Most young people are used to living cheaply when they get out of school, so it’s not much of a lifestyle change. Many people have started earning decent money by age 30 and tend to blow it on a nice car, etc. But if you can put spending off and pretend you’re still a student for 5 years, you’ll see a huge payoff. I used a married couple as an example because I am married- if you are not married, try having roommates for 5 years to cut down on expenses. There are lots of people you can share expenses with besides a husband or wife.

Variations

The plan above is just an example- my own financial plan involves putting some money in a Roth IRA and some in regular stocks to stagger the money I’ll be able to take out. I also have savings plans to start a business. My point, though, is that saving can be very straightforward. If you pick a diversified index fund with a trusted, insured company, you can probably get away with just having one. If you can put away enough money and plan for an early enough retirement, you don’t have to worry about fluctuations as much because you can always put off retirement for a few years.

How to invest

So how do you invest? Well, I got the book “Investing for Dummies” which actually has a pretty nice overview of the investment market, but it boils down to this:

1. Use a low cost website like vanguard.com. Sign up for an account, hook up your bank account, and away you go.

2. Stick with low cost index funds like the S&P 500 index or the whole stock market index. If you want to diversify more, get some foreign stock index funds too, and maybe some bonds. Or you can go with a formula from a pro.

3. Keep putting money in, don’t touch it FOR AT LEAST 10-15 YEARS.

Also:

If you want to work out a savings plan, use a compound interest calculator to determine how far your money will go.

Always participate in your company’s savings plan if they have one and match funds, and invest that money in an index fund as well. If they don’t match funds, I don’t think you are necessarily better off using your company plan.

Make the entire process as automatic as possible. The less you have to think about saving, the more you’ll save.

The End

So there’s some basic financial advice. This is why I can’t understand the huge number of financial blogs out there. They all pretty much say the same thing, with slight variations. The ones that don’t advise you to do all sorts of different things, when the best bet is just to pick a plan and stick to it. Unless you are prepared to devote a serious amount of time to managing finances (I’m not) you are probably better off just picking an index fund that mirrors the market.

And I said it once but I’ll say it again: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF COMPOUND SAVINGS.

Also, keep in mind that I am in no way a financial adviser, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.

PS- before I posted this, I saw a post on lifehacker which links to an article on Warren Buffet basically affirming what I said above about just putting money into index funds.

Fruits Basket opening and ending

I like them both so much I couldn’t choose just one.

Ouran opening

Just so happy and poppy- makes me feel happy whenever I listen.

Naruto ending (Wind)

It’s in English! Sorta.

Bleach ending (Life is a Boat)

By Rie Fu- I really enjoy her other music too.

Here’s the whole song:

Eureka 7 ending

None of the other endings were ever as good.

Chobits opening

Another happy poppy one

Tokyo Mew Mew ending

This one is just catchy as all get out. Plus it makes me hungry.

Excel Saga opening

I like how they have the characters singing.

Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya closing

Dancing! I love the dancing!

La Corda D’Oro opening

Mostly I just really love the voice on this one. How many cartoons are there about violin players?

Spice and Wolf ending

Another one of those mostly English ones. Geoff and I debated about what the exact lyrics were (little wolf inside a cart? little wolf inside a girl?)

Nana opening

Pretty much all the openings and closings were good on this anime, but this is my favorite.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei opening

Just a warning, this one is a little disturbing.

Cowboy Bebop

And of course, no list like this would be complete without cowboy Bebop.

There were lots I left out, believe it or not- and I know I missed some.

I have seen a lot of comparisons of Linux (especially Ubuntu) to Microsoft OS’s, but lately, most of the comparisons are to Vista. It makes sense, of course- Vista is the new kid, presumable the heir to Microsoft’s OS legacy. But more and more I’m wondering is XP won’t stick around (and be supported) longer than anyone thought. And XP may be the biggest competitor Linux has to face.

Thing is, Linux supporters WANT to compare Linux to Vista. Vista is an easy target, called “perhaps the most frustrating product Microsoft has yet heaved onto the computing public” by some, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Meanwhile, XP is finding its way to a variety of low cost computers and proving to work very well. Two recent stories I have noticed:

Meredith Farkas purchased a Cloudbook and had troubles with it. Her husband installed XP on it, and the thing worked much better than it did with Linux.

OLPC News says Windows will be on the OLPC in no time. OLPC welcomes this. For the record, I don’t think a choice of operating systems is a bad thing, as long as it does not detract from Sugar and customizing Linux for the OLPC.

In Meredith’s story, especially, we find a case of where XP just worked. It’s not surprising- XP has been around for years, and all sorts of companies have been doing R&D for Microsoft. Of course that adds up to a OS that works fairly well on just about anything. And I can say from my own experience that XP is not the horror story many make it out to be- it’s a pretty stable OS, especially when I don’t go overboard with installing every new program I find. Plus, XP has some of the lowest system requirements around. Even Xubuntu recommends at least 256 megs of memory, 128 megs more than XP. (Granted, I have not tried running XP on 128 megs of memory.)

The makers of the Cloudbook didn’t appear to optimize the OS at ALL for the system- some of the setup screens were too big for the screen’s small resolution! The OLPC has power issues that keep me from using it as intended- the promised power management isn’t here yet, and 4 hours is a far cry from the promised battery longevity (one of the reasons I bought the laptop.) I’m not saying I wouldn’t have bought the OLPC had I known, but if the XP can manage to put the computer to sleep upon close, it will be a huge step towards working for what I want it for.

I still think the OLPC is an amazing product. The design is marvelous- I love using it. And the software kinks I think will be worked out in time. But I don’t think XP on the OLPC is the end of the world- especially as a second operating system. Exposure to more than one operating system is a good thing, in my opinion. (You might be able to infer that from the title of the website, I suppose.) Perhaps Sugar is an ideal interface for the 6-10 year olds, and then some may move on to using XP, or another version of Linux, or some other OS not yet invented. OLPC’s are supposed to have an amazing usable life, so it is not unthinkable that kids who get an OLPC now might want to use it to make money in the future- and that might mean using Microsoft products.

And I’m not about to give up on Linux, either. My main computer at home still runs Ubuntu beautifully, and I would be hard pressed to fine another operating system that is both simple when I want it to be yet almost infinitely customizable. It is, in my opinion, the prettiest OS out there too (or, at least, it can be with the right artwork installed.)

I realize I am not a typical use case for the OLPC, but part of the reason I bought one was to use as a conference laptop. I can’t do that as it currently is- so I would consider putting XP on it (especially if I can use one of the licenses I already have lying around.) Perhaps to some, that makes me evil. I think it just makes me practical.

Illustration above is a combination of my photo and a CC licensed photo by Kit Hartford.

I recently cleaned up my art room. It had become a catch all place to put stuff before parties, etc. Now there is room to walk around, though not quite enough room to do a very large painting. Which is fine right now, because I have been doing small things.

Anyway I have been making things now that I have room. Spring break is this week, so I have a little bit of free time. I even took today (Monday) off work so I could stay at home and do nothing useful (except cleaning the kitchen and laundry - that doesn’t count, right?) It has been great to paint again.

More pictures below. Next steps - paint the room, maybe get a new chair instead of the couch, and clean out the closet (currently hidden behind the orange curtain.)

1. lets you play as a girl (although there’s only one girl option out of 5 playable characters) and
2. has slightly easier controls and on screen cues, IMO

I do wish it had online play and the video editing features of Proving Ground, but I don’t honestly think I would use those features that often. The (very helpful) employee at Gamers recommended Skate for the PS3, and I think I will try it in the future. Video reviews of all three games can be found here (click on “watch review”):

• Tony Haw’s Proving Ground
• Tony Hawk’s Project 8
• Skate

The video review above tells you a lot about the game mechanics and what the game looks like, so I’m just going to list a few of my impressions of Tony Hawk’s Project 8. Keep in mind that I am not a “hardcore” (read: very good) gamer.

The first thing that struck me about Project 8 was it is sort of weird, physics wise. When you fall, sometimes you defy all physics, flying into the air and bouncing of the ceiling (if there is one). Later in the game, the reasoning for this becomes apparent - there are goals where you need to crash spectacularly. In the beginning, though, it’s a bit strange. Other controls just don’t work quite as I thought hey should, though I could blame that on me being rusty.

Another thing I noticed fairly quickly was that in game people around you respond to you much more than in previous games. When you’re doing well, they might start praising you (”way to go, man!”) and when you’re not, they’ll let you know. Neat idea, but if I hear that kid say “you should go pro!” one more time I’ll… well, I can’t do anything, can I? Also, if you run into someone, they sometimes start chasing you, and there’s a rear view mirror to let you see yourself as you run away from them. While this isn’t so great while playing (you can’t watch both at the same time very well) it’s fun while watching someone else play. If they catch up to you they’ll beat you up, but it’s not hard to get away from them.

The design of the game is good and bad. Some features of people (like teeth) look weird. But I really like the style of the load screens and other graphics, and I like the way they worked real video footage into the game. Overall, it is a pretty good looking game.

You can complete most of the game in a number of ways. Many of the goals just require point totals to proceed, so you can do what you are good at instead of what the game tells you to do. So, for instance, I can do manual and grind tricks, and my husband can do air and wallplant tricks. Also, there are cheats, so you can enter in a cheat to complete a task if you are really stuck. I always appreciate this in a game. The game does utilize the SIXAXIS tilt control, and for the most part it works pretty well.

There’s no online play, which really didn’t bug me much. What DOES bug me, though, is the poorly implemented 2 player play. I have not found mention of this elsewhere, but for us the the play is super slow and laggy, especially when there is a lot of action. It is NOT what I expected from a current gen gaming system, and by far the biggest disappointment of the game. We also have found we can’t both choose custom characters while playing 2 player. I have a sneaking suspicion this is better implemented on the 360, which also gets online play.

All in all, it’s a fun game, but a bit disappointing. If we didn’t have a store credit, I probably would have waited till it was a little cheaper - it was $45 used. ouch. I can’t get over this annoying feeling that the game was overall more responsive and fun on the PS2, and that makes me sad. I’m sort of regretting selling back all our old Tony Hawk PS2 games if only for the 2 player fun, but we can always rebuy them later. (I see they are super cheap on Half.com)