flashback: july 29, 2004

f-thefamilyc, k-holycow, e-idonthaveadesignationyet...
lunch, popeyes, times square, 12:15.

i was contracting at ms in 1655. e was working there as well. k-holycow in the rock working at ap. and f, pre-g, was at reuters. quite nice to have people to eat lunch with completely not in one's field.

e is still at ms, but downtown. k's offices have moved to around b&h. and f-thefamilyc, post-g, post-s, i haven't seen in months it feels like, has changed companies somewhere in jersey.

me, i am still in the neighborhood freelancing a block west.

i'm craving chicken, but popeyes has been torn down.

sicily

si-ci-li-a you're breaking my heart/ your shaking my confidence baby

sicily was the first real bit of travel on that trip. coming from rome. sicily felt more real, rawer. the late spring-like, weather was definitely welcomed in the beginning of march.

i spent the majority of the time over on the west of the island (but that's for a different post). but before hitting trapani i spent a week plus crossing from the east in catania there. it was an interesting band of people i met.

i mostly traveled with a 19 year curly haired western canadian with a good head on his shoulders. it was his first trip outside his country, 4 months in europe and he was killing time before meeting his brother in malta. at times, i thought the situation would warrant him explode, like i would if i were 19, but he didn't. never exchanged email addresses we were both confident that we could get in contact with the other if we wanted to.

i met a californian researching his sicilian roots. going from one municipal hall to the next. he wans out of the u.s. system and is looking for italian citizenship.

to him i told "nobody this generation is capable of saying goodbye anymore" everyone is too connected by mobiles, email and facebook. so he was too afraid to ask for contact information.

oddly enough a month later, i bumped into him in napoli. we swapped email address then, but neither of us have sent a message yet.

oh yes, oranges were in season. they tasted wonderful. every other day i would buy another half kilo.

world dominination and my random searches

the path to world domination goes through me. actually it goes through everyone. slowly large companies amass data about us. the ads we look at, the web pages we view, the things we buy, the dvds we rent. it is just a matter of time before it is all correlated together and know more about me than myself.

google of course is one of these giants. the control the software for this very blog. they are also the defacto search engine everyone uses.

a week and a half ago, i started a little experiment that i will run for the next few months. it is to log every google query i've made just to see what the patterns are. but even with the short amount of data so far, it's pretty easy to guess what sort of person i am.

Mon Jul 14 10:01:23 2008 don't look back in anger
Mon Jul 14 11:53:31 2008 resource managment, internet based
Mon Jul 14 11:53:46 2008 resource managment, internet based, reservation
Mon Jul 14 11:54:01 2008 resource management, internet based, reservation
Mon Jul 14 12:43:39 2008 setcookie, php, unset
Mon Jul 14 13:49:56 2008 trim
Mon Jul 14 13:50:02 2008 php, trim
Mon Jul 14 13:53:12 2008 php, soap, fault
Mon Jul 14 14:57:15 2008 best cover
Mon Jul 14 14:57:25 2008 best cover, song
Mon Jul 14 15:05:03 2008 best cover, song
Mon Jul 14 15:16:28 2008 cover albums
Mon Jul 14 15:26:28 2008 lefty and pancho
Mon Jul 14 15:26:42 2008 lefty and pancho, wiki
Mon Jul 14 15:27:59 2008 pancho and lefty, lyrics
Mon Jul 14 15:29:27 2008 dj dangermouse, wiki
Mon Jul 14 16:25:21 2008 bryant park, movie
Tue Jul 15 10:21:23 2008 sunshine theater
Tue Jul 15 10:34:40 2008 wiki, alan greenspan
Tue Jul 15 10:39:49 2008 Sonny Landham
Tue Jul 15 11:09:14 2008 dementia, tofu
Tue Jul 15 13:36:41 2008 Holly Figueroa, Dream in Red
Tue Jul 15 15:56:45 2008 extension tubes, photography
Wed Jul 16 10:37:59 2008 festival calendar
Wed Jul 16 10:38:10 2008 festival calendar, september
Wed Jul 16 10:39:41 2008 festival, calendar, september
Wed Jul 16 11:37:36 2008 la vie en rose, long take, marcel
Wed Jul 16 11:41:34 2008 nokton, 40mm, mount
Wed Jul 16 11:42:50 2008 nokton, 40mm, mount, classic
Wed Jul 16 17:10:23 2008 festival, september, 2008
Wed Jul 16 18:02:53 2008 tomatina, spain
Thu Jul 17 10:20:58 2008 capadoccia
Thu Jul 17 12:02:52 2008 gormenghast
Fri Jul 18 12:25:19 2008 netscaler
Fri Jul 18 12:25:36 2008 netscaler, http rewrite
Fri Jul 18 12:38:24 2008 netscaler, http rewrite, https
Sun Jul 20 20:30:35 2008 chimping
Mon Jul 21 18:30:43 2008 to_date, oracle, 24hh
Mon Jul 21 18:53:25 2008 sunrise: the song of two humans
Tue Jul 22 10:53:20 2008 site:lightstalkers.org, tomatina
Tue Jul 22 11:11:02 2008 midnight train to georgia, lyrics
Tue Jul 22 13:51:32 2008 php, soap fault
Tue Jul 22 14:49:48 2008 php, ldap_search
Tue Jul 22 14:56:15 2008 ldap, count, results
Tue Jul 22 16:00:45 2008 no tns, sqlplus
Tue Jul 22 16:01:02 2008 no tns, sqlplus, direct connection
Tue Jul 22 16:01:12 2008 sqlplus, direct connection
Tue Jul 22 16:02:44 2008 oracle, connect_identifier, sqlplus
Tue Jul 22 23:37:45 2008 walden, conscious effort
Wed Jul 23 00:30:15 2008 conscious, walden
Wed Jul 23 00:30:39 2008 conscious, walden, quotes
Wed Jul 23 11:12:33 2008 shopping street, telaviv
Wed Jul 23 11:53:11 2008 select, procedure body, oracle
Wed Jul 23 13:09:15 2008 minimum distance, 50mm, leica
Wed Jul 23 13:13:04 2008 minimum distance, 28mm, leica
Thu Jul 24 00:31:55 2008 melvin mora, second half
Thu Jul 24 09:00:33 2008 pujols, polanco, second half
Thu Jul 24 11:23:54 2008 titus groan

conscious endeavor

i know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

- walden, thoreau (1854)

i just heard a chef quote that and it blew my mind.

small steps

corfu, greece.

corfu was reinvigorating for the trip. i was suddenly interested in taking pictures again. good timing as i was spending palm sunday there.

on the home front.

after work or on the weekends i do 2 to 4 hour sessions at icp. each week, i am there about four or five times a week. going pretty steadily since i got back from the big trip.

by my counts i've printed up about 480 work prints from the trip. i still have two more major sections. about another 80 or 90 images. i hope to be done by august 7th or 9th if all my calculations work out. i can't wait.

flashback: july 15, 2000

caracas, venezuela

my first full day traveling alone in my life. i think everyone should try it until they are comfortable with themselves. it took a few trips before i was.

looks like i'm traveling myself again in september. now i just have to pick a destination

pop

playing tennis today, and "pop." a string snapped on my tennis racket. cut my afternoon of running around in sunlight down.

later in the evening, i claimed 'adverse possession' on y-fohi and e-fohi's rackets. they didn't put up much of a fight, i don't think they've touch them in three years (or more).

sometimes i feel like i should do it with people's camera equipment.

i'll be there for you

i had everything planned out. random press cards from past cpf events. a number of the person at b of a who put together the concert. list of cppd whom i remember from ss. my ss staff card.

i was going to invade the bon jovi central park concert. in reality, i don't even care about bon jovi but i did like the concept of getting into a free concert. i think the part the bothered me the most was the great lawn could easily hold half a million people (from pochantas and garth brooks experience) but they had only given away 60,000 tickets.

didn't get a chance to storm the castle. e asked me to assist her with a fashion shoot in prospect park. so i did. it went well.

sometimes, i like to think of myself as an enabler.

 

 

... later (Aug. 10th)

wasn't built in a day

roma, italy.

i was in rome on three occasions during the trip, accounting for about 9 days all together. it was a good logistical center to leave stuff (mainly film) going in and out of both sicily and israel.

while in rome i saw the pope three times. for sunday mass, for easter sunday and for a wednesday blessing. i got tired of him after that. besides that i was pretty much in rome meeting up with friends. on the final day there, i got myself to head to the vatican museum.

slowly i am inching toward finishing all the pictures. i still feel about a month away. which is bad considering i have been working on them pretty nonstop for two months already -- the same amount of time i was away.

be the tortoise... be the ant...

flashback: july 8, 2007

calgary, alberta, canada

calgary stampede - combination state fair, amusement park and rodeo.

the morning was pretty mundane, got up relatively late. had brunch in town and then walked towards the stampede ground. wandered around for most of the afternoon.

i lost a hundred bucks or so shooting craps, there was a casino set up in one of the arenas. i had a cowboy hat on and always wanted to shoot craps with someone wearing a cowboy hat, i figured that might as well be me. saw some of the other player throughout the rest of the day and night and we all commented to each other how we were all destroyed on the table.

the evening we headed for the chuck wagon race. horse drawn wagons are loaded with weights and driven around a track. not too bad but by the time we understood it it was over. after that the cheesiest stage show i've ever scene, but thats part of the experience.

echito: independence day

first time in a few years i spent it on eldridge. i've been either out of the country or out in coney island. still working on the easter work stopped the first, the weather stopped the second.

after some pushing from e this weekend i decided i had to go and photograph the kids who's friend was shot. over the past week i had dropped off some pictures to them, but thats not the same as pointing a camera at them. i mustered up enough courage to walk up there with my (recently repaired, yippee) camera.

they were letting off fireworks. smelled like my childhood. rarely get that aroma, since gulliani outlawed it them years ago. it was the start of a worldwide trend.

for the most part the guys hanging around were pretty nice to me. they were having fun again. i snapped a slew of pictures. some of them got r.i.p tattoos in rememberence, that is solidarity. there are still some who think i am f.b.i or something.

i had noticed a squad car as i was walking up and warned some of the kids who were lighting up. i hope i got one shot of them and the fireworks, but i do so bad with that stuff. in just 10 minutes, undercover cops show up and take one of the kids aside.

the rain started to come down, but the "official" fireworks started up. the officers held him there for half an hour.

he was set free without being charged.

sudoko

darkroom is closed on the week. so besides editing down i'm doing random things.

some coworkers bring in a free paper every morning. mostly smutty news about pop tarts gone bad. in there is a basic crossword puzzle and sudoku. the crossword isn't too challenging but sometimes amusing. the sudoku ranges from ridiculously easy to how did i miss that.

i can take care of most puzzles given enough time. i have enough small tricks to get going. so with a bit of time the thing to do is to write myself a sudoku solver. there are already plenty of them online. it's not too difficult, the hard part is to logiscally think about the process of filling out and eliminating numbers. and then after that to reduce the logic to more basic functions.

but now that i've done this, i won't have to work on another sudoku ever again.

voila