WET & WILD

okay, maybe not so wild, but definitely wet. today i decided to see what sea i could see...or something. the north sea being the closest it wasn't much of a choice. it was ~70km roundtrip, roughly 40 miles, it was wet, it was cold, it was brilliant. :D more pictures after the jump.

rainy saturday project

it rains a lot here, my bag isn't water proof. this is my solution because i'm too cheap to buy one for 50 euro. more after the jump.

Drawings by Preschoolers Expressing Their Feelings

via boingboing today. i thought this was too perfect to pass up. there are more pics after the jump.

bots & vids

259: wow, long time no write in here. my head's too fuzzy for this at the moment, but i'm going to plow ahead for a few ticks and then go make some tofu n'noodles. i just meet w/karen lancel, the core-teacher for ime. it was great. i think. :) ok, i've deleted three possible sentences, so i'm going to go make food and then come back. don't you kinda wish you knew what i was going to say, but didn't? me, too.

ahh, much better.

so, my meeting with ms. lancel went very well. had a quick/intense discussion about the underlying foundations of my work. she asked some very poignant questions, one in particular that stopped me flat. not many questions have been asked of me (about my work) that i haven't been able to answer after the briefest of pauses. it was a nice shock. a very nice shock. it's interesting, though, how often the only way we feel we can help one another is by sharing our own particular way of negotiating reality.

i've also uploaded a number of videos: most from robodock. enjoy the madness.

Saul Griffith, PhD., wins MacArthur "Genius Grant"

boing boing had a notice about this guy today. he's just been awarded one of the $500k MacArthur grants. he's the guy behind many, many things that i've come to know and love. click his pic for his website.

Gibson Goodness

i tried to stay away from him for a long time. why? i can't explain, other than to say the awe, as voiced by others, surrounding him turned me off, completely. i have this deep seated aversion to "popular" things. i prefer to find things my way, quietly, if you catch my meaning. that was until i decided to sit down this past may and read an old, oft thumbed copy of neuromancer. i couldn't put it down. at first it seemed stiff, hard to visualize, but as it's hooks sunk deeper into me, i became to gibson idiosyncratic way of writing and i was converted. since may i've started through his bibliography in reverse. i next read spook country, not so please with it, that's not to say it wasn't good, but it seemed more of a novella or a short story taken too far. now i'm two-thirds done with pattern recognition, and i like it. a lot.

so much so, that i've started reading gibson's blog and i'm going through what information i can find about his other, non-book works. so i found this: the agrippa files

specifically this is what i thought was cool. download the appropriate format.

BRAD SUCKS

BRAD SUCKS, so says william gibson, who am i to argue?

ROBODOCK photos!

pascal and i managed to scare up some tickets for the last day of robodock in amsterdam this year. the highlight of the show being SRL, amongst other things. photos for now, more later. i'm having a hard time focusing on the screen.

Swedish Sunspot

random post of the day.

Flight of the Conchords - the humans are dead

Senator Chambers Sues God

Yep, good ol'Ernie. read the lawsuit here (pdf). I especially like item #14.
via boing boing.

BLOGGER PLAY launched

play.blogger.com

i got a notice from blogger today saying they had launched this "wonderful new service" that shows, in realtime, all the images uploaded in all the blogger blogs at that exact moment. check it out. kinda of like a zeitgeist-slideshow.

...i can't believe i just wrote that...but, check it out anyway.

1709: well, it' been more or less an eventful week. first week of classes (read: workshops) and meetings with a few professors. intro week is the same the world over, it seems. lot's of sitting around, waiting, pamphlets of papers, etc. i'm learning maya, a 3d animation program; flash/processing more animation programs. there's a electrical hardware workshop every monday (whoo-hoo!) and a bunch of theory classes. also today i start the max/msp/jitters workshop. probably the most versatile tool for the new media artist, the max programming suite acts as an blank slate between you and any hardware you can hook up to a computer. the possibilities are almost endless. there's also a free version of max called pure data. there's some history between the two, which i won't bore you with here, that you can read on the pure data website. i'll write more later. for now, check out my shared posts to the right, or a few pictures of my studio.

<3

oh, and it's raining again. and i finished 'glasshouse' and i'm onto mcluhan's 'understanding media'...

Only Mario Level to Play Itself

The Only Mario Level That Plays Itself - Watch more free videos

exceedingly fascinating and oft times subtly witty. this mario level plays itself entirely. via boing boing.

toetjes

a device for studying dynamic theory/chaos systems. DIY

morning goodie, part twee

many (duh) free ebooks from CCL to just plain open source.

an excellent flickr set of polar bear pictures to start your morning off with. courtesy of ucumari via boing boing.

MKOB

IF YOUR COMPUTER IS SLOW DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK: i am an unabashed oingo-boingo fan...most especially because danny elfman is just fricking wierd...

this made me smile :)

this made me smile...as did these

this kinda made me sad

sadness

i should have expected it, but...

FIRST DAY

1009: first day of real classes...just eating breakfast (coffee, cheese, bread, oj), reading feeds and what does it start doing outside? rain, what else? pat, you told me it was going to rain a lot. i believed you, but living through it is something else entirely. :) in the past week, 2 days of sun, 5 of rain. oh, well.

new find: www.playthisthing.com

843am: wow, it's pouring down rain. i mean really pouring. i'm taking a movie of it. i'll try to get that and all the other movies posted tonight.

557pm: back from an entire day spent at FMI. i had class with Robert Jan Smit today. he's the resident robotics/hardware expert. he was about 45 minutes late (lives near amsterdam) and he's a lot of fun. i spent the first 45 minutes watching a dutch soap opera (see above). robert showed us a bunch of his work...we (me and one other first year, more further on) spent the first half hour tearing apart some old equipment looking for a functioning motor to tape to the side of a fish tank that Robert had filled with water and put a mirror in. the idea being that robert would project images onto the mirror which was angled to reflect the images onto the ceiling. the water made the images ripple and distort a bit, but not enough, so Robert wanted to tape a motor to the side of the tank to make high-speed vibrations. :D it was a lot of fun and didn't work right in the end, so we abandoned it. later on i helped pascal clean out our shared space, just the two of us and it's huge. i need to get some pictures of the studio tomorrow to upload and share with everyone. still working on finding a linux flickr uploader, or i can do it the hard way. met one of the other first years today: cheung hong song (enoch) from hong kong. he's 36 and pretty cool. lives in the same house as i do, upstairs, but on the same wing. i'm going to go exploring later and try to find his room. also found out that there is only one other first year, bringing the grand total IME first years to THREE. annica (de managementassitent) told me today that soon (within the week) my name and school email/website links will be up on FMI website. which is cool and makes me feel a bit more legitimate :) yep, grandma, this place exists :)

oh, and it's raining again. :D i'm going to go take a shower and eat. bye all.

ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO...

i've finally converted. i'm now running and using exclusively ubuntu and open source software! (and listening to: oingo-boingo "i'm all dressed up with nowhere to go...walking with a dead man over my shoulder...") i love danny elfman...in a platonic, toga-wearing, logic-bending way. now i'm installing all the programs that i used in windows. most of them were open source anyway and originally built for linux. plus i'm reading my gi-normous UBUNTU LINUX BIBLE provided to me by the wonderful person at Mom, Inc. :D

SO FAR SO GOOD

well, i've got ubuntu installed, now i'm updating and installing software. kinda nervous, but definitely excited. more updates later.

OPEN SOURCE FTW!

yeah, so i'm going open source today. i'm removing windows from my laptop and installing ubuntu. wish me luck!

BIKESHED ETIQUETTE

i was leaving to run some errands (pay tuition and such) went to get my lovely, harmless, innocent bike and lo, what did i see? my bike and six or so others laying in a domino-heap, all still chained to their slots, mine at the bottom. now, at first, this didn't seem so bad, until i realised that the racks are thin slots for your wheel to go into + my wheels are thin aluminium composites = my front wheel bent and crumpled like a soda can = not happy alex = 3 hours of walking around town trying to find a good, inexpensive replacement. i found a really cheap second-hand wheel, but i wasn't happy with it. it was really beat up and old, so i kept looking. in the mean time, i got on the bus with my two wheels and rode up to Zernikecomplex. After paying tuition and talking to the International Student Office (ISO), i went to the bike shop on campus and found a beautiful italian Fir wheelset with a Shimano hub for 40euro. Ontop of that, the owner of the shop bought my two old wheels, the damaged one for scrap and the other to sell for 15euro and only charged me 10euro for a new tube/tape and assembly. All in all, i bought a new wheelset for 50euro. The new wheel lives in my room now, not the bike shed. And my fiets is no longer subjected to the tortures of the rack. i found a nice quiet spot in the back next to a steel roof-support pole. that was my adventure.

so far, so good.

my actual classes will start on monday. first up is an intro to the tech lab, then on later in the week we start theory and computer visualization. then nothing else until the following week. there really aren't regular classes, just workshops and open hours for the labs. i've been filling my time with trying to get some basic BEAM bots to work (no luck so far) and learning a new program called "Pure Data" which is an open source version of a popular media IDE called Max/MSP/Jitters. Yeah, it's actually called all three of those. Oh, that and i'm working on my Dutch. . .slowly. Well, i'm going to go shower now and get ready to pay the last bit of tuition. Bye, Bye, Money. oh, i also uploaded three photos of my worktables in my room.

cheers.

Mij Fiets

the conclusion of my first week of studies is nearly at hand. not much has happened in the way of school, though monday we had a meet/greet. most of the faculty for my program, IME, weren't there and i was the only first-year IME student there. There are two second-years, a Dutch guy, Pascal Petzinger and a lady from France, Berthe Salegos. Other than that it was the usual introductory thing: "state-your-name-and-the-nature-of-your-business", and, "do you have any ve-guh-tAH-bles to declare?" well, okay, maybe not that last part. i'm not very funny first thing in the morning after a night/early morning of international student parties. actually, that and collecting electronics gear is about all i've done this week. i did find a comic shop, the proprietor of which is one "Bob" who is dutch and speaks engels with an VERY british accent, but is like most comic-shop owners: very laid back and very cool.

i also found a great electronics-gear store for all my needs called "okaphone", and the dutch version of a thrift store. they're called "koopwinkels" ("sale-shop" i think, my head's a little fuzzy right now, but coffee's trying to change that). one in particular, "mama-mini" is definitely an almost exact copy of goodwill/sal-army we have in the states. all of that combines to make for a cheap supply of electronic guts and parts for BEAM bots, etc. all for now, tot ziens! ('tot-scenes' "see you later") as always, click on the photo to see more!

Seam Carving

found this through reader via hackzine.com. there's no such thing as image integrity despite the commonly held assumption that photos never lie, one which, i think, we are quickly letting go of. this is definitely one of the best examples of the subjectivity of perceptions that i've seen in a while.