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Hah yall doin?

Saturday, February 25, 2006

It's like a free-for-all here. And there are college kids everywhere. It's Saturday night, now, and it rained off and on today, so they postponed Endymion until tomorrow after Bacchus. For those of you not in-the-know, Endymion and Bacchus are the highlight of Mardi Gras weekend, the two biggest parades that roll on Mardi Gras day. They're two of the highlights of carnival season, and now it's all going to be happening on one night. Should be some night!

We saw three parades last night, one after another, rolling down St. Charles Ave. The crowds were way thicker than I was expecting, only because I was expecting the crowds to be thinner than in the past. But No! Like I said, lots of college kids. Too many really. Ugh.

The city has this very electric feel to it. You can tell that things are just not normal. For one thing, Uptown is BUSY. I mean, it was always busy, but it's become the central hub in the city. It's really kind of nice, in a way, because you always knew that uptown was the place to be in the city. But now there aren't many other places you can be.

I haven't done a LOT of devastation touring yet, but I've done a bit--and it's intensely surreal. Intensely surreal. We were in Lakeview driving through dead neighborhoods, looking into houses filled with blackness. We drove down the lakefront for a little ways to West End where we had to stop to soak in what we saw. There were boats just scattered around, like toys that had been tossed across the floor. We circled around to West End Park and there were literally sail boats in the street that we had to manuever around. We turned onto one street and 100 yards ahead there was a sail boat perfectly erect in the middle of the street, being held up by stilts. We also drove past the break in the 17th Street canal where the street was covered entirely in mud and the houses were broken, bareing their insides to scrutiny.

I rode with my friend Dave, who is in from Dallas, and passed by his old apartment, then got out a few blocks away at his grandmother's house and went inside. Her house is on Milne in Lakeview... It is decimated. The walls are covered in several kinds of mold, the floor is buckling, and every single thing is covered in a film of mud. It was truly disgusting and very sad. We left pretty quickly--it's pretty hard to look at.

I also saw my grandma's house yesterday. The basement has been reduced to bare bones; all of my grandpa's books, his desk, his entire den area is gone. This is a tangent, but my grandpa died 2 weeks ago in Dallas, Tx, living in rehab hospitals in a city that he didn't like, never having the chance to see what happened to his home. Granted, my grandparents' house is not nearly as bad as Dave's grandma's house, but it's still unliveable in an empty, desolate part of town. I told Dave today, and this was the point of my tangent, that it was really sad that my grandpa lived for 83 years in this city and had to witness the destruction of NOLA before he died.

It was hard for me to be in my grandma's house yesterday. It was really the first I had seen of the destruction, after driving around the damn westbank all morning (which is a rant all its own, I'll get to that in a second). It just all kinda came flooding back to me--all the time I'd spent in that house, the loss of my grandpa, whose funeral I was unable to attend, the fact that my grandmother wasn't there in the house with me, and just the condition of the neighborhood and the reality of my old house across the street, which just looked horrible. I wasn't able to go into my old house, but we looked inside. Looking up into my old bedroom window on the second floor I could see that there was a huge chunk of the roof missing, light filtering in through the blue fema tarp.

We managed to get into town at a good time Thursday night/Friday morning at about 2:30. I got to sleep by 4am but woke up way too early to have fully recuperated from the drive, but it's hard to wake up and not want to just get up and go. Chet, the friend I drove with, requested that we go drop his stuff off on the West Bank, then hit the city, which was retarded because we were gonna be dropping him off a few hours later anyway. But he tends to argue and manipulate until things are the way he wants them and I had no selfless reason not to go along with it, assuming it wouldn't take three hours. Which is exactly what happened. After we dropped his stuff off he wanted to commandeer the driver's seat and drive around the West Bank for a little while, you know, "since we're already here." Then he wanted to see Old Algiers, you know, "since we're already here." I tried very hard to be patient, but by the end of his ride I just had to tell him "look let's go, I'm getting really antsy." It's only because my need to control comes in conflict with chet's need to control and at times our democratic processes break down in favor of "what I want." It all pans out in the end.

I have to say, though, that being here with other people makes me miss being here with my wife. She wakes up, gets dressed, figures out what she wants to do, then (here's a word: ) implements. She's up and ready to go. No messin' around, let's get out the house.

So anyway, I'm in the airport now using PJ's unsecured network-- free with purchase, 'cept they're closed. Luckily their gate to the network is wiiide open. I'm waiting for my sister-in-law to come in; her flight is coming almost an hour late. We'll assume it was delayed for weather. I think I'll be doing a bit more devastation-touring tomorrow--it feels kinda awkward sometimes to do so, but like my friends with me pointed out, I'm from here too. It's therapuetic to see it and experience it and I have every right. It just feels really strange--undescribable. I've taken a few pictures so far and I'll have more soon enough. I'll post some stuff soon enough, but for now I think my sister-in-law is almost here, so.... See yall lata.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

Melancholy Reveler

Sunday, February 19, 2006

"Will the first post-K Mardi Gras serve to reinvigorate civic pride and community cheer and our sense of esprit and renewal? Or will all the parading about on the only remaining sliver of habitable ground in a larger desolate wasteland only serve as a disjointed reminder of just how out of whack our lives have become?"
I like Chris Rose, I think all New Orleanians do. I just read this article, Melancholy Reveler, he wrote, explaining the contradictions he feels about Mardi Gras this year. A large part of me is uneasy about what I'm going to find when I go. I've read a lot of news and seen a lot of pictures-- nola.com is on my list of daily sites that i read-- but I haven't had the experience of being home yet and I know some of it is going to be pretty hard to swallow.

I talked to my younger brother last night, he had been in town last week for our grandpa's funeral which i wasn't able to go to. (My grandparents were evacuated to Dallas to stay with family, after a week in a New Orleans hospital during/after the storm. My grandpa was flown back to be buried at home.) So my younger brother told me about some of the things he saw on his drives through the city. He didn't cry, he said, but it was difficult and overwhelming to see. His experience there last week will probably be pretty different than mine-- his pretext was a funeral, mine is Mardi Gras. But we'll have seen many of the same things: destruction, desolation, our ruined home.

I'm so excited about going and so anxious about what i'll see. I just hope that the restaurants are open later while i'm there.



I leave thursday morning and i'm bringing the on-its-last-leg laptop, so i'll post pictures when i can.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

Keep up the good

Saturday, February 18, 2006

I got an email the other day about my google module:
Adam Sah [asah@google.com ]
to me
Feb 17

Hi!

Thanks again for creating modules for the Google Personalized Homepage! In an effort to get more modules into the directory (http://www.google.com/ig/directory) we're reaching out to developers asking them to submit their module(s) for consideration (http://www.google.com/ig/submit).

We'd appreciate it if you would submit these modules: http://www.j-ink.com/randomArt.xml My apologies if you already submitted these, please go ahead and submit them again, just to be safe.

Disclaimer: submission is completely optional and free of course, but doesn't guarantee admission to the directory.

Keep up the good hack,
Adam Sah
Google Personalized Homepage Team


It's pretty obvious that this was a form letter, but there's something very odd about it. "Keep up the good hack"?

My friend adny seems to think that this is "some high level recognition." The other flash developer at work says, "that dude just called you a hack!"

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jorbs

Sunday, February 12, 2006

I was going to spend my last day on tuesday ruminating about things from the past six years, the people i've worked with, the "open office" experience of our second office space, those months that we spent playing Dreamcast and HalfLife (we didn't have a foosball table). But then it turned out that I was the only person in the office on my last day. To be honest, it was kind of a disappointment. You think of your last day as something like the last day of the school year, but there was no one there to even goof around with. They're in the process of closing their downtown office and moving the "Tech Dept" to the print/office facility outside of Milwaukee in some corporate park. I am so glad not to be going to work in New Berlin. What a relief. So I spent half the day deleting things from my computer, cleaning out my stuff, and packing up. Then i just went home, not with a bang but a fizzle.

The bang, apparently, happened elsewhere. The owner of the company got really angry that here it was my last day of work and I had not removed every single reference to the company from my website. I have been vehemently prohibited from displaying my work with them in my portfolio. Whatever. It's no more or less insulting then when the owner, in town from Phoenix, stopped by my office door and said "Hey man, good job on that... stuff... you've been working on. Looks great."

"Oh, thanks! Hey, can i have an industry-standard salary now, then?"

In my own defense, I've never said a disparaging word about the company-- which you know if you've been around here a while. But that wasn't really the issue. I think honestly i got better search results for than the company did, which couldn't be good for them, though it's not like they ever put much effort into it. But whatever.


So Wednesday was my first day and I was sick as a dog. I didn't want to call in on my first day at a new job, so i loaded up on Sudafed and brought a pack of tissues and went in for a full day of orientation meetings. I've done a little work in my first three days, but it's mostly just been meetings and scouring over the other flash developer's code. I'm going to be doing nothing but flash development-- all code. No graphics, no design, not even any html-- at least not for the time being. I'm glad not to be doing any design work. I've naturally been a bit anxious starting a new job, but I'd be much more so if I had to produce graphics. I like structure and patterns. Commercial design is just not my thing.

I'll be doing Flash OOP (Object Oriented Programming), writing all of my code in external class files, which is a bit different then i'm used to working. The scopes of variables and functions is a lot different then referencing everything to "_root," but I'll get used to it. I even spent quite a few hours yesterday working on a project to help me get more acclimated. It's just a goofy little image viewer program using some of my Fine Art images, but all of the code is in external class files and it makes use of the Tween class for all of the movement and XPathAPI for parsing xml-- two things i picked up this week.

Yay for challenges and learning new things!

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

Fine Art Collection - Google Modules

Monday, February 06, 2006



My friend Jake helped me figure out the image hosting/bandwidth problem for the Fine Art module. There's something called the Coral Content Distribution Network that basically caches your entire site, then you simply reference their cached versions of your files by appending the http path to the file(s). It's a very simple solution that basically removes almost the entire burden of bandwidth from my site. So, after I got everything working using the new off-site, cached images, I submitted the Fine Art Collection to the Google Modules website. Hopefully I'll get some good feedback on it.

Jake is one of the few people that I know that actually put some time into setting up his Google Homepage and he's been pretty happy to have art on it, he says. One of the catalysts for me being more proactive in telling people about art was a conversation I had a while back with another of our developers. It's ironic, you wouldn't necessarily think of programming as something that people are driven to do for creative reasons, but it turns out that that is a big motivating factor. I get so stuck in this mind set of creativity's output being something "artistic," but that's not always the case. For them, however, they've never really approached creativity from a visual standpoint so they aren't naturally drawn to artwork in an aesthetic sense. I have an appreciation now for the structures and patterns involved in programming, so I've tried to relate to them the visual structures, patterns and techniques that I appreciate in visual art.

It's easy to look at a Mondrian painting and see lines and blocks of color. But what you don't see, without looking into it, was that he was searching for a purity of form -- and of self. Or that Lichtenstein's dots and lines were a sort of John Henry parallel, exemplifying man's ability to achieve a certain sort of mechanical perfection. Or that Monet's paintings weren't just about making a quick "impression" of an image, they were about how light affects color, and the immediacy in capturing how timing can alter how the same objects or places look from one moment to the next.

So, besides the obvious reason that I want Fine Art on my google personal portal, those are my reasons for creating the module. I try to take it upon myself to help spread a better appreciation for art in whatever small way I can. If that small way is in the form of a 300 X 180 pixel image, so be it.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

i hate php

Saturday, February 04, 2006

PHP IS THE WORST FREAKIN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE EVER

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

old art journals

Thursday, February 02, 2006

i was digging around in the basement a few weeks ago and came across some of my old art journals/sketchbooks ("art journal" was a NOCCA term). it's always strange to look at old things that you've drawn, and even stranger to read old things that you've written. Maybe "strange" isn't the right word. Often it's just embarrassing.

there were a bunch of cartoons that i had done in 1995, as well as a few other drawings that i decided to scan while i still had access to a scanner at the office. I have to clean them up, but here's a sneak preview:


Click for full image and text


I'll give the full disclaimer later when i post more, but keep in mind that I was 20 years old when I made this.

More to come...

posted by j. Permanent Link 2 comments