Turning 50

           “The Savoy Express rolls down track number 4. ALL ABOARD.” My last few days in the forties and memories of everything until now color my mood and fogs recall with soft focus. No single incident, but a continuous flutter of moments pass as if through the window of a passenger car. It’s a blur with occasion detail and color, unless I gaze further a field at the Grandest View or the Mother of all Delusion. Where did the time go? Did it matter and did I accomplish anything at all? How do you measure the success of your life?

           I am not sure if there are metrics for those questions? I know that material things never satisfy, but only wet the appetite. Desire is insatiate, and shallow comfort rewards complacency and boredom. All is vanity; it is its own worst enemy that feasts upon itself. Knowledge is a good cause, but it to is only the filter of someone else’s experience. Lots of people know lots of things that I never hope to nor would want to know, and they don’t seem any happier for it.

           It could be that I am asking the wrong question. A single lifetime is its only true expression, good and bad, happy and sad, or success and not. Does wisdom come from devouring as much experience as possible while clearing the filters that protect the self-journey or something else? I know it is the journey, but the mind must have its catalogue and metrics. I have succeeded at being exactly where I wanted to be; I just need to find a way to accept it. I am where I need to be at this moment on these paths. Where else is just so much wankery.

           So at 50, I have to finally throw off childish expectations and desires, move on with my life. I have to stop asking these questions expecting that I am going to find or figure out the answer. I have to believe that wherever my life may lead is enough.

Autumn Moon Festival 09, 3D Photo Fun

          The 2009 Autumn Moon Festival in Chinatown, San Francisco, provided me the perfect opportunity to try out an interesting new camera gadget. The Autumn Moon festival is a harvest festival celebrated by Chinese and Vietnamese people. Around, over, or on the autumnal equinox, families gather and celebrate the harvest by eating moon cakes. The moon is at its brightest and roundest during the equinox and Chinese tradition holds that at one time the earth had ten suns, and during one harvest they all lined up together evaporating the rivers and burning the crops. The emperor offered his crown to anyone who could solve the problem. A brilliant archer, Houyi, shot out ten of the suns and became emperor. Eventually a despot, he acquired a pill for internal life. To spare the people, his wife ate the pill first and ran from her husband. She flew to the moon. Houyi’s pursuit failed, but he so loved his wife that he could not shoot down the moon. People hand out and consume moon cakes to honor the princes, for good luck, and harvest.

          My new lens, or 3D Lens In A Cap is a crude beam splitter from Loreo, Hong Kong. It creates a stereo image on a digital SLR. It is a matched pair of focusing lenses from one meter to infinity, 38 mm focal length at F22. It is a permanent focus device with three settings, 1.5 m, 3m, and infinity with 2 f-stops, F22 and F11. Although the manufacturer claims it should work with my onboard TTL flash, I’ve not been able to get it to work. Instead, I’ve been adjusting the shutter speed to accommodate light conditions, slower to bring in more, but not too slow without a tripod. My best results are between 1/30^th to 1/60^th of a second.

          At around $100 bucks Loreo’s 3D Lens in a Cap really works as you can tell from the first slide show below.  You will need a stereo viewer to see 3D from the parallel images. Several are available online, such as at www.3dstereo.com, who also distributes the Lens In A Cap. Bring the viewer to your eyes and move closer or further away from your screen until the image is sharp. Focus on one of the images.

          Also, I’ve been exploring a second method to display 3D images, an anaglyph. It creates a “stereoscopic 3D effect, when viewed with 2 color glasses (each lens a chromatically opposite color, usually red and cyan). Images are made up of two color layers, superimposed, but offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect. Usually the main subject is in the center, while the foreground and background are shifted laterally in opposite directions.”¹

          I am using a piece of software called Anabuilder, created by Etîenne Monneret and Didier Leboutte. It has the capability to convert 2D images to 3D from a single image, two very similar images, or in my case, stereo pairs. Anabuilder converts directly and has the capability to batch. The user can tweak the image if necessary. I took the above parallel stereo pairs and created anaglyphs sans tweaking. You will need a red and cyan lens viewer to see 3D (available as from above.)

          If you have a stereoscopic viewer or red and cyan lens, check out the slide shows and tell me what you think. So far, it’s interesting, but I would guess not many people have the viewers, so not very practical. I will have to search for a java app that can simulate one.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_image

Brief Encounters, Noel Coward and Emma Rice

          Emma Rice’s stage adaptation of Noel Coward’s film Brief Encounters is a reminiscent, romantic musical journey from the 2-d passive entertainment of film to 3-d real-time story telling at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco. Rice, Artistic Director for Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall, England, achieves adventurous, breathtaking realism by leaping from film to stage and back as effortless as if the audience is just another passenger in a 1930’s English railway tearoom. The audience is waiting to board.

          The stage and production values are intentionally low budget, but highly effective. The actors not only play their parts, some multiple, but also push momentum through set management. Puppets take on the full personality of intent. Scene transitions, the steam of a film, are affected with simple set metaphor and earnest vaudevillian revelry in front of the red curtain and directly to the audience. The play begins before the last lights are down as a ukulele, stand-up base, and trumpet, serenade the audience through its final sitting.

          Rice and Coward embark on a comedic, bittersweet class journey along one of love’s forbidden paths of inevitable relationships and choices. Steam is but water heated through the movement or excitement of emotions. Forbidden for 1930’s England, a doctor, Alec (played by Milo Twomey), and a married housewife, Laura (played by Hannah Yelland), meet by chance and so enjoy each other’s company over several more meetings that they fall in love. Their love is an expression of how they feel, the beauty of life being in the moment, and the consequences of action, including remorse, guilt, and longing. The housewife’s husband, Alfred (played by Joseph Alessi) is somewhat unaffected and uninvolved. Alfred knows his wife is distracted, but he is too English to display angst, anger, or even curiosity. In the scene transition to the living room, the husband always carries a floor lamp into scene. Simple stage movement that speaks volumes about his role; the lamp is a metaphor for his emotions and steadfast perseverance. Middle-class, she is too English as well to ever admit her true feelings for Alec.

          Myrtle, the tearoom proprietor, (played by Annette McLaughlin) and Fred (also played by Alessi), a station platform conductor, love as much in the physical realm as the emotional; their tryst is most honest like the everyday work of an hourly wage. Beryl, Myrtle’s assistant (played by Beverly Rudd) and her son, Stanley (played by Stewart McLoughlin) are the naïveté of young love at the base of the English class system.

          Although Laura and Alec’s affair is the engine of the play, it fades somewhat in comparison to the reality of the other two love stories. Perhaps Rice’s, even Coward’s intent is to show how love muddles all preconceived notions about it.

          I highly recommend Brief Encounters at A.C.T for the unique staging, music, and action. It is a delightful way to spend an evening. The story is only as serious is as is necessary to laugh. Revelations about the consequences of love are an eternal theme, and Rice/Coward portray a single aspect of it beautifully.

Community-Based Marketing-Do’s and Dont’s

First a quick definition – Community-Based Marketing vs. Social Media.

Social Media to me sounds slippery.  Like it’s a fad, phase or worse a “trend”.  And in some ways it is.  It suddenly became the darling of the “Web 2.0″ world and everyone was an expert that had ever written on a blog.  But for those of use in this industry… Read More  http://bit.ly/exBiQ

Comment:

1. What about saturation?…

Short answer, on a social network saturation is annoying even if I am the proponent. A great topic, it is an interesting reflection of our humanness and one to watch. The two-spaces option is a rational model of an organic process. As humans we tend to catalogue things and define their relationship (at the base) along a single partition, before and after, we poke and interact with them. As a “consumer” of social media, I think you have to keep your hand on the tiller, predict and interact, not react. The waters are much less predictable than metrics may be able to tell you. Metrics assumes you have a base for comparison. The protocols of new channels take time to evolve and you don’t want to oppress their potential by forcing them to react to over-stimulation. I guess I define saturation as over exposing your product or service in the market; like say, Kleenex, a brand that is so embedded in the language that any brand of tissue hits its target. You want clients/friends/both to seek you out for your specialty, but you don’t want them to opt out, because you answer their question over and over.

In a profession network, the protocols are well defined along common interests, answer before asked; but in the broadest sense of a social network, protocols are fluid. For example, Facebook’s intent was a professional/personal social network, but the professional side dims more and more with its popularity to the extent where mining professional information is a subversive affront to privacy. A professional network expects its data to be mined for mutual benefit. An interesting case to watch is Twitter users on Caltrain, http://cow.org/c/about. Users post information about specifics as they ride along in real time; users Tweet about which cars are clean, which are quiet, delays, which bathrooms work, even satiric comments from frustration are expressed. So far, Caltrain reads the Tweets, but does not directly participate in the network. Instead, they clean cars, fix bathrooms, etcetera, interacting without reacting. Caltrain can mine specific data about conditions in their service without ever asking directly or accepting responsibility for the question. They can solve real time nuts/bolts maintenance without negative media connotations, and avoid saturating the market with information/reactions about those issues of their brand.

As the two-space model expands and retracts, I guess the trick is to find specific intersections, use them in real time let them go, find the next intersection, and repeat. The market is the potential intersections. Hum, saturation must occur when the networks intersect, define the market as those intersections, and then assume the intersection is the only market.

However, I don’t mean to saturate you on this topic.

Yo, Ho, Ho..,

          Yo, Ho, Ho, scallywaggers and scurvy dogs pass the bloody grog and a wi’ a wannion on thar swaggy squiffiies. By the powers o’ the lady lasses and wenches o-erly fair, pass the weevily gruelly, and go on account to rail through and through lily-livered, loosey law-givers, and son’s of biscuit eaters fer thar gleamy goldy pieces o’ the booty.

          The June 2009 Pirate Festival in Vallejo, CA was a blast to say the bloody least. Several small cannon, 2, 5, and 10-lbers boom and pop for tips to support the cause. An old country carnival atmosphere, events include swash-101, builwhip-101, axe throw 101, a mouse in the hole game, gambling with wooden die and colored numbers, target practice with a water cannon, fortune tellers, and a tomato toss at some less than savory characters through a hole as they taunt their aggressors.

          Several Privateers and lesser louts duel at telling outrageous, bold stories of the sea, Davy Jones, and world-wide conquest to win a kiss from a maiden fair; several music groups sing and jig, including pirate rock and madrigal (if that’s possible in pirate-ease?). British officers and their toads establish a historical encampment with recreations of the era everyday. Every other hour’s bells they patrol the camps for sedition, drunkenness, and any unsavory behavior.

          Merchants sell pirate attire and all manner of accoutrements: one sells steel stabbing tools and eye pieces, another sells wooden facsimiles; several barter, hats, rags, parasols, leather pouches, armor and restraints, both friendly and other wise. My favorite offers authentic pieces of eight from the Caribbean and many a sparkly bobble for the misses, a lady, or comely winch.

          I stop at the Emerson Family for a tellin’ of my future. Her cards are laid out on one edge of her small table next to a crystal ball. She instructs me to put my right hand on top of an old empty coffee can half full of bones, and to pick three cards. She lays them on the table in front of me and says, “Ye be movin’ from one sit-yeation to another. Ye be a generous spirit, but (the third card), beware-y of unscrupulous naives who parlay on ye nature.” She smiles a partial toothy grin, and takes my left hand. “Dearly, ye needs a bit of encouragement and lightening.” She crosses my right and sets it in on a massive silver ball at the edge of the table. “Close ye beauty brown peepers, breathe slow, and concentrate on me words.”

          Buzz, ZAP!!! A spark and jolt of electricity jumps across my flesh and bones, my eyes and mouth are as wide as saucers. She giggles and points at her tip jar. I cannot resist and smile back. I dig in my wallet for a fiver or ten. She bats her eyes, “Thank ye kind Lord.” I turn to leave and 6-foot pirate with a white face and blood dripping from the sides of his mouth looks in my eyes. He holds a 3-foot cutlass across his belly.

          “Pass,” she says.

          He smiles and steps aside “Fare they well, sir,” he grumbles.

          The gathering is supported through tips and fees of vendors and family. I drop a twenty in the plate and offer a kiss to the hand of the fair lady at the exit. Next year, I will, as most faire goers, attire myself in pirate rags, suit, or Indian feather. I will have to practice the accent and lingua of the brethrens to pass more than just a tourist.

          She smiles, flutters her eyes and raises her bosom, which is already trussed to the nines. “Please dear sir, come ye again.”