A TWIN THING

Last night I went to a local brewery, The Standing Stone, with some friends after watching the over-hyped Pats vs. Giants game. There was a band playing, which was unusual at this particular venue, but ever since the Jefferson State Pub closed due to gross mismanagement the other bars in town have taken up the slack. Originally slated to wait around for a table in the back with the friends I came with, I decided to walk to the back area to see the band play. After standing around for a few minutes watching everyone else enjoying their beers, I went back to the bar to see if they had this year's Barley Wine available. They did, and I ordered one while sitting at the bar on the last remaining bar stool.

Next to me were two very pretty girls, and I asked them what types of beer they were drinking. We exchanged samples of each others' beers, and I then asked them if they'd been friends for a long time, even though I could tell they were twins. I just wanted to see what they'd say, since I'm a twin myself. It turns out one of them—Carrie—lives in West Virginia and had just flown out to surprise her sister. And her sister, Jackie, said she happened to look up in the sky the evening of Carrie's arrival and saw the plane she was on and said to herself, "I bet my sister's on that plane", even though she'd had no advance warning. I understood perfectly.

We then proceeded back to the dance floor and these girls, who are 29, could really dance. I was overdressed in long underwear, and had to decide whether to really cut loose and get all super sweaty, or take it easy and not be a turnoff. I took the take it easy route, and we danced together for some time. During a set break, a guy I know from the first week I moved here (he hired me to do a freelance job on his poster) said hello, and I saw what clearly had to be his twin brother (which I didn't know he had) sitting next to him. I then introduced him to the twins I was already with, and we proceeded to bore everyone else with our twin stories for awhile.

So there we were, three sets of twins. It felt like we'd somehow landed in a twin convention or something. I would have liked to have made further plans with the twin girls, but I cheesed out and took off with the guys I came with when I saw they were leaving. Maybe I'll run into them again...

CHRISTMAS EVE 2007

My mom and her husband Chris were visiting Oregon this Christmas, and I took them on a tour of the wine country between Eugene and Cottage Grove on Christmas Eve. The soundtrack is a local radio station that was playing in the car as we were driving.

GO READ MY BROTHER'S BLOG

What are you doing reading this? You should be reading Matt's blog; he's in Mexico with his girlfriend Marla and he got a sunburn on Winter Solstice. Check him out here:

http://photomatte.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/tulum-mexico/

Merry Christmas

HOORAY FOR SENATOR DODD

My decision to continue to avoid joining the cellphone generation was made easier by the fact that AT&T is one of the main criminal organizations within the telecom industry who are involved in illegal wiretapping. I was very close to purchasing an Apple iPhone until I learned of AT&T's willingness to break the law and join the fearmongering campaign of this current regime in Washington, DC.

So, thank you Senator Dodd for not being a S.C.U.M.B.A.G. (State Controlled Ultra Military Bogus American Government)!

HEY GOOGLE

This entry is an addition to the entry I just made below. It might help if you read that one first....okay, are you done with that one now?

Well, I wasn't entirely forthcoming about the randomness of the blog I was accidentally logged into. The blog actually belongs to a friend of mine, and I just called him to see if he'd logged into his blog on my computer, and he said he didn't think so, and that he hadn't updated his blog for awhile.

I then went to the question mark next to the Remember Me text on the initial login screen, and clicked the question mark to see how Google handled the Remember Me option. Well, here's a screen shot of what it said. Notice that it says the cookie expires in two weeks for any automatic login. This means that even if my friend did happen to login to his blog on my computer, which he doesn't think he did, and if he did happen to click the Remember Me checkbox, which I can't imagine he would have, it STILL would have expired after two weeks. But the initial screen shot I took (see below), says his blog was last updated Nov. 20, 2006 which was well over A YEAR AGO!

I'd love to know Google's explanation for this huge hole in the security of this blog service.

THIS BLOG SITE IS UNSECURE

Warning, anyone who has a blog on this site runs the risk of having their blog accessed by anyone. I was about to make a new post tonight, and when I arrived at the blogger.com homepage to login, my screen refreshed before I could even type in my info and suddenly I was in another person's blog, with the Sign In/Sign Out link set to Sign Out, which means I was signed in to another blog. Here's a screen shot of the blog I was signed into. Hey Google, fix this shit, now.

DOGGONE IT

This morning my next-door-neighbor's dog started barking right outside my bedroom window at 7:34 a.m. Luckily I was already awake and dressed, which is normally not the case at that hour. Still, that didn't stop me from thinking about all the other times the dog has woken me up at that hour when I wasn't up and dressed.

Then this evening I thought it would be a good idea to take a little cat nap (with my cat, of course, who never wakes anybody up but me) before going out tonight, so I went in and laid down next to the cat. I was at that point where you don't really realize you've drifted off to sleep until something wakes you up, when sure enough, there went the neighbor's dog, right outside my window. And it's one of those small dogs with the yippy bark that everyone's really afraid of.

I immediately had this thought while laying there in bed: I should include in my blog how many times a day, if any, my neighbor's dog has woken me up. And then, as this thought was still in my head, my phone rang, which would have woken me anyway. And who was it? It was my neighbor, the one with the dog. I told him that it was ironic that if his dog hadn't just woken me up, he would have with his phone call. Then he said he wasn't at home, and didn't know his dog was barking. To which I said, "if a dog barks and you're not home to hear it, does it really bark? Why yes, yes it does."

So, today the dog tally is two and counting...

DAVE GETS A BIKE HELMET

Yesterday I went into the local bike store to see about getting a new back tire, as the one I have now is getting worn out. They didn't have the one I wanted, but I was also in the market for a new helmet (my first helmet purchase ever, actually). After looking at the most expensive ones, I saw one for $39.99 (no tax in this state!). The price wasn't what convinced me, however. It was the name of the helmet (a Trek helmet) that really made my decision for me. It was called the Vapor, which is the name everyone down here in Ashland has me as in their cellphones, and the name I'm pretty much called by most of my friends here.

Seriously, my friends down here will start a sentence with, "hey Vapor", or "hey Vape". I'd say I'm called Vapor a large majority of the time, and it's a name I can live with I guess. As to how I got the name, well, I can't really say here.

So, there you have it, Dave gets a new bike helmet, and he's even planning on wearing it. But if I get in a crash and hit my head, I'll still think that it wouldn't have happened if I'd left my house a few seconds earlier (the time I would have saved by not putting on my helmet).

to iPhone or not to iPhone

Within the past year, my laptop has had water spilled on it and died, my digital camera was in my front pocket as I tried to lift a pool table and the LCD screen is shot, and now my iPod—which is the earliest version ever made—has decided to freeze up when attempting to sync with my iTunes.

This could mean two things. It's either time to abandon modern technological devices altogether, or it's time to get an iPhone.

But there's another issue—I've never owned a cellphone. I find them to be highly annoying, 'til I need one, then they're great. I also don't like the EMF radiation they put off. But since there's so many out there, I just borrow one from a friend, or in some cases I've even borrowed them from random people (in Amsterdam last year I borrowed a woman's cellphone to get ahold of the person I was staying with, whom I'd connected with via craigslist, and the other week I borrowed one from the girl sitting next to me on the flight to Cleveland to tell my pickup person I was going to be early).

So I'm in a quandry. The iPhone has the ability to replace my laptop, digital camera, and iPod, but it's still a cellphone. But the price it would cost to buy all of those items individually is way more than the $399 iPhone. But then there's the monthly charge, which is about the same as I'm paying for my old-school landline. If I got the iPhone, it would seem a waste of money to have both a landline and a cellphone, yet if I cancelled my landline, I'd be relying on the iPhone for all my phone calls, which would then cause me to be exposed to all the EMF radiation I don't like. But, the iPhone has the ability to listen and talk via the headphones, which theoretically would reduce the EMF radiation coming into my brain via my ear canal. Of course the radiation would still be there, it'd just be closer to whatever body part my iPhone was nearest to (chest pocket would by my heart, and pants pocket would be close to, well, damn).

I've always sworn I'd never own a cellphone, and I can rationalize to myself that the iPhone's not really a conventional cellphone, but yet it's still a cellphone.

If I get one, I'll have to listen to all my friends give me shit for talking trash about cellphones for so long and then becoming a sellout hypocrite. Then they'd want my cell number, and then they'd be texting me.

What to do...

WHAT'S UP WITH ASHLAND?

Lately I've been hearing a lot of people complaining about the Ashland Food Co-op here in town. The co-op is the only game in town, and they know it, so they price accordingly. Since most of their clientele are retirees who move here with lots of money, they can get away with it. But it sure does squeeze out the working class (what, a working class in Ashland? No way!)

Recently I was back up in Eugene, and I stopped by my favorite store in the world, Sundance. I went to their salad bar, and knew I'd find a killer selection made with progressive ingredients. Like instead of any of their noodles being wheat, they're all rice or quinoa. And instead of any of their sweeteners being cane sugar, they're agave or honey or brown rice syrup.

Sure enough, there was a great selection, and I ate like a king. And the price was only $6.59/lb, as opposed to $7.50/lb at the Ashland co-op, which does use cane sugar and wheat noodles. Hmm, cheaper ingredients, higher price. Greed? Nah.

Why does this matter to me? Well, because this town likes to think of itself (if a town can be said to think of itself, which is another way of saying what the majority of locals think, whatever they are) as a progressive, healthy, spiritual town. There's a place here called the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library, and there are more naturopaths and chiropractors and spiritual healing centers than anywhere I've ever been.

Yet they still smoke cigarettes in some of the bars here. How 20th century is that? And everyone drives, everywhere, even though it's a very small town.

All of this has led me to the idea of putting out a hoodie that says UC Ashland (University of California at Ashland). And it wouldn't even have to be on organic cotton.

CLEVELAND WEDDING VIDEO

Okay, I tried using blogger's automated video sharing with YouTube, but it doesn't recognize my username, or maybe it's my password. I know I typed it correctly, so this is a bug that Google needs to address.

In any case, here is the official wedding video from Sidney and Heather's wedding in Cleveland.

CLEVELAND, OHIO, CONT.

Okay, so we managed to get in the wedding after all. However, only a few of us, who happened to not be immediate family, managed to get in. We were told not to tell the other family members, who all showed up at the reception, that we in fact attended the wedding.

Currently sitting in the Cleveland airport, using my brother's laptop. They let me walk through security with a bag of groceries, which included a jar of very watery kim-chee (korean dish). Gotta love it.

Okay, my flight is boarding, on to Philly, then Vegas, then finally back to Oregon.

HERE IN CLEVELAND, OHIO

Okay, just got back from a very interesting evening at a pre-wedding dinner here in Cleveland, Ohio.

After a meal in which my waiter brought me the wrong beer twice, brought my soup to the wrong person, and brought my vegetarian dinner complete with lots of chicken, the groom-to-be announced to our party of 17 that tomorrow's wedding would be 2 hours earlier than scheduled, and that only 12 people were invited. Which twelve was not stated, and we're now convening in our hotel room figuring out how best to crash the wedding.

I mean, when you fly from Oregon to Ohio after RSVPing a wedding you were invited to, you kinda expect to actually attend the wedding. I know, sounds presumptuous doesn't it? Silly us for being so selfish and needy.

At the moment, my twin brother and I are here in our hotel room with an old friend we haven't seen for 25 years, drinking Belgian lambics mixed with Bell's Brewing stout. It's basically dessert in a glass, complete with the warm fuzzy feeling associated with imbibing alcoholic beverage.

To be continued...

IN MEMORY OF JOEL RIBICH

Joel was one of the most giving people I've ever met. He lived a more full life in his 33 years than most people will in 80 years. He is, and will be, sorely missed.

APPLEGATE, OREGON

Okay, I think I really like this painting-from-video thing. This painting is not based on any one still frame in the video, but is rather a compilation of elements I thought were the most memorable. This painting's for sale if anyone wants to make an offer. It's 9 x 12 inches.

VIDEO PAINTING, CONT.

I'm tempted to scan my current painting right now to upload, because it's so close to being done and I want to post something visual. But of course I can't do that, I just have to wait for this latest glaze to dry and finish it off.

I really like the idea of painting from a small video thumbnail. Normally I make thumbnails on paper if working from a photograph, but with the small size of the videos taken on most digital cameras, the thumbnail is all you get to work with right from the beginning.

Now I want to go back and look over my other videos I've taken; I'm sure there's tons of material just waiting to be exploited.

VIDEO PAINTING

While driving through the Applegate region of southern Oregon, I was inspired by the many possibilities for paintings. The lighting this time of year is always exceptional for painting, as the sun is never too high in the sky, which makes the shadows more pronounced.

At first I wanted to stop at every inspiring place I saw to take a photo, but by the time I saw anyplace good, I'd already passed it. So, I decided to try a new idea for paintings.

Video.

I like the fact that if you stop the video at a still frame, the image is not crisp and exact, but looks more like a painting. Shapes and colors become more obvious, while detail dissolves. When I paint, I try not to do what I do in drawing, which is photorealism. When working from a photo, this gets hard to do, as the camera makes such an exact image, and it's tempting to try and copy it. But I was more interested in the mood of the sky and the weather today, and now with just one video I've got numerous selections for paintings.

To those of you who are wondering why I was driving a car at all, that's a good question. I really have no excuse.

SUNRISE

As I was laying in bed this morning, I noticed that my living room was bathed in a surreal light of pinkish orange. Not knowing what time it was, only that it was before sunrise, I got up to be in this magical light, and was amazed at the sky outside. This is a photo I took at 7:05 this morning, with my little Olympus 7 megapixel camera. I really wished I had a nice medium format camera for this shot, it was (and still is outside right now) incredible.

VECTOR ART

One of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator® is the gradient mesh tool. It allows one to create photorealistic images in a vector program (not pixel-based), which is kind of like a CAD program, but much cooler. Obviously this isn't photorealistic, but it's one of my first attempts at using the gradient mesh tool, and I thought it turned out okay. I can't claim to have created the original design, which was painted on silk by my super-talented aunt Laura in Hawaii. I simply used her artwork as a template to try out the gradient mesh tool.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

After writing earlier about how an image needed to be made of dictators past and present, I just had to go and at least make something. I couldn't find any high res images online, but there was more than enough material to work with. Okay class, name the dictators from left to right.

SERENDIPITY

Sometimes you just know you're doing the right thing. As some of you may recall from an earlier post, I was working on a logo for a friend. I was initially hesitant to proceed with the work as my super-cautious nature warned me of possible complications down the road (it wasn't clear whether or not I was the only one working on the logo, nor whether or not I was going to get paid).

After consulting my friend, I was assured that I was the only one working on the logo. I decided to proceed with the second phase of the design, in which I was to implement changes based on input from my friend's friend (the actual client). One of the changes was to somehow insert computer logic board iconography into the existing logo design. This boiled down to one solution, which was to place the iconography in the background of the logo, at a light enough tint of the color so it wouldn't compete with the foreground.

The day I decided to begin working on the new design, I received a brochure in the mail from my alma mater, the University of Oregon. The subject of the brochure was a speech to be given by a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The topic of the speech was named Cyberintimacies, and was about humankind's relationship with computers. The graphic used to illustrate this concept was that of two silhouettes of human heads, facing each other, with logic board iconography inside the heads of the silhouettes. It was exactly the kind of iconography I'd imagined for my logo project, and I placed the brochure on my desk and used it for reference while I hand-drew similar iconography in Adobe Illustrator.

The only drawback to creating this logo was that the client lives in Berkeley, and wanted the colors to match that of the Cal Bears, a team I dislike with a passion. But, since it was a paying gig, I even went the extra mile and researched online what the Pantone spot colors were for Cal, and gave the client two versions of the logo, one a four-color build, and one a two-color build using the Pantone colors.

RAMBLE ON

This painting represents a memory I have of Holland, specifically of a little village across the river Ij (pronounced "eye") in Amsterdam. It was very refreshing to take the ferry across the river, which was a fairly wide river, and ride my rental bike off into unknown territory. After the density and dirtiness of Amsterdam, this town (whose name I never got) was what I initially imagined Holland to be like. I didn't stray very far from the main road, which was narrow and lined with the archetypal red-tiled roofs of Holland. I came to a sharp turn in the road and off in the distance was this super old church, towering over the village. I did a quick sketch of the scene, which was the impetus for this painting. I also did a more detailed and finished painting of the street, which I might add to my website at some point.

There's just something magical about taking one's painting supplies to a foreign country and coming back home with paintings done en plein air. The time it takes to make even a quick painting is much longer than the time it takes to snap a digital photo, and I felt like I bonded with each and every place I painted far more than anyplace I photographed.

LABOR DAY '07

One of the things I wanted to do with this blog was to post a new drawing or painting on a daily basis. Having the pressure of a daily posting is good for me, as I want to get in the habit of creating a new drawing and/or painting every day. We'll see how it works out, but for now, here's a quick painting I did in the warehouse/industrial part of town yesterday evening.

My travel kit includes a Van Gogh Pocket Box watercolor set, a #8 Kolinsky sable-hair brush, a 9 x 12 inch Arches 140-lb. watercolor block, glass water containers, tissue paper, and a Staedtler 4B pencil.

The watercolor above, however, was done on cheap 72-lb. Fabriano paper, as both of my Arches blocks have unfinished paintings on them at the moment. To view more of my work, visit my website listed in my profile on the right.

JULIA'S BIRTHDAY

Above is a sketch I did of a friend sketching by a creek. The plan was to spend the day outdoors somewhere doing art, and it turned into a party. The occasion was yesterday, Julia's birthday, and about ten people ended up making the drive from Ashland through Jacksonville and on into the Applegate. Only four of us actually ended up doing any art, however, with the rest of the crowd being content to play in the water all day.

PHOTOSHOP FUN

Playing with Photoshop is always fun, and I've been using it almost daily since version 2.5 (for those of you who know when that version was, you'll know how long I've been using it). This image worked particularly well due to the fact that both photos had the same light source. Can you guess the original locations of the source photos?

POWER OUTAGE

This storm increased in intensity until the rain turned to marble-sized hail. Power was out for the entire city of Ashland for about an hour, then again for another half hour later in the evening. And we're supposed to play poker on this deck tonight...

EARTH, SUN, MOON

Last Sunday there was a full lunar eclipse of the moon, visible out here on the West Coast in the wee hours of the morning. While enjoying the red glow that permeated the night sky outside my bedroom window, I began to have those thoughts you get when you're half awake, half asleep.

I started wondering why it was that although the sun is much larger in size than either the moon or the earth, and much farther away from the earth than the moon, it appears as the exact same size disc in the sky as the moon does.

Think about it. If you look at the moon (when it's full and you can see it in its entirety) you'll notice that it's the exact same size as the sun to the naked eye. What are the chances that we happen to be on a spinning orb in space that allows us to see two such disparate objects in space at the exact same size?

Indeed, if this were not the case, such things as eclipses would not be possible. Scientists would have you believe this is a random coincidence, and that the distance of our moon and of our sun from the earth is attributed to nothing more than random chance, all as a result of the Big Bang.

Am I missing something, or is there more to the picture than the modern, Western, scientific model wants us to believe?