pres.umptuo.us

• Do I even need to explain this?

  Monday April 30, 2007

• HP Cameras Slimming Feature. Thank god they came out with this feature. Those fatties they used in their demo were way chub.

  Tuesday September 19, 2006

• Star Wars On Earth. Like Camelot, it’s only a model.

  Thursday July 13, 2006

Chess

I try to play at least one game of chess a day, in the hopes that a) I’ll get better over time, and b) My brain won’t completely atrophy from lack of use.

And what have I learned so far? I suck at chess.

Ashes and Snow

Went and checked out this exhibition at the Santa Monica pier. The exhibition is in the Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure built out of shipping containers. It looks pretty sweet from the outside, and once you’re inside you would be none the wiser as to what it was made of.

The photos themselves are all amazing, and what’s even more amazing is that they’re all on handmade Japanese paper. The exhibition has some films being shown as well, although they got boring after a while since they consisted mostly of slow-mo shots of humans and animals interacting.

The best part was the gift shop where they had a museum-quality collection of all the photos from the exhibition selling for $8,000. I’m sure a big chunk of that money went to supporting the Flying Elephants Foundation, but I can’t imagine anyone would go to an exhibition expecting to purchase something like that..

Ashes and Snow goes until May 14

Room Redecorating

I’ve reorganized my room. For those who had seen my room before, the big desk in the middle of my room is now gone. You’d be amazed at how big my room seems now.

I’ll write more about this soon enough, and hopefully some photos as well.

• BLDGBLOG: The Garages of Branislav Kropilak. The other photos on his site are great as well.

  Wednesday April 26, 2006

• February 2, 2006 Rainbow at Elam Bend (McFall, Missouri). If I’d taken those photos, I’d just retire and never try to take another photo again.

  Friday April 21, 2006

• Gigapxl Project Image Gallery. I think I’ve caught the photography bug again.

  Sunday April 16, 2006

• HDR Photos of Tokyo Gotham. Now I really want a decent digital camera again.

  Friday April 14, 2006

• Beautiful China.

  Tuesday January 24, 2006

The closing remarks of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival were lead off by Bret Anthony Johnson. After an awkward yet amusing rendition of “Happy Birthday” for coordinator Kurt’s birthday, Bret opened with a joke, which I will poorly paraphrase here:

A writer out of town on business receives a phone call from the police department. They tell him they have bad news — that his house was burnt down to ashes and nothing remains. They have good news though — they caught the guy who did it. It’s his literary agent.

The writer says, “Really? My agent came to my house?”

An inspirational speech about writing followed, and thus ended my first experience at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

But not yet! My plane back wasn’t until Saturday evening, so I actually had an entire day to myself just to enjoy Iowa city. The Mayflower dormitory forced me to check out at noon, so I left my luggage at the desk and went off.

I enjoyed an Iowa omelette at Hamburg Inn No. 2 before heading back to the used bookstores where I picked up a few more books to bring back in my box. I’m really into used bookstores now and hoping I can find some good ones back in Los Angeles. With still a few hours to kill until the shuttle would arrive, I rested in a coffee shop and just read to pass the time. Having nothing to worry about and just tons of free time was more than worth the trip.

Although my primary goal of just “to write more” wasn’t accomplished simply because the workshop was not very writing intensive, I still learned a lot from the people I met and have more insight into the writing process now. I’m fairly certain I’ll return next year, and encourage everyone who has even the tiniest bit of interest in writing to check it out too. If anything, it’s a good, relaxing, vacation away from everything.

Final flickr photo set of Iowa City.

The free coffee in the morning was way overrated.

Here’s my daily schedule first: Morning coffee from 8:30 to 10:30. The Elevenses Series, presentations on a variety of topics of interest to writers, at 11:00. Workshop session from 2:00 to 5:00. Prairie Lights readings at 8:00.

Any time before, after, or between those is free time. Heck, anything other than the workshop is free time, all other activities are optional.

Continue reading “Iowa Summer Writing Festival - Day 1″

My name is Eric and I like running on an hour of sleep.

I arrived at LAX two hours ahead of my flight departure time. United Airlines decided to go “self check-in” with this e-ticket business, and naturally about 90% of the people who go up to the kiosks don’t know how to use it and need someone to help them with it. It’s amusing to watch the “paper ticket” lines move about ten times as fast.

After 30 minutes of standing in line, a representative informed me that if I had no bags to check-in (which I didn’t), then I could do the express check-in at the machines hidden under the bridge.

Thanks for telling me earlier.

Continue reading “Iowa Summer Writing Festival - Day 0 (Part 1)”

So I come across this link to a forum thread, where supposedly someone found a digital camera while hiking in the woods. He downloaded the pics that were in the cam and posted them up for people to see, and there’s reflections and freaky silhouettes that people start pointing out.

I hate scary shit. Scares the crap out of me. Saw What Lies Beneath a while back and was paranoid everytime I took a shower for at least a week afterwards. So naturally I kept reading the thread as people kept finding more stuff. And then they find a corrupted image from the camera’s memory and attempt to recover what’s on it. And then the person who posted the pics says he’s going back with a bunch of his friends and BB guns. This was good stuff.

Then a few pages later on people link back to the original thread where this is from in another forum, and it’s a hoax. They were laughing their asses off. Really good stuff though.

I’m sure everyone’s too lazy to go through the whole thread, but basically around page 14 or so is when people start calling it a hoax. And finally on page 24 is when they link back to the original thread where it first started. And here’s the excellent photoshopping of the “corrupted image”. Fake, sure, but entertained me for a good hour or so.

I’ve been reading about this one photo-sharing site for a while now, Flickr, and been itching to give it a try. Being too lazy to setup my own photoblog again and having spent a good amount of time since moving home to try to make my room “mine” again, I finally got the wall right next to where I sit to a level I’m happy with. Took photos and setup account on Flickr, and off we go.

Here’s a link to my page on there. Checkout the nifty features like being able to comment and adding notes to the photos. I think there’s tons of other cool stuff on there too that I haven’t even begun to play with yet.

Pat sent along a coupon for 25 free digital prints at Target. Went out and tried it today, and it couldn’t have been any easier. Just loaded 25 pics onto a compact flash card, went over to the photo counter and showed them the coupon and that was that, no questions asked. I’m gonna have to get the most out of this and get some more photos printed.

Shame I’ve still got a roll of film (old school here) that I need to get developed. Who the hell still develops film these days?