unbillable hours

Belmar No. 2

Belmar, New Jersey
(significant post-processing)

By significant, I mean I spent a damn hour coloring in that sky. 

 

all good things

This is the end of Unbillable Hours.  After four years, it's time to move on from a hosted service. 

Over the last six months, I've had the pleasure of seeing a new site be born.  It's not in final form, but...

It's here.

Update, Circa August 2006: After a year of trying to deal with Movable Type, I decided to come back to this page.  I prefer not dealing with the technology and just dealing with the content.  The CSS/HTML stuff, for me, just became an obstacle to saying what I wanted to say.  Nonetheless, it was a good learning experience. 

belmar no. 1

Belmar Seafood Festival, Belmar, New Jersey

update:
Due to serious problems with comment and trackback spam, I'm switching over to comment approval.  Don't worry; I won't be using this format that long (hint, hint). 

the circle of [trash] life

Back when I was a boy scout (in the age before the oughts), the scoutmaster - my father - used to volunteer the troop's services at the local large-item/recycling dropoff point (conveniently located in the parking lot shared by the first aid squad, Dept. of Public Works, and the forklift-jousting field erected by the men of the Dept. of Public Works).  There, the townspeople would drive up in their Range Rovers and Ford Planeteater (tm) SUV's with junk that they wished to recycle.  Occasionally, as cited by Pops in his weekly guided meditation (used by those who cannot grasp Kierkegaard's tantric-like inspirirational qualities), people would ask us questions, which I would, of course, use as an opportunity to misdirect. 

("Sure, you've got about three feet of space [until the twenty foot drop between the road and the surface where dumpsters were located]; keeeep backing up....")

("Absolutely, benzene and lighter fluid should be deposited in the dumpster marked 'mixed paper.'")

In between saving people from my attempts at making art through public disservice, my father, the scoutmaster, scanned the large-item drop off items for, as he put it, "the good stuff." 

"We could use this refrigerator.  It just needs a little work," he would say with glee. 

"It has no door," I would answer. 

"We can build a door for it.  Or use it as an air conditioner." 

"Don't we have a fridge already?"

"Well, what about this television?"

"Dad, I think televisions usually come with cathode ray tubes."  [For those of you joining us from the modern age, this was back when there were two types of television: color and black & white.  Black & white was the passenger pidgeon of the day.]

About once a month, we'd come home with .... something.  A couch.  A six-foot wide cabinet turntable, complete with thirty year old Tito Puente records.  My brother.  One would think that, at this point, my mother would have gone postal on my father.  She didn't want this sort of, well, junk in the house (particularly the destructive force of Tito Puente).  Instead, I was the one that took the potato masher to the gut. 

"How can you let him take that couch home?  There's a bloodstain on it!"

"You try arguing with a judge who is set on an eighty year old piece of fabric, mold and foam cushioning," I responded.  I didn't tell her that my father promised that I could go to the nearby Barnes & Noble if I helped him lift the couch into his battered white van. 

I believe this was how Charles Starkweather convinced Caril Ann Fugate to join him in inspiring an entire Springsteen album. 

evernote

I have been looking for a good consolidated notes/to do editor for a while.  Outlook's To Do and Note functions are okay, but not great.  I'm giving Evernote a shot, and, so far, this looks like a great program.  It's amusing that a text editor would excite me so....

flickr to do photo printing?

If this is true, then I will be a very happy camper.  (Originally via Derek Powazek)

Incidentally, I do have a flickr account, but I don't often use it.  There's no advantage to it... unless they do end up offering book and print making services.

Addenda

For me, there needs to be a consolidation of all of these web services.  Flickr, Delicious, etc. ... there's too many "things" out there.  I guess that's why I don't often use my account.  I consider my blog to be the consolidating factor, not these other services. 

dare i eat a peach?

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

Sören Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849).

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!         75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?         80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,         85
And in short, I was afraid.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917). 

toms river no. 2

Cattus Island County Park, Dover Tp., New Jersey

picture envy no. 32

A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania, Delaware Canal at Raubsville, Even with the River, Usually 50 Yards of Land Between Them (Apr. 3, 2005).

I don't think I've singled out "Durham Tp." often, if ever.  The pastoral scenes there are heavily manipulated, and sometimes I feel it gets a little too cute, but these shots are great.  Taken during the heavy flooding that affected New Jersey and Pennsylvania this spring, "Delaware Canal at Raubsville..." is one of a series of dark shots that really bring out the menace of a flood.  I'm impressed with these shots, regardless of the photoshopping. 

I'm envious of those that get to take shots like this for a living.  A good, newsworthy shot that is also beautiful... now there's a creation. 

Toms River No. 1

Cattus Island County Park, Dover Tp., New Jersey

I took some time. I thought about those decisions I wanted to make and where I wanted to be... and I'm no closer to being certain than I was when I began this deliberation.