Archive for July, 2005
I’ve been edited and tweaking the photos on my site and in Flickr. I’m wondering how they are being perceived. It takes me alot longer to edit the photos, then if i were to make simple/limited color alterations in iPhoto. The way I’m doing them is quite extensive and time-consuming, in Photoshop. I like to be able to give a set of photos another layer of emotion and feeling by tweaking the color, saturation and vignetting, but it forces me to be more select with them, only posting a few.
what do you think?
Here’s a heap of photos from my trip to D.F.
On a personal note, I’d like to thank Mauricio and Isabel Arroyo for having us over for a wonderful lunch/dinner and inviting us into their home. It was a great experience, spending the afternoon with them, meeting their son, Antonio and getting an insider’s tour of Coyoacan, one of D.F.’s oldest, controversial and most celebrated colonias. Thanks guys!
I’m back in the land of green green everything and extreme humidity to the nth degree. Mexico City was a wonderful little trip. I love Mexico City. Someday I’d love to live there. D.F., as in “day-eff-ay”, is one of the craziest most beautifully ugly places I’ve ever been, the city is over-packed with vibrance, culture, life and vitality. Chaos theory is the unspoken religion underlying all things, in this city. Modernism and post-modernism and post-post-modernism clashes with colonial, pre-colonialism and every other kind of ‘ism’ out on the streets in front of your eyes. A neighborhood of conquistador houses set down the street from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house; an entire new colonia of corporate office towers built on top of a trash dump with severe water shortages with the most shi-shi mall in all of Mexico; an entire neighborhood carved out of the hillside, one house at a time, essentially removing the entire hillside and leaving a giant concrete patch wall; union sewage workers peacefully blocking traffic in a solidarity march to raise awareness of the city government’s crooked contract; armed guards at the entrance to what looks like a small little side street yet turns out to be the old house of an ex-president’s slain brother; armed guards standing sentry outside of practically every other high-walled property in the hill section of Reforma Avenue; ladies who lunch and business men who do breakfast; Mexico has something for everyone and offers up something new ’round every corner. This trip was no different. I learned so much and for that I am thankful.
and while I’m at it…
Here are the Guadalajara photos. all random and dreamlike.
So on the airplane to Mexico City, last night, I got in some iphoto/photoshop time and edited the LA and Guadalajara photos. Here are the LA photos (from a month or so ago) in all their technicolor glory. click here for the pop-up slideshow. gotta love the Flickr.
DrunkenBlog: On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley of “Delicious Monster” fame. A great interview with the owner of a small, creative, successful company and someone with great ideas on how to be a visionary entrepreneur. and great mac lore knowledge too.
So it’s Monday and we’re back in Vallarta. The Guadalajara trip was great, Operation “Relax And Enjoy Ourselves” was a smashing success. Lots of photos to post, one of these days I’ll have enough time to edit and upload ‘em. my flickr account is starting to feel a bit lonely.
Yesterday we came back to a nightmare scenario where someone who was supposed to be doing some legal translations for us, flaked and did turn in the docs last night as was supposed to be the case. So Marcia and I had to stay up until 3:00 am translating mexican legalese into english. Two words: fun. Anyways, we did the best we could and our investors, who the docs were intended for, were very grateful.
Today I’m headed up to Mexico City, D.F. for a meeting with the architects we are working with. Tomorrow will most likely be an all day meeting and then we’ll spend wednesday establishing contacts with vendors for the various finishings. and then we’re back in PVR early thursday.
I can’t wait to get back into the waves, but the waves are pretty non-existant right now and will be until i get back, so not much lost.
Once again, Marcia and I are in Guadalajara for the weekend. Her sister, Andrea, just finished the 6th grade and today was her graduation. We just a had a pretty busy week and it’s good to rest away from home. Tonight we’re meeting Marcia’s friend, Alejandra, for some food and drinks. I could use a beer or three. All is good though. yes, things have been quiet, but we’ve been working on big things and one day soon I’ll be able to let the cat out of the bag. I can’t wait.
We’re now head long into the raining season here and this topic deserves it’s own entry, so I’ll be brief. I love the rain. Up here in Guadalajara it doesn’t quite have the one-two punch it has in Vallarta, when you mix the rain with the humidity, but still, it’s so nice to hear and smell the rain. Everywhere you look, an intense, vibrant, saturated green is exploding from every tree, field, crack in the concrete, yard etc…
everything is alive.
ps. it just started raining in biblical proportions. Guadalajara literally turns into one giant river system as the streets can not drain the water fast enough. Marcia says we’re still going out, this should fun. wish me luck.
Typo Huh oh! new blogging software running on Rails and Ajax. and looking very clean and easy. nice! time to do my homework.
Lately, Marcia and I have been going to movies on a regular basis. call it a minor case of the small town shakes, but we are in our first few weeks of the rainy season and movies always seem to be a worthy ‘thing’ to do. With that said, since we’re in Puerto Vallarta, a largely rural area of Mexico, there’s not a whole lot of choices of movies to see. mostly your average blockbusters and studio fluff pieces and an occasionally interesting smaller movie.
In the past few weeks, we’ve seen “Batman Begins”, “War of the Worlds”, “Fantastic Four”, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”, “Melinda & Melinda” and a couple others I can’t seem to remember just now. Other “Melinda & Melinda”, most of the films were typical studio movies, entertaining but not much else.
Today, we woke up to a rainy sunday morning. A perfect day to go the movies. Marcia mentioned “Code 46″ and so we checked to see the playing times. MGM/UA made this movie and since I hadn’t heard anything about it from my MGM friends, so I hadn’t really thought about seeing it. I knew it had a futurist tint to it and Tim Robbins is usually a good bet (excusing “War of the Worlds”).
What a pleasant surprise. “Code 46″ is a wonderful, meandering, beautifully flawed film. Michael Winterbottom is one helluva director. I loved watching this film. The colors and feeling of the film were worth the price of admission alone. Saturated blues and reds, stark white/silver offices, unsaturated desert scenes, green tinged subway scenes, strobe light slowed down club scene, yellowy high contrast skies, each different scene had it’s own color, feeling and energy. The editing seemed a bit crude (and drawn out) here and there, but I get what the director was pushing for. The film’s futurist concepts were radically different from other movies in this genre and credit goes to the writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, for being so original. In this film’s future people speak english in Shanghai, peppered with heavy doses of spanish and light occurrences of maybe 10 other languages. There were certain aspects of the story that I didn’t like, but the choices Boyce makes are wonderful and never cliche. The one big thing that I didn’t like about the movie was that the main characters were in a love relationship but Samantha Morton (who is a great actor) looked like a little boy and acted like one too (in some scenes), in contrast to Tim Robbins’ flawed daddy character looking after her. I thought this was a bad choice and brought another level of subtext that detracted from the film’s plot needlessly. But hey!, that’s just me. you make your own judgments, I’ll leave it at that.
On our way out, Marcia said that she kept on waiting for the action or for something to happen, and that is why I loved this film: nothing happened quickly or rather, everything happened so slowly. This film definitely felt like a cross between the hyper aesthetic style of a ridley/tony scott film (without the forced, fast-paced, video game action) and the deliberately slow dream-like style of Sophia Coppola (”Lost in Translation”). Forgive me for not knowing off-hand which classic directors Sophia got her ‘inspiration’ from, but I think she’s also ‘one helluva’ director.
“Code 46″ isn’t the best film, but it’s definitely the first film I’ve seen in awhile that has soul. Calm, aesthetically sensitive, beautiful, flawed soul. If I could get stills from this movie framed on my walls, I would. It’s that good.
Rove-gate? try this instead: Cheney-gate.
Great article on who Fitzgerald’s target really is. woo-haa!
Architect Craig Steely
featured in the July/Aug. issue of Dwell. awesome stuff!
EcoTimber Wood Floor seems like an awesome company to buy hardwood flooring from. I don’t even wanna see their prices
LiveModern - making modernism affordable
perfect site for all us house improvement junkies with modern tastes
Eco Hacking Wired 8.11: Dumping Iron
a wacko “quick fix” for the greenhouse effect. great read. (via Boing Boing)
Some photos from a recent sunday out, at Playa Destiladeras.
I caught this on the way back from the pig farm.
defective yeti: Roving Reporter
great totally biased article sum up the current Rove/Plame/CIA/WMD hoo-haa.
On July 2nd, Pinky invited Marcia and I to go to her uncle’s pig farm, for a cook out. It was an interesting experience. We had a ton of fun and got to see all the aminals at the farm. Here is a photo slideshow of our day out at the pig farm.
sometimes I wonder if the people that make Adobe Illustrator even use their product. This app makes it as hard as can possibly be to do any type of text layout. I’m glad I payed for this product.
I love Illustrator for drawing. For vector art this program is the bomb. But for type layouts, oh my god. I just opened InDesign for the first time, and within a half an hour I’ve pretty much duplicated my layout and i have a ton of cool stuff like character styles added. InDesign is the new green and yellow stripes.
So we got back last night, from LA. all is well. my parents also got back, today. LA was nice, a little too short, but geez was it expensive. I don’t think I could have afforded to stay any longer. Those 40 dollar meals were killing me softly. A warm thanks to all my peoples that I was able to hook up with and Mel, Lilia and Jasmin I’m sorry we didn’t connect. It was a hectic fast paced trip and I never seem to be able to plan things correctly.
Marcia and I both dove right back into work and today has been utterly exhaustive. We’re heading into a week of preparation for next week, our investors are coming into town on monday. Marcia is doing a million different things and I am working on our branding and identity and put together a first look at sales material.
work work work.
So, I got a new board. It’s a beauty. it’s a 5′7″ fish, shaped by Zippr. Fish are slightly smaller, wider, and thicker then a short board and have a split tail with only two fins on the sides. I got it at ZJ Boarding House in Santa Monica, the famed successor to the Zephyr house immortalized in Dogtown And Z-Boys. I cant wait to try it out tomorrow, there’s a new swell coming into town and there should be some good waves.
I have a ton of photos. Now if i could get off my lazy tukus and upload ‘em.
It’s Wednesday night and we’ve been working awfully hard these past few days. Can’t seem to get a minute in to update. I have a ton of new pictures to show, this past weekend, Pinky invited us to go to her uncle’s ranch for a pig cook-out. We accepted her offer and we thought it might be a good experience. And it was. I can safely say I’ll never eat pig again that isn’t purchased at the supermarket, but I have some great pics of the pig farm and accompanying animals. It was a great experience, I’ll post the photos one of these days.
Marcia and I have been trying to get to Los Angeles over the past few weeks but things have been keeping us here, mainly airplane ticket prices and work stuff. So today on a whim I said why don’t we go to LA tomorrow for the weekend. 10 hours later and our tix are purchased and we are headed to big bad Los Angeles from Thursday to Monday.
ta-dow!
List of things to do: Relax, shop, eat, relax, see friends, relax, eat, see lots of art, eat, shop, relax, buy a new surfboard, eat, relax, go to venice, relax, enjoy the sun (minus the humidity).
The Flying Carpet
file this under: “why didn’t i think of this?” (via Hi-ReS! Feed)
For this 4th of July day, I thought I might list of some of the pros and cons of living in a largely rural area of mexico vs. living in big-bad Los Angeles. It just seems like the right time to make this kinda list, so here’s my random list of observances (in no way is it complete for even that well thought out):
- My electricity bill is $3.50/month. pretty hard to beat.
- It costs $3 to rent 2 DVDs for 1 night.
- Movies cost $5 bucks except on Wednesdays when it’s 2 for 1 all day long (at every movie house).
- My DSL bill is the same as it was in the states and gas costs a bit more.
- $10 buys a ton of vegetables down at the local fruteria and this feeds us pretty well. But no matter what else we buy, if we go to the regular super market it will cost at least $50
- Marcia’s VW Polo just went in for tune-up and it cost $250 dollars, for some reason I didn’t expect VW dealers to charge the same price as they do in the states.
- If you think L.A is known for it’s bling-bling crowds, you should check out our local nightclub, De Santos. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
- In Mexico it’s standard to work on Saturdays.
- Mexico has taco stands on every other block but there are no good waffle joints. period.
- I love those hot summer cook-outs with friends, it’s summer all year long here.
- $650 Rent for a two bedroom apartment, two blocks from the water is a great price anywhere, but when we lose water in our apartment complex for a day or two each month, the price seems kinda high.
- We have a thai fusion restaurant here that’s pretty good but the sushi joints here are terrible.
All in all. Both places have their good and bad points.
So I’m sitting here at my computer, it’s monday and the ‘net is dead. it’s like a ghost town. no new news, no new updates from my favorite blogs. It’s almost as if the entire U.S. took a day off or something.
Oh yeah, it’s “independence” day. ok, back to work for me!
Karl Rove leaked Plame’s identity
I’m sure he’ll get out of this one, the question is how?
My computer has been acting funny lately, little things here and there, so last night I did the essential full back up and this morning I did a full erase and install with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. As opposed to my archive and install about a month back. It only took me 3 hours to get the system up and running with most of my apps working as before. This is record time. And this thing is so much faster. I love it. All that Panther junk gone. and hey look mah, no more Classic! woo hoo. I reinstalled all the “heavy” apps and just dragged and dropped the smaller ones. Mail is running 10x better as well as iPhoto and iTunes. Believe it or not, but the biggest problem I encountered wasn’t getting Microsoft Office to work correctly, or even Adobe’s CS1. The biggest problems I had were with Apple’s iApps: iTunes, iPhoto and Mail. they were pains in my ass (relateively speaking). So many little files scattered everywhere. Apple should keep all the files in one place and then all the user>library junk in one place. Like say: “User>Library>iTunes” instead of littering the various directories within User>Library with iTunes files. And while they are at it, Apple should acknowledge the fact that occassionally people will want to install a clean system and so they should have some kind of migratory app, similar to the one that transfers your files from your old mac to your new one. The interface should give you a list of your apps and another list of your directories that contain your files. You should be able to choose which apps’ files and prefs you want to copy to another disc along with your working files (assumably your user folders). The migration app copies all the files to another hard drive and then after you do a clean install, you run the app again, you point it to a restore file that it saved with the files and the app restores your files for whichever apps you specified.
This allows you to do two things: 1. To migrate the files and prefs you want for only a certain number of apps, without having to manually go into the very icky User>Library folder yourself 2. It saves the pain of having to move files, start the app, say “hey this doesn’t look right, what did i forget?” and then have quit the app, go back to the User>Library directory to rummage around some more, copy new files over and restart the app.
Basically, I want to move the prefs and files associated with my most regularly used apps plus my keychain etc… but instead of doing it manually, i want Apple to create an app that helps me, considering that many people do this on a regular basis.
While I’m on a rant here, I’d also like for Apple to have more intelligent diagnostic tools. I want the OS to tell me why it’s running slow. I want it to say “hey you, you’re running to many jenky bit torrent apps and when you quit the app it doesn’t necessarily shut down the streams” or “hey you, you have this font app installed, and even though it’s not running and none of the 7,000 fonts you have in the app are activated, it’s still pulling precious system resources, you might want to un-install it”. Is that too much to ask? The computer knows that after a fresh install it’s running perfectly, why can’t it tell me what’s wrong after i go and populate it with a million useless apps and files?
Oh and while I am it: Why are both iTunes and iPhoto looking more and more like MS Excel by the day. Just because iTunes is a database of songs in list format, doesn’t mean you can’t make the list look good. The iTunes interface isn’t long in the tooth, the teeth are so old, they fell out years ago and have been exchanged for dentures. Same goes for iPhoto. Apple could take a lesson in UI design from Macromedia, for sheezy.
Well, that’s my two cents. I love Apple. I can’t even imagine going through this process with the 2 PCs at work, when those things stop working properly we don’t do clean installs, we retire them and use them as foot rests. Oh by the way, my mom just bought a 12″ PowerBook G4, just like mine. All those curmudgeon mac rumor nerds that said that people won’t be buying new macs because of the impending switch to Intel are wrong. 90% of the population doesn’t care what processor they use, they just want the computer to work correctly. Albeit, that 90% are probably using MS Office 90% of the time.
Talk amongst yourselves.
