Laura said she hadn’t had a tomato that good since Italy.
Doesn’t that look good? It was. I haven’t had a tomato that tasty since the ones we were forced to grow as kids. I never would have known what I was missing. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
All a man needs out of life is a place to sit ‘n’ spit in the fire.
Laura said she hadn’t had a tomato that good since Italy.
Doesn’t that look good? It was. I haven’t had a tomato that tasty since the ones we were forced to grow as kids. I never would have known what I was missing. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
I finally got off my butt this year and planted a little vegetable garden. I have always loved fresh tomatoes, and I find the quality of grocery store produce has declined so drastically that you’re basically paying for tasteless fibrous water. Starting with Olaia’s science fair project on compost, we began our green journey to the perfect tomato. The vegetable garden is about fifteen feet long by two and half feet wide or so and has been stocked with nearly three cubic feet of homemade soil from compost.
Our compost is composed of yard waste (green grass and leaves), vegetable and fruit waste from the kitchen, coffee grounds, a bit of ash from barbecuing, some paper waste, and egg shells. You should not use meat or protein as it is said to attract varmints. Anyway, all that lead to the creation of this:
Lovely, isn’t it? Isn’t nature cool?
I planted two varieties, roma and these called beefeaters. Today, I was surprised to find that a third variety had sprouted from the composted seeds and was bearing a different type of fruit. I imagine that even though they are from tasteless grocery store tomato seeds, homegrown they will taste much better.
I can’t wait to eat it tomorrow on an egg sandwich with lettuce, fresh mayonnaise, and cheddar cheese on bakery bread.
And then I took this little picture for Olaia for a class project as we dined outside next to our garden in the cool night air.
Chee-bow-bow, the moon.
I’ve been using and abusing Gutenberg.org a lot lately. It’s a web site dedicated to public domain books, mostly in English but there is variety in other languages too including Beowulf in Old English. You can basically find anything you want that was published before 1923. They have ebook formats, pdfs, html documents, and a lot of audio books submitted by supporters. All the classics are there.
I’ve been reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books to the kids at bed time. I loved those books as a kid and now despite limited library space and an unwillingness to store any more books in this house, I can read the classics to my heart’s content.
So here’s the work flow: Download a book at gutenberg.org, open it up in konqueror or firefox and when you come upon a strange archaic word pop it into your kdict public domain dictionary reader and peruse several different definitions and usage entries. I’m simply amazed at how awesome the public domain is and how many volunteers have come together to make it all possible. Consider donating to gutenberg.org.
I just noticed that the character of Tarzan went into the public domain in 1998. Is it a coincidence that Disney’s movie was released in 1999? Hmmm.
I was at a client’s office working on their office server this Thursday. In addition to all the crawling around under tables and dealing with cables, switches, and routers, I also have been re-creating their website. I was getting short on photos. “Do you have any more photos I could use?” I asked their accountant/onsite help desk guy, “I’ve exhausted all of the ones I’ve shot myself and I need some more.”
“Oh yeah, we have tons,” he replied, “One of our members is a photographer. He has a photography firm and he takes all the pictures for us. El es un fotografo buenismo y toma fotos increibles. (he is a really good photographer and takes incredible pictures). I’ll burn you a CD.” And he disappeared to his computer and the burning.
I went back to trying to figure out why Samba had decided to stop working, dumping core, and refusing connections. Bizarre. It was doing something all right, just not what it was supposed to do.*
After a few minutes, he returned. “Here,” he said, dropping the CD in my hand, “This is from an event from last week.”
I opened my laptop and anxious to see these beautiful photos, clicked it into the drive tray. After hearing all about the photographer and his mad skills, I prepared myself for a huge pile of awesome photos for the website. This was going to make my life easier. I’ll have more to choose from. I opened the CD and started browsing. I furrowed my brow. “These photos aren’t really all that good,” I said, “They’re kind of bad, actually. I thought you said this guy was as good.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, those are actually photos I took. I have a crappy little camera. They are just snapshots.”
“Hmm,” I replied. “After all the talk about this professional guy, I was worried. Okay, I’m glad. Do you want to know how to make your shots better? You could improve a lot with just a few simple tips, even with a crappy camera.”
“My wife takes nice pictures,” he said. “Her photos are a lot better. She has a lot of artists in her family. Her brother is an artist.” I could tell he was a little embarrassed by my accidental bluntness. But, hell, I’ll just go with it. I am not a mealy-mouthed type. He could spent the rest of his life taking shitty photos and never have anyone give him any pointers “to save his feelings,” but I wanted his photos to say something or at least fake saying something, anything but stand still.
“Yes, an artist probably has some formation and training for using the space and telling a story, showing action or whatever. I have a couple of basic tricks to go from beginner to amateur. Do you want to know what they are?”
“First, is the rule of thirds. It goes like this. Take your canvas and divide it into thirds, horizontally and vertically. Your intersecting points are interest areas. For example, why do shots of the ocean always fail to live up to the moment? I’m sure you’ve taken lots of shots of the ocean, beach, la isla, and they never come out the way you remember them, right?”
“Yes, pictures never capture how beautiful it was,” he agreed. He was shuffling his feet and seemed to be losing interest. They are forever polite and have little capacity to deal with uncomfortable moments.
Hang in there a little longer, and I’ll have you fixed up, I thought. “Okay, so a little trick for the ocean is to make sure that the sky always takes up either one third or two thirds of the frame. Never half. If the ocean is two thirds, the sky is one third. If the sky is one third, the ocean is two thirds. If the ocean is in the middle, the way your eye perceives it, you end up with a boring shot. The shitty picture that you all know and ends up in a box with the thousands of others.”
I continued, “If you are shooting people, make sure you get close. If it’s a group, apart from a planned group portrait, try to focus in on one or two people. Basically, just get closer. When in doubt, get closer. Those are my two tips, and they will cover 99% of circumstances. As you improve, and believe me, I’m no professional, you can break these guidelines. But to start out, they’ll help you turn snapshots into art. Really great photographers can tell amazing stories with bigger groups, more complex elements, and from farther away, but the beginner doesn’t know how how to balance so many things at first. Just be patient and get closer. Stick to one or two elements and tell a simple story.”
”Okay, thanks James,” and he excused himself. I could tell he was only being polite. It’s probably why his pictures will continue to be shitty. But that is another story. I decided that I was going to write down what good art looks like, feels like, and is. Since I’m a multi-disciplined person I think I am qualified to define what makes good art in a variety of media. I think I can even tie it into what makes a good battle plan and a good life. I use the word “good” because to be “great” you’ve got to dedicate yourself to one thing. To be merely good, requires only a little bit of passion and purpose.
So let us begin, shall we?
The photography/graphic arts “rule-of-thirds” is really just a trick. You trick your viewer into believing something is happening in the frame. Take the sky and ocean example. Put the ocean in the middle and it is stagnant, locked in stasis with the sky, a stalemate, neither giving nor receiving. The sky and ocean just sit there. The photo says nothing and gives nothing either way. Should, however, the sky yield to the ocean or the ocean to the sky, now you’ve got something. Movement. Purpose. It is small, yes, but with the ocean spilling into the sky or the sky pushing down the ocean you have begun a process It is this something, this movement, that makes the picture interesting. Bingo. It’s not the greatest picture in the world, but neither is it the worst.
Instead of shooting a person right smack in the middle of the shot, put them off to one side. Which way are they looking? Are they leaving the frame, or entering it. If they are in the middle, most of the time it’s a boring photograph because the perception is that nothing is happening and the space around the subject it distracting or wasted. Maybe you should crop it or get closer or offset the subject.
There’s a lot of clutter behind, little Mr. Asier, but instead of putting him in the middle frame with clutter all around, I have his motion moving in frame with the clutter blurred and de-emphasized. A great photographer might have planned this better, but sometimes you just have to shoot what you have in front of you. With a few simple tips you can turn ho-hum snapshot into something you and others will adore.
Beginning writers are told to show don’t tell, to use adverbs sparingly. Don’t tell me about what someone said or did. Show me. If someone was sad, don’t tell me: He was sad. Show me how he was sad. And don’t say: He walked sadly. Tell me he walked without picking up his feet and the sound they made as they dragged over the dirty floor. Tell me how his clothes drooped, or how his hair was flat and oily or how when he answered questions he mumbled or looked away and didn’t meet your gaze. The key is that good writers can take any subject and make it interesting and put you in the moment. Take this passage for example about coming home, sitting on the toilet and through a simple discovery realizing true love. Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world. Except for a nice MLT: a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They’re so perky, I love that. But I digress.
From http://sigg3.net/:
Thinking about this, I smiled as I made my way up the godforsaken five floors I have to climb every fucking day to get to the apartment. I got inside, put the groceries down and headed for the bathroom. It felt good, if you have to know. (And reading this, I suppose you do.) Went back into the kitchen, picked out the beer and put ’em in the fridge, put the frozen pizza on the table and turned on the oven. That’s when I saw it. At first I couldn’t believe it, it just couldn’t be true. Was it really real? I swallowed solemnly while revering every inch of the realization that crept upon me like a slow sunrise in the time frame of geological foreplay.
Lady C had actually taken out the trash.
All of it.
All by herself.
Note the spare use of adverbs, the build up, each mundane detail, the slow difficult climb, taking a dump, putting some groceries down, and the frozen pizza (how clever). Each serves as contrast to the final realization: LOVE. But not just any love. Our writer has cleverly placed the ultimate force of the universe within the confines of a small act of refuse disposal. Doubly clever. Touché. It doesn’t get any better than that folks, and is basically the rule of thirds. Contrast, movement, purpose. Some people do it naturally, some do not. The key is, however, anybody can learn this.
A little imbalance allows your electrons to flow.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
There must be movement. Movement for movement’s sake is okay for the amateur, but your goal is purpose of course, willful story telling.
If you had to sum up good art in one word it would be “contrast.”
* it ended up being a GCC 3.4.6 hardened compiler problem. I don’t now what specifically, but after upgrading to the 4.x series GCC Samba stopped dumping core.
This morning, Laura asked me to pour bowls of cereal for us both.
She was insistent that it be me who does the pouring. I protested at
the oddity of the request but quickly dismissed my hesitations. I have
such a short memory for things like this, and since I was hungry, I went
to the kitchen to "make" breakfast.
Hmm, that’s weird, I thought
as I took out Laura’s Corn Bran and found my Honey Bunches of Oats
stuffed inside. Who did that? Who does a thing like that, I thought, my mind’s paranoia engine at full throttle. Let’s see
what’s inside the Honey Bunches of Oats box then. Well, will you look
at that, there’s the Corn Bran. Someone switched them. Who does
that? Can’t they read?
I was seriously shaking my head at the insanity of switching the cereals’ contents. Was the universe screwing with me?
Will this mystery haunt me for all the days of my life? Just as I was set to call 911 and report a cereal "incident," Laura breezed into the kitchen with a wry smile.
"Hey hon, did you notice that the cereals were switched? That was Olaia. She wanted to trick you for April Fools."
"Oh
that little girl," I said, smiling. "That is just too cute." I
imagined her sneaking out this morning, carefully switching the
cereals, and then informing her mommy.
"Mommy, you have to tell
Daddy to pour the cereal this morning, okay. I switched them for April
Fool’s. You have to make sure Daddy does it, okay."
"Okay," her mommy replied.
And there you go. That’s how Daddy fell for an April Fool’s joke on April Fool’s Day. You got me. 🙂
You know what makes a great cleaning song? – Tableau IV. Fête Populaire de la Semaine grasse (vers le soir), the fourth act of the ballet Petrouchka by Igor Stravinsky. It’s a series of lively dances, triumphal, tragic, fanciful, and full of folly – much like my kitchen in all its disasterous dimensions.
Within my kitchen, there is the toil of the ants scouring the counters for small crumbs to take back to their lair and feed their families. I know too well how they shall never again see their homes as I crush them and wash them down the sink.
Then there are the remnants of the children with their messy plates, forks, glasses half full of liquid. Their little spirits are too lively to sit still for more than a moment, yet their bodies are small, incapable of pacifying the mess of life. They make do as best they can given their small statures.
Laura too is represented here in the menagerie, for all that we consume was created by her hands, lovingly prepared for us without reservation. There are the burned pans, stuck rice, splatters of oil and tomato sauce. Disorder is an unavoidable bi-product of creation, I think.
Would it be better for the magician to have never brought this kitchen to life? The tremendous gift that is a kitchen comes with an inevitable cost: The Cleaning
Is a kitchen worth it?
Someone send me a maid!
Straight away upon arriving at home Javier strips his clothes and replaces them with his favorite pajamas. He likes being Batman.
"Javier," I ask, "How come you keep taking your clothes off and putting on your jammies? It’s not time for bed."
"I like them, and I’m hot."
"So they are comfy?"
"Yeah."
Javier, comfy at home
And I’m sure Batman has nothing to do with it.
I just got a new phone, and I wanted to customize it with some of my favorite things: my wife and songs that remind me of her, one being her incoming ring of course. I don’t care much for any other calls, but when my love calls, my heart skips a beat, so here we go.
First, select a photo. I choose this one because she’s smiling at me and looks lovely.
Next, I took a short video in order to reverse engineer the video format of the Samsung Rant m540. Turns out the sound is AAC, 128 kbps, and the video is mpeg-4 (reports as DIVX) and the frame size is 176×144 and the rate is 15 fps.
I want to create a video with a still picture along with a song by NEK called, "Laura no está" – the sentiment of the song is that Laura is not there, but in her absence, I am tormented, she is everywhere. I am unable to escape. Honey, your feet must be tired, because you’ve been running around in my head all day. Chuckle. So I want to loop a 16 second sample of that song (the refrain) along with the above still picture. Turns out that ffmpeg (in Linux) will help you out tons. Check out the following gem:
ffmpeg -loop_input -vframes 240 -r 15 -f image2 -i foo.jpg -i foo.wav -s 176x144 -f mp4 -acodec libfaac bar.m4v
-loop_input causes the image to repeat throughout the clip. -vframes 240 is 16 seconds multiplied by 15 frames per second to give total frames. -f image2 is from the man page of ffmpeg and and forces a format. Specify two inputs -i foo.wav and -i foo.jpg a frame size -s 176×144, and video format -f mp4 an audio codec -acodec libfaac (you have to compile ffmpeg with libfaac support) and the output file bar.m4v.
Take the resulting video file and copy it to the directory /dcim/100ssmed/ of your phone’s memory card. I think you have to rename the file to sspx000(?).3g2 where the "?" represents a sequential number. I had trouble getting the video to play properly at first, but I think it’s because I had the frame rate slightly off. I don’t know, however, because I changed the frame rate and the file name at the same time and the thing started playing, so I’m unsure which was the cause, the frame rate or special sequential internal naming of the Rant m540. Dunno, maybe I’ll mess around with some more and post my results here.
So there you go. Now every time my love calls, I am greeted with her smiling face and a song.
I don’t know exactly what the writers intended, but from what I can gather from "Kung Fu Panda" I think I have figured out the secret of the Wuxi finger hold.
There is no secret.
The Wuxi finger hold is a bluff. The golden explosion at the end represents the last shreds of Tai Lung’s ego going skadoosh. Tai Lung had bound up all his self-expectations in obtaining the scroll, and when he finally looks upon it reflecting his own face, he says, "It’s nothing."
Skadoosh!
Po’s realization that there is no secret ingredient opens up numerous truths, among them that the Wuxi finger hold is a bluff designed to crush an opponent’s ego by using his fear against him. The secret of the finger hold lies in belief of its power. Once Tai Lung realized he had been fooled and had quivered in fear in front of Po, his mojo went bye-bye. Tai Lung was no more the big scary bad guy.
Tai Lung believed that the scroll held everything. He believed he was nothing. By this logic the Wuxi finger held nearly infinite power over him.
I figure Tai Lung didn’t die at the end of the movie though, the golden explosion simply a metaphor for his exploding ego. Tai Lung realized for the first time that day he was lost. Crushed and broken, without a sense of self, he is found limp and listless by the noodle duck. "Why are you lying there, snow leopard?"
"I am not the dragon warrior. I was defeated by a Panda. I am nothing."
The duck replies, "Oh, come now, I need help in the noodle shop. You would make a fine noodle chef. Come with me."
Tai Lung eventually learns humility, and by serving others he begins to realize his true power.
A noodle cook becomes the dragon warrior, the presumed dragon warrior becomes a noodle cook.
Laura had me rolling with this post and I had to share.
Interpret me this: I was having a happy dream. I did not want to wake up I wanted to keep the dream going.
I
had just gotten out from hanging out a hotel pool with Javier and
Jaimito. We had been sitting on the steps, chatting, playing having
fun. I remember thinking I love these two little boys they are so darn
cute. Next thing I know we were out of the pool, kids had gone up to
the room to change and go down for the evening. I was hanging out at an
outdoor bar in plain clothes waiting for Jim to come down and meet up
with me.
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