As Far As I Can Tell

I was born twenty-seven years ago today. Here I am 25 years ago; check out the sweet denim jump suit.

When I started school I was given a 15-inch Powerbook to use. I�ve never had a laptop powerful enough to do actual work on and I�m really enjoying it. I�ve fallen into a mobile work style where I�m constantly changing my location. I�ll roam from the studio on campus to the public library, over to the caf�, and then home. Even in my apartment I�ll swap between the kitchen, couch, and bed. I like not being prisoner to my desk.

One of the reasons this works is that every place I go in a normal day has free WIFI. The one missing spot was the 61C coffee shop next door to my house but this week they hooked it up. I don�t even think about internet access anymore; I just open my laptop and assume I�m connected. Complete city coverage through municipal wireless would be great but in my day-to-day geography this mesh network is great.

By the time I’m done writing this Meredith’s flight will have landed in London, the first leg of her trip to Lille completed. I woke up so nervous this morning, as if I was the one leaving the country for over half a year. I was dreaming that all our houseplants had starting growing like mad, sprouting upwards and spawning giant flowers that they’d never had before. It’s like they’d learned how to speed up time, growing and flourishing at an increased rate. I can only hope the next 8 months will feel that way for me. Go time go.

I’m not dwelling on the whole chunk of time though; I bought my ticket last weekend. Ninety-two days until I’m in France. I’ll be counting them down.

I�m busier than I�ve been in years but this is a no schoolwork weekend. I�m headed to Michigan early tomorrow morning to spend my last days with Meredith before she heads to France. This two-week warm-up period was okay as long as I stayed busy. Luckily that�s in the cards for the duration.

Besides tons of fun with her I�ll be celebrating an early birthday with my family in Sturgis. My brother�s birthday is today (Hey Isaiah) and since we�re both so far away we�re rolling it into one. Better yet since Meredith will be gone over hers next month we�ll celebrate that early too. Every day�s a birthday.

It�s funny — since I�ve had so little downtime lately I had to schedule phone calls during for my drive to Michigan. Basically I couldn�t answer some lengthy emails so I moved them into voice. That sort of time and task shifting is essential now and I�m getting better at using every spare moment for something.

I just noticed that when using Google Scholar from the campus network certain entries have an extra link next to the title that says �Carnegie Mellon Fulltext�. Clicking it takes you an internal CMU library page where you can read the entire article. Since it�s doubtful that they�re rewriting the results on the fly I�m guessing that they�ve partnered with Google to detect the network source and include the link.

There are other digital libraries, like the entire ACM, that detect my campus connection and let me in. But that�s a basic authentication system: check IP range and allow access. This is entirely different, serving up a specially rewritten page with links to an inside network. The scholar features are a distinct service from Google University, which offers a Carnegie Mellon option. I wonder how data is obtained. Is it queried in real time or does somebody at the library provide them with an update file periodically? I�ll have to ask around.

When I visited my brother in Philly last July we took the Chinatown bus into New York for a day to visit museums and galleries. It costs an amazingly low $10 one way for a two hour ride on a comfortable charter bus. Compare that to driving where you have to pay gas, tolls, and parking all day. The bus drops you in lower Manhattan a short walk from SoHo or the subway.

One of the shows we saw was an exhibition put on by the Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art at a gallery in the meatpacking district. I didn’t care for most of the work but the one artist that caught my eye was Mark Powell of Detroit, currently living in Mexico City. His street portraits of life in the Mexican metropolis really capture the uniqueness and personality of his subjects. Each one seems like a small clue to a strange and lengthly story.

After seeing an artist I like it’s normally fruitless trying to find online examples of their work. Not so with Powell, who has a huge collection of photographs on his Flickr account and adds new ones almost daily. He uploads at full resolution so every detail is visible and even publishes them under a Creative Commons license that allows for non-commercial usage. He recently created a catalog photoset that contains all the photos from the show I saw and more. The catalog photos are lower resolution but many are duplicated at highres further back in his photostream.

I took a break from work to look at various record label sites and the tour dates listed for their bands. It’s frustrating to see that nearly every one I check plays Philadelphia but skips right over Pittsburgh. As if thats not bad enough I saw that Kalamazoo is on the Destroyer tour schedule. Big ups to Kalamazoo, but what the hell? Everything else here has been splendid but who would have thought that I’d have fewer show options?

New layout, new city. It�s impossible to recap everything that�s happened to me over the last two months or so. Who am I kidding; I haven�t been updating this site with any frequency for much longer than that. That is about to change though; believe it.

I live in Pittsburgh now. Meredith and I moved here in the middle of August and spent two quite wonderful weeks together exploring the city and really enjoying our new neighborhood. She�s back in Michigan now, biding her time in Gobles and trying not to feel like she�s time traveled back to high school. At the end of the month she leaves for France so this is just a weird limbo state.

For both of us I suppose, though my setup here is roughly the same as it will be when she leaves. I�ve had a week of school so far that went by quickly and felt good. I�m teaching a class as well, which was disorienting to find out about a week beforehand but once I get in the groove of the semester it�ll be fine.

So enough of this attempt to recap and reframe everything you may or may not already know. Posts like these are what cause me not to update after a lull. If you want more info on what�s new with me or just what my new address is then drop me an email.