I Need a Stretch

So, seeing that I'm out of school (graduated and all that good stuff), and am once again shooting for a paper (and once again in the less-than-enviable-but-better-than-nothing position of "Photo Intern"), I should start posting again.

And I will, I swear. At the moment, however, I'm having issues because I can't get the 'net at my new abode, but I'll starting doing a mobile update from wherever I can get signal. Soon. Truly. Promise.

Speaking of "my new abode," I've moved up to Chattanooga, Tn., for the time being, and am interning at the Chattanooga Times-Free Press, which was voted the best newspaper in Tennessee, according to the big trucks outside. I basically live an hour away from my parents, a fact which they have yet to abuse (thanks, guys), and about two hours away from anybody who would seem to want to talk to me.

Phhbbbbbtttt.

But the staff is great, my roommate's cool, and I do enjoy the city. Things are decent/good enough.

Enough babble, I'll post when I've got something to show you. Till then, cheers, ziveli, etc, for a new city and a new job. Maybe if we run fast enough, we'll outpace the bad stuff.

Tired, but recharged

Long weekend, but my soul's batteries are definitely recharged. Got to shoot a little bit of my roommate's tattoo, so I figured I'd post it up as a dry run. I'm not too hot on any of the three, and I stuck to monotone because the light was kind of blah. Also, it's a pretty simple tattoo, itself monotone, so I thought it wouldn't detract from it. If I get the chance and time, I'm going to see if he'd be willing to do it again because I had more ideas afterward.

Hindsight's 20/20, right?


Any who, I'll be posting a "real" photo later in the week. This was just an attack of opportunity, if you'll pardon the geek-reference.

Ciao, y'all.

Cans! And more portraits!

One of the local high schools does a can drive every year during homecoming week -- it used to be a big competition between them and their rivals, but now it's downgraded to just a competition between homerooms and school clubs. They overshot their initial goal of 30,000 cans, and managed to hit somewhere in the range of 37,000, so the three charity groups that got to split the collection of canned goodness were quite happy. Dat's a lotta cans.

_____

Okay, I won't claim to know how to evaluate art. I'm curious about the subject, I'd like to learn and what not, but it's just not happening at the moment. It especially catches my ear when the words "controversial" or "possibly blasphemous" come into play. So when I got told to head out and shoot the artist of a "controversial" religious artist who specializes in surrealism, I thought, "cool." Honestly, though, it wasn't that bad. Maybe my sense of controversial is a little more extreme, or maybe the folks at the gallery at a little ... thinner skinned ...? Anyway, the artists showed up after a while, reminded me a lot of one of my old roommates, and things went pretty quickly and comfortably.

The last one was just playing around with a very white bench they had in the gallery. I really wanted a honeycomb or snoot or something on my flash to narrow the light, but I've yet to cannibalize any of the collected cardboard junk at my apartment into something sufficient. Soon, however -- soon. And all my problems will be solved.

Ha, okay ...

EDIT: Oh, and points to the person who can identify the roommate this guy reminded me of -- you'd have to have known me for a good while.

Ah, sigh ...

Usually, I arrive home and burst through the door adjacent to the one I pay for, receiving a greeting of " 'Eeeyyyy, how's it going?" from my housemates. But tonight, I arrived home to find only the lethargic one upstairs grumbling about. Everyone else is gone. And, though lonely, it's nice. Prop my feet up, cut open a Freezer Pop, and crack open my laptop. My attention doesn't have to contend with video games or movies or off-the-wall conversation. It's a change from the norm, and a change is as good as a holiday.

On to more interesting subjects:

I spent ... perhaps two or three days designing and building a Web site with Adobe GoLive, tried to transfer it over to Dreamweaver, and found out that though it's all the same language, the two programs are reading it slightly differently. Layout stays the same, but the text didn't transfer right, appearing on DW as way too big and not the text designated in the CSS file. After about 90 seconds of pondering, I realized that the Mac (boo, hiss) doesn't have the text, jenkins v2.0, that I was using on my Windows-running laptop. So now I either have to decide to add the font to a computer in the lab, change the graphics in the current design (which already incorporate the font), or just boot it all to the curb and start over. But other than the font, everything else seemed to be in order -- graphics were fine, links worked, et al.

I hate Myspace, by the way. I just do. Thus, I like this idea. I'll be joining the rebellion.

You know, right now, I don't have much else. Here's a photo, just for making it through all that mess.

The Legion of Merit, awarded to Col. Bob Izlar (Ret.) Thursday of last week.

Ciao.

Revamp

I realized I have been leaving out tags on pretty much all my posts, so I just went back and added tags to them. Also, "I tell (Insert Adjective) Stories" seemed a little ... flimsy ... or something ... for a blog, so I changed it, too. As well as the address. They're both now jakeforddaniels, three quarters of my name.

The weekend was long and fraught, to say the least, I had a minor case of insomnia last night, I'm really tired, and I won't be eating until nigh on six. As my roommate Tilley would say, "Good times, good times."

Ciao.

Finito

Yep, finished with classes for the semester. I had an Arabic final at noon, and now I'm done.

To celebrate, I'm going to ... change my desktop background?

From this:

To this:

This is a completely pointless change, but, as I now have all of perhaps two responsibilities, most things I do will seem completely pointless.

There'll be more later, I'm sure.

Just a little update

This is just to keep up appearances. (Blatantcy is the crutch of brevity, which, as we all know, is the soul of wit.)


On the 29th of November, my roommate Tilley invited me to ride in a helicopter with his ROTC class, and, being the weirdo that I am, I skipped out on two classes just to do so.

(Above: that's my man Tilley on the right. Finance, hoo-ah!)

Unfortunately, it was a Chinook, not a Blackhawk like the original plan had called for. The pilots complained about something regarding the weather and the number of people who would be coming, so they elected for the twin-rotor beast. A good time had by all.

And then I drove to Decatur to volunteer for the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar, met a few interesting people, got seriously ill, attended only a third of the actual seminar and remembered only half of that, and spent a lot of time either on the road or asleep. Fun.

Ciao.

Oh, yeah ...

Something else, I've been making these for the past 24 hours or so (no, not constantly). The photo folks at the R&B were trying to do the "iPod" commercial effect, and I was trying to think about how I used to do it "back in the day," "back in the day" meaning last semester. So here's a couple.

Photos

So the photos I had planned to load up ...

Yeah, so I got into the idea of doing interesting "party photography" over the summer -- the result of some ill-thoughtout drunken photography on a tour bus in Cuba. This was our last party, pre-cops. The stripper is one of my roommates, the stripper pole is a staple of the household, and she was not, in fact, at all toasty.

Another of the same party, somewhere around midnight, most likely shortly beforehand. With the assistance of house-friend Sam, Robert take a drink off his girlfriend Mia.

Everything else is on my external harddrive, so I'll post more later.

Like knitting, only masculine.

So one of my roommates (bad influences, as I said) brought home his dad's homemade maille shirt, which was actually made from key chain circles. I laughed and made mention that it was cool, but a step-and-a-half above pop-top maille. See, I used to make maille back in high school. It's not that complicated, it's just time consuming and a little on the physically demanding side. It used to be something for me to do with my hands while I watched a movie or suffered through deep thoughts.

In the spirit of nostalgia and that occasional desire to make something with my hands, I bought 100 feet of 14 gauge galvanized wire (thin stuff, basically), rummaged up a pair of wire cutters, a Leatherman and a Gerber, and a screwdriver for the molding shaft, and went to work. A hour later and I've got a small sliver of maille, 4x1 inches hanging. That, and my hands are red and raw, a status which did not change over night. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Anyway, this is a decent site for beginning maille makers. There are lot out there, so just hit up Google if you ever become interested.

Headed for Atlanta in 15 minutes with Aleks -- she's finally getting her citizenship! I'm happy for her, but unfortunately, her family can't attend the ceremony, so I'm going to go along and be celebratory. My family always raised me to believe that it doesn't matter where you live, what flag you fly, or who gets your money when the tax man cometh, you are always who you were born and raised. She'll officially be a citizen of the United States, but she'll always be Serbian, just like I might end up in ... oh, hell, I don't know, Serbia, but I'll always be a good ole hillbilly from the American South.

I guess this is pointing toward my ideology that you are who you decide to be, not who someone or something else says you are. There is no piece of paper, no edict, no televised ceremony that can take away the mountain and rivers in my blood, or the sawdust, roofing tar, or grease on my soul. Or clothes.

Later.

Somebody shoot me

I've begun an experiment that may or may not result in my total failure in life. To be more specific, my roommates (bad influences, all of them) convinced me last Saturday that it would be a good idea to load "World of Warcraft" onto my computer. And thus it began. The uploading, the downloading, the emailing, the headache, the long wait, and then I was finally signed up, 10 free days of adventuring, killing various fantasy animals, and running around in a pretty well-designed environment. As my sister and my best friend warned me, "It's another addiction, Jake! Bad! Bad, bad, bad!"

Eh, we'll see. But after my 10 free days, I'll probably just cancel the whole thing. $15 a month is not terrible, but I like doing other things, like salsa dancing and, you know, eating, which require money as well. But at least I will be able to say I ventured through WoW and survived. Not to mention I'm thinking about doing a comparison piece with "Guild Wars." And thusly the battle began ...

Other news - still sore.

Yet more news - the SLC (Student Learning Center, for those poor souls not living in Athens) was shut down this morning due to a bomb threat. I was headed for my first class when I got waved off by the cops, who just said, "Bom' threa'." Ah, gotcha. So I hung around as they evacuated everybody, took some pictures, ran into someone from my writing class who was getting the story, and took some more pictures. He can have the words, I'll take the pictures. I like it like that.

Bomb threats. Some bastard probably had an exam this morning, woke up and just didn't feel like taking it. Pretty damn inconsiderate. (As I write this, I sort of assume the entire building will collapse or something, making me eat my words, as always.)

Aleks and Zorana are headed into Atlanta today to try to see the Dalai Lama. I know I should be more interested - he's a massive international political figure, he's controversial, et cetera, et al - but I can't really miss my photojournalism class.

Later.

Another game

My roommates are bad influences on me ... I already want to get a new computer just so I can run this ...



I love the concept of magic and technology mixed in the same environment, and (it seems) especially when the environment involves some kind of horror aspect. Not to mention it's damned pretty - one of my roomies is beta-testing it and I watched over his shoulder for a while.

There are some things you can't beat with a stick

Two things which I -- generally -- always seem to enjoy: science and video games. I like that really weird science, too, the stuff you only find in far-out bad science fiction, like quantum mechanic guns and such. So I giggled like a little schoolgirl (pardon the mental image) when one of my roommates showed me this trailer.



This is a new game from the guys who brought the world Half-life, bless them and their offspring's offspring. Instead of the run-and-gun homogeny that many first-person-shooters seem to have, this is instead a puzzle game. You dash about with a device that opens what equate to something like worm holes (ha - knew I could get a Star Trek reference in there somewhere), solving problems.

For me, the real kick are the physics they're using. Say you're on a platform ten feet from the floor, and you need to get to a platform ten feet above your current position. There's a lip, but no way you could make a ten-foot jump. So you pop an exit portal on the ground next to you, shoot an entry portal on the ground ten feet below you, and jump down through the entry portal. This, of course, sends you through the exit portal, not only with the same momentum, but in reverse to your previous spatial orientation, so you're now essentially flying out the exit portal at 9.8 meters per second squared upside down and backwards.

HAHA! I think I just wet myself with excitement.

Okay, so I'm a geek. This isn't as exciting as I think it is, but it's pretty friggin' awesome.

Go to IGN.com and look it up.