kinda cool. i'm 'mrindigo', and i got it set up so i can just type an entry in the browser's address line, and post right to twitter. there are a slew of other apps that support it.
also, an interesting article from Wired, about it, is here.
Correction: I had the wrong ID listed, earlier. Fixed it.
Do I have any friends anywhere near El Segundo, CA? I'll be wedged in between Xerox and LAX on Tuesday, but don't have any plans on Tuesday night, before leaving Wednesday morning.
Well, tonight is my official big-city VJ debut. It's been over a year since I whipped it out at our String Theory monthly, and this one is going to be quite different, though the turnout will likely be similar. I'm performing as part of an event called 'vs. the world' at Strawdog Theatre, a small black-box theatre above a Mexican restaurant in Wrigleyville, near Broadway and Sheridan. It should be a pretty straightforward electro-acoustic jam band performance with occasional spoken word interludes.
My part will be quite a bit more intense than the String Theory visuals, which were played on two plasma screens above the bar. This time, it'll be a burly, bright, super-swank digital projector, blasting right onto the screen. I even found a generously (and artfully) programmed free application which will allow me to run the whole show from my wacom tablet and a MIDI controller. In addition to looping and compositing a couple dozen of my little glitchy movies, I'll also be able to draw on the stage with colored light, and create effects like color fields, follow spots, and animated streaks, all with the digital projector. It will be an adventure, since I only found the program a couple days ago, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.
Hey there, good people. I don't know if any of you are familiar with etsy.com, but it's a cleverly-designed arts and crafts (mostly) marketplace with some pretty bells and whistles, like listing items by color, and some basic social networking and preference-detection.
More importantly, it now has several of my digital illustrations up for sale. If you're looking for some last-minute gifts, or just want some colorful artwork on your walls, check it out. There's a lot of great stuff on the site, and most of it is very fairly priced.
(p.s. - the domain name, groundarts.etsy.com, isn't working at the moment, but the above links will, as will any search for 'groundarts')
I'll give you three guesses which delicious dish finished off our home-cooked dinner last night:
We had black-eyed peas, cornbread, fried red potatoes and...?
If you answered 'spinach from a bag', you win. If not, you lose. Here's hoping we don't lose, too. At least it was sauteed. Still, that e. coli O157:H7 is bad fucking shit, no pun intended. For those of you keeping score, that's the 'Jack in the Box deathburger' variety.
Maybe the worst part of this mess, other than the handfull of deaths that will result, is that this bacterium is present in manure, which organic (and other) farmers use as fertilizer. I expect to hear that a lot, in the next few days. I *don't* expect to hear that this particularly wicked strain didn't exist before the late 70s and early 80s, and seems to be a direct result of drugged-up feedlot cattle farming.
Now we get to hang out for the next couple of days, hoping the bottom doesn't drop out. Pun intended.
I'm stunned that we've been in Chicago for nearly 10 months, and I've been working this job for 8 of them. It has paid the bills, so far, but that's the best I can say about it. At first, it was supposed to be an account management job, with some production work included. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the company is poorly-managed, disorganized, and not terribly interested in the well-being of its employees.
I work in a basement, mostly. The noise of air compressors and copy machines is so loud I should really wear earplugs, and I do, some days. The intercom system barely reaches the basement with enough volume to be useful, so I must choose between damaging my hearing and missing every phone call that comes my way.
There is no system to get me the paper or supplies I need, so I have to order everything myself, and if I need paper on short notice (most things are on short notice), I have to schlep it up- or downstairs, even cut it myself. I stand all day, lacking a proper workspace, and I swear to God, I almost gave myself a hernia last week.
It's taken me a while to get over feeling like I should be able to fix all this, myself. I've been snakebit from the beginning, though. I feel like, in a job like that, you only have a limited time, right off the bat, to change systems, before you get so enmeshed in production that you just have to keep swimming. Right about the time I figured out how to do my job, my Dad died, and that cost me a couple weeks of work, along with a few more weeks of less-than-concentrated effort.
Thanks to the aftermath of that, in part, I spent the next couple of months getting back up to speed, and trying to recover from mistakes I made in those first couple of sleepless weeks.
In the next few months, my production workflow went from $60,000/month to $100,000. Last month, we did more than $150,000. It is too much, and by the end of last week, I was completely burned-out.
I've spent the weekend working on a new version of my resume, and made a list of digital imaging companies to apply to, and I have a meeting with my boss at 7:30 tomorrow morning, to talk about ways to reform our workflow w/r/t my customer. I am *not* excited about it. I've got to get out of that place, and quickly.
Jeez, it's been forever. I knew it would take some work, settling into a new city, but this is pretty rough. I feel like I haven't been myself for a good while, and I'm just now getting back into the swing of things, making art and whatnot. Work has been kicking my ass, and not in a very interesting way. It has come to my attention that I need to get my ass a new job, and soon. On one hand, the pay is quite a bit better than I ever made in Tucson, but that's in Chicago dollars. And I'm a little flattered by the fact that my job is enough of a pain in the ass that there aren't too many people around who could fill my spot. Still, that isn't enough reason to keep doing it.
So my job basically consists of producing complicated medical forms, each of whose pages are bar-coded and serialized, for dozens of different pharmaceutical studies. If any of the numbers overlap, that's bad. If any of the code page #s don't match the actual page #s, that's bad. It doesn't help that my boss is a bit of a dick, who flips out to the extent that people are noticeably on edge when he's around, and amazingly relaxed when he's gone.
All that wouldn't be so bad, but the equipment is unreliable and outdated, the organizational systems are shredded (at best), the support staff have been fired and deliberately not replaced, so I have to order supplies, take care of billing, shipping, etc. On the upside, I've learned to do even more stuff in this generally crappy business. On the downside, my workload has doubled over the last few months, and things are starting to slip through the cracks. Personally, I don't want to be there, when everything falls apart.
Oh, did I mention I work in a basement, surrounded by fairly loud copiers, even louder bindery equipment, and fuckin' loud air compressors, that vent moisture (think 'bus air brakes' for 5 seconds straight) unpredictably every hour or so?
Now I just need to figure out what to do, instead. Time to polish up the resume and portfolio, again. Time to do some serious thinking, too. This business just isn't good for me, and I need to start busting my way up the food chain. Any suggestions?
Requiescat in pace Thomas James Taylor Nov. 5, 1921 - Nov. 18, 2005
A couple of days ago, there was a brief power outage at my parents' house. The clocks that hadn't been reset all read midnight at 5:00 this morning, when Dad finally passed in his sleep. He never regained consciousness after the initial cardiac arrest, so we can only assume his departure was instantaneous and painless. Thank Goodness.
