Play Ball!

I've been getting cute little Tiger game update texts from Heather this afternoon. Seems we're up 2-0 in the opener. World Series here we come! :)

Embossing Me Around

Heather got a cool, big, heavy die-cutting / embossing machine for her scrapbooking. This thing is built like a tank, and cuts all kinds of shapes that she's going to use to make her scrapbooks even cooler. I think we could also possibly run Coco through it if she was especially hyper one evening. Then Heather could scrapbook her!

She Came, She Cleaned

Well, Ala was everything we were promised. And more. She stayed for 12 hours and our house looks brand new. Heather thinks she even drained the dogs' anal sacs :)

Saliva Warning

If you have Maddie on your lap and someone within 50 feet mentions a horse, she will look at you and blow a giant raspberry in your face, as she helpfully shows you what a "horsie says".

Reisen nach München

We went to Michigan's ode to Bavaria - a small town called Frankenmuth Saturday for dinner. HB and I have both been there quite a few times in our short, glamorous lives. But this is the first time we went together. As usual, the food was great and we stuffed ourselves to the gills. But there was a disturbance in the force as we drove by Bronner's.

For the uninitiated, Bronner's is the world's largest Christmas store. Acres of glitzy, glammy commertialism, surrounded by hundreds of miles of billboards reminding everyone of said place. Well, Mr. Bronner died Saturday, the day we drove past his temple to December 25th. We resisted the urgent need to actually go into Bronner's this time, so we didn't get to properly pay our respects. But next time we need a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a beer stein, we'll be back.

It Happened One Night

Heather has been sick the last few days. Very stuffed up, so she hasn't been sleeping well. She also snores, just little girly snores, when she is sick. But that is enough to wake me up, and it did the other night. I reached over to tap her a little to try to bring her up into the lightest levels of sleep so she would roll over and stop.

I meant to tap her on the shoulder...except I missed and tapped on her head. She woke up with a start and said:

"What are you doing?!?!"

I said "Sorry, you were snoring". To which she replied:

"Did you have to Woodpecker me?!?!"

I laughed hysterically at the time, for like five minutes, but she was so sleepy she couldn't figure out what I thought was so funny. The next day we talked about it and we have both been giggling about it ever since. Freaking hilarious!

"What's your favorite song?"

I hate when people ask me that, because what music-loving person could ever distill a lifetime of exposure to all kinds of wonderful and moving material down to one song? Perhaps "What's your favorite song right this second" might be more approachable as a goal. Or "What is your favorite song by Son House?", although even that would give me pause.

So I have lots of favorite songs. But a couple are really special. If I am ever forced to answer the question at the top of this post, I will almost always answer with "Statesboro Blues" by Blind Willie Johnson. I love that song every time I hear it. I have a verse from it tattooed on the back of my iPod:

"Big Eighty left Savannah, Lord and did not stop"

This song is raw and displays the full range of yearning and spunk that Delta Blues is famous for. But if I were to be asked what I think the most beautiful song is I would reply without pausing, "Until The Last Moment" by Yanni. Yes, I know...Yanni. Ha...ha...get it out of your system. It is an amazing song. We have it on Maddie's iPod playlist at night and so I hear it through the baby monitor quite often. I sometimes just wake up and hear part of it and think "Damn, that's awesome". So don't laugh until you go hear it first. Amazing.

There are more favorites, for different moods and times, but those two are right at the top of my Himalaya of music...so high the Tibetan prayer flags are fastened to them.

Mootch!!!

That's what Maddie says when you are in her way.

Social Security Number 000-00-0001

Last year I was lying in Zach's bed reading to him. He has a nice mattress pad and comfy pillow.

Dad: "Your bed is comfortable. When I was a kid..."

Zach: "...beds had straw in them?"

I Must Be Slipping

Immersed as I am in this near-constant haze of sleepiness, I almost stuffed a banana peel into the paper shredder today. That would have been messy.

Seeds

If you are in the know, you know what this means. If not, just wait...

Wild Dance Party!

We have been having fairly regular dance parties in the old living room lately. Whenever one or more children are getting cranky or bored, it's time to fire up the funky dance songs. We usually do a mix of Disco (Play That Funky Music), Funk (You Dropped A Bomb On Me), Techno (Aux88) and LA Club music (The Crystal Method). We all love it, everyone should let loose every now and then. Keeps you sane.

Of course, it drives the dogs batty. We usually have to resort to locking them in the kitchen to avoid inadvertently stepping on one and squashing it. We also occasionally get a dented shin, and the neighbors surely think we're nuts. But we don't care.

It's our party, and we can freak out if we want to.

In Between

We had a fun-filled and raucous almost-week with Zach. We went to The Spiderwick Chronicles (verdict: he LOVED it), played Mario Galaxy, went for walks, drew, ate, and of course, played with rubber worms.

Zach is really starting to grow into a big boy. He's doing chores now, playing with his sister (at least sometimes) like a good big brother, and he's able to carry bigger and bigger grocery bags into the house. Every time I see him, he does more and better things. I always miss him so much after he leaves. I can't wait until the next time I get to see him.

Walt Disney once said that animation is the magic that happens in between frames. It sometimes seems like Zach does all his growing up in between visits. I hope that's not true, because my little guy has more than enough magic to go around.

All Praise Ala

Our new housekeeper "Ala" starts tomorrow, and judging by reports from my brother who recommended her, our lives are about to change. She is from Poland and apparently works like a mule team on caffeine and uppers. She often stays for 12 hours and reorganizes his whole house during the day, which also includes doing all the laundry.

She seems very nice, but in a "get the hell out of my way so I can get this done" kinda way. We're spending tonight making sure all clutter, dogs, and small children are way out of her way by tomorrow.

I'll give a full report from the new crib after Hurricane Ala...

In My Veins

Coffee!!! It's in my veins now, coursing and traveling to the nether regions of my sleepy cells. It wasn't always so. We ran out of coffee last week and my life has been lived in slow motion since that fateful day. Dragging and walking slow, like Frankenstein's monster, but way more handsome and with a slightly better haircut :)

Everything is ok now. With enough juice to function, my brain is showing signs of life. I may even attempt simple addition, later in the day of course.

Goodbye, Sunshine

A good friend of mine died on March 11th. He was a really great guy, and only 34 years old. He was the kind of bloke who would do anything for you. Awesome at sports, especially football. He was huge and powerful, but due to his always-happy disposition, we all just called him Sunshine.

Sunshine must have really loved animals, because every time we went to the zoo, there he was too. He practically lived there.

We're going to miss sunshine. He could bench more weight and burp louder than any of us, and was the life of any party. He'd get ripped on a few dozen beers and carry eight or twelve of us on his back as he ran around jumping and playing. We had some crazy times.

I wish he'd showered more though, it was hard to really get close to him, what with the horrendous stank and all.

Oxygen, Need Oxygen

Maddie has been waking up during the night and not sleeping until we plop her in bed with us. She sleeps crazy. When I left for work this morning she was wrapped around Heather's head like an Alien face-hugger (slightly cuter though).

The Beeatch Of Bar Itch

Heather got us a game for Wii called "Game Party". It's essentially a collection of bar games. You play the games as all the other bar denizens, diverse and dressed pretty much like the village People, watch your game with semi-detached interest. Some games are better than others, we like the darts and indoor shuffleboard the best, and the table hockey is ok too. The skeeball is not so good.

But one thing really bothers us. The people watching the game are always scratching themselves! Some unknown itchy thing has invaded this bar and is driving everyone nuts. Not only is this behavior freaky, but it's pretty distracting too. You are trying to push a shuffleboard puck across the table with care, and some dude in a pimpy-looking leisure suit is going at it at the far end. It makes me itch just watching this freak show.

We "play through it" most of the time, trying to ignore the Bar Itch, but once you realize it's going on, it's always there in your peripheral vision.

Boondoggle

So, I drove Zach almost to my work today before realizing that I was supposed to be taking him to school. We were pretty late, needless to say, and I felt dumber than a bag of hammers.

She's Bananas About Her Monkey

Much to my surprise and delight, when I arrived in my hotel room in Chicago last time, I found this set of marked-up bananas (I had previously only heard of marking them down) that Heather did for me and packed in my stuff. Every day I got to see how much my family loves me. :)

Adulthood's End

Goodbye to one of the greats...2001 author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday in Sri Lanka. What an amazing writer, who also happened to have laid the groundwork for the telecommunications sattelite. I loved his book "Childhood's End", and his outlook on life: both optomistic and realistic. Things can get better, it just takes work.

Harvesting Grain

One of the greatest ironies of modern technology is how it almost immediately becomes cool to imitate the old technology that has been replaced. This happens in music, it's cool to have vinyl albums now that shiny discs are everywhere. Stone washed jeans, fake antique furniture, we all crave authenticity. And of course, this pervades art, including digital photography.

Now that we have replaced the darkroom with Lightroom, and the stinking chemicals with Photoshop, it is fashionable to make our "digital captures" look as much as possible like the old-timey photos be they silver gelatin, bromide, or tintype. That means basically two things: 1) remove any trace of "digitalness" from the capture, and 2) add in adjustments to mimic the old processes.

Modern digital SLRs are pretty good at capturing images accurately, and that is part of the problem. They are often too in-focus, over too much of the field, and they have high sensitivities that freeze action, something that was difficult to do with the chemistry of the past. Color is captured more realistically now too, and often appears almost flat next to an old Kodachrome slide or Velvia print, which burst with ultra-saturated colors. New sources of noise in the image from the digital nature of the capture must be removed to leave no trace of the photographs origin. These show up as chroma (color) or luminance (black and white) noise from the sensor, and lens defects that digital cameras are great at amplifying. It can be a real pain to remove these things but since they do not appear in old photos, they must go.

Now the fun part: adding in the quirks of the past. Volumes have been written and many opinions traded on how best to add fake "film grain" to a digital capture. I myself often use a high-resolution scan of an actual medium format grain field lifted from a pushed, high ISO blank Hasselblad 120 frame, applied to the image in Photoshop as an overlay. The result is an amazing replication of film grain, something that we used to celebrate the death of when digital cameras first came out.

Color tints made by exotic metals like platinum and gold, focus defects, exposure irregularities, lens vignetting, blurriness, and contrast shifts can all be faked, and to pretty good effect. It is interesting that we spend as much time trying to put these things into photos now as the old-timers used to spend trying to get rid of them. Perhaps more.

"In a world of post modern fad, what was good now is bad" - Jewel

Hanging All Over Each Other

Going Down

I am SO tired today. Poor HB is too. We have not gotten much sleep lately...and not in the good way. Coffee...I have been drinking like a storm sewer all day and still the hazy sluggishness remains. I might have to try electricity.

Avian Tacos

Could that salsa be more green?

The Cave

The beast, sitting in it's cave, ready for work.

Hhhhhhhhot!!!!!

More proof of paternity...this girl likes her food smokin' hot.

Little Clicker

Yes, she is my daughter.

Yum, Spanish Style

Authentic Spanish Empanada

I've Been Thinking About Your Face

Besides depriving me of much-needed sleep and making every muscle in my body sore, the Wii has done something to my brain already. I can no longer look at anyone without trying to analyze their face and postulate how best to make their Mii. I do this with people I know and famous people as well, everyone. It is like having a song stuck in my head, I cannot concentrate. Someone will be telling me a story about something important and in my head I'm trying to decide if their eyebrows would be best represented by the third selection from the top rotated two clicks right, or the one second from bottom, raised up one click and enlarged two clicks.

Here's my Einstein...what do you think? If you are reading this blog there is a very good chance you are already represented by a Mii on my Wii, which means I was thinking very hard about your face recently. How's that for a Tuesday morning thought?

Quite a Wiikend

We have some friends we get together with a couple times a year for no-holds-barred dinner extravaganzas. They share our love of great food, wine, and conversation, and we had plenty of everything Saturday. From mini beef wellingtons to green olives marinated in lemon and coriander, Pinot Gris to Valpolicella, we indulged in a bacchanalia of locally legendary proportions. Then we went downstairs into the new studio and got some really great pictures of the girls in their dance outfits. Nine hundred and eighty-odd pictures with many wardrobe changes. When we do it, we do it big.

It was a long but fun day, that lasted well into the night. And if if are anything like me, you would think that kind of fun was enough to fill a whole weekend at least. But you'd be wrong. You see, Heatherbaby had still more plans for fun hidden up her skinny sleeve.

You can imaging my surprise when my lovely wife awakened me very early Sunday morning and said she had to go out on a secret mission and would be back later on. It was puzzling, intriguing even. She came back in about an hour with a package she plopped on my lap, and all was revealed.

It was a Nintendo Wii. She had planned to get me one for my birthday, it turns out, and she found one early. Rather than wait the grueling few extra months until my actual birthday, she decided to make me a new "Wii Birthday" on March 9th. Is this chick sweet, or what? Zach almost fell off the couch onto his lower jaw, he was so surprised.

Needless to say, we played and played all day Sunday, swatting tennis balls and virtually bowling and ended up tired, very sore, and wonderfully satisfied. I even had dreams of running over virtual sunny landscapes, my virtual toes happy with the moist feel of virtual grass. We even spent an hour or so creating our virtual selves (which is called a mii, of course)

Another, perhaps inevitable fallout of my Wii birthday was that everything wii said started to take on the double-i suffix. As you can sii, there are manii chances to have a wii bit of fun hiir.

I want to send out a big thank you to my hotsexiibeautiful wife...I'll play ball with you aniitime. :)

Owsh

Maddie has started sitting at the dinner table with the Big People this week, no high chair. She likes it much better but still has to master the process of sitting on a chair with no restraints. She got sort-of caught between the chair and the table yesterday and started sinking down.

She said "Owsh".

Fun With Science

Coco loves to rub her face rapidly on her big cushy doggie bed. But in the winter, this process generates a near-fatal zap of static electricity. It's tremendous fun to watch her face-rubbing frantically only to hear a loud POP! and see her sit up fast, looking straight ahead with a puzzled expression, only to shrug it off and go right back to rubbing.

Linked In

Zach has been spending some of his free time as Link, the hero of "Legend of Zelda". He is very good at finding his way around that big virtual world, and even better at solving the riddles and problems the game throws out.

And most of all he loves being called a "Swordsman".

Snow Day With Fine Print

Zach had a snow day yesterday, You should have seen his face change from sad to ecstatic in a microscopic quantum slice of time when I told him the news. It was as though a veil of thunderstorms suddenly cleared to reveal a sunny day at the beach.

Of course, nothing is free, he still had to do some homework ("You're always making me do things that don't let me play video games at the same time"), but all in all, it was a fun-filled day of wonders.

Beastly Impressions

Many (2) of you have been asking me how I like The Beast, and if He is everything I had hoped he would be. The answer is, yes, and then some. I now own a supercomputer. I'm not sure anything I could do to this thing could really tax it. That's a good thing because I am going to challenge it with giant photos and complex filters and massive data manipulation. And maybe some moviemaking in the future.

As of yesterday, I have it about half setup for the Photography business. Lightroom and Photoshop are up and running, all pictures and user data is moved over, and Dot Mac has synced all my email, preferences, widgets, addresses, appointments, and dock items over from the MacBook. So it is beginning to feel like home. I told Heather it was a little sad moving all my data off her MacBook, almost like moving out. And now I have moved into a much bigger place with a really nice view.

So far, so good. I really needed to do this, editing and compositing large photos is hugely resource intensive and it was really challenging for the MacBook. The Beast just tears through that stuff like a bullet train through parchment paper. And the big cinema display shows every nuance of the photos all big and up-in-my-face.

My next steps are to calibrate the display so it shows perfect color, set up the pen tablet, move over all my Photoshop actions and Lightroom presets, and custom brushes, etc. Then I'll have no excuses left :)

If you're still with me, here are the specs for The Beast:

Apple "Early 2008 Model" Mac Pro
2 x 4-core Intel Xeon "Harpertown" 5400-series CPUs, clocked at 2.8 GHz per core, 8 cores total
12 MB Cache per CPU
Dual independent 1600 MHz front side busses, one per CPU
10 GB Fully-buffered 800 MHz RAM, 256 bit wide 4-way ported memory architecture
500 GB main HDU, SATA interface
2 x 160 GB SATA striped RAID drive array for Photoshop swap space
ATI Radeon graphics with 256 MB memory and support for up to two 30" ACDs
23" Apple Cinema HD Display, 1920x1200 resolution, DVI digital connection
Wacom Intuos3 6x11 tablet
X-Rite Eye-1 display calibrator/profiler
Apple Mighty Mouse, Bluetooth version

Mac OS X 10.5.2 "Leopard"
Adobe Photoshop CS3 10.0.1
Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1

Plus a constellation of external Firewire drives for data and backups

Zero Hit Points

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons died yesterday. Many of my teenage (and later) hours were spent playing his incredibly diverse and complicated and wonderful creation. And before you say that only geeks play D&D, please note that Vin Diesel also plays, so go tell him that first. Then you can come back and tell me. Anyhow, it is not an understatement to say that much of what I am today is because of this game. It showed me how to use my imagination and I still get goosebumps thinking about roaming the halls of some humid imaginary tunnel being hunted by a herd of dark beasts.

Bye Gary, happy travels...

Mar 4, 2008 12:20 PM

Mac Pro: Delivered. I can hear the angels now...

A Bunch Of Nuts And A Bolt

I never thought I'd grow up to be a coffee drinker. But then again, I am a lot of things I never thought I'd be. It usually takes me about two giant cups of coffee to get through a typical day now. If it's really bad, I might need three, but then the jitters set in and I become volatile, like a nervous squirrel handling nitro glycerin.

I have come to like really good coffee, the kind that I can't get here at work. Back before I was a coffee drinker I got some 100% Kona and even back then I knew it was good stuff. Now I drink the local industrial kitchenette variety, rough and tumble with a finish like licking a rusty fender. But I guess I shouldn't complain, it's hot and carries the requisite load of caffeine I require.

Coffee is a funny thing, isn't it? We take some beans, dry them out and roast them and grind them up and run hot water through them. Then we drink the resulting brown liquid. Who ever dreamed that up? Did they try it first with a range of really nasty and sometimes fatally poisonous beans and seeds, only to decide by default that only coffee did the trick? I'm sure the coffee plant has been bred by humans to be more tolerable over the years, the early, natural varieties were undoubtedly harsher and more primitive. So it must have been one wicked-tired adventurer that first dreamed up that brewing process. I'm sure the rest of the tribe looked at him like he was out of his mind. I'm not so sure he wasn't.

But crazy or not, thanks dude!