Category: General

I noticed that all content has vanished from my front page, which means I haven’t posted anything in 30 days. So I figured I better write something, just to let people know I’m not dead, I just haven’t had anything interesting to say lately. So please visit the archives for my older writings, and bear with me while I work intensively behind the scenes.

I’ve been busy upgrading my systems to MacOS X 10.3, and preparing for updating the server to a new version of Perl (I hate Perl). So just hang on and I’ll get everything working better than ever.

I found some discarded books and discovered a copy of Mein Kampf translated into Japanese, “waga touzou.”

It has been cold and rainy this autumn, so on a whim I pulled out some old Kodak PhotoCD scans I took on a sunny summer quite a few years ago. I brought them into the new Photoshop CS for color correction, the new version works wonderfully with the native 16 level LAB format on PhotoCDs. This first photo seems nicely moody, and is almost exactly what is recorded on the 35mm slide. I couldn’t improve on the exposure curves, it was very accurate.





I took a few photos to test out this cheap $75 secondhand Canon AE1, and the lens just wasn’t up to snuff, too much lens flare and insufficient sharpness. But the color intensity was wonderful.





The pictures seem to work OK at 72 DPI but I can’t help but think the final reduced photos would be a lot sharper if the camera lens was sharper. Still, 2048×3072 rez was pretty good, way back in about 1994 when I took these pictures. I still have the Canon camera and it’s still a piece of junk.

I’m looking at the world through rose colored sunglasses, and it’s horribly depressing. I had a new prescription for my eyeglasses, and I noticed my clip-on sunglasses got scratched, so I had the sunglasses lenses replaced too. The new lenses have a severe magenta tint, instead of the perfectly neutral gray in the original lenses. The optician said there’s nothing they could do about it, but they’d give me a discount on my next pair of prescription lenses. Sorry, that was the last time I spend $250 at their establishment.

This probably wouldn’t be a problem for the average eyeglass customer, but I am an artist and often work in prepress as a color separator, people use my services because of my accurate color vision. If I wear heavily tinted lenses for a prolonged period, it can ruin my sense of color balance. So I hardly ever wear my rose colored sunglasses.

The difference in what I see through the tinted lenses is dramatic. The sky is always a dark, brooding color, and full of fluffy pink clouds. This was kind of amusing during the summer, but now that it’s fall, things look incredibly different. The grass and trees look brown and dead. If any foliage shows the slightest autumnal color change, it looks completely brown. The tree in front of my house is dropping leaves, they’re still bright green as they lay on the grass, but they look brown to me. This is horribly depressing, I feel like I’m walking through a dead world.

But at least I have a few moments of amusement. I can spot artificial hair color a mile away. If anyone has dyed hair, even the most natural color, I see it as bright purple.

I recently found an old gadget I bought a long time ago. I saw this little cookie cutter in a mail order catalog, and immediately I saw the potential for a sculpture project. This little gadget would be perfect for incising letters in clay or wet cement. It reminded me of a strange old photo I saw in an Art History lecture, it was taken around 1900, it showed a man pushing a big paint roller down a Paris sidewalk, printing the Cinzano logo right onto the pavement.






The kit advertised 26 letters and 10 numbers, so obviously I had to buy two kits, since I might need double letters for some words. Fortunately the kits were cheap, only about $5. But you can imagine my disappointment when I opened the kits, and found this:





The packaging is correct, it contains 26 letters. They just didn’t include all 26 letters. Both kits were identical. I’m throwing the whole mess in the trash, it’s totally useless.

I’m putting up this trackback link for Metafilter readers that might want to see the original idea that this guy stole from me. I first did this well over a year ago.

I don’t mind people stealing my idea half as much as I mind people not giving me credit for
the invention. My only consolation is that they did a lousy job.

I had to buy some stamps at the local US Post Office branch, but I’m sick and tired of flag stamps. I asked the clerk for something neutral and without flags. This has been a perilous request in times past, I recall reading one article about how a publisher of a pro-Palestinian newsletter was interrogated by the Police merely for asking about stamps without US flags. But the clerk knew exactly what I wanted, something that symbolizes the sacrifices people were forced to make under that flag.

I live in fear of electricity. This is rather an odd thing for an electronics guy like me. I won’t touch any circuit over 24 volts, no matter if it is powered off. This is not some irrational fear, it is a fear born of extensive experience being electrocuted.

I still vividly remember my first experience with electrocution, I must have been about ten years old. I attended an ancient junior high school with an amazing collection of antique scientific apparatus. Every day after school, the science teacher set up the next day’s experiments for the senior class, I discovered that I could sneak into the lab after he left and fool around with the equipment, and nobody ever knew I was there. One day I came in and a Wimshurst Generator was set up. Wimshurst generators are a demonic device designed to store static electricity in primitive capacitors. You crank on the handle, the discs spin and store the electricity in Leyden Jars. You can set the electrodes to repeatedly discharge little lightning bolts, if you put them close together they zap frequently, if you set them far apart they store up a larger charge and zap less frequently. Of course I had to put the electrodes as far apart as possible and see how big a charge I could store, and how big a lightning bolt I could create. Of course, not being scheduled to take this science class for another 2 years, I did not know the safety precautions. If you try a stunt like this, you’re supposed to push the electrodes together using a nonconductive wood or rubber rod. I did exactly what you’re never supposed to do, I used both hands to move the electrodes together simultaneously. I bridged the circuit with my hands and body, the last thing I remember was seeing a lightning bolt jump towards my fingers. I woke up on the floor several feet away from where I was standing, it was dark and I must have been unconscious for several hours. I did some calculations and I figure I must have been hit with at least 45,000 volts. Fortunately it was low amperage, or I would be dead. Two years later, when the device was demonstrated in class, I learned I had violated the “one hand rule,” if you work with high voltage circuits, you should keep one hand in your pocket, to prevent yourself from bridging the circuit with both hands, just as I had done.

My science teacher was an eccentric old guy with white hair and moustache, he was the spitting image of Albert Einstein. He taught me more about science than anyone else, but not through the classroom, he gave me all his old scientific apparatus catalogs. Many of the experiments were considered obsolete because they used hazardous or illegal chemicals, like the lysergic acid I found in the storeroom. I could probably demonstrate hundreds of dangerous experiments, I’ll do about any harebrained chemical experiment, but I just won’t touch electricity, it’s too dangerous.

At one time, Pokemon cards were the most sought-after items in the world. Today I found one lying in a gutter.




One of my long-term crazy art projects is collecting lost playing cards. I used to see discarded cards blowing around in the streets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, I thought this was a really strange omen, so I decided to pick them up whenever I found them. I figured that given enough time, I could eventually collect a pack of cards with every single card from a different deck. The task is easy at first, any single card you happen to encounter is likely to be something you haven’t collected yet. But as you get towards the end of the deck, the task increases in difficulty expotentially. When you only need to find a few last cards, the chances of any random card you find in a gutter is likely to be something you’ve already collected increases dramatically. I thought it would be a Sisyphean task, but then one day I was walking along and I found almost a whole deck of cards blowing up the street near my house. I decided I should just take the first card I found, it would destroy the whole integrity of the project to pick a card I needed and alter the randomness of the collection process.