Ploafmaster General

(image via Adam Currell on Flickr)


Tonight Valerie wanted to try something new for dinner, so we skipped our usual haunts and drove to Dot's Back Inn on MacArthur Ave., in the Bellevue area.

This place typifies the neighborhood hangout restaurant with its low roar of patrons, low lighting, and low prices for food. The requisite tin ceiling so prevalent in Richmond eateries was there, too, along with a well chosen and balanced selection of kitschy decorations. Since Dot's seemed to be a "regular place" I decided to try some "regular food": the steak and cheese sub plus an extra fifty cents to eat fries instead of potato chips.

I was well rewarded.

The steak was indeed steak - sirloin pounded thin and tender with real cheese melted over it on a lightly toasted sub roll. It was one of the tastiest steak sandwiches I've eaten in ages. And the fries! They were a fine surprise. These were no sticks-o-starch. No, these were thin slices of potato cut in half before deep frying. Crispy, tasty, and clearly made today. I finished off my dining with a slice of homemade (from a nearby bakery, I'm guessing) chocolate pie. Capital!

This is just the sort of restaurant that makes me happy to live and eat in Richmond.

Ever since I got Dave into Flickr he's been digging through all the pictures he can find. Several days ago he discovered Sean Wood, an Aussie living in Tokyo, Japan. This guy is incredible.

The earliest of his posted work on Flickr comes from his DSLR, but the vast majority of his work lately is made up of film shots taken with medium format, rangefinder, and panoramic cameras. I've never been so inspired by what's possible with film as I have after looking at these. Additionally, with both film and digital, Wood has exceptional talent for capturing candid moments of genuine human expression.

He's highlighted a subset of his work on his beautifully simple (yet unfortunately slow) website, 50mm, where you can see the images much larger than allowed on Flickr.

Wow...you'd think I've never done this before...

My earlier attempt at farting out a post for the sake of it backfired. It turns out I created a "page" rather than a post. And only just now realized it. So it's gone.

Good riddance, too, since I finally got my act together so late at night to deliver a real post (the one prior to this) anyway.

I can't recall for the life of me where I originally saw this, but this gentleman built his own Mellotron from the carcasses of old Sony Walkmen. He has sound samples, and a link to a "making of" page as well.

That most excellent website, The A.V. Club, has an interview with original MythBusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. It's interesting to see how little they expected of the show at the time the the filmed the pilots. The whole thing is well worth the read.

One of my best friends, Jacob Kelly, is getting married in September! Congratulations, home slice. I think I owe you a brew. Or several.

The fact that he's asked me to be his best man (a grand honor indeed) means this will be the TWELFTH wedding other than my own where I'm in the wedding party. I'm pretty well practiced at this point :-)

Well, well, well. Flickr now has video.

While the interface, on the surface, seems to borrow heavily from Vimeo I must say that their implementation concept is pretty interesting. They only allow clips up to 90 seconds so as to maintain the idea of "long photos" or "slices of life." I'm not too happy with the default auto-playing behavior (which CAN be switched off) or how long it takes to make the clip full screen, but it DID just launch. As a Pro member, I'll be keeping my eye on this...

After work, I'll head straight to Best Buy to purchase There Will Be Blood since it's released to DVD today. I can't recommend this movie enough if you haven't seen it already.

Apparently the Germans aren't known for good service in restaurants, but it looks like 's Baggers restaurant in Nuremberg has solved that problem by removing the wait staff entirely.

This clever eatery provides touchscreen ordering and service via steel rails. You really have to check out the video at the top of this BBC article to get an idea of how cool this looks.

Matt Boulton put the above picture of this righteous creation on Flickr. He has, in fact, an entire set devoted to objects made from dry goods, commissioned by the Vancouver Food Bank as part of an event called Canstruction.
(via Serious Eats)

You familiar with a reflector telescope? You know, mirrors and lenses instead of simply lenses? That sort of system is called catadioptric, and several manufacturers also build camera lenses in this fashion. The methodology allows for long focal lengths at significant size reduction than traditional all-lens assemblies.

A really interesting side effect, however, is the donut-shaped bokeh visible on out-of-focus portions of resulting photographs. This is because of the secondary mirror in the center of the front portion of the lens. While the Wikipedia entry claims it's unpleasant, several photographers on Flickr seem quite adept at using this "flaw" as an advantage, as in the above picture from Julio Jiménez. Just run a search for "catadioptric bokeh" to find some other cool examples.

Patrick, Trey, this one's for you guys (assuming you didn't already know about it).  One of my favorite music websites, La Blogotheque, has a feature up on their Take Away Shows page on Pigeon John, and he was gracious enough to do four videos with them.

It's Saturday and I'm still sick, so while my mother-in-law went out with Valerie to look at bathroom furnishings I decided to finally try out Hulu. Now enough has already been said about this video service that I don't wish to dilute the stream any further. I'd rather talk about the first film I watched: A Life Less Ordinary.

I have to be honest - the only two reasons I decided to check this film out before hand were because I knew Beck had a song on the soundtrack ("Deadweight") and I had a vague notion that it was some non-mainstream movie when it was released. I've since found out it was directed by Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later fame. While A Life Less Ordinary certainly reflects Boyle's good direction, the story ends up feeling flat.

A love story at its core, the movie features two angels tasked with setting up two humans to fall in love on earth. There are some rather surreal and strange events along the way that make the movie feel as if it's trying to channel Raising Arizona, but ultimately the ending feels too predictable and the story too thin to warrant high praise.

3/5

On a side note, I hope Hulu can expand its full-length film offerings. This was a great way for me to check out a movie that I was on the fence about without wasting a slot on my Netflix queue.

I guess everybody's gotta post about a comic from Married to the Sea, so here's one of my favorites in a long time.

My Autumn's Done Come from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Excepting an unfortunate choice to use Eccentric Std for the typeface of the titles, this short makes me smile in a melancholy way.

Maybe it's a bit pretentious of me to call it a "logo study" since I'm no designer, but I AM analyzing a logo (in my own way, for what it's worth).

Anyway, Valerie was perusing furniture upholstery choices on the website for The Momentum Group yesterday, and I couldn't help but notice how pleasant their logo and brand name are:



The two things that stand out most are perhaps the most obvious. First the symbol, shaped as a modernistic line drawing of a ball of yarn, contains a subtle "M" within its confines. Second, the brand name is rendered in one of my favorite typefaces, Gill Sans.

Quite a nice effort, I think, though I can't seem to find anything about who designed it (I'll assume for now it was internal).

When you know that Weird Al Yankovic wrote the song, do you really need further explanation?

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8710797866388017148&hl=en

This is the second day that I'm staying home sick. Yesterday I went in to the office but left around 9:30. I've got some vicious cough that's loud enough to be heard in a 30 foot radius, and my voice is going.

I think the only place I'm going today is Walgreens to pick up some Mucinex.

I finally have my film pictures from Paris, and let me tell you...I still can't shoot to save my life in overcast weather. I only uploaded 14 of 246 pictures. Sure, there are some other okay ones, but either Valerie took a better digital version, or my picture was just too boring.

I must say, the anxiety of shooting that many rolls without knowing how they're going to turn out is tremendous. This makes me want to take that class (and eventually get a DSLR) all the more.

Radiohead, according to iPodNN, has decided to take a seemingly novel approach to its next single.

Fans will be able to purchase the individual musical components of the song "Nude" from the iTunes store and create their own remixes. It was already an exciting prospect to name your own price for the original release of the album, and I think this concept for their latest single is both a nice way to keep up the buzz and provide an interesting level of interaction with the fans.

So I've found the photography class I'd like to take. It's "Introduction to Black and White Darkroom Photography" at the Visual Arts center on Main Street in The Fan. It's Monday evenings for 10 weeks in the summer, and it's taught by a gentleman named Christopher Wiedeman. Here's a blurb about the instructor from VCU's School of the Arts blog:

Mr. Wiedeman was recently awarded a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship for video (2006), and...Mr.Wiedeman [is a graduate] of Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Fine Arts, having recently been awarded [his MFA] from the Department [of] Photography and Film.

I'm really hoping to take a photography class sometime this year. Here's what I'm looking for:

1. 35mm manual photography
2. Some emphasis on composition
3. Darkroom skilx0rz
4. Class must be after work hours, starting no earlier than 5:30 PM.
5. Start as soon as possible.

What I'm wondering is where the heck to I take a class like this in Richmond? If I wait until the fall I can almost surely take a course from J-Sarge, but I'm hoping to start sooner if at all possible. Are my only options community colleges or VCU? I doubt I could get into a VCU course even though I'm an alumnus. The Glen Allen Cultural Center and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts both seem to offer courses, but the VMFA course already started, and the GACC course starts next Tuesday...and is it any good?

All my Richmond folks - any ideas? They don't have to be yours - you could pass on what you've heard from friends/colleagues. Hit me in the comments, or daniel + c + warshaw [at] gmail dot com.

It appears that the BBC News website has had a dramatic makeover since yesterday. My immediate first impressions are that it's both less crowded and more contemporary. I'll have to see how my daily browsing is affected, but I'm glad they finally did something about the clutter.

Yeah, so I'm also hitting the Muxtape bandwagon. Peep my current mix - there's no concrete theme, and I could probably stand to reorder it a little bit, but for now it's essentially my top 12 current jams.

I don't know if you can create more than one mix per email address, but if you can I'm all-up-ons. I'll try to keep things up to date, and I've linked to it in the sidebar so you can follow along (assuming that I stick to it in the first place!). Let me know what you think of my selection in the comments.