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Posts
Bionic Leg

2012-09-05 • 02:45:15

AP Standing

Well it's been about 1.5 months now. The xray above shows what's going on in my leg, did the zipper fool you? The majority of physical pain right now is related to muscles getting bruised during the impact, and also what had to get sliced through to get to the bone during the operation. Hardware is all titanium, and pretty much permanent. You can also feel the screw heads sticking out slightly, which is a weird feeling and I imagine will bring comic delight at my next TSA grope session.

Today I'm up and walking around, there's a cane I use most of the time but can hobble (gimp like and all) without it just fine. The atrophy has been a little saddening, lost a bit of weight, too much for how skinny I am already. Waiting on a piece to show up in the mail that'll allow me to hook up my Bike Friday to a bicycle trainer so I can get some physical pedal therapy inside the house without worrying that my right leg wont be able to support me when I come to a full stop. With all the pain and lack of support my standing body muscles I'm having to walk in particularly odd ways in order to stand up, sadly this is taking a toll on all my other muscles and ligaments in my right leg and the rest of my body. Sitting down for long periods of time doesn't really help my back either (send massage therapists asap). But beyond all the constant pain, my leg's beginning to feel fully functional and human again.

My mental state has been a different matter. It's amazing how much of a drag going from a certain expected speed of mobility, down to almost nothing can do to your mood. Not to mention the suckage of going from getting around by bike to dealing with the failures of MUNI. As much as I cannot stop appreciating and thanks friends for lifts around town and to other places, it saddens me to see bikes zipping by enjoying life at a pace that seems right while I'm stuck in a cage of metal and glass and isolation. And as it turns out, coming off opiate based pain killers is a horrible thing, especially when it's already hard to maintain focus on anything while on them (like writing this post). Mildly contemplating spinning off a new blog/domain to simply cross post about gruesome bike related injuries and fatalities that originate from a strong lack of helmet usage, just to stay focused on something. Luckily I see the doc tomorrow and that'll help.

All and all to sum it up, I'm happy I'm alive and recovering so well, but long so much for my ability to get around San Francisco in a fun and quick manor , and above all else want to not feel mentally trapped in my head anymore.

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Posts
Sponsor a Roll of Film, get an Art

2012-08-18 • 20:25:31

Film Cans

So I'm currently in a bit of a mental block with photos. Not enough of an incentive to do anything with them after they're shot. I've mostly switched over to film a little while ago to help with that, slow down how often I shoot. Still my backlog is somewhere past a year. Kind of need a little bit of a push to get some of this stuff done. Additionally processing and scanning film is costly and annoying.

Care to sponsor a roll of film? It's sort of like getting a surprise present. You select a roll from the following list, not really knowing what's on it, send me about $35 USD (Bitcoins accepted) to cover costs, and in return I'll get the roll developed, processed and send you one 8"x12" prints and a hand full of 4"x6" of my choosing from that batch within a few weeks. In the end you'll be kicking me in the butt to get some of this work done, funding a fellow artist, and get a set of shanzy prints out of it in the end. Plus if you like I'll list out your name and a thanks along with the photos that get uploaded.

The majority of these rolls are from the past 6 - 8 months. Boats, weddings, bike trips, international travel, and other oddities. What you get is basically up to chance as I honestly don't remember where the majority of these rolls were shot.

If you're interested in helping out with a sponsorship, pick a roll and drop me a line. Thanks!

Color/Slide 35mm:

  • AGFA CT Precisa
  • Kodak Ektachrome E100SW
  • Kodak Ektachrome E100SW
  • Kodak Ektachrome E100SW
  • Kodak Ektachrome Pro 160T
  • Kodak Ektachrome DX EPY

Color/Slide Medium Format:

  • Kodak EIR Aerochrome
  • Kodak Ektachrome Pro 160T
  • Kodak Ektachrome Pro 160T
  • Fuji color

Black and White 35mm:

  • Arista EDU Ultra
  • Ilford HP5 Plus
  • Ilford HP5 Plus
  • Ilford HP5 Plus

Black and White Medium Format:

  • Ilford Delta 100
  • Holga 400

Note: The rolls in the photo above were developed ages ago.

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Posts
Potholes and Broken Bones

2012-07-16 • 15:20:11

If you haven't heard, I ate it while biking through West Oakland yesterday, tried to avoid some train tracks, inadvertently steered into a pothole and somehow broke my femur. Went through surgery this morning, and I can already walk mostly fine though with a bit of pain. They're going to keep me for another night here, not sure if it'll last longer than that but we'll see. Modern medicine is amazing, there is no cast!

I've been in good company so far (Al is sleeping in one of those crappy hospital room chairs) and the hospital staff here has yet to fail. I'll most likely be here for another night. Some people have asked for visitor information, poke me if you'd like to visit (but honestly nothing special is happening).

Thanks for all the well wishes, but what I would appreciate far more is for folks to (properly) wear their helmets. There's a good chunk of my helmet that compressed and crumpled during the fall, I would have been seriously fucked if I wasn't wearing it. And don't give me that shit about not riding in traffic. There were no cars around when I hit the pothole from hell.

Photo by Sofauxboho, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

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XOXO Handsome

2012-07-03 • 10:37:01

My friend Ari is selling a beautiful bike of hers. I dragged Docpop and the bike up to my roof for a quick photo shoot that turned rather fun.

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Posts
Film Photo Workflow

2012-06-12 • 01:03:00

Handsom, Doctor Popular

  1. Take a photo
  2. Finish a roll (30 minutes - 3 months)
  3. Try to remember to label roll with load and finish date (only done it once)
  4. Develop roll (a night at Noisebridge), or hand off to Photoworks (a few days)
  5. Wearing gloves, load film into scanning trays, cleaning off all dust then using canned air just to be safe
  6. Scan roll with VueScan on an Epson V700 (30 - 90 minutes depending on how anal I am)
  7. Scan again because I missed some setting within VueScan because of how horribly complicated it is
  8. Apply exiftool metadata changes for camera body type, and lens
  9. Place photos somewhere in a directory structure that makes sense to me
  10. Boot up Windows virtual machine and start Lightroom
  11. Import photos placed in the right spot into Lightroom
  12. During import also stamp into the EXIF my name, contact info, site, and Creative Commons license
  13. Make sure photos imported chronologically
  14. Track down film manufacturer, make, ISO, film codes, and tag all information into each photo (15 minutes)
  15. Make a first pass of picks, only update those from this point
  16. Bring up Google Latitude history, my calendar and digital photos I took along the same time frame
  17. Attempt to remember where specifically I took each photo
  18. Using Latitude approximate the time stamp for each photo and update EXIF (60 - 120 minutes)
  19. Target by hand exact geo location of each photo with the jfGPS plugin, because Latitude is inaccurate and only updates every 15 minutes (60 minutes)
  20. Reverse geoencode city, state, country data into EXIF
  21. Make a second pass of picks, only update those from this point
  22. Rotate photos to proper orientation
  23. Mass apply 2:3 aspect ratio
  24. Crop, tilt (30 minutes)
  25. Third pass of picks
  26. Dust/scratch/artifact removal (60 minutes)
  27. Development corrections, colors, tone curve
  28. Noise reduction or sharpening
  29. Artsy farsty color isolation and other things I tend to avoid in film (60 minutes)
  30. Fourth pass of picks
  31. Add content tags for names of people in photos, landmarks, objects, colors, spirit animals, hate, anger (60 minutes)
  32. Add snarky titles with odd capitalization and captions that only make sense to me (15 minutes)
  33. Double check that photos contain the proper metadata, including Creative Commons license information, geo data, film type, camera, and anything else that'll get stuffed into the EXIF
  34. Fifth, final pass of picks
  35. Create a "collection" in Lightroom with time stamp of first photo taken and toss photos in there
  36. If other photos exist (digital, other rolls) taken at the same event/date, check time stamps make sense and photos appear correctly when chronologically ordered (60 minutes)
  37. Last minute dust removal and other developing things (15 minutes)
  38. Using jfFlickr plugin prepare photos for Flickr upload with film, camera, lens, geo location data also included as (machine) tags and Creative Commons info in caption
  39. Export and upload to Flickr
  40. Babysit the upload, while compulsively hitting refresh on the Activity page to see if anyone favorited anything yet (60 minutes)
  41. Check photos to find the two with spelling errors or screwed up tags or wrong geo location, correct it in Lightroom, resend metadata only (15 minutes)
  42. Resend metadata to update "Photo" link in the Creative Commons license info in the caption to actually point to the same page
  43. Create a new Flickr set for the photos with proper time stamp of first photo taken, throw photos in there
  44. Review the photos and criticize myself about nothing more than just having to see these photos over and over again for the past week and being completely sick of them (30 minutes)
  45. Dump some of the better photos into a couple random Flickr Groups for posterity (15 minutes)
  46. Make a post on this site with a hand full of photos I liked from the roll and a link back to the set on Flickr (60 minutes)
  47. Tweet and Google+ about the post
  48. Compulsively watch the Activity page (for the next couple of days)
  49. Become frustrated with this garbage that has taken so long that it's 5 in the morning now and there's no one around that gives two shits about the photos I've posted (again for the next couple of days)
  50. Get disgruntled over this masochistic photography workflow I've created for myself (extra minutes if I vocalize it to others over IM)
  51. Resolve to cry and masturbate on the floor of a cold and dark closet, never wanting to ever pick up a camera again (two bottles of wine later)
  52. Months pass
  53. Photo backlog spans over a year
  54. Feel like I'm creatively dying and need to improve something (end up at a bar)
  55. Select a couple rolls of high speed black and white and toss my film camera in my bag, because it'll some how make me feel good to carry around that extra weight with me for a few weeks, like a dead body rolled up in a carpet representing the alternative time line where I pick up meth and become a wedding photographer
  56. Take a photo

Or I can just take a crappy looking photo with my Android, 'chop the shit out of it, push it to Flickr within the same day, and just remind myself that no one looks at photos bigger than a 640px resolution and that online photography is a sham, like with the one above.

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London January 2011

2012-06-05 • 00:22:20

Finally after well over a year, here are photos from my little jaunt through London.

Our Dinner

Arthur

Finer Teeth

A very Generic Mind the Gap Photo

In

Untitled

Clown Vomit on the Thames

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New Years 2010/11 – Berlin and Vienna

2012-04-15 • 23:30:21

Finally got done with processing film photos from Berlin and Vienna during the 2010/11 New Years.

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History Memes Itself, Again and Again

2012-04-04 • 17:40:20

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FriscoGate’s lack of respect for the Creative Commons

2012-04-04 • 16:28:49

This morning I had a number of friends point out an SFGate blog post that included a photo I took of a pair of MUNI transfers from a few years ago. Little did I know this would be the Nth time I would get annoyed by an entity on the internet. At first I was generically flattered by the whole thing, photo of mine, on a largish site, wow! Maybe I should check to see if my servers can handle the load from the link back. The post itself is about what makes you a San Franciscican, and also talking about how the last time they did a post like this they had of negative responses to the word usage of "Frisco".

After actually finding the post and where my photo was in it, all of my dreams of how I've just hit the big time and am totally making a name for myself as a street photography among the millions of other street photographers also trying to make a name for themselves here in San Francisco, came to a crashing, sobbing, forum trolled end. Why? Because groups of people backed behind the blurred name of a larger company typically don't respect licensing and copyrights of individuals on the internet.

My photos are available online through the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. I do this because it allows me to share my works for others to come by and use in whatever they want to noncommercially. And sharing is caring right? If you're unfamiliar with the various kinds of Creative Commons, the license is broken down like this...

  • Free to remix and edit the work
  • Free to share, copy, repost the work elsewhere
  • If the work is shared elsewhere, edited or not, the editing/reposting author must give attribution back to me
  • The work may not be used in any sort of commercial capacity
  • The same Creative Commons license must be used when reposting the work

SFGate is a commercial company, with ads all over their site, that page in particular is features ads for AT&T and some car insurance (I despise AT&T and would like to see less cars in my city). Within the terms of the Creative Commons license SFGate isn't allowed to use my photo, they can however contact me and ask for some kind of permission, to which I would respond back with, "Sure, buy me dinner," and they would tell me to piss off by simply not responding, and I live a happier life knowing my work isn't on a commercial site where they don't want to share any of their revenue with me. In sort my photos aren't published from commercial use without prior permission and a worded out waver.

Additionally as part of the Creative Commons if attribution is required and instructions on how that should be displayed aren't attached along with the item, the party wanting to use it must ask how so and get a response back from the owner of the work before actually posting it anywhere, SFGate completely failed at that. They did provide my Flickr name, no linkage back and the title of the original work is missing, so if someone wanted to find the original copy they would have an crappy hard time doing so.

On top of all of it they didn't republish my work with the same license, which is also required. At the bottom of the SFGate page you'll however find a link and some text: © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Material published on The SF Gate online service is copyrighted by Hearst Communications Inc. or its licensors, including the originating wire services. Such material is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and treaties. All rights reserved.

Users of the SF Gate online service may not reproduce, republish or redistribute material found on the web site in any form without the express written consent of the copyright holder.

So my photograph is either now under the copyrighted work of Hearst Communications Inc, or it's still mine but you really can't tell because they're not providing any specific information on how to find the original copy or even how to contact me. Additionally Hearst Communications Inc has altered the terms of my license to the point where others can no longer use it within the capacity of my original Creative Commons license, which is exactly what I don't want.

What's going to happen next? Possibly SFGate isn't going to care after they read the annoying email I've sent them asking why they feel ripping off other people's (not other company's) work is OK in their book. I could do the same to them by scraping their site and republishing their content somewhere else on the internet, possibly with a little twist, hurm...

Lastly, what the shit, MUNI doesn't punch transfers. Are these people even from San Francisco?

Update 20120405 113346 - Looks like my little troll rage is slowly making its rounds. As of this morning the SFGate blog post no longer has my photo in their slideshow rotation, also missing are 2 other photos (suppose I'm not the only one to get their panties in a twist). Sadly no email back from them with an answer as to why they thought it was ok to count Creative Commons as free domain. I imagine they're attempting to word out the most politest cease and desist email right now, scented stationary and all.

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BrainMeats: Occupy Everything – Overlap of Tech and the Occupy Movement

2011-11-06 • 12:32:22

A Messy Bench


Audio: OGG / MP3

About two weeks ago (October 27th) while up in Seattle I was invited to participate in a podcastable discussion about the current overlap of technology and the Occupy Movement.

The inaugural episode of the BrainMeats podcast is devoted to the Occupy movement and what hackers and makers can do to support the protesters on the ground. Willow spoke over Skype to Ari, Ella, Matt, Rubin, and Smári about the history of OWS, the meaning of illegibility within the movement, software tools for protesters, and more.

I was a little groggy through most of it and wish I had more fruitful things to say other than being the devil's advocate that I normally am. Anyhow it was a good discussion and if you're interested I recommend listening in on it. If you're curious about any of the sites/services/things talked about, please check out Willow's post for more details.

The podcast is provided under the Creative Commons: Attribution, Share Alike, Non Commercial license.

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