Ploafmaster General

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.

I've just uploaded the first chunk of pictures from Paris - all of these were taken by Valerie using our digital.

I'll be returning to Richmond this evening and I expect to get my film developed on Monday, after which I'll have loads more to sort through and (hopefully) to upload.

My hombre Dave introduced me to this amazing photographer, Emmanuel Smague. He shoots almost exclusively in black and white using a Leica M7 range finder camera, and I have to say the results look like they came out of National Geographic. This music teacher from Brittany, France is so good that I have to wonder whether he chose the wrong career...but he does seem to be after some exposure now and wants to exhibit his work. I hope he finds success, because his frames are incredible.

The picture above, Diyarbakir, is from his Turkey set, but be sure to check out some of his others as well.

So I'm back in America now, and I'm hanging out at my mother-in-law's place until Saturday evening when I return to Richmond. It's good to be home, and now I can return to my normal Internerding.

I think a small post script on my trip is in order, though, since I stopped posting after a few days into the vacation. Because I'm feeling lazy on this Friday morning, however, I'll make a numbered list.

1. Breizh Cafe was the best meal I ate. I had a "complete" which was essentially an omelette on top of a crepe - eggs, ham, and cheese, and a buckwheat crepe. Man, that was tasty. For dessert I had a "crepe briochine" which was a sweet crepe with caramelized bananas and home made caramel sauce. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. We all shared a bottle of hard cider from the French countryside to finish up.
2. The Louvre was incredible - the Mona Lisa is lame, but the apartments of Napoleon III rivaled Versailles for ornament.
3. I would totally go back to Paris again, and I definitely want to go back to France. Perhaps the wine country next time?
4. I have about 9 rolls of film to develop in addition to Val's 1200 digital pictures. That's a lot of photo to sort through...but I'm sure there will be serious hotness in there out of all that.

That's it for now. I have a lot of catching up to do otherwise - movie trailers, articles to read, memes to explore. Muxtape seems to be next on my list as soon as it stops being dead.

Easter mass at Notre Dame was beautiful - especially the Gregorian music. Afterwards we were soundly ripped of in a tourist trap restaurant with a friendly waiter, tasty food, and super high prices. I made up for it afterwards, though, with a crepe from a little stand on the curb...with butter, sugar, and Grand Marnier. Oh my, this was delicious. The fresh, hot crepe turned everything else on it into a tasty syrup.

We took a short break back at the hotel to change out of our Easter duds, and headed over towards the Catacombs - which we discovered are currently closed for some repairs or something. So a strike there. Instead, we visited Musée d'Orsay to see some of the Impressionist paintings from the likes of Monet, Manet, Degas, and Van Gough.

After THAT, we walked across Pont Royale to be completely overwhelmed by the impressive former palace that is The Louvre. More pictures, more walking, and we took a train to grab dinner in a random part of town at what seemed to be a Belgian chain restaurant specializing in mussels. After all that, we' were pretty much exhausted, so we've been taking it easy this evening so I can nurse what may be a growing cold...and also because Valerie seems to have planned a veritable marathon of activities for tomorrow...oh my...

So yeah, we never were able to eat at the Hidden Kitchen. Apparently, there was some computer virus, and the reservation was lost, or something. I don't know - I'll take them at their word since their apologetic reply came with a heavy helping of detailed suggestions for eateries (and wine bars!) around town.

For dinner instead, after getting rained upon while killing myself to climb Montmartre and see Sacre Coeur, we ate at some random restaurant at the bottom of the hill. The service was way slow, but HOLY CRAP, I had Duck Confit for dinner. That. Was. Awesome. Valerie described it as tasting like "dark meat turkey with the BEST gravy." I just know it was amazing, and fell apart from the fork. Oi. And it was 11 Euros, which is like $16, but I assure you it would have been double states-side.

That's it for tonight. Tomorrow morning we go to Easter Mass! Bon Nuit!

Today we had a later start, sleeping in a bit to recover from our long day of travel. After showering and dressing, we headed to Ile de la Cite to check out Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris, which, I must say, WAS AMAZING. The picture you see above, in fact, was taken by Valerie inside near the back.

After Notre Dame we headed to La Conciergerie‎, which was originally a palace before being converted to a prison - it's where Marie Antoinette spent her last days. After THAT, we headed over to Saint Chapelle‎, a smaller yet incredibly more ornate church on the island.

Food highlights include Brasserie Les Deux Palais‎ where we had cappuccino, croissants, and the most amazing orange juice I've ever imbibed, and then some random crepe shop on the sidewalk where I had a sweet crepe with applesauce. Dinner, which was supposed to be at The Hidden Kitchen (it's mysteriously fallen through, it would seem), is to be determined, but I imagine it will be excellent regardless.