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on saturday we threw a birthday party for ryan at nikon whiskey lounge at folsom and 14th in san francisco. extensive whiskey bar, great japanese food. we reserved a private even room upstairs for our party. we topped off the party with two delicious cakes from miette.
i decided to bust out my polaroid spectra camera to document the occasion. it was a big hit, everybody seemed to enjoy using it and watch the prints develop. they all turned out great!
(640×797)
feeling grey lately. i think it’s stress from work, joint troubles, and continued house-hunting.
i decided to wake up early this morning and do a self portrait. i understand why some artists make them.. it’s sort of a “portraiture for introverts”. when you make something, what’s going on in your mind is projected through it. you not only see how you look to others, you see yourself subconsciously interpreted.
ilford hp5+, rodinal 1:50 for 12 minutes. negative scan.
shot with an 19″ apochromat red-dot artar with a dark blue (tiffen 47) filter taped to the front. wide open at f/11.
light was 400 watt-seconds from a speedotron 202vf head in a medium softbox above. white reflector below in butterfly position.
position self with pre-measured twine. open packard shutter. pop flash with meter. close shutter. develop sheet film, something i haven’t done enough of lately.
last night ryan applied a m0zaikit from shalgo industries on his new macbook pro. it turned out pretty well. it’s a set of pre-cut vinyl stickers, all cut in the same pattern with one color per sheet. you pick the pieces you want to lay out the pattern.
it was an excuse to setup the softbox and speedo. our little canon g3 does well with the right light.
this week I was asked at work if we had any internal blogging platform. of course we didn’t, but I was interested in setting one up. I chose wordpress, specifically wordpress-mu, a multi-user, multi-blog setup.
it took a while to get used to how wpmu does things. an ldap plugin for wpmu worked perfectly to tie my installation’s authentication to active directory. now anybody with an active AD account can login, create an arbitrary blog, and start posting.
i also took a while learning how to manipulate layers in gimp to produce a header graphic for our new internal blog site. i’m pretty proud of it.
now we’ll see what happens. i’ve seen internal blogs take off before, i’m interested to see if it takes off here. if you build it, they will come..
i really do think blogs have a place at work. at my last job, we (well, mainly jim, myself, and our manager) saw the potential. we used a blog to record our status, thus saving ourselves the need to take time out of our day to report to our management. it brought visibility into what our group was doing. at my current employer, we have many sites, peers in different offices, and a large development site on the other side of the planet. maybe this will help bridge some of the usual communications gaps that happen. there are already many internal forums, drupal sites, and other places (including the horrible microsoft sharepoint) for information, but this will be the first centrally managed, cross-organization, freely open system.
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