Category: General

For the past few weeks, during the recent server upgrade, I’ve had seriously debilitating migraine headaches. I occasionally get mild migraines, but only one or two per year. And suddenly I get a blinding migraine every day at exactly 4PM. That’s the biggest reason this server upgrade took so long, the harder I worked, the more pain I was in.

I looked intensely at my life to see what was triggering the migraines, there must be a pattern if they occurred with such regularity. I changed a few things just about the time the headaches started, maybe they were responsible. I thought it might be due to my new pillow, maybe it gave me a stiff neck. Maybe it was my new electric toothbrush vibrating my teeth in their sockets. Maybe it was because I was eating on an irregular schedule and I had hypoglycemia. Maybe it was bad ergonomics, I moved my desk around for some temporary rewiring. I looked at every aspect of my life and avoided the possible triggers. I could not figure out any pattern, except that I’d been intensely working on the server. Maybe it was just plain old stress. I was looking for an easy solution, it’s easy to change your pillow, or your diet, but it’s a lot harder to change the fundamental stress involved in your work.

At that point, I thought about an old friend who ran a respected graphics service bureau in Los Angeles. One day while he was in the middle of his usual stressful routine, he developed a thrombosis, it migrated to his heart and lungs, and he had a heart attack. As he recovered, he announced that his doctor advised him to find a less stressful job, something that didn’t involve sitting in front of a computer all day and listening to stressed-out customers with short deadlines, some job with a bit more physical activity. He sold his company within a couple of weeks and left the business forever.

I started to feel a little disconsolate over the situation I was in. Every day the headaches got worse. I considered tossing out my whole computer career and becoming a lumberjack or something. As I worked on my computer, amidst a migraine so severe I considered going to the hospital, a funny thing happened. I accidentally switched my monitor to the wrong setting. And then it struck me, the problem was staring me in the face the whole time. It was my computer monitor! I have an old Sony 300sf CRT, it can go up to insanely high resolutions like 2048×1536, but only at low refresh rates. I always set my monitor to 1600×1200 at 60hz refresh. Many people report that refresh rates below 75hz cause eyestrain and migraines, but even 60hz never bothered me before. So I switched to a lower rez at 75hz, and I got immediate relief. My headache started to dissipate, and the daily 4PM migraines have not returned. Oh man do I feel stupid, I’ve been torturing myself unnecessarily. If only I’d figured it out earlier! I made more progress on the server in a couple of days than I did in 2 weeks of self-torture.

I managed to get the two major components of this server working together, MovableType’s Perl config, and QuickTime Streaming Server. I had to do a complete reformat and reinstall, but this time it went rather rapidly, since I didn’t let the system upgrade to Perl 5.8 like it wanted to. Now everything is happy with the Perl 5.6 configuration. Perl has been the sole source of misery with this server upgrade. Perl sucks.

Now I just have to get a few things back in operation, like SSH keys, log monitoring, etc. I’m waiting for some details from Apple on one last QTSS configuration option, then I should have the BlogTV services back up and running better than ever. With luck I’ll have the answer tomorrow, if the Apple techs aren’t too busy watching the Apple WWDC announcements, or goofing around at MacHack.

From the lack of updates, it must be obvious by now that I’m still struggling with the server upgrade. I haven’t been able to get the streaming server back online because I upgraded to Perl 5.8 and QTSS is incompatible with version 5.8. I could downgrade to 5.6, but it is nearly impossible to downgrade Perl under MacOS X Server. So I may have to do a complete OS reinstall. That would really suck. I’m working with some support listservs but answers don’t come immediately, so bear with me and I’ll have this all cleaned up and working better than ever within a few more days. I promise.

I’m not sure if anyone is seeing this site outside my local network, so if you are reading this, please leave a comment (you can be anonymous). I just need to know if I’m completely off the net, or not.


I’ve just gone to extreme trouble getting everything working, and now it has all fallen apart. I spent days getting Perl 5.8 working correctly, and now it turns out that QTSS administration requires Perl 5.6. So I might have to do this installation all over from scratch, that’s almost the only way to get back to the virgin Perl 5.6 install on MacOS X Server. At least it should be easier a second time around.

Video is still unavailable. This server may go down for rework, and will be unavailable at times. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.

It obviously took me a lot longer to get the server upgraded than I thought. It took me 2 extra days to get Perl working, because MacOS X Server apparently does not set the token HOSTNAME like the regular client MacOS X version.

So now that I’ve spent 2 days wrestling with an obscure bug, it’s time to see if the system works. This message is mostly for testing purposes, text messages and graphics appear to work but it will take a little longer before the videos are back online.

I’m preparing for a big upgrade to my server’s software, so Disinfotainment may be temporarily unavailable at times over the next few days. I’ve decided to upgrade to MacOS X Server, which supposedly offers superior management capabilites for QuickTime Streaming Server. I played with the OS for a few minutes and it appears that it solves the problems that prevent some people from viewing BlogTV. But I won’t know if the problem is truly solved until I get this site running on the new OS.

For many years, I have not owned a decent camera. This is particularly galling for many reasons, not the least of which is I have a BFA degree in Photography. I have always owned great camera equipment, at various times I’ve owned top-end cameras like the Canon F1 and Hasselblad 500 C/M, I worked hard to afford these expensive toys, only to fall on harder economic times and be forced to sell them. Now I only have a used Canon AE1 and it is a piece of crap. This is a camera that’s been bought and resold over and over at the local camera store, I bet it was owned by a dozen different Photo 101 students before I bought it for $50. I took some test shots and it’s just inaccurate enough to be completely worthless for serious photography, so I never use it. I had better results from disposable cameras.

Photographers tend to be obsessive about equipment, especially cameras. It’s one of the worst faults of photographers and photography as a medium, they tend to become obsessed with technical aspects of the process, to the detriment of their aesthetics. That’s one reason why I mostly gave up photography and focused on painting, to focus on a message and a meaning in imagery, and not on the process. But I have continuously done photo printing for many years. I have a huge darkroom rig but no cameras to make films to print in the darkroom. So I use non-camera processes, like photograms, contact printing, etc. My photography professor always said that a great photographer should be able to make great prints, even with a pinhole camera. I tried to go one step better, I can make great photographs without any camera. My approach to photography is more like printmaking than camerawork.

These non-camera methods only go so far, especially with someone who can work a camera like I can. But I’ve agonized for years about what camera to buy, nothing I’ve seen (or can afford) has the features I like. I considered digital, but it was too expensive for a decent resolution camera. A pro digital camera could cost the same as 3 or 4 good film cameras. I even considered old classic medium format cameras, and I came really close to buying a Graflex Speed Graphic 4×5 and even a Rollei 2 1/4″ twin lens reflex. If I can’t get along with the new computerized cameras, I can still do wonders with medium format film. But I could not decide what to get.

But now my agony is over, I just received a wonderful birthday present, a new Canon Powershot S50. 5 megapixels is just about bare minimum resolution for what I need, and overkill for some work. There are digicams with slightly better lenses, but not this small and pocketable. It’s about the top of the line for current prosumer digicams, and it looks like it will be a good value for many years. I bought a 1Gb CF memory card for $180 after rebate at Amazon, but it still hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t really use the camera yet. I can only fit about 5 pictures on the free 32Mb CF card that came with the camera.

The S50 has so many cool features that I’ve resumed work on some old photo projects that were too unwieldy to do on film, as well as some new ideas. They’re too complex to describe, and what would be the point of describing a photographic idea anyway? The proof is in the work. I’ll just have to make some images and prove my ideas.

Now I have no excuses, I finally have the tools I need to do some great work. I always tell people that digital tools for the arts are so good these days, that if your artwork sucks, it’s not because the equipment or software sucks, it’s because you suck.

Slacktivist was musing today about small change and rolling coins. I had to laugh because it used to be my job to sort and wrap coins.

My father was a banker, and even as a young teenager of 12 or 13 years old, I used to do odd jobs around the bank. One of the jobs I got stuck with was running the coin sorter. Every Saturday morning my father brought in the coins from the laundromats in his apartment buildings, and many of the other local merchants brought in cloth bags full of coins, since there was a full-time coin counter (me) working on Saturdays.

The counter was a huge machine that looked like it was built in the 1930s. I dumped the coins in the hopper in the top, the coins spun around on flat metal surface with round holes to let the coins drop through. The front of the machine had a round tube where you stuck the paper coin wrapper, then push a lever, and with a loud vrooom the machine would dispense one wrapper full of coins right into the tube. I could press a lever to set the coin dispenser to dollars, half-dollars, quarters, nickels, dimes, or pennies, and it knew how many coins to dispense in each roll. If I held my finger at the right depth in the bottom of the tube, the coins would center evenly in the tube for a nice crimp. I whipped each uncrimped tube from the roller, and with a couple of taps, I folded each end quickly. I could produce a roll of coins every 2 or 3 seconds, and sometimes I had to do that for hours on end. It was a noisy, dirty, filthy job. I especially hated wrapping nickels. the soft metal blackened everything it touched.

I remember I was required to empty my pockets before sitting down at the workstation, and empty them again afterward to make sure I wasn’t stealing. After handling all that change, I even had a metallic taste in my mouth, so the last thing I wanted was any coins in my pocket. But I was always attracted to the bad coins that didn’t make it through the sorter. I always collected the foreign coins, slugs, and unidentifiable round objects, looked through them maybe hoping I’d find something valuable like a gold coin, but it was always worthless junk. But I was always astonished at the variety of odd coins I handled, and even to this day I will pick up about any round object and add it to my collecting jar of round junk. But I digress..

Ever since then, I always hated small change. Men’s pants seem designed to dump your change when you sit down. I usually dump all my change in a bowl, if it doesn’t fall down the crack of my couch first. It can be difficult to get rid of accumulated change, as the Slacktivist noted. And therein lies another tale..

My sister’s (now ex-) husband, as a joke, gave me a copy of “How To Be Rich” by J. Paul Getty. I was working at the Getty Museum at the time, so I had to read it, just to see what the mindset of J. Paul was like. The book purported to be a manual on how to be rich. It claimed to show you how to become rich, but all the schemes seemed to require multimillion dollar investments. In order to become rich, it seems one must already be rich. There is an old saying amongst economists, “making one’s first million is almost impossible, making one’s second million is almost inevitable.”

Finally towards the end of the book, J. Paul admits these schemes are beyond the reach of mere mortals, so he throws us wage-slaves a bone, a practical scheme to become rich. He called it “the unspendable quarter.” He suggested that you pick one denomination of coin like a quarter, and at the end of every day, empty your pockets of every smaller coin into a jar. Aggressive savers could accumulate 50 cent pieces and lower (wow, when did people get 50 cent pieces as small change?) and less aggressive savers could save nickels and pennies. I decided to give it a try, I saved all my change. I saved an astonishing amount of change.

So now it was time to reap the rewards of my plan to become rich, I took my bags of coins to the teller at my local Bank of America branch. I was informed that they don’t count coins. They didn’t even have a change counting machine. They suggested I try another branch. I tried dozens, I was refused at every branch. I finally worked my way to the main office, they offered to send my change to the main Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, where it would be counted and automatically deposited into my account. The service fee was $75. Ouch. I asked them if they would accept the coins for deposit if I wrapped them myself. The said they could accept them, but they’d have to unwrap them all and have them recounted for the $75 fee, after all, how do they know I didn’t wrap 49 pennies in each roll instead of 50?

Well, it seems that accumulating small change is not the way to become rich after all. Now I was faced with the task of getting rid of all that change. The quarters were fairly easily dispensed of. I used to carry around ziploc bags full of quarters, $20 or $30 worth. As much as I hated to carry around change, now here I was stuck with carrying around heavy bags of change. Many of the stores where I shopped got really tired of that guy with all the change, I could often be seen lining up little rows of $1 stacks of quarters at the cash register. My pants pockets all had holes in them from carrying all the heavy change. It took months and months, and I still barely made a dent in the pile of change, and most of the easily picked quarters were nearly gone.

One day, the owner of my corner store asked me why I always had so much change, and I told him my lengthy tale of woe. He said he wasted a lot of time going to the bank for rolled coins, and he’d take them. I told him I had hundreds of dollars of coins, mostly nickels and pennies, he said he’d take them gradually. So I set about rolling all the remaining small change.

I was unemployed and broke at the time, so as I set about wrapping coins, I kept thinking about an essay Phil Dick wrote about being poor. He said that being poor forced you to become a skilled accountant handling extremely small sums of money. You have to learn how to budget your remaining 35 cents accurately, because misspending a single dime might mean you do not eat dinner. I was in a similar state, there were many weeks my food budget was paid for by rolled coins. I couldn’t even afford coin wrappers, I tore strips of newspaper and rolled them manually, and wrote “pennies” or “nickels” on the outside. It was the same old filthy, dirty job I had when I was a kid, but without the nice machine, and even dirtier because of the old newsprint. I decided to measure how many coins I could wrap in an hour, as a comparison to the machines. I discovered that once you get down to sorting pennies and nickels, you can barely wrap about $10 of change an hour. You’re barely making above minimum wage wrapping your own money, you might as well throw it in the garbage.

Here’s an old Polaroid SX-70 image I took many years ago, probably around 1975. Lucas Samaras invented this technique to alter SX-70 images by pressing into the emulsion with a stylus, it was wildly popular with Polaroid owners. It was tricky, you had about 3 minutes to work with the emulsion while it was still developing, and the results were always unpredictable. This picture of some potted plants was about as good a result as I ever got with this technique.






Of course this technique isn’t going to impress anyone that ever used Photoshop and the Smudge Tool, but it was a revelation to photographers back in the 1970s. Photographers tend to treat their technology as inviolate and perfect, gouging prints with a stylus while they developed was exactly the sort of thing you were supposed to never do. Polaroid discontinued this type of film just as the technique became popular with fine artists, and it died overnight.

When I looked through my old SX-70 prints, I was astonished to see several prints with a large crack through the middle. Polaroid promised us that the SX-70 process was the most archival process they could make, and the prints would last for hundreds of years. The dyes are still in great shape but the emulsion is cracking. It doesn’t do much good to have stable dyes if the supporting emulsion is going to shrivel up and die in 25 years. I decided to have an almost microscopic look at this altered image to see if the emulsion was in good shape. It isn’t. But it looks really cool.





I expected these prints wouldn’t hold up over the years so I’m not too surprised at the fine cracking. It’s adding a patina to the images they didn’t have when they were first made, I kind of like it. These images are some of the first experiments in one of my most abstract ideas, that my prints should be interesting at every single viewing scale, from microscopic on up to normal size, and that you can only get these effects by seeing the image firsthand. So this web image only gives a tiny hint of the cool stuff happening in the fine details of this overall image. And that’s one of the other problems with Polaroids, every one is unique and can never be reproduced properly.

Yee Mee Loo’s used to be my favorite drinking spot, back when I lived in downtown LA’s Loft District. I always took my friends to Chinatown and Yee Mee Loo’s since it was such a crazy place. They had a huge altar behind the bar with a statue of Hotei, the fat-bellied laughing buddha. The bartenders burned huge amounts of incense on the altar and the air was always thick and smoky with a strange fragrance. The establishment prided itself on having never ever cleaned the interior. Cobwebs covered with clumps of dust drooped from the light fixtures. Every wall surface was brown from smoke residue. Yee Mee Loo’s was also famous for their clock that ran backwards, I don’t wear a watch so their clock was always a torment after a few drinks.

But mostly I liked to take people to Yee Mee Loo’s because it was near a live poultry shop. All my friends liked to see the chickens and other small fowl stacked in cages by the windows. One day I took a friend out for a drink and we went by the poultry shop. As we approached, I saw about 30 cats standing around the back of the store, yowling, scrambling around by a fence, keeping them from the dumpster which was overflowing with waste. I’d never seen anything like it. We tried to avoid that scene, I told my friend to peek in the front window. He looked through the grimy window and started screaming and freaking out. He asked me if it was always like this. I said, “what? It’s just some chickens in cages.” He said no, I should take a look for myself.

I looked but I couldn’t see anything. It was just a dimly lit shop with some cages of chickens and quail. They seemed to be awake and flapping around agitatedly, which was odd because they’re usually asleep at this time of the evening. My friend said “no, look at the floor. I thought it was just a grey floor, I couldn’t really see it through the window grime. He insisted I should look closer, and wait. And then I freaked out. The floor was grey because it was a wall-to-wall carpet of rats. Some of the chickens got out of their cages and were being chased around the room. I told my friend we’re getting the hell out of here, and we ran back past the dumpster area. Now our eyes were more accustomed to the light, we could see what was happening. There was a huge battle between the cats and the rats swarming over the dumpster.

I never ate at a restaurant in Chinatown again.