As Far As I Can Tell

The last three days were spent in Michigan, spending time with friends and family for Thanksgiving. I went to Ohio for the first time in years, and it was exactly how I’d left it. King family gatherings are always full of religious zealotry, self-aggrandizing, and figuring out who has either adopted or had a child since the last time we got together. The count this time: one born, one adopted, two foreign exchange students.

I got to hang out with my brother Isaiah, whom I haven’t seen in over two months. Now that I’m in Chicago and he’s in Ann Arbor we’re far enough away that visits are a multi-day affair. He’s busy as hell in the architecture school at Michigan, working on some really interesting projects.

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Recently I’ve come to the realization that I have a fear and hatred of new products, or of any nice new things. Why the hell is this? I’m skeptical of anything too nice or perfect, and feel very apprehensive about owning nice things, even if I can afford them. It’s as if I so firmly believe that one shouldn’t try to obtain happiness with products that I view wanting or owning them as negative or false.

It’s not like it’s a crippling feeling that doesn’t allow me to purchase anything that I might need or want, it’s just a pervasive guilt about tension between need and want. Maybe it’s triggered by being asked what I “want for Christmas”, and in feeling like “want” is a cheap and selfish term—that “need” is the only concern I should have.

I guess December always brings out my hyper-sensitivity about consumer culture.

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This is my Grandpa’s barn that I played in all day long during visits to Ohio when I was a kid. I’d make forts in the hay, create adventure games in the silo, and swing from a rope off the rafters, landing into a giant mound of corn feed.

The barn is full of cows, most of who can be referred to as “Bessie” if you’d like.

I just got back from Chicago Thanksgiving, a vegetarian friendly feast hosted by Tim and Ivo. Delicious food all around, with lots of old Kalamazoo friends and Chicago people. I guarantee tonight’s meal and after dinner time were much more enjoyable than my official family gathering in Ohio this Thursday is going to be.

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Chicago’s first real snow came today—making me dig out my ice scraper from behind my truck seat. I’ve been putting it off, but it�s definitely time to bring the mopeds into the basement. I don’t mind the winter right now though; my scarf is warm and Chicago looks good in its snow suit.

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Guess what? Meredith has a weblog now.

A few days ago I ruined my DVD player.

I’ve been watching a lot of SVCDs that I download off of newsgroups lately. If I miss an episode of The Sopranos or The Simpsons, it’s no big deal, I just download it a couple of days later.

My Mintek DVD player didn’t officially support playing SVCDs; you had to select the file off of the disc manually instead of it just pressing play. Also, it cuts out 5 minutes before the end of any video, forcing me to watch the last 5 minutes on my computer. I wanted to see if there were any firmware upgrades to fix the cut-off problem, and I found this page.

I did some research and it seemed that everyone had been successful in upgrading their firmware to the version recommended, even though it was for a different brand DVD player. Long story short—it didn’t work, and now the startup screen just blinks on and off without loading the disc. So if you have the Mintek DVD-2580, and you’re thinking about upgrading the firmware, be warned.

I went out and got the Norcent DP-300 for $60 and I’m pretty happy with it. It fully supports SVCDs and has other pirate friendly features like letting you listen to just the right or left audio channel. Lots of pirated movies from China are encoded with Chinese in one channel and English in the other.

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I saw a lecture last night by LOT/EK, a NYC based architecture duo that builds really interesting buildings and installations. Their work focuses on re-using and appropriating existing materials such as shipping crates, water towers, oil tankers, and airplanes.

I’m a sucker for the themes of module based system, customization, and multi-program design. I guess that’s why I like their work so much. I’ve actually been able to experience two of their installations first hand: Ret>Inevitable 1.5: Cinema at the Crossroads at Art Chicago 1999 and the listening environment that they created for the Whitney’s Bitstreams exhibition in 2001.

First snow in Chicago, though I wasn’t here to see it. Coming in from Kalamazoo tonight we noticed the white ground outside of Gary. Tomorrow I’ll bring the mopeds into the basement; the snow is always my cue.

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For a while I was trying to take a photograph of myself every day with my webcam. It was a simple way for me to keep a visual log of myself over time, but I never did it every day; eventually I stopped altogether. I was looking through the photos that I have today, and I’m sorry that I stopped. I’m going to try and start up again.

I seemed to do it more frequently around the this time of year for some reason. I was able to find three photos of myself from past years at this time. Here they are:

1998

1999

2000

2002

I went to second grade at a small school near my house, located in Fawn River Township, but still technically part of the Sturgis school district. Second grade was great — I sat on a big rock in the oversized playground and whittled sassafras sticks all recess long. At the end of the year, my academic aptitude was evaluated, and sure enough, it proved to be too high to let me wistfully whittle my life away.

So in third grade I entered Congress school, in the “gifted and talented” class. Besides branding us with a moniker that gave us instant and unwanted pretension, they also pushed us to complete roughly fifth grade level work. I didn’t mind, except for the spelling.

These were tough words — spelling bee words. Every week we’d have 20 of them, and every week I’d fail miserably. When I’d had enough, I turned to what every little kid pushed beyond his means does: I cheated.

There were two modes that the desk could be in, slanted and flat. When in flat mode there was a roughly two inch gap between the metal cradle of the desk and the wooden top; perfect for my mischievous plan. I would write down all the words really small, and prop them up inside of this gap. Then, with every new word recited by my teacher I would “relax” a little, and slump down enough to catch a glimpse of the word list. Sometimes I would write with my head down, being able to look over the list constantly during the quiz.

Eventually my conveniently timed relaxation and subsequent eye darting caught the attention of Mrs. Sprowl. I was caught, and my punishment was that I had to tell my parents about it. How they would have enforced this, I’m not sure. Chances are they called my parents ahead of time to let them know it was coming, but to 3rd grade me it seemed like I was letting them in on my secret life of shame. After some crying and apologizes I promised it would be the last time I’d ever cheat.

It wasn’t of course, and I still can’t spell worth shit. Thank god for computers.

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I found these spelling tests discarded in a leaf pile outside of my house today. My favorite: “When will you study?”.

The amount of people that can’t seem to unsubscribe themselves from receiving Moped Owners Directory updates is amazing. For those that don’t know, the Moped Army website will send out an email letting you know about a newly registered moped owner in your area. You define “your area” when you create an account. You can choose people in your zip code, your state, or your entire country. Soon I’ll be changing the zip code choice to be something like “25 miles from you”, which will be more useful than zip code.

Every message that gets sent contains the following instructions:

If you no longer want to receive these messages, or want to change how nearby a person must be before you get a message, please to go http://www.mopedarmy.com/, log in and edit your account to change your preferences.

Even if they didn’t read the whole email, you would at least think that people would go back to where they signed up for something in order to unsubscribe. It’s not like these notifications were turned on by default or anything.

Maybe I need to make a link in the email that when clicked will simply cancel all notifications. Yeah, yeah, that�s the wolf ticket.

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It’s so frustrating working on design projects at work. There are always a million people involved, but I couldn’t tell you what all their roles are. Their titles range far outside of industry norms, ending up sounding somewhere in-between the heyday of the self appointed dot-com titles, and something that sounds like it was created by a new economy phrase generating perl script. Example: Digital Strategist.

The worst part is that the titles don’t seem to actually dictate roles, or expertise. I have everyone from copy writers to producers to random people walking into the meeting giving me advise on minute design decisions that aren’t in the realm of concrete business nor technical concerns, but more like - “Can we make this red?”. Wrap all of their whims under the guise of improving “brand-equity”, and change the straight forward sounding copy to be a muddle of strung together synonyms. End result: blah.

At the end of the day though, aren�t we all happy? Some dude somewhere rakes in major advertising award show entry fee cash while giving an arbitrary award that means little to nothing. Corporation XYZ decides as a committee that indeed, they are happy with what�s been created. Product ABC is now properly marketed to their target age group and demographic, but best of all, that pesky advertising budget has all been spent; whew. And I — well I get paycheck of course, and that�s all that really matters anyway right?

$ell out.

A spam email message that I received last week wins the award for the unsolicited message to least waste my time. It was for a Korean website named Cyber Orange Festival, and although I can’t read a word of it beyond the name, I’ve gone back multiple times.

It seems to be a celebration of oranges, and is very elaborate. There are games to be played (which I can’t play because I can’t read how to sign up), fun illustrations of orange farmers, and my favorite: high-res photos of Korean people in orange groves.

I assumed at first that it had to be a Japanese site. In my face; Koreans can be wacky too.

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Last weekend I went and saw Frida. I’m told by Meredith, who knows a lot about Frida Kahlo, that is didn’t represent some key aspects of her life and work. That aside, the movie was visually beautiful, as you would expect from Julie Taymor, the director of Titus. The costuming, the sets and the overall feel of the movie are really high quality. I’d recommend it.

I saw The Black Heart Procession at The Abbey Pub last weekend as well. This is the second time I’ve seen them, and each time they started playing at midnight. The enjoyed the show, but I know I would of liked it more if it hadn’t been so late; their music is too enchanting and slow for that time of night.

That show also more firmly cemented my hatred for cigarette smoke. I go through phases where it doesn’t bother me, but right now I can hardly sit in the coffee shop without having my eyes hurt and skin feel like slime. After the show my throat hurt, my eyes stung, and my clothes smelled terrible. How do smokers deal with not only this, but with the smoke going straight into their body yet too? This is a serious question - doesn’t smoke bother smokers too?

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I got a copy of the book that TCUP is featured in last week. It’s really weird to see my photograph in a book next to other projects that I know and respected. I feel like it requires some sort of action or responsibility, though I have no idea what that means.

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I’m currently working on some website designs for Kellogg’s - our cereal friends from Battle Creek. I didn’t realize that they own so many other brands, like Morningstar Farms. I’m a big fan of Morningstar Farms veggie burgers and other veggie products. Their grrreat!

I have a teleconference to discuss a concept in 5 minutes; I’m doing the work through Biggs-Gilmore.

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There’s something very strange and psychotic about Miguel’s cat’s weblog. While reading it I couldn’t help but picture Henrietta Pussycat from Mr. Roger’s Land of Make Believe: Meow time meow meow to make an entry meow meow to our weblog meow.

Birdie would like to challenge Sophie to a cat fight. Meow.

This last week I went to Kalamazoo on Friday, and drove down to Cincinnati, Ohio with 10 other Moped Army kids on Saturday. The Bombardment Society was hosting a moped rally. It’s the first time another branch has hosted an event, so I was pretty excited.

It ended up being as cold as you’d expect the first week of November to be, but we had fun anyway. My favorite thing was riding across the Ohio River in a pack of 20 with a train heading toward us on a parallel train bridge. That’s a really fun city to ride mopeds in.

I’ll have a full set of photos on the Moped Army website soon, but here are two of them for now.

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On Friday I went to Dan’s opening reception for his show, Boxes of Clay, at Water Street. The work deals with the concept piggy banks, and the idea of things that need to be destroyed to get at money. Each one is displayed inside of an opened and hanging box, which doubles as a permanent storage facility.

The show will be up through the end of November; stop in if you’re in Kalamazoo.