the new kim painting is done
Saturday, May 31, 2008
It's really late, but I finished the painting tonight! as i'd said, it's pretty huge -- 4 x 5 ft. the colors came out a bit brighter than in the vector version, but I like it that way. it seems more joyful. this photo doesn't do it a whole lot of justice... i just took the pic with my flash at 2:30am. I'll try to update the photo later, but i'm pretty excited about getting this piece done in a week. yay!
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house hunting ain't fun
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Apartment hunting here is NOT easy. This is what I've found from looking for apartments two years in a row:- expect to pay more than you are prepared for
- don't expect much out of realtors
- start early and hold out for the right place
- don't bother making an appointment to see an apartment without doing a drive-by first
- negotiate!
- craigslist
- latter & blum's rental section (search by zip code)
- nola.com
- driving around in your car
There's something rudimentary about the way that craigslist works, but perhaps that IS what makes craigslist work. I didn't see much overlap at all between properties on craigslist and those being handled by realtors, although i think there may have been a bit of overlap with the nola.com classifieds. New houses / apartments are being added on craigslist constantly throughout the day, with many of them being re-listed every day or so. It's a little aggravating, on one hand, to keep seeing the same properties over and over. But the positive side to it is that it's a easy to keep track of which properties are still available, which ones aren't moving, and which ones are dropping their prices.
One thing to keep in mind, especially with places that aren't being listed by realtors, is that owners can be flexible, especially if their apartment has been empty for a little while. It's more of a hassle to haggle on the price with a realtor, who has to get back to the owner and relay messages, but it is possible. It's also helpful if you have something to offer -- like being willing to do the lawn work, offering to sign a longer lease, or if you're moving uptown, play up the fact that you're a family and not a couple of 19 year-olds getting your first apartment. Landlords love families! Who doesn't, right? You're not a couple of college kids, are you?
We searched for weeks to find the right place. I think Kim probably went to see at least ten different apartments. I did a LOT of driving around, gathering phone numbers from For Rent signs, doing drive-bys on places that we had seen online, and checking out a few of the places with Kim. There were a few notable apartments that we found. There was one on Egret St. near the lakefront that we probably should have taken and we knew it, but we kept holding out for something... The apartment wasn't spectacular, but it was big and functional. The yard, though... the yard wasn't really a yard. It was the park. The "bird streets" in Lake Vista all have these park / walking paths between them so all of the houses are basically situated in this park environment. The house we saw was actually on a cul-de-sac, so the yard was about as open as possible. It would have been a great place to just let the kids run and bike, but there was no fence, so the baby would have been uncontained. Nobody likes an unrestrained baby. You just can't trust them. Oh and Lakeview, especially past Robert E Lee, just kinda feels a bit isolated from the rest of civilisation. It's nice... but it's kinda surrounded by under-populated areas on all sides. Kim and I kinda realized that she'd feel a bit isolated out there during the day, which isn't so perfect.We saw a few places in the Garden District that were compelling. One on Pleasant St. right off of Prytania that we really liked a LOT, but it needed quite a bit of work to really be livable and I only had so much faith that it would get done. Yet we still kept coming back to that place in our minds and would probably have taken it if nothing else came along in time -- which was quickly approaching. The other one that we seriously considered for a day was on 4th St 1/2 block off of Magazine. It was amazing. It was 150 years old, green with shutters across the front, there was exposed brick and a remodeled kitchen, and a master bedroom upstairs that was literally 1000 sq/ft. Really. But it had a spiral staircase. It might have been perfect to actually give the kids the upstairs bedroom with all of that space to play. But it had a spiral staircase. And the bedrooms downstairs would not have suited Kim, Sid and I very well. But we really wanted it! But it had a spiral staircase and someone would have killed themselves on it.
At some point I started looking at slightly more expensive listings, sending emails asking if the owner would be willing to negotiate with the "right tenants." Pushing it a little, but at least I didn't go so far as to call us the "perfect tenants." I found a place on Arabella, a double shotgun that's been converted to a single house (perfect!!) and sent them and email... and got no response. Then Kim sent an email asking to see the place and got no response... until the next day. So we went to see it at 3:30 on Friday and LOVED it, but we told that someone else wanted the place and wanted to bring a deposit by later. Oh, and it turned out that the owner of the house was one of Sid's pediatricians! We told her that if the other girl didn't come through with the deposit that we'd really appreciate a phone call. I woke up Sat. morning thinking about the apartment and how I would phrase a phone call to her to ask if the other girl had come through and, if not, would she be willing to come down on the price even just a little bit please please pretty please? I asked God to look out for us and help us get this place and if He saw fit He could even have her call right now. And then she called. I swear I'm not exaggerating, it was like two minutes later. For whatever reason the other girl couldn't get it together and they really wanted us to have the house, so we left the house and went to sign the lease on our new place:
Perhaps this picture doesn't fully do it justice, but if you know nola you know this is a traditional New Orleans house. It's a 6 block walk to Audubon Park, near PJ's and Whole Foods, and right around the corner from the house that my mom grew up in on Joseph St. I don't know when I've been so excited to pack all of my stuff and move.Labels: apartments, moving, new orleans
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lolcats
Friday, May 23, 2008
Sometimes lolcats really live up to their name.
http://icanhascheezburger.com/ is one of my favorite sites ever.
posted by j. Permanent Link
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new kim painting
Thursday, May 22, 2008
I'm about ready to start my next painting. I'm bordering on having free time again, as the hunt for the next year's apartment winds down, and I picked up a big new canvas from Forstall Art Supply. I was looking for something in the 3x5' range. The closest they had was 4x5', which is close, but that extra foot makes a big difference. It's kinda like the difference between widescreen and standard tvs / monitors.
So this is a drawing of a picture I took of Kim during one of our last weekends in Milwaukee. We were kinda roaming around town, going to parks and coffee shops that we had frequented in our 12 years there. We stopped at Lake Park and sat in the field near Lake Dr. and Bellecastle. The first apartment we lived in was about 8 blocks away on the corner of Frederick and Bellecastle. We had played frisbee in that field with friends and walked on the short trails in the woods with the kids... We were wrapping up our time in Milwaukee and it was as fitting a place as any to sit and enjoy some sunshine.
Ironically, the background in the photograph is entirely boring so I've replaced it with another photo that I took soon after moving to Nola of Arrowhead Elephant Ears taken at her friend's wedding at Acadian Village in Lafayette, La. I took a bunch of pictures of plants on the grounds with the express purpose of painting them, so I guess now I'm finally getting around to it.
The thing that draws me to this composition in particular is that it reminds me of Botticelli's Birth of Venus (at left) and, to some extent more, Warhol's rendition -- but only in that Warhol cropped the original down, where this is only a detail of Botticelli's entire work. Of course at close inspection they're not much alike, but the curvature of the neck and face, the waves in the hair, and the somewhat distant look definitely has a certain similarity, albeit incidental.I'm also pretty happy with the color palette and I hope that I can be successful in recreating these colors in acrylic. I'll post a pic or two of the painting as I get going.
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nola wins!
Monday, May 19, 2008
My posts are all old lately, but I've spent the last 3 months being retarded amounts of busy and equally stressed out about what to do... in life. Now that some big decisions have been made we're dealing with finding a new apartment. Ugh.Here:
I haven't gone into much detail at all about things here, but I've spent much of the last few months stressing out about The Clash's big question: should I stay or should I go? Let me say, continuing with my lack of detail, that there were some pretty compelling reasons not to stay in New Orleans. I might even say that there were more reasons to go back to Milwaukee then there are to stay here. I don't know, maybe that's a little strong. But for me, some of the reasons for staying in Nola felt *larger*.
There are a few key things that I think really helped me decide, but I think the biggest factor is the permanence of the decision. knew when I left Milwaukee that, if nola didn't work out, I could fall back. But it wouldn't be so simple if I left nola. I think at this point I would have to accept that leaving here is very long-term. Which my wife was fine with. But the situation was such that I felt more compelled to go to Milwaukee than to leave New Orleans. Perhaps that sounds like splitting semantic hairs, but the point, which I may have stated before, is that I want to be in New Orleans assuming New Orleans doesn't fail me. And I don't think that it has It all. As a matter of fact I've had a great time here over the last year.
One of the things that I'd hoped to accomplish here was to spend more time with my wife and kids. Part of me felt that pulling myself ort of my Milwaukee routine would allow me to put more focus on my family. This has held true to some extent, except when I've been particularly busy with freelance work - like for the last 10 weeks, ugh. Between going for walks in the park, going out for snoballs or beignets, or going to various festivals, parades, and other events, I feel like we have done more things as a family. But then I've also spent quite a few late nights working at the coffee shop, too.
I probably don't need to point out what a big draw the weather here is. Yes, it gets extremely hot in the summer and perhaps are were slightly spoiled last year in that when we got here summer was half over. But I don't need to tell you how much better the winters are here. Or how much shorter. I bought a vespa and can ride it almost year-round. I got a new bicycle and ride in the park outside of my front door. I don't have to wait for it to get warm enough to go for a walk. I can get outside and see people - friendly people who greet each other and genuinely smile.
Labels: milwaukee, new orleans
posted by j. Permanent Link
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the spurs don't really lose game sevens
This was a great series from start to finish. I'm probably the only person in the city that was glad to see it go to seven games, but I'm a fan of both of these teams. I love to watch great point guards play and this series had lots of great action from the point to be sure. To beat the Mavs in 5 and go to seven games with the Spurs is a great feat, even if they couldn't pull it out in the end.I really hope that this can be the start of New Orleans as a great basketball town.
Labels: basketball
posted by j. Permanent Link
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"from_" values in Tweener
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The following is in response to some emails on the Tweener mailing list that asked about using "from" values, similarly to how TweenLite has to() and from() methods. I'll start by saying that I'm a huge fan of "from" values (or methods...) for one main reason. First of all, I don't ever have assets on the stage in my .FLAs, I attach everything to the stage at runtime from the library (or libraries from swfs I load). So if I have a display object that is going to be at x:100 & y:200, but it's going to tween in from off-stage I have two options. I can place it off-stage and then tween it to (100,200). OR, I can place it at (100,200) and then tween it from off-stage. I prefer the second option for two reasons.First, I often build my screens at one stage of development, then do all of the animation later. Placing everything where it's supposed to go allows me to see everything in place and know that the screen looks as it should. Second, I find that it's much clearer later when I come back to my code to have the separation between the placement coordinates and animation coordinates.
SO.
I've been working for a while on an animation class that "pre-packages" animations that I can use out of the box -- stuff that I use a lot like fadeBlurIn(), flickerOut(), swooshIn() (bezier tween...), and ones that I like a lot -- popAndGlow() and tvOut(). While my animation class uses Tweener, I've built "from" values into this class by making very small tweaks to Tweener allowing me to interface with it. I'll point out those changes at the end of this post.
The way it works is quite simple. When I create an animation, I can prepend "from_" to (just about) any value for that value to be set before the animation begins: from_x, from_y, from_alpha, from__Blur_blurX... I know that there are some properties that this will not work with, though I can't say that I've tried everything yet. I do know that from__color does not work, so I'm making the assumption that there will be others.
This is where things get really messy. This is the code I'm using in my animation class to make all of this work:
public static function createAnim(mc:DisplayObject, base:Object, tweenProps:Object = null):void {
trace("create Anim with " + mc);
var allProps:Object = new Object();
if(tweenProps != null){
// create one object with all tween properties
for(var prop in base){ allProps[prop] = base[prop]; } // set base properties first
for(prop in tweenProps) { allProps[prop] = tweenProps[prop]; } // then the properties the user passed in, giving them priority
} else {
allProps = base;
}
// set property values of "from_" properties in allProps
setInitProps(mc, allProps);
allProps = removeProps(allProps, ["from_"]);
// and do the tween (not quite like o/` do the hustle)
Tweener.addTween(mc,allProps);
}
/*
* used to set all "from_" properties before any Tweening starts
*/
private static function setInitProps(mc:DisplayObject,tweenProps:Object):void{
for(var prop in tweenProps){
var propStr = prop.toString();
if(propStr.indexOf("from_") != -1){
// remove "from_" from property name
// ie "from__Blur_blurX" becomes "_Blur_blurX"
var p = propStr.substr(propStr.indexOf("_") + 1);
if (Tweener._specialPropertyList[p] != undefined) {
//previously Tweener.setPropertyValue(mc,p,tweenProps[prop]);
Tweener._specialPropertyList[p].setValue(mc, tweenProps[prop], Tweener._specialPropertyList[p].parameters);
} else {
trace("from_" + p + ": " + tweenProps[prop]);
mc[p] = tweenProps[prop];
}
}
}
}
/*
* removeProps allows you to remove any property or set of properties from an object.
* properties to delete should be passed in as an array.
*
* examples:
* to remove all properties containing "from_", pass in ["from_"] as your propNames array (as in createAnim())
*
* to remove all properties containing all scale and alpha properties, pass in ["scale","alpha"].
* this would remove alpha, from_alpha, scaleX, scaleY, from_scaleX, from_scaleY...
*/
private static function removeProps(tweenProps:Object, propNames:Array) {
for (var i = 0; i < propNames.length; i++ ) {
for (var props in tweenProps) {
if (props.toString().indexOf(propNames[i]) != -1) {
trace("propNames[i]: " + propNames[i]);
// hmmm... will this require a list of exclusions?
if(propNames[i] == "y" && props.toString() == "delay"){
break;
} else {
delete tweenProps[props];
}
}
}
}
return tweenProps;
}
To walk through the way this works, let's say I create a new movieclip from the library:
var bla_mc = new Bla();
bla_mc.x = 100;
bla_mc.y = 200;
bla_mc.alpha = 1;
this.addChild(bla_mc);
If I publish the swf now, I will see the bla_mc on the stage. So I add:
Animator3.createAnim(bla_mc, { from_x:-200, x:bla_mc.x, from_alpha:0, alpha:1, from__Blur_blurX:30, _Blur_blurX:0});
Now if I publish I will see the swf fade, blur and slide in from the left. You'll note that I have to pass the values in pairs, which is a little tedious, but otherwise I'd have to check for "to" values for every "from" value and create them where there are none. Perhaps I will even do that in the future, but for now passing values in pairs works fine for me.
My Animator3 class (the original for AS2 was Animator, so this one is Animator3 for AS3 -- which avoids confusion with Adobe's new Animator class as well) uses setInitProps() to find all of the "from_" properties and set them using Tweener's _specialPropertyList. After the values are set, the "from_" properties are removed from the list of properties being sent to Tweener.
Ok, finally, here are the changes to Tweener that I have noted -- there are only two: in Tweener.as _specialPropertyList must be public and not private; and in ColorShortcuts.as, replace
var cfm:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform(mc, mc, mc, 0, co, co, co, 0);
with
var cfm:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform(mc, mc, mc, p_obj.alpha, co, co, co, 0);
One final disclaimer is that this is tested and working for me in use thus far, but testing is not 100% complete by any means. I'm not sure which properties will join from__color in not working -- but this is a start!
posted by j. Permanent Link
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