Some things require face time.
I am willing.

Child Rearing

Child Rearing

The best test of any procedure is the result.
If you are happy with her and she with herself, that is a wonderful success.
Failures and other disasters abound.

I can and probably will carry on theoretically. I am not an authority.

I will do as instructed.

My decisions are all made. My unlimited yes stands.

I will try to read all you reveal.

Reading Still

reading your posts, learning. Thank You.

merry merry

Feeling my S.A.D.

Still, it is a season of joy and hope.
I was raised a Unitarian.

Contact feeler?

No matter how or what I desire, I will take no greater action without a direct invitation. More, please.






I find this man a very good source on politics. He is a Canadian with connections to Austin, Texas.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/parliamentary-politics-in-a-non-parliamentary-system/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IanWelsh+%28Ian+Welsh%29

Clear?

I do not wish to reconsider.
The unlimited yes stands.

clairity?

Thank you for your words. I have much to think on. I have missed you for so very long.
I am very relieved.
I still want to see pictures.

They told us that only "real" love lasts. More than a generation later the attachment is still very present for me. Not a puppy but a pack. I did puppy.
You were and are not that.

I want to do a card for the season. More, I would like to receive one.

confused again.

The two cases are not comparable.
Tiger Woods sponsors pay him to win golf tournaments. He does that very well when he can play. His wife's threat to drive his balls her way may yet get him abandoned but it has little bearing on his endorsements of golf equipment. It might enhance the relationship with Gatorade. “This is textbook in P.R. circles in terms of addressing an issue and bridging to a vision of moving forward,” Perlut wrote. “And that should suffice in terms of helping him manage his personal brand, which is worth more than $100 million annually.”
Eliot Spitzer has left public life. His proper response was Wellingtons: "Publish and be damned". The problem he faced was a perceived blackmail vulnerability. The republican party was hunting for him. His State Police guards sold him. I believe that he thought he could not function in such a hostile environment.
So, yes, golf is why tiger is so special. That and he is very pretty.

That Scout is a very blond dog. In the flicker pictures, as a puppy there was a perceptible yellow tint to it's ears. That leads me to wonder if peroxide entered the picture.

Dogs are fine with me. I do not have a dog because I cannot bend my life to give one the leadership it would require.
It would please me to co parrent a pup. It would be your dog.

South Asia II

A solution to the problem posed by recrudescent Islam has occurred to me.
We should establish a protestant Islam. We cannot be seen to do this or it will poison the conflict that would be the functional goal of of the effort. The puritanism of the Wahhabi sect and the suppression of further revelation are just a few of the reasons such an effort is difficult.
An internecine conflict is my best thought at how we could withdraw and leave general destruction without ruinous responsibility. It would yield oil.

South Asia

I am not enthusiastic about this set of thoughts.
I not a good orientalist.

What we want to do is shut down the jihadi aspect of Islam.
When my high school teachers, an early twentieth century lot, touched on Islam
they named jihadism "conversion by the sword". This was objectionable at best.

Some progress was made by the British Empire. Starting with the suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and continued with the second Afghan war and the campaigns on the North West Frontier on into the Sudan Campaign. T.E.Laurence attached the jihadi to the cause of Arabic nationalism in 1914-1918 to continue the destruction of the Turkish Empire. Ataturk managed to halt that destruction by accepting Turkish Nationalism and forcing a secular state. Jihadi nationalism led to Saddam's Iraq where it again halted as a secular state.

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan our CIA used Jihadism to further motivate and support the Mujaheddin. The CIA intentionally awakened the dragon. We are left with the problem of dealing with the further consequences of that act.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Bell

Virginia Creeper

10/31/09

Witchhazel

Halloween, Enjoy

We no longer see the kids. I think distance and darkness has discouraged them.
Parents discourage the canvasing at random.
Down town it is an adult event. Uptown the neopagans have it.

We have not yet had a real frost but the air is full of yellow leaves. The dogwoods are down and bare of berries. The hollies are loaded with red berries. The birds will thin them soon.

Burning leaves is unlawful.

I will find you a picture.

TO BE CONTINUED

The attempt to externalize costs looks to be at the root of most of our nations problems.

Helping People

http://www.ianwelsh.net/support-for-public-option-collapses-if-real-public-option-polled

Helping people is probably the only real "good".
Any discussion is of method and timing. I think scale is included in method as are group and the definition of help.

Seven months, Ten days

We made a war. We did it by proxy. That fight ended. Our nation did not make a peace. Our agents saw us as their next great danger.

Dying changes minds. Education does also.

"You can send a man to Harvard but you can't make him think."

The place I want to be is with you.
Where is not important to me.
"Sooner is better" is as much as I can say on when.

I have drawings I must get out and a memorial for my aunt Lucretia I must attend.
The bicycle business has lost its' lease. There is no grant for the architecture as yet. The furniture is on the back burner with the manufacturer. I have some Cushmans to repair and fit up to keep a trickle of income.

I treasure your news. Please let me have more of it.

All you have had to do for the last forty years is ask.

state of my mind.

Do your jobs.
I will do mine.
When you wish me to change what I do, ask me directly.
My feelings remain unchanged.

Lead on

All you will get from me is yes.

I am a skilled woodworker. I own tools and enjoy using them.

Politics

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/older-workers-and-their-rights/?src=tp

I am a civilian US citizen. I have attempted to live elsewhere. I cannot and do not wish to try. I am sovereign in my own right. Politics is how we decide how we shall live. I pay attention to politics. In so far as I am able I participate.
Our government is political. It exists to consider and debate action. After due consideration and debate, it can do or not do. When an action is resolved it should and will occur.

I am very glad you have your job. As far as I can tell, it is a wonderful fit.

About a third of the national population speaks from their beliefs rather than from direct knowledge. They are not amenable to argument. I want to learn your thoughts.


Drywall is fire resistant. It is not suitable for rough or wet service. There are versions that do better.
I wonder who warrants merchantability? The real question is how hydrogen sulfide got into the stuff?

Veterans Administration

Our United States has and needs a professional military. Military careers are short. Exiting military, for whatever reason, need and should get effective help with civil living. Those who provide that help get my profound thanks.

interiors

I can do and have done this work.
It is fashion. I do not volunteer to do fashion.
The fact that the interior of a building has little or nothing to do with the exterior was brought home to me only a few years ago.
The problem of interior design is much the same as that of architecture. It is to make the space fit the mind of the occupant and or the client.
Let me deal with the specific case.
The designer has done her client proud. There is nothing I can quibble with in the work done. The presentation by the reporter needed some polishing. It got it in the comments.
The negative comments fall into three categories. Failure to read. Failure to see. Failure to think. I will include simple jealousy in the last category.

No, a pretty throw would not "fix" the sofa. The client's problem was that she had not moved in to the space. As a fashion house publicist and an English major she may not be capable of moving in to the space. The party procedure I learned is that coats go on the bed. Closets are Private space. About a third of this space was not covered in this article. The windows face south. I would not willingly socialize with the client.
The city is not a requirement of mine. I found work there within range of "free" rent.

dogs

I like dogs. I like them enough that I won't have one dependent on me in my present circumstances. Twenty to forty pounds is a good size.
I interact with a female pit-bull. She is affectionate company and people tolerant. I like and trust her. I also interact with a Yorkie who does not suffer from the extreme dwarfism that corrupts that breed. A six pound dog, he is a house pet. I like him though he is nervous about strange things. Working dogs are my intellectual preference. Two of my brothers had Brittany spaniels. Nice dogs. Very hierarchical.
I am dog tolerant and doggedly ignorant. I have no objection to dogs.

(ART)

I was taught that art is nonverbal communication. It is.
Poetry may be putting the nonverbal burden into a verbal structure.
. . .

Art is many things to many people. For me it is exploration of the aesthetic experience. Design is, in general, not exploration but the creation of an aesthetic experience for others. Design can explore. Most such explorations should not reach the customers.

Fashion

Fashion is derivative of itself, always. The last great innovation in the fashion industries was Velcro. Fleece (Polartec) and Gortex are not yet fashionable. EMS, L. L. Bean and MSR are working on that. The art of fashion design is to do the same thing with recognisable differences. Microsoft is guilty of fashion. The important thing about fashion is not the design but the date. This makes "avaunt guard" a fashion statement. Styling is always an attempt to move an object to current fashion.

Fashion, Design, Art, Novelty

In my mind, design is the consciously planned portion of both fashion and art. Novelty

I am unsatisfied with this line of thought. What was clear to me has vanished in fog.

An aesthetic experience is often considered to be one of beauty. I disagree. It is one of power.
still not quite right. beauty is only a part of it. sunsets, thunderstorms, mountains, clouds,
none are created by people.

Say when and where.

The movie industry has lost its' minds.
Description of movie production.
Management methods.
Fashion and design.
Innovation and risk.
When the established model no longer "fits" the public mind, that model is a formula for disaster.
learn or die.

The Obamas are well advised.

If it is physically and legally possible I will be where and when requested.

This is an outline. I will expand it at my leisure.

crystal clarity.

Perhaps allotropic.

The question comes down to what an individual person or more at personality perceives as good, true, beautiful or right.

Everything sold can be considered as a product. I am not at all sure that I like that thought.
Products are subject to optimisation.

confused.

A self defense shooting in Harlem by a licensed gun owner.
Two dead armed robbers. two wounded and arrested robbers.
"I wish I didn't have to do this." is about the sanest reaction imaginable.

I have never had a conceptual problem with killing people. I will not do it at an other's whim. It is a very effective cease and desist order.

I do have a problem with the death penalty. Torture is unlawful, even psychological torture. The dead do not suffer. Only the living suffer. If we want to kill people for their acts, call it an editorial policy. Do it swiftly and without appeal.

random thought (n)

Motor fuel has been on my mind.
Bio-fuel has dropped from the news for the moment. The world is in trouble and the Arabs want to sell gas.

When bio-fuel was in the news it was ethanol and fryer oil. Not good policy. Ethanol is food or food derived. Used fryer oil is rather limited as fuel for the truck fleet. Both receive big support from the agribusiness lobby.

Methanol is simple, easy, toxic and can be made from any carbon feedstock. There is no constituency for it

I looked up manufacture. It is catalytic processing of water gas. Electrically heated carbon is treated with steam. the resulting hydrogen and carbon monoxide are reacted in the presence of a copper catalyst. Methanol. Tough on fuel injectors but no worse than ethanol. High compression returns. The energy density is not great but what we want is miles per buck.

Ah! maybe . . . still thinking . . .

a question:
Is the aesthetic experience identical to "Quality" as examined in "Zen and the Art" ( Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (P.S.) by Robert M. Pirsig)?
It very well may be. If it is not this project grows without bound. If it is, the project is still enormous. Pirsig leaves quality experiential and otherwise undefined. The "We know it when when we find it." definition is a very slippery thing.
It is also very real.
If I consider it as a statistical space it appears to have multiple maxima. Most of the aesthetic fights I have encountered have been between believers in different peaks.

Competing orthodoxies

examples

You may have missed this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=&mrt=realestate&sll=40.78886,-73.968201&sspn=0.103975,0.205994&attrid=ee6d68e1e5cb9843_&ie=UTF8&radius=5.39&rq=1&ev=zi&t=h&ll=40.763121,-73.9991&spn=0.104015,0.205994&z=12

It did come out of a browser window.

better portrait

round lake again

still here

Work has overfilled my time and attention.
Complexity: a composition of differences. Complication: a composition of similarities.

There is no purity in any real design.

The objects of a design are a solution to the problem utilizing maximum visual differences and minimising visual similarities.

This is one of those statements worthy of Redmond, Washington.

The ratio of complexity and complication

Complexity by complication.
These terms are fundamentally different. This extends "on design". The ratio is an aesthetic measure.

I think I have nailed this profession of design.
The problem I am having is one of philosophy.
I expect that I am better prepared than most to deal with it.
Is truth separable from experience?
I say no.

JBL to sat. South to indian river in cedar lakes wilderness. weather good.

7/11/09 - 7/12/09 Motel night, Tupper Lake. off to limekiln, Indian, south of limekiln, not on the Jessup. Look at the Indian river back toward cedar lakes. Cedar River Flow?

Industrial design / product design

This is the source and reason for my view of aesthetics.

The "profession" of industrial design consists of the manipulation of the end users of objects through their aesthetic responses. Because this takes place in a commercial environment, manipulations are strictly time and cost limited.
Occasionally there is an opportunity to start a project with a blank sheet of paper. This can be fun in the deliverable stay finite and the manager stays enough involved to follow the project learning curve. The problem with such projects is to deal with the entire situation. The engineer probably will See no point in designing the package and the interface. He knows what all the buttons do and what will result from pushing them in a given order. The user will not know. The salesman knows what is on the spec. sheet and how to run the demo. This is probably useless to the user who probably comes to the equipment cold. Think of a command line dos "C:" prompt. type (file name) |more is not obvious nor is cd*. The color of the screen is just a fact to the hacker. To a casual user it is its fifth wall and proscenium arch. Keyboards are another can of worms.

Message and Aesthetic

A problem in mixed motives. Things are made because a patron is willing to pay the costs of production. What gets produced is a compromise between the patron and the creator. Self patronization is rare and has been more rare in the past. I suspect it is a cause of starving artists. The opening line of Genesis is: "In the beginning there was the word and the word was GOD." This is a tell for christian religious art. Islam and Judaism have prohibitions on imagery.

more later.

Plan?

I will be in the Adirondacks 7/7/09 ~7/15/09

More pictures is my intent. The Loj or Johns Brook to start. Look at the upper still water on the Indian south of the Moose river plain. Plans tentative.

Portrait?

Me in the studio last spring. The structure is student work.
Nick Foley is seen in the green sweater Sean has the camera.
Nick thinks and talks. Sean draws and paints.
Both work hard. The frame is far too dark. I will republish after post processing.

The first frame is the modified image. I have done what I can for it. The shirt is Ann's humor.

Large white oak, local

thought on painting

In medieval times, painters were mercenaries. They made pictures for patrons, religious or secular, it was a design project with an explicit aesthetic. William Blake Is an early example of an artist as we understand the term.
The romantics of the nineteenth century were Were painting popular drama. The impressionists leading on to the fauves were answering a question: Why are we not photographers? Dada does not paint. cubists explore perception. expressionists emotion and image. abstract expressionists do color and texture toward emotion. they were all jazz fans.

more soundtrack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpO5xIltlyU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPG1OnOrhis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0MTQpDgSFc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O5nPM0atg0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMwUuS4CFT8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEKKqNc2b0Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWuwoGqYgjg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhlZCzzoTVY

Next night Sunday, summer solstace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knU-r_6DylM

Aesthetics and Fashion

I believe these are not separable. A reasonable simile would be Siamese twins with too few organs to make two functioning independent persons. As I think on this it occurs to me that aesthetics and fashion have different bases.
Aesthetics is the search for beauty through philosophy. Fashion is the active pursuit of beauty. Add the market place and have a three body problem, an inherently unstable and unpredictable system.

hear this.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/podcast-me/

It is a thief of time but well worth anyones attention.

early spring, witch hazel

I am still learning the way of photoshop.
This camera has depth of field limits.
I need to practice portraiture.

On design ( Preliminary)

This is an intention and a project.

Design is a profession without an official curriculum. One becomes a designer by being recognised as a designer by others recognised as designers. A design education helps but is not required. In this respect it is rather like Science. Such a recursive entry does not make for a satisfactory definition. " Design is what designers do" amuses me but is not helpful.

In the very broadest sense designers manipulate perception at the behest of clients.

About a year after leaving Parsons for the second time I put in some time thinking hard about
"DESIGN". The forty years or so of existential accretion crystallized into a statement. The object is ornament. The dual meaning of this statement was intentional. Object being both a physical construct and goal or other desired end point . Object is not an infinitive because it is not additively applied. The physical object is beautiful in itself. Adding to it does not increase its beauty. Subtracting from it does not improve it. As an example take type. You have probably noticed that I am writing in Times Gothic. When I was introduced to graphic design, my class followed fashion and used sans serif faces, mostly Micrograma bold. I was unhappy with the legibility. It took years for me to notice that book designers in general used serif faces for text that was to be read. It took more years for it to come to my attention that the serif was inherited from the Romans who took it from the Greeks. The accent at the end of the stroke adds to the legibility of the letter. A manipulation of perception.

This is an attempt at an historical approach.
Ornament is sin. Corbu, Adolf Loos, Catholicism, protestant, Rennie Mackintosh, Elephant portfolio, Wright. Glass chain? Marc Isambard Brunel?
Whistler, Ruskin, Gothic, William Morris, romanticism, socialism, impressionism, photography

There is a bipolarity in culture: additive - subtractive. objects illustrate it. it is ideological.
What is under consideration is aesthetics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic
I object to this approach. Aesthetics for me is the very practical and applied craft of producing a graceful and useful object. It uses the social norms rather than the personal.

between rock pond and little tupper

Auto correct is a snare. I will look again at "open raw"

sound track?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DEA8YgdWIw

This is a cleaned up presentation Armstrong's 1928 cut of "west End Blues"

Brasier Falls, John's Brook

There seems to be no good way to photograph a falls.

economic recovery

We must manufacture. The rest is just taking in each others laundry. Zero sum is a loosing proposition.

War memorials

I really liked the Vietnam memorial on the mall in D.C. as built. The additional statuary does not add to the impact.

Memorializing our current conflicts presents a problem.

A dark passage ending in a vertical shaft open to the sky.

A raised area of tightly mown grass surrounded by a red granite wall with names. No entry to the grass.

Alcohol

I can live very happily without potable ethanol. I very nearly do.

George Bliss

Bicycle enthusiast. I do some work with him. He pays.

Off to his hub station on Morton street for some income. 12:32 Friday.

Yes means Yes.

Adult children are only to be expected at our age. Independent is better than dependent but I will deal with whatever I must.
AS it happens, I have none. Marla teases me about her second child but she would have to have worked very hard to make her mine. I do not put that past her which makes the tease most effective.

Food.

I had another look at my shelf. The volume of Alice Waters I find is: The Art Of Simple Food.
I did read it when it showed up two years ago but it must have been a bad day.
It is a simple, readable, book on an excellent approach to food. It is without nationalistic special pleading and mystic passes. I would happily cook to her standard.

travel.

will return to 516 Wednesday-Thursday, May20-21. There is no Internet at Miami airport. Air train from JFK to Jamaica, Oyster Bay train from there.

Pygmalion?

Not significant.

On the island. Key West at about 10:30.

try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DEA8YgdWIw

All well.

mumble

I am two days into a drive to Key West. I spent a day and a half on I95 and got bored. There was enough sweep to the road hat sleep was not much of a problem. The second after noon I left the highway and drove US17 through Myrtle Beach and Charleston back to I95 at South Point. Not boring. I have tried to read Legislation. Boring. Government: not boring. What do they have in common? My thought is the prevention of unintended consequences.

more high places

high places

FORK

I will start a public blog. This private blog will continue.

Reboot

I was awake, for the first time in twenty eight years. I had hope replacing the grey stoicism which had underlain my existence. I was also vulnerable. Things mattered. I needed friends. I needed connection. I wanted my profession.

continued.

Mother began to walk every day. By summer she was getting to the beach and back.
I put a message on Bill's answering machine. " The object is ornament." I began to look for my friends from Parsons.
I consulted Marla. I began a library search. Marla found the Classmates listing. I joined IDSA. I went online. I began to build a portfolio of work. I began to work at design. I built a resume. I found Ini again. In May I called Bill in search of work. Maybe in September. September came, I went in to Pratt and did. There was no money.

news:

start here: http://www.newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/saturday/news/ny-hsalz0812742909may07,0,6015309.story
I looked for it in the Times. Not found.

My patron at Pratt, William Katavolos (Bill), and I put on a display of his water architecture yesterday. We had very little interest until I was taking it down. We will try again Monday.

Sunday, Bill's wife, Terenia, will fly to her home at Key West. Bill, I and The Dog (Bravo) will follow in the CRV Tuesday morning. I will be gone about ten days. I will take my laptop and sign on in the evenings.

I have much to learn.

I led an isolated cloistered life from from 1970 to 2000. since then it has not been better, just different.

the turn of the year to 2000

Chronology is hazy. The much hearalded Y2K was a nonevent.

I know what I did, I do not know when. I will ask some questions. Marla remembers differently.

The suppression system I had built in the early seventies crashed in mid January. I had my memories, what of them survived. I had a direction. I sought and found help. Several times.
I was again a designer with a design education.

mostly luck

Armistace day 2005, about 11am est looking north from Henderson Lake.
Wallface.

see your tag. will respond on reading.

meanwhile, here is a cartoon series: http://www.wapsisquare.com/d/20010909.html

you should know to copy such a url into a browser line and push enter.


Working for the next few hours. Next week looks like a drive back to Florida.

There is a book on Lavern, Katavolos's onetime employer.
..........................................................................................................................

I have read the article on this new A H1N1.

It would appear that most of the information is in what was not said.
The noise now looks more and more like CYA.
As Emily Latella would comment:
"Oh . . . Thats very different . . . Never mind."

Japanese Maple 10/05

Attention fails. I will sleep and, perhaps, dream.

History,

We need to know it. Consider my adventures with suppressed memory.
History is all we can know. Attempts to edit it are attempts to enforce behavior.
Machiavelli's The Prince is case studies and thus powerful. There are numerous
other examples.

History is performed acts.
In laboratory work, if it is not in a notebook, it did not happen.
It is the foundation from which we build.
Let us have more of it.

spring again

spring again II

Mother's cancer

Diagnosed spring, 1997. lumpectomy. Radiation to end of June 1988. Collapse July4 1988 resulting in emergency hospitalization. Family gathering planned for august called early.
Her life was despaired of. My surgeon brother flew in from the west coast, calls in an old cardiac surgeon to install a pericardium drain. Not a hopeful pathologists report. slow improvement. We held the party. It felt like a wake. I was not employed. I volunteered to be it but could not manage the DNR. Ann took that.
A few days later we had her released to hospice. She bore that for a week and came home with a visiting hospice nurse and doctor. We had an open morphine prescription and an oxygen concentrator. We never started the morphine. Slow improvement. She sent my sister back to Detroit. months of wheelchair and assisted bathing. I was doing all the cooking. The nurse turned over to an aid. The chair retired for a walker. In the late autumn of 1999 the aid realised that mother was not dying. Hospice Withdrew.
I do not remember Christmas.

I95 Southpoint, South Carolina

Just a stop and another day.

They were not stupid or dumb.

I have heard these words. I have none better.


First Corinthians 13:1-13

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth:

but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known. But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

work in progress

I have spent parts of several decades learning the active.
The passive role is very difficult for me at this time.
I can and will take that path.

breakfast

I cooked. Crepes.
This day I drove her for glasses so she could renew her driving licence.
She passed.

local radar and Forecast

http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/radar.php?rid=mux&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no

Here is your forecast office:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.77397129533325&lon=-122.28057861328125&site=mtr&smap=1&marine=0&unit=0&lg=en

The Feds do a wonderful if conservative job.

All I can do is polish on it a bit. Look at the radar and the wind and think locally. That works for individual systems but I usually can't guess any better than they can. Katrina was a rare exception.

Shook?

Go and experience: http://www.exploratorium.edu/faultline/index.html

California is fighting with the National Weather Service. Try: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/nepac/wv.jpg

That should give some idea. There is an animation of half hour images here: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/west/nepac/loop-wv.html

An enthusiast based weather compilation is here: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Do not neglect the header and side bars.


I would do better working for something like IDEO the Exploratorium does not pay.

My Daily Reading

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

http://agonist.org/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://www.ianwelsh.net/

http://slashdot.org/

Listen to

http://www.wnyc.org/ The AM feed

http://www.vpr.net/listen/stream/ The BBC world service stream.

http://www.wpkn.org/ontheair.html Just for fun, when the world is too much with me.

Read as available:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/

http://firedoglake.com/author/94/ or, http://agonist.org/diary/stirling_newberry (snit? no recent posts.)

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/

Look at:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/

http://www.technologyreview.com/index.aspx

only a beginning.

Food

I cook.
For many years I insisted that I cooked in self defense.
For the last ten years mother has not been up to cooking successfully.
I am not an obligate carnivore. I am an omnivore.
I rarely cook vegetarian for myself. I have no objection to the practice and can produce good food under those strictures.
I admire Alice Waters. I have her bread book.

apology: The book is Nancy Silverton's "Breads from La Brea Bakery"

Parsons II

I was graduating again. I had an actual BFA. Commercial professional employment escaped me again. There was nothing in the Parsons list of opportunities that was any kind of a fit. I had been doing art and tool technique as a student employee. Systematic design was still blocked. My supervisor, the Pratt student, knew something of my earlier education. I was hired to operate the product shop and given a couple of electives as financial supplement. This lasted two semesters.
The dummy shipped a Mac to his home address. He was fired. I lost support. I moved to foundation where I was the wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong belief system and had the wrong philosophy of art.
Worst of all, I was unfashionable. I was summarily fired in the spring. I came home that evening to mother's announcement that her mammogram had come back with a hot spot.

Incompatible operating systems

Microsoft and Apple intentionally keep their file systems incompatible with each other. I think it is an effort to preserve user base and thus income. There seems to be no way around this policy.
There are several ways to assault the problem. Both Linux and BSD will read and write these files. The learning curve to make use of this feature is steep.

The simple approach I know is to use email. An incompatible file received as an email or an email attachment will not open but it can be stored or compressed. It then can be uncompressed and emailed back to a compatible system. Compatible file formats, such as PDF, JPEG, GIF etc will run after mailing.

I am completely serious. Action will not get any easier for me until death resolves my a domestic situation. I find that I can act at this point but need an explicit invitation from you before I call on my siblings and say "Your turn."
A quiet meeting on "neutral ground" could easily resolve all doubts.
Your words, if they are not such an invitation, will be closely attended to.

It was you in front of the Forrest Avenue Stop & Shop. I am very sure. You were dramatically unwilling to be accosted.
Thus I did no more than nod in passing. Shock does strange things. I am still reeling. HCH

Weeks' trip.

I shall fly to Key West Sunday, Take a day or two to rest and prep a car and drive back to New York.
Blogging and other contact will be light. Trip will take seven days plus depending on passengers and dog.

Make it march

Marla helped me get the research papers written. I would do the library work, mail her the references and a lead paragraph and an outline of the logic. It worked for academics. Aesthetics and criticism I found I had to write myself.
I wanted access to the tools so I took student employment in the product design shop. My supervisor was a John Sweeney, graduate student in architecture at Pratt. His professor was William Katavolos. I allowed myself to be drawn into their project for a few weeks. First encounter in twenty plus years. I pushed on toward graduation in December 1994.

bed.

I had asked for as much computers as we could squeeze into that semester. There was a course in illustrator and photoshop on Macs. I found that the work was easy. I could read the manual and make sense of it. My Algonkin Park pictures made a splash. First roll of film I had shot since Halifax. Autocad was a dream for this pencil draughtsman. Alias turned out to be of little interest. The required hardware was a fifty thousand dollar Unix Sparc station. I put a teapot I had worked up fifteen years earlier on as project and passed the course.

I enjoy . . .

http://officialpibgorn.livejournal.com/

Links to "pibgorn" and "9 chickweed lane"

back to school.

My paying work had evaporated. I had a bank account. I had COBRA. I had an equities account. I had skills. The grant at Fosdic was going to pay an aerodynamicist. I had no dependents. I job hunted hard for about ten months. Not even a nibble. Marla and I looked at my resume. On paper I looked very light. The only thing that even approximated a degree to an H.R. type was an Old Parsons certificate. Know that any school that bears "institute of technology" in its' name graduated students with three year certificates until ~ 1900(?). Qualification creep begins about then. I was still not writing more than absolutely required. My computation skills had not advanced. The original arguments applied. Art School. Where? Parsons was still extant. They did not offer industrial design but did offer product design. I just wanted a degree to show. Close enough. The ten k per semester was a stretch but reachable. Loved it. Aced most of it.

continued. time to go to work.

Parsons under The New School was very different from the organization I had known twenty five years earlier. Design was a poetic practice. There was no attempt to consider whole systems. Logic was ignored. Inductive logic was unheard of. The workload was heavy but the serial all nighters had disappeared. None of the old staff were there. When I signed in with the registrar, her comment was "You're Old Parsons. We don't see you people." I learned that rusty as I was, I could design faster and better than any one there. What they were offering was design flavored liberal education. I quickly shut up and concentrated on passing the courses. This was a joy but relearning the writing of the English language added plenty of sweat.

this is about half done.

editing is a constant. What is here so far is an outline dressed in rags. Details count and loss and recovery happens every day. I am still verbally shaky fifteen years later.

Fosdic hi tec

About a third of the way through Marine Sciences an adjunct, George Fosdic showed up with a model building project.
George is an unrecovered boy soprano, A. I. L. spec. writer, piano salesman and would be inventor. What he wanted was a "pretty" model of a wind turbine he had worked out. I built him a brass model that pleased him for the price he offered. Then came the problem of measuring its' performance as a prime mover. In various forms this went on for twelve years. I did a great deal of free work and learned much about power measurement. I built a series of calibrated brakes, cradles and turbines. Learned something of rigging and tower design. I learned about obsession.
It was not a workable idea.

The Marine Science Research Center

I was there for nine years eleven months. I was a tech. I did some design work. I began to learn DOS. I struggled with Auto cad. In the early releases it was a monster. I finished out my guide boat. I built a paper tape reader for tide gages.
I built an apparatus to measure thermistor time constants. I built a stable micro oxygen sensor and support circuitry. I built several precision incubators. I built remote water samplers to go down with Alvin. I built instrument mooring releases. I built pressure cases. I built centripetal bubble separators. I built a multiple release mechanism to control a sampling net. I designed all of these. I serviced and calibrated the current meter pool. I invented a non spiking salinometer. I fought for development time and lost. I was laid off.

"I am not much into nostalgia." I would like to make a plan.

two year old picture

You have seen me more recently.

Where are your pictures?

If digital photography is a hobby, You must have a file.

Theta Industries

Marla was graduating. I needed a real job and a car. The Volvo had died after being side swiped while parked. I built a wooden rowing boat. I spent weeks searching the classified. I found a job as a bench tech at Theta Industries. It paid seven bucks an hour. When I left that was my rate. Their main business was dilatometers. There had been no change for a decade. I tried to do design. I had some success. Work got a bit better but my rate did not. The Volkswagen Variants' engine mounts rusted away.
Marla told me she would seek other company. I had no car and was depending on trains and buses. I was too haunted and exhausted to object effectively. I was sad but relieved when she asked for her key. There was some cash again. I rediscovered the Adirondacks. I bought an MGB. I went out and visited Tom Wilson at Stony Brook Marine Sciences. We agreed that I could be useful to him in his electronic instruments shop. The owner at Theta decided that I didn't deserve my vacation time. I left. Almost five years passed there.

Marla's half grown girls.

southside trail

student again

I signed up for courses at Stony Brook. I failed the calculus the first semester and knew I would not be a graduate engineer. I had a good time with history and finite math. Took Quantum mechanics. I think I passed. I fell in with the S. F. Forum. I am a long-time fan. The group read. The president flirted with me for a book contribution. I liked that and eventually presented a cubic yard of paperbacks. We formed a steady relationship. About a third of the time for the next three years. We still talk. She has a husband and two half grown girls. That spring I was broke again. I found a job-shop position at BNL on a heat pump project. Learned a lot about refrigeration. Regan was elected and the project was defunded. Out again. I spent more time correcting Edwardian construction.
The S. F. Forum was an eclectic group. There was a perennial grad student who was moving from doing wet chem on eel grass toward running the electronics shop and instrument pool. more on TCW later. Marla graduated and I needed a job.

DEL Mfg.

I went home for Christmas break at the end of 1975 to discover that my father had initiated a solar energy project at Halm . He put me to work on some of the technician work so I could collect some cash for pocket money. I think he knew I was not going back. I did not. The axe fell. He put me on the payroll with the comment "This is fun but it doesn't pay". I paid off my student loan in the grace period. I have been cash only since. We had a good time racing into the front of the field. We were doing patentable work. I ended up with three. There were about eight. I learned to drive and bought an old Triumph Spitfire and rebuilt the engine. I kicked tobacco and have stayed off it. We had a house built as a test platform. I was learning the instrumentation trade. I was good at it and loved the work. Carter founded the DOE. Government funding disappeared. We went on. In November 1978 my father had a fatal heart attack in the night. I was not able to manage the project. I was out a year later. There was minimal insurance. Mother was working the orchids at Planting Fields on a state line. A family friend gave me a pittance to struggle with his Edwardian house in Sea Cliff. Electrical work, Plumbing, some carpentry. I was drifting out to Stony Brook. Initially it was memory leaks and good libraries.

Stevens

I went back to my loft. The contractor had returned with friends. I was getting work again. I took in a pair of room mates and got a phone. It was my intention to commute to Hoboken and keep the place and work as I could. No. The room-mates moved out. The contractor needed someone who could work on his schedule. Joy was not enough to pass math. I did summer semester. Three times. I could not trust my notes and thus did not study. The texts became steadily less readable with my limited progress. I finished about two and a half years work in three and a half years. I sold the loft in the summer of 73 for back rent. I was in debt. I had the concepts but not the skill for their successful manipulation. I had a few good friends.

Spring 1972

at home I ate and slept for about a month. I remember little until the weather broke and the frost came out of the ground in March. I knew what the recent events were but was not looking at them. I had no interest in doing design, art or photography. Life was on hold. Intellectually I was again the fourteen year old I had been. My father took me out into the back yard and pointed out a locust he thought needed to come down. I took it down, cut it into twelve foot lengths and split it into rails. I cut the top into fire wood and burned the brush. In the process I rebuilt myself physically. I was still rail thin but no longer skeletal. Warm weather surprised me. I sank in salt water. About here my isolation began to grind on me. I had forgotten the lessons learned in intermediate algebra and other mathematics courses. I applied to Stevens Institute. Found William Katavolos on fourteenth street for the required letter of recommendation and was admitted as an M E major class of 1976. I did not want N.Y.U. They had closed their engine school in The Bronx. I liked the Breuer building.

N B

The memory block I built in 1971 stood, leaking but intact, to the beginning of 2000. 28years

Spiraling down.

I had a three year lease. Bill Katavolos would come down and look in. We would all go out and eat Italian in little Italy. As the summer advanced into fall, The neighbors showed up. There was just a couple in the small loft one floor up on the other side of the elevator a small contractor married to a Japanese silversmith and a painter and his wife two floors down.
There was a cotton waste business opposite the painter. There was a photo finisher on seven. I was 6W. The contractor saw what I had done and I began to get work. It almost paid the rent. Nancy got strange. She was smoking pot laced with pcp. She began to diet. Not a good idea for her. Her docs had beefed her up to stabilise her moods. In this process I had lost the habit of regular meals. Nancy and I hitched north to visit a friend rusticated in central Quebec. He was having a rough time fighting with his homosexuality. While there I took a walk around the pond and got lost in the woods. No trail and very little grade. I found my way out in about an hour but late fall and a sleety rain made it memorable. We stayed three days and took a bus home. Nancy went out to her parents in Garden City. They caught her taking the washing machine apart and lecturing it. They institutionalised her. Electro-convulsive therapy. I had told her that machines were easy. you just had to "speak their language."
Bill Katavolos showed up with about 16 young adults who wanted to continue under his instruction. September was very exciting. At the end of the month He took them to Ohio where they could graduate from an accredited program. Life was quiet. No work. Nancy came back for a visit and recovered her memory. She sent her father for her clothes.
I hear she is a tenured professor at U Va. I felt abandoned. By my profession. By my friends. By my life. Depression and sleeplessness. Food was not worth the effort. I stopped reading and eating. I dropped thirty to forty pounds . I found I could suppress memories while in that state. I did. I started at that time and dumped everything that led to real pain. All of art school. All of design. All of college The last three years of High School. It was not a complete wipe but I made it all fall out of consciousness. Toward Christmas I was wondering why I existed. I found one bare and distant hope. I was still in love. She was not dead, only married. In time that could change. If it did, she would seek me. I roused out, had a meal and went home for the holiday. I weighed one hundred and twelve pounds and smelled like fresh bread.

After Graduating that time.

At the time of my graduation in 1969, I know now that I was unprepared to work as a designer. I had no non graphical communication skills. I avoided the telephone after some big bills on the family line. The net was not yet a dream though the DARPA net went in about 1960. That was military only. Computers were mainframes. I had some money. I hung in the city for about six weeks helping classmates do portfolio work. I was unable to do that for myself. As that spun down, I locked my door walked down to the Lincoln tunnel and stuck out my thumb. A memorable trip to California the summer after the summer of love. I ended up in the Bay Area. Had an adventure with the street people of Oakland.
Slept on a dorm floor in Berkly. The U.C. Berkly Library held me for a day. I thumbed north. Hot, Dry, Lonely. Turned west and landed in the bed of I think the American river with a manic veggie in a van. Rousted at 2:00 am. Stunned by fatigue, I thumbed north on US1. I saw little. I was mostly dozing. No redwoods that trip. I kept getting rides from cruising gays and other adventurers. I spent a few days at the U. of Oregon, got turned back at the BC border and headed east. I wasn't looking hard but the work I found was drug dealing and petty cons. Nothing I wanted to get involved with. Manufacturing seemed to be shutting down everywhere. I got stranded in the scab lands of central Oregon. A stunned quick trip through the mountains. Standing and sleeping. I walked a few hours by the Green. More mountains in the dark. I crossed into Canada from Minnesota and picked up the Transcanada through Sudbeury. Moonscape with drifting miners. The nickle pits were closing. I zipped through French Canada. Paused at St John New Brunswick to watch the tide in Fundy. The bore came up the river. I pushed on to Halifax. More sleaze. I found a couple of classmates who had gotten jobs at N S C A D. They found a couple of guys who were willing to try founding an office. I flew south and got some cash and kit. I must have looked in at Parsons. I don't remember. Passed on my student apartment and sank into despair. No income. No contacts. Canada is foreign. I survived the winter on dreams. I came home for a visit and spent an hour with Ini. I had nothing positive. I visited Parsons. Antiwar and Green were taking over. I was glad to have missed drop city in my loop. I went back to Canada to try some more. Things just got worse. Beer did not help but pub food was cheap. I moved my pad again. I had been getting robbed. I shared a former school house on the beach that winter. No traffic, no food store, no phone, no radio. I quit in the early spring and traveled south. The ferry from Yarmouth to Bar Harbor. was a joy. I had dozed in the police station waiting for the boat. Boston and my MIT brother. Home.
Visited Ini when I could move. They told me I must move on. I moved on.
I went back to Parsons to see if I could find a way to earn a living. Parsons had been sold to The New School For Social Research. The industrial design department had been ordered closed. All that remained was a trash out and a wind down. Some of us moved William Katavolos and his papers to a studio loft on fourteenth street. I was working.
No income but satisfying work. I Wanted a base in the city. I found a loft on Canal and Broadway and split it with Nancy. Nancy is known to be a diagnosed schizophrenic. She is also the best free hand draftsman I know of. We had a wonderful month cleaning, painting and refinishing the floor. I built an internal structure to hide the beds and walk in closet. No A.I.R. lease. It also provided a corner for the kitchen. One of the two water closets became a shower. It was almost comfortable. The traffic noise was always intense. The light was perfect. The view, stunning. I did not own a camera that worked. My next photographs were twelve years in the future.

It goes on.

Parsons college

I have little to say about Iowa here. The state was full of distant relatives I never met. My explorations in aesthetics continued. There were no museums. The library was very limited and I had not enough sense to look there for something I had not yet found a label for. What I found were Marvel comics and Playboy. Marvel in the mid sixties was graphically adventurous. I found them delightful. Playboy was and perhaps is a designed environment for heterosexual male fantasies. Think Surrealism for exurban America. It was called porn but had about as much relation to that as Darwinism or Dirty Harry. I wish the yogi joy of the campus.

Art school

I went reluctantly. I went with the promise that I could have art and income. No one makes that promise now.
I had been finding my aesthetic "fix" in broadcast radio. This source is played out. My experiments, I now find, replicated "Foundation Year" in the Bauhause curiculum. I did not know. Froebel gets in here in theory and practice. I very much needed to go. I was admitted to Parsons School of Design, The industrial design department. I was immediately lost. Nothing I came with seemed to work. My emotional support resigned. I drowned in work. All according to the schools plan. I learned. Perception: we became photographers. The whole craft. Light, light control, image construction, illusion, composition, content and presentation. The images I shall post here are raw unless otherwise labeled. Mechanical drawing taught space, geometry, process, organization, and the importance of detail. Freehand graphical notation was the central study. There was a continuing rumble of the combinatoric study of Cartesian space. This dominated second year. I spent the first summer learning by doing flat plate geometry in cardboard. Second year also did color and materials. The third year was the business of design. I missed most of third year getting a 1Y draft status.
What I learned was a complete and effective rational design procedure. We had A horrible drop rate. sixty in, twenty out. Suicide was common in the rest of the school. Seven that I knew of. At the end William Katavolos looked at my record and graduated me. He had the power.

catching art

Art bit me early. I know this. I have spent the last twelve years in the company of artists of various flavors. Lots of talent free wannabees as well. I was prepubescent. My aesthetic had no sexual content. I began to investigate and found confusion. The critics were not speaking to me. Most of the museums did not speak to me. Some of the work had "power"most did not. Amateur shows were a bore. Galleries, I found them much later, not worth the travel. I began to experiment randomly. My interest changed from dinosaurs and astronomy to I did not know what. Finding out has dominated my existence.

old silence

Sometime early in 1968 I lost the writing part of the English language. I could letter with difficulty. Written words were not my medium of ideas. It stayed buried for over twenty years.

When I was a child, dyslexia was not a word, much less a diagnosis. I did not learn to read early as my siblings did. I did not learn to read on on schedule like my peers. I was taught to read by a brilliant and determined tutor at age seven to nine by endless drill and small rewards. I still read by word recognition and have never learned to spell. Spellcheck!
As words are not, for me, composed of letters, the keyboard is unmemorable.
The lack has odd effects. I flip letter order and digit order and do not notice. Bad enough in text, disastrous in algebra. I cannot trust my notes.

first post:

I was not an early adopter. I bought a Sinclair, one of the last Osborne 1s and finally learned on a 286. Ten years ago I bought a new machine: A Pentium II equivalent by AMD. By the time I had it a year and a half I was thoroughly disgusted with Microsoft. I found a remaindered copy of Mandrake Linux. I did not get that installed but did install the next but one release. I run dual boot and Linux boxes and a Vista Laptop. The Vista because the Auto cad I depend on insists on Microsoft.
Toasted CD ROMS last twenty years in the cool dark. A hard drive can fail at any time and is usually replaced every five years as I have learned by bitter experience.