Ploafmaster General

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this push processing stuff :-)

This was TMax 400 shot and developed at roughly 1600.

So Val and I never made it to the grand opening (circumstances as they were), but this evening we watched our first film at Movieland. We saw Frost/Nixon (4 out of 5, by the way), and were generally impressed by the design and operation of the theater. So impressed, in fact, that we will return tomorrow to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as originally intended.

A few notes:
1. The projection was gorgeous. Crystal clear, vivid, and all the benefits of brand-new screens and projectors.
2. I look forward to the velour-like seats getting a bit worn in. Even in jeans, I felt as if I was stuck to the seat.
3. I hope they get some automated kiosks for purchasing tickets - not simply for picking up pre-purchased ones. Or they should at least keep five registers open for ticket sales like they did this evening.
4. Dyson Airblades in the bathrooms. Sweeeeeeeeeet.

Tonight's the night that Bow-Tie Cinemas' Movieland at Boulevard Square opens. Valerie and I are still debating which movie to see and when, but I'm currently lobbying for tonight's 7:20 showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I think (when the weather is nicer) I'll see if I can make it there on my bike in 15 minutes - then I'll never have to worry about parking :-)

I finally got push processing to go my way :-)

Dig this sweet Space Invaders-in-real-life style video from Röyksopp for their latest single:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3281558&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.
(via kottke, from whom I rarely re-post because he's so widely read, but I couldn't help myself with this one)

Holy smacintosh, this is awesome news: Andy Richter, Conan's original sidekick on Late Night, will rejoin the red-headed pale man as The Tonight Show's announcer on June 1st.

If only I could get everybody who sends email in my office to sign one of these...
(via swissmiss)

UPDATE: Ack...fixed the link.

This is seriously one of the coolest musical experiments I've yet heard, and I've been listening to it repeatedly:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYa7furgQsA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=580&h=470]
(via waxy)

There's a new website for food in the Richmond area called Food Around Richmond. I'm going to gently dismantle it today.

The first thing that slaps me in the face is something I can't say too much about, but it's still worth a mention: It looks pretty foul. Yeah, I'm using a slightly broken Wordpress theme myself, and I've not taken the time to clean it up. That doesn't mean I can't recognize another website with visual issues. The header appears to be three stock food photos of varying size stitched awkwardly together with a not-so-appetizing transparent embossed "Richmond" stretching nearly the full width. There's the tag cloud, the 500-ish wasted pixels below every post dedicated to subscribing, tags, sharing, advertising, etc.

Oh yeah, the "advertising." The entire website feels like an ill-conceived money-making project. There are four permanent spots for sponsor placement in addition to the banner ad at the end of each post. So far they're all empty (though the banner advertising is BOTH "cheap" and "affordable"!). You know why? Because nobody really reads this website yet. It's as if the site owner erected billboards in the middle of farm land that might possibly have a road built through it someday.

But you know what? You could have an ugly website littered with ad space and still have a winner if you have good content. The content, though, is the most unfortunate part of Food Around Richmond...

Problem #1: There have been five reviews since February 9th, and the first three were chains. Richmond is replete with outstanding and varied independent restaurants. It's nearly criminal to start off a local food blog with a review of Outback Steakhouse.

Problem #2: Four of the five reviews have been well outside of the city limits. The only review of a restaurant in Richmond proper was for Weezie's Kitchen.

Problem #3: No links to restaurant websites. Sure, "the social networking application of Twitter and YouTube is cool," (lifted directly from the site) but you can hardly talk about the social aspects of the web if you're not linking to the websites of the restaurants you review. I know not every eatery has a website of their own, but that's not the case for Weezie's or the three chains reviewed on the site. Restaurant websites nearly always have menus, pictures, and other useful information, so it's unfortunate that Food Around Richmond couldn't include links.

Problem #4: The "twist of video" for each post doesn't add much. I don't expect a new site to have professional video production, but these short segments don't serve the food well. The shots are often too close to focus, and the lighting is usually too dark which frequently leads to the food looking unappetizing.

Problem #5: Food blogging usually requires food writing, and the writing here just isn't that good. I don't mean to insult the author(s) because not everybody writes well. I don't consider myself a good writer, but you don't have to be a good performer to recognize whether a performance is good. The style here is too direct, adding little more than simple descriptions and statements of fact.

It's not that I expect a fledgling food blog to be A+ in it's first few weeks, but there are already several solid food columns and blogs in the Richmond area that you can't avoid good examples if you spend five minutes looking for them. I don't mean to say that you shouldn't start your own food blog just because there are some out there, but it would be hard to take you seriously if you're just more noise instead of at least standing tall among the existing players. If the goal is to rake in some advertising dollars, as seems to be the point with Food Around Richmond, you have to do at least as well as Richmond.com. I just don't see that so far.

If you want a broader perspective of food in the Richmond area, check out Richmond Good Life's sprawling aggregation of reviews, etc. You'll find links to plenty of worthy Richmond food reads and even write-ups of restaurants by other blogs/sites around town.

Well it seems that Kodak is responding to popular demand by planning to offer Ektar 100 in medium format!

Just look at what the great Tommy Oshima can do with the 35mm, and you'll see why I'm pumped about getting some of this for my Yashica. April can't come soon enough, but that still leaves me plenty of time to get used to it before my trip to London in late May.

WOOHOO!!! The smoking bill now heads to Governor Kaine's desk for his signature! And the dopey exclusion for times when minors weren't present has been removed. The original exclusions for private clubs and physically separate smoking areas with independent ventilation have remained, but those are fine by me.

After it's signed, the law will take effect December 1st of this year!

I finally got some pictures worth sharing. This dude was rocking faces (while hiding his own!) in front of Plan 9 on Friday the 13th.

Words fail to express how surreal and messed-up is the very notion of a whole chicken in a can.

Regular readers of this site may have noticed that I've been a bit thin on content lately. Part of that is because the last two rolls of film I developed weren't exactly successful (though I hope the slide film I pick up today is a different story), and certainly photography-related posts have become a staple around here.

A bigger reason, however, is that I've simply not had a lot to say lately. I doubt that I'm bumping up against the limits of my blogging. It's just that there haven't been a whole lot of primary sources of input for me lately. It's much less desirable for me, these days, to re-post something I've seen elsewhere (unless it's REALLY good), and even in that department I've lately run thin because I'm in a rut as far as my daily web reads are concerned (maybe that's a good thing considering my real life reads have increased at least a little bit). I suppose if I took some time to read some articles I'd at least be able to write some sort of response or rendered opinion.

But really, if I had to choose one main reason for my lack of insight, humor, or what-have-you around these digital parts is that I'm under a bit of stress these days, both good and bad, and I've only recently begun to realize how that's affecting my mood, attention span, and enthusiasm for outside stimuli. I've recently transitioned to a new church, I'm waiting on graduate school details, I have to do my taxes, blah blah blah blah blah.

I can just sum it up by saying I'm a bit distracted these days.

The grand irony, of course, is that such circumstances have, in this post, generated one of the longer pieces of writing I've posted in quite some time. That's probably more a result my long-winded writing style (when unfocused, as here and now) than really having anything to say. I also can't help but think that I'm likely to find a host of small and trivial things to post over the next day now that I've made such a statement. I often find that my later actions contradict my earlier words, but I'm certainly not going to hold back sharing something funny or interesting should I come across any.

Whatevs...that's all for now.

Tonight I finished reading Isaac Asimov's acclaimed collection of short stories: I, Robot. This is my introduction to Asimov's writing but I enjoy it already. While I enjoyed his style of writing, I was most impressed by the heady concepts which I found pervaded the anthology. Besides the in-depth consideration of the psychology of robotic machines, we're presented with a picture of the human impact of the presence of such technology from its near introduction to its startling potential future.

At a brief 256 pages (or 192 in my 70's edition belonging to my wife's late father) it makes for a quick read of all stories. Now I feel like it's but a small taste to whet my appetite for more of Asimov's work.

I made my inglorious return to Facebook several weeks ago because I got tired of calling up my mom to tell her stuff only to find she already knew because of her friend status with various people I know. So I'm back in the loop, at least for now. I still see the same thing as I did over a year ago - people friend each other, and once you've made your digital connections there's little else to do but post status messages and use their mountains of useless apps.

But now it's just a bigger and more tangled mess, and no more so than on the default view when you log in: the News Feed.

I feel that there's very little rhyme or reason to this view. Here you have a jumble of status updates, comments, fan-mentions, sponsor surveys, app notices, friend notices, et cetera. Is it chronological? At first it may appear that way, but over the course of any given day I begin to notice certain items jumbling, disappearing, reappearing, moving further up or down the list, and who knows what else. It's fairly often that I see something posted early in the week suddenly appear underneath a status message posted two hours ago even though there are more recent items below.

There. I've released a little bit of steam over this still-almost-entirely-a-waste-of-my-time website. Yeah yeah yeah, I'm still on Facebook. Maybe in another year I'll look at it the way I look at my cell phone - just another "necessary" communication tool. But for now it feels like using cough syrup; you feel like it could be helpful, but it's disgusting all the way down.

Tonight is the opening for the new VCA exhibit, "Building Images: Seventy Years of Photography at Hedrich Blessing." There will be around 80 images, many quite large, which showcase a broad spectrum of the studio's work. The exhibit runs through April 12th.
(image courtesy Ansel Olson)

I was in the car with Val last night when "Bohemian Rhapsody" (Yes! It has its own Wikipedia entry!) came on the radio. I can never resist the opportunity to crank it, and I still mist up a little at the sound of the first guitar solo (I mean, you do, too, right? You're not heartless...are you?).

So this evening, I'm perusing the web as usual when I come across the most glorious of mash-ups...a smooshed audio tour de force (farce?) containing pieces from nearly every cover of the song that could be found. While the genres and quality truly run the gamut, it's actually...well...awesome. Beware the end, though...I believe there's some coarse language (in case you're sensitive to that or at the office).
(via waxy)

Holy Smokes, the ban on smoking in restaurants in Virginia passed today.

I'm getting mixed signals from the news, though - the Times Dispatch article to which I linked says there's more voting to be done. NBC 12, on the other hand, reported on the 6:00 news that the bill "now heads to Gov. Tim Kaine for approval, where it is expected to be signed into law." I'm guessing NBC is a little further ahead than the Times Dispatch (I hope so), but either way there's sure to be more detail as time passes. The main thing I'm trying to hear now is when the measure is to take effect. Some sources say October 1st while others say January 1, 2010. I'm hoping for the former :-)

UPDATE: Okay, so NBC 12 updated their story and removed the portion stating that it's moving to Kaine's desk. Regardless, it seems that at the latest VA restaurants could be smoke-free by the end of this year. I'm pumped!

UPDATE 2: Final word for now...so some of the bill's teeth were pulled. The delay is indeed 'till January 1, 2010. So it won't take effect this year. At least it will sometime, though. Additionally, the Times Dispatch reports that another more craptaculous exception was included to "allow smoking whenever minors are not allowed." Oh well. It's a start. It's a good thing that our state government was able to do anything here in the land of tobacco.

Oh man...Layer Tennis starts again today. Set your phasers to "stun" and your Interwebs to today's match.

Should be grand!

As part of their "One in 8 Milliion" series, the NY Times site has a short audio/photo piece on Georgiana DePalma Tedone, a 90-year-old who still makes her own mozzarella cheese in Brooklyn.

Today is a glorious day in Virginia. Smoking looks like it could be completely banned from Virginia restaurants soon. Some private clubs are exempt, and so are restaurants with physically separated smoking rooms with independent ventilation, but over all this is fantastic! The will of the people will finally be represented on this issue!

Okay, so it's not law yet, it's just a bill, but it's apparently the strongest one yet crafted on the issue. There's support from both sides, and it's on it's way to the House Laws Committee. It sure would be nice if this was all settled in the next month or so...
(via RVANews)

I got a couple of keepers after all. I finally got around to trying out a roll of Kodak's pro slide film - E100VC to be exact. That "VC" means "vivid color" I believe, and I'm guessing it's intended to compete with Velvia 100. This being my first roll, the jury's still out, but I think it's got a broad range for sure. Sometime soon I'll try me some Kodachrome :-)

So my Intermediate B&W Darkroom Photography class - the one about which I was soooo excited - has been cancelled because of low enrollment. Looks like I have the next 10 Wednesday nights free, after all.

On the bright side, Val said she might take the class with me if I try again in the summer :-)

Anyway, stay tuned...I think I just got some nice pics back on a roll of slide film...