Archive for August, 2008
i was recently hired to take photos at a 3 year old’s birthday party resulting in the great shot above of the birthday girl dancing with her father. it, of course, became my “one good photo a week” selection. you can see the rest here.
rain had finally been falling upon austin causing the temperatures to drop from the 100′s to the lower 90′s. i keep imagining fall on its way. i love when the temperatures begin to lower into the 70′s after a hot summer; the air loses its sticky humidity and the days get shorter.
its almost the afternoon and i’m still putzing about in my night clothes sipping coffee and writing. today is my day off and i have several things i should do today such as buy a new skillet at the finally re-opened ace mart and finish editing photos from the party so i can get prints and get paid, but i also have been needing to think about yellowtrenchcoat.com and its future. as of this morning, i’ve re-directed it to my photo portfolio site. it began as an online outlet to publish the writing of my friends and grew into an international writing project, but since it has completely fizzed out. i’m thinking of setting up a different kind of writing collective that would also include design and photography… or, making it into a zine of work stories, in a sense, “giving a voice to the working class”. well, maybe i could do both… but i need to get some peeps together that are interested… so… well, if you are interested or have any ideas or suggestions, we should talk.
this is something i couldn’t be more excited about. i really want to subscribe, but i should probably use that money on something else… well… for now.
something funny happened yesterday after my last post. it might be some kind of crazy karmic whatnot. while i was riding my bike to whole foods to pick up some groceries for dinner a car backed into me and knocked me off my bike. i was riding with traffic on the left side of the one way road of fifth street just as a car began to back into the street. i had just turned onto the street with my fixed gear, so i was going slowly when the car i thought was moving forward began to push against my leg and caught my pedal. i wobbled to a stop as i slipped out of the pedals to get my bike away from me so i could scoot out from the moving vehicle. its hard to explain because i’m not entirely sure what happened, but she stopped backing up when i hit the trunk of the car with my hand. i picked up my bike and began to walk up the street when she rolled down her window and yelled “i’m sorry, i didn’t see you.” i told her its okay, really because i just wanted to keep going. when i got to the store, i was still shaking.
ah, the joys of riding. really, i should have been paying more attention. it happened really quickly.
i’ve been craving new mexico. i’ve been there every summer since i was sixteen (10 years!), and it seems that i will be missing out this year if i don’t get on it RIGHT NOW! i’ve been in austin for a bit now, a longer stretch than ever before in my 5 years of living here, and i’m craving a road trip. i at least want to make the fort davis, marfa, and alpine loop, but new mexico, the land of enchantment, is what i really want. i have great itineraries for both places that can be combined to create a super trip that i will post in the trip itineraries section pretty soon, but its such torture to write and organize all that info when i really want to be experiencing it.
wanderlust rules my life, and i’m really okay with that.
the above photo is my “one good photo” of this week. the store is looking good. nice and clean and shiny and everything. i need to carry my camera with me more, though, and actually use it when i have it. its difficult to see this town through the perspective i would have if i were only visiting; its good for me to try.
i found this article about cycling in the city quite interesting. since my move, i’ve been riding on streets with higher traffic and have come to some troubling ethical questions:
- ride between cars stopped at lights to get to the front of the intersection?
- cross the street as the light is changing to green?
- yell at pedestrians when they cross in front of me while i have a green light?
- what is appropriate to yell?
according to the NYT article, i really should be stopping and going at traffic lights just like all the cars, in short, cyclists need to be following the same rules as cars. you know, the rules of the road. it might bring down the anger factor. really, pedestrians are more of a problem for me than cars. they jump into the street without looking because they don’t hear cars and they especially don’t hear me. my bike is super quiet since there is no freewheel, so, i’m super stealthy and can easily be overlooked by a pedestrian. most of the time, though, i feel that pedestrians don’t think of cyclists as much of a threat. we aren’t as heavy as cars, but we are pretty fast and not looking both ways when crossing the street in the city can mean getting slammed into by a cyclist.
i’ve been experimenting with script.aculo.us and an really loving it. hopefully i’ll be pimping out my website with features that will make it more user friendly.
i have the whole day off again, and i’m trying to figure out what to do with all this time. i’m a bit tired of being in my apartment… i think i’m a bit tired of being in austin. driving out into the country yesterday was really nice. i used to just drive for miles and miles all day long, but now its seems like such a waste to drive like that just for fun. its a luxury, really, and i want to save those miles for when i can drive out west into the desert to spend a few nights under the stars. so, what can i do here that will feel new to me? how can i, in a sense, vacation in austin today?
when i used to ask myself that question i would immediately try to think of all the things in austin i want to show bryan, but those aren’t really things that i want to do by myself and i feel like being alone today. what do i do on vacation when i’m alone? hmm… well, i sit and read at a coffee shop and try to feel out the differences between doing it out wherever i am to doing it at home. i wander the streets looking for things i don’t think i would be able to find anywhere else… and i try to pinpoint the differences between what is popular in my city and what is popular in the city i am visiting, whether it is hair style, music, and outdoor sports. if i’m at a coffee shop that has wireless, i would write my friends long emails about the things on my mind, what i have discovered, and how everything has been so far on the journey.
i do what i do at home, just in another city, except for one huge difference: i take lots of photos. i barely take photos of austin, now that i think of it, and i really should.
back in the day, i frequented the website of kyle cassidy and followed his one good photo a day project and thought to myself, i should one day do this. well, here i am, but i’ve decided to change it to one good photo a week, and, of course, document my progress here. being that today is sunday, my project will begin tomorrow. i’ve already packed my camera into my bag and everything.
today, we’ve been nesting. finally completely moved out of and done with the old place, so, the new place has a nice amount of clutter on the floors waiting to find permanent homes on shelves and walls. being that the new place is considerably smaller than the old place, its going to be a bit of a challenge to hang up all of my framed photos.
new appealing and informative ways to present statistical data always interests me. for example, take a look at this map of the united states as walmart stores spread from the ozarks to the east and west coasts. other presentations that i found incredibly amazing (just in case that last example piqued your interest) was this video and this video from TED.com by Hans Rosling or gapminder.org. through the interactive nature of the computers, innovative ways to discover meaning in statistical data will eventually be developed as computer processors get faster and faster. oh, and much of that info will or is already available online. aren’t we all excited? i’m going to be spending some time surfing the pages of flowingdata.com.