Hi!
April 19, 2019
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What to say about the Notre Dame fire?

Travel
With all this talk about travel, it occurs to me that during my 2+ year layoff where I didn’t post, some things happened that I’d like to have record...
October 27, 2017
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Destroyer 4.0

Gaming, Hardware
With all this talk about travel, it occurs to me that during my 2+ year layoff where I didn’t post, some things happened that I’d like to have record...
November 3, 2016
6727 0

Travel Bucket List - Version 1α

Travel
With all this talk about travel, it occurs to me that during my 2+ year layoff where I didn’t post, some things happened that I’d like to have record...
August 12, 2016
1141 0

Catching Shooting Stars

Pictures
With all this talk about travel, it occurs to me that during my 2+ year layoff where I didn’t post, some things happened that I’d like to have record...
promo_1
a thing i do

Pics of Wine

InstaScram
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places i go

Travel

Come Along
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a thing i do

Shoot Movies

Watch
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where i am

Home Cookin'

Come Visit
November 9, 2016
826 0

I went to Champagne!

Travel, Vacation

europe2015_239With all this talk about travel, it occurs to me that during my 2+ year layoff where I didn’t post, some things happened that I’d like to have record of, here, somewhere, wherever.  So I’ll break those things up into some posts and put them up as I think of them.

Today, I want to talk about Champagne.

I don’t feel like my pictures were very successful here, and maybe that reflects my sort of general inability to do things right on this leg of the trip.  I didn’t book us very many tours (three), and we didn’t get accommodations till like the night before.  That turned out okay, but then there was the drive, where getting out of Paris was stressful, but ultimately trouble-free.

Reims is a beautiful little city and it really does feel like a gateway to wine country – like they’re celebrating you for having arrived and wishing you well on your journey onward. While our journey onward was not to Bourgogne but to Budapest, we had plenty of champagne for the ride, which helped us make friends and have a great ride (or as great as it could have been, under the circumstances) all the way to Hungary.

40ish pics after the break.

November 3, 2016
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Travel Bucket List – Version 1α

Travel

France_2016_408Travel is important. It gives us perspective. It challenges our perceptions. It teaches us problem solving.  It comes with great food.  It interrupts the normal flow of our lives and reminds us that there’s so much out there to see and do.

Travel makes us better.  We could all use to be better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about travel these days (both because I don’t have the money to do it and because I’ve been going to lots of places I’ve already been), and to that end, I thought I’d make a travel post. Well, that, and the fact that I haven’t posted in a REALLY long time again. Whoops.  It’s been nice seeing all these old photos from trips as I’ve been running through the site, too.

I think it’s a good idea to keep a “Bucket List” of places that we want to go. I hate the phrase “Bucket List,” but I’m using it, and I promise not to put it into quotes anymore.  Keeping a list, and keeping it updated, is a good way to keep your longer-term goals in mind, after all.  This is, however, only a “Places I Want To Go” list with a smidge of “What I Want To Do When I Get There” thrown in for good measure.  It is, by no means, intended to be an exhaustive list of all the shit I want to see, accomplish or experience in my life.

After the break is my current list.  In the vein of “fuck it, let’s post,” I’m putting it up even though it’s not “done” or even “ready” because, damnit, I never post anymore.  So click through and tell me what you think.

September 1, 2016
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Paris 2016

Vacation

France_2016_025Believe it or not, Paris was again on the agenda in May, this time with Laura, and I have 409 pictures to prove it.  The full story is a little long, but the pictures tell it better anyway.

We did get to spend a day out at Mt. Ste. Michel, which was every bit as beautiful than it was 20 years ago, albeit unexpectedly crowded. After a long half day at Versailles, we visited the town of Chartres, too. The town itself was beautiful and charming, and I’d never paid it much attention before, so that was a nice surprise.

I’ll even be making a real binder with printed photos and little keepsakes for the first time in years. I like binders and I like printed photos, so that’s nice, too! A souvenir of souvenirs, if you’ll excuse the gratuitous use of French in a post about France.

Also, I got to eat a lot of ice cream.

Pictures, as usual, after the break.

August 24, 2016
758 0

Warcraft Mounts Worksheet

Gaming

mounts_imageI’ve messed with a bunch of ways to display this data, and I think for now, a regular, boring PDF is best.  It’s only the mounts I want (and don’t yet have), so it’s skewed pretty heavily towards flying mounts.  If you think I’m missing stuff (which I am, obvi), let me know and I’ll add it.  If you send me the base mats and such, so much the better!

This data comes from my Warcraft XLS and should be updated on the regular.  If it’s not, let me know and i’ll update it to the latest version.

Download/View here

August 21, 2016
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Gettin’ Back into Volleyball!

Fitness

In the first half of the 90s I played a lot of volleyball on the sand at the Franklin Mint sand volleyball courts. That was back when the Mint was, as was its namesake, based in Philadelphia.  Nowadays, they’re a shell of their former, volleyball-loving selves, and I digress in the way that all old men do.  Point is, they had great courts and I had a great time playing on them.

vball_glamorNow, 20+ years later, I’m playing whenever I can on the beach in Southern California.  Whenever I can isn’t nearly as often as I’d like, but it’s often enough that I can say that I play again.  It’s fun!  Sometimes I even play well, but not as well as I would if I were in better shape.

I figure it’d be fun to post a couple pics here of the current iteration of the games look like to me. I’ll probably manage to post another photo or two here, and if I can figure out how to refresh this post to the top of the site. Maybe the “Aside” post format will do it for me?

Anyway, after the break are a couple of photos to show off my almost-40 prowess.

August 12, 2016
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Catching Shooting Stars

Pictures

Last night, I went up to the Santa Monica mountains and tried to get pictures of the Perseid meteor shower.  While messing with my camera definitely affected my overall viewing ability, I had a great time trying it out.  I even got a selfie, as you can see above.  A handful of awesome pictures are after the break.

August 8, 2016
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JAZZMIN Vocal Band Videos!

Movies

Over the last month or so, I’ve been consumed by work on two videos for the JAZZMIN Vocal Band, a vocal group that includes at its core, my mom and Rod.

I went up to Vegas twice to shoot footage, once at a live event and once as a production day on a green screen where each singer came in in turn and performed his or her part.  The production went basically according to schedule, considering, and the footage looked good.  Changes to the project after the shoot as well as creative hangups and differences hindered the edit process, as did my own ignorance of certain key (and keying!) elements, but all of these got overcome or steamrolled and the project got finished.

I’ve cut a couple of Director’s Cuts to reflect more accurately the vision I had when I was shooting, and after the break, I’ll share them with you.

August 4, 2016
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Computer refresh (Destroyer 3.0)

Hardware

Rosewill Thor CaseBelieve it or not, it’s time for Yet Another Computer Refresh and associated post.  These are really nice for me to be able to reference, so I post it for all to see and to judge. I expect to field “Why aren’t you using Intel/Nvidia, you n00b?!?” questions starting anytime now.  since these things tend to be long, I’m going to put the entire post after the fold.  There will be pictures, both ones that I took (dusty computer innards!) and press shots of components I’ve stuffed in here.

To skip the 2.0 history and jump right into this week’s build, click here.

August 2, 2016
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Wine Tasting in Mendoza

Food & Wine, Vacation

Back in April 2015 I flew down to Buenos Aires and then, with a little help from my good friend Silvana, drove cross-country to Mendoza (an 11-hour ordeal made longer by jet lag and police checkpoints), then had three beautiful days in an amazing wine region.  The pictures below barely do the place justice, but they’re a step. A mildly out-of-order step, at least, because there doesn’t seem to be any way to organize the photos in a gallery by simple file name (clearly, I’m missing something), but a step nonetheless.

wine_pressOver those beautiful days, I got to eat and drink some of the best fare the region had to offer, from cosmopolitan restaurants in Mendoza to food trucks by a famous apple tree. I didn’t get the full story on that one, unfortunately.  I did take pictures.

I fell in love with a town south of Mendoza proper called Tupungato – it was quaint, pretty, and perfectly situated in wine country.  Analogous, maybe, to Solvang as it relates to Santa Barbara, although thankfully without the absurd Danish influence.  I didn’t take enough pictures there, but I did have a couple of very nice meals and some good wine (one from a house called “Finca Flichman” that I found particularly fun).

More trip and winery details follow the break!

July 25, 2016
926 0

Welcome Back!

Internets
this is the Firefly base of the site - back when WordPress was just another minor player in the CMS space rather than the only one.

this is the Firefly base of the site – back when WordPress was just another minor player in the CMS space rather than the only one.

And welcome to the new Clapboard.org!

There are so many new things to explore and test, but at the moment, all I care about is that the posts are back, legible and that I can start putting new posts up ASAP.  Later, I’ll worry about what “Formats” are (an Aside? A “Quote” format? – really?) and such.

HTTPS is now enabled by default, too, thanks to Dreamhost and their partnership with LetsEncrypt.  I’m sure there will be a page or two with issues, but I’m working on finding and fixing all the issues as quickly as I can.  I’m happy to report that I’ve been using rel-links since almost the beginning of the site, so there are way fewer problems than there might have been otherwise, even with the very old content.

Anyway, lots of things are a little wonky, and I know older images don’t always work (some of them never will – a handful have been lost in translation over the years), but mostly, I’m happy with how we came over from Joomla (and how Joomla came from Firefly, and how Firefly came from my hand-coded wwweboard script and how THAT came from an all hand-done HTML site).  The Web Board and all its amazing posts is gone (i’m especially sad because I’ll miss having Scott’s brilliant requiem for the house at Browns Terrace.  I’m sure it’s in a SQL dump somewhere – maybe I can dredge that up and make it into its own post.

As always, let me know if there’s anything that’s not working and I’ll do my best to fix it. We’ll be doing some more social media sharing and cross posts, but generally, I expect more of the same drivel over the years.

March 24, 2015
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I have 500px now

Pictures

In a continuing effort to push myself to be creative in interesting ways, I created a 500px account.  I’m putting a bunch of sets on there, but right now there’s not much.  I realized that I don’t think of shooting in sets, but that I should, so I’m going to try to push myself in that direction by putting things out there that are set-based.  I’m not sure how it’ll work, but that’s okay.

Right now, you can see my 500px profile right here. There aren’t any nudes on there now, but there will be soon enough, so this is your warning that it won’t always be SFW content.

I don’t even have a header file yet!  I’ll get there…  Enjoy!
PS – I added the link to the OTHER PLACES TO FIND ME footer element, too. You know, because I can.

February 20, 2015
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Jess walks old-timey

Pictures

JM_02-62Jess from MissMooreStyle was modeling some new finds for me the other day, and I shot a series of stills that, as I edited them, I thought might make a cute old-timey-lookin’ video.  Let me know whether I was right.

Video moved to after the fold for organization’s sake.  It’s still plenty cool enough to click through for.

January 28, 2015
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Driving to Portland

Vacation

Portland may not have been all I was dreaming of and more, but we take the good with the bad and just fucking own it, right?  I did manage to do a decent shoot up that way and see Scott and Sharon, so there were some good parts of the weekend, too.

One of the best of the bad things was the fog on the drive up.  It was super stressful for ~300 miles, with dense fog, then a patch of clear, then another long run of zero-vis.  I”m glad I was doing a Time Lapse!  Anyway, below the fold is the video if you”re interested, complete with a mashup by Loo & Placido. (…because what else?)

One thing to note is that I had to turn around about 10 minutes into the drive, adding 40 minutes to the overall trip, but it syncs up really nicely with the intro to the song, so it”s 100% okay now in a way that it definitely was not before.  Anyway, enjoy.

January 23, 2015
621 0

lies i tell myself

Musings

It’s funny, as the new year dawned, I wasn’t thinking a lot about resolutions or what I might want to do differently, but now, a month in, I am.  Aside from knocking bicyclists from their seats if they ride on the sidewalk, most of my thoughts have been about myself, if they haven’t been entirely motivated by my own actions.  The long drive back from Portland this week gave me plenty of time to think about personal responsibility, and I’ve been musing on it ever since.

In this case, I’m thinking about responsibility as it relates to creativity. I can’t be creative by hiding from my responsibility to just DO it, you know?  That doesn’t work any more than hiding from our responsibilities makes us happy for more than just a minute.  You can ask any of us.

So I’m attempting to work through the “writer’s block” which is actually just me being lazy and avoiding my responsibilities.  Ask me Monday how it’s working out.

January 17, 2015
681 0

Ikea

Rants

it’s a good thing I like to put together furniture from Ikea, because I just put three drawers together inside out.  Complete with those nylon push-in “screws”.  Now I get to take them apart and try not to break anything.  I think I’ll take a breather first…

Edit: this is much funnier given the rest of the weeknd.

October 28, 2014
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2 or 3 NFL things

Eagles Football

Okay, first of all, at least the goddamn Cowboys lost yesterday.

Second, why isn’t there more consternation about the NFL’s changes to their TV contracts?  Maybe everyone lives in their home markets or else subscribes to the Total Access package? I miss being able to flip between games I liked in the morning at home. Now there’s only ever one game on at a time.  Dumb.  Also, give up on the NFL network exclusivity for Thursday Night Football.  Fucking retarded.  It’s like holding games for ransom, and how do you think fans like their games being ransomed off?  Treating fans worse isn’t a way to keep them – just ask the RIAA.

Third, can we just agree, collectively, to never use the “official” name of the team from DC anymore? I don’t care if we agree on an alternate name (that might be best), but just never using the name on TV or in print anymore would end up being the same thing as having that asshat Snyder just agree to change the name, only it would be a “fuck you” to the dude as well because no one cares what he wants.  This isn’t an issue I care particularly about, but since it’s easy to do the right thing, why not just make the switch?  And since he won’t, we can make a painless change to the way we refer to the team and, boom, problem solved.

Fourth, goddamnit, Eagles!  The Cardinals? The fucking Cardinals?  Then again, we’ve never been a strong team this year, so maybe we’ll pay more attention to shoring up our weaknesses now that we have another mark in the L column and get better.  What happened out there? We looked slow and confused all night, and I’m talking about before the snap. Where was our pacing? Our tempo?

October 1, 2014
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London with Laura

Vacation

LONDON_009I went to London with Laura in September, and am just now getting around to posting some pictures.

There are like 150 in all, which reflects about 20% of the overall shots I took in the 4 days we had.  I wish I didn’t hate photo editing so much.

All the pics after the break!

June 26, 2014
609 0

headin’ to Philly

Vacation

media_crewNow that I’m not traveling for a living anymore (what AM I doing for a living anymore?), I have to make an actual effort to see people I love. I’m doing it, even if it’s not THAT often, and this weekend is Philly.  I’m actually psyched – it’s a long weekend and I can promise we won’t get up to much, but that’s okay because I’m lazy.

I’ll definitely snap a couple photos, though.

May 20, 2014
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Happy Birthday, Alina!

Extra! Extra!

It’s not a holiday yet, but someday, no doubt, we’ll look back and know when it all began.  It’s an incredibly exciting time to be me.

April 8, 2014
649 0

Caloric debt or, why am I so fat?

Fitness

In order to lose weight (and I certainly have belly fat to be losing), you have to operate at a caloric debt.  there’s a lot of science going on that I don’t understand, and a lot of pseudoscience that I’m not qualified to debunk, but at the root, the rule is Lose Weight: Caloric Debt. Build Strength: Exercise.  You can basically never exercise away eating too much, so I’ve just got to stop eating too much. Especially since I don’t exercise much.  I haven’t changed my 12,000 step “goal” on Fitbit, but I also almost never get anywhere close to it (last Monday-Friday: M:4647, T:6107, W:1504, T:13780 F:18.518). Keep in mind on Thursday I played 3 hours of volleyball and on Friday I hiked and was generally active with a couple friends, hiking, hill climbing and wandering around much of the day.  Today I’ve done just north of 3100 steps and it’s not looking like I’ll do many more.  I’m the laziest, is the moral of the story.

March 26, 2014
691 0

I’m not breaking up with Clapboard

Internets

I didn’t even realize I’d been thinking about it, but I guess I was, over these last, umm… months since my last update.  Well, I’ve decided.  Clapboard lives.  It gets updates again because despite the splintering of my attention into a million pieces, despite the lack of easy options for posting photos and such that benefit Twitter, Facebook and so many others, despite the fact that it just isn’t cool, Clapboard is mine, and that’s good enough for now.

I’m off to look into ways to post things.  Maybe it’s even the right answer to change the underlying software (gasp?!).  Whatever it is, it’ll get some attention from me while I’m doing normal updates again.  My computer works (although I did just realize I lost a few folders of pictures – nothing heartbreaking, but I’m still rattled all the same), my phone works, my camera works… I can update. And I shall.

So hi.

February 19, 2014
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Cool XKCD gif

Internets

I know this is like trying to draw attention to a rock concert by sitting in the stands and whistling, but I really dig Randall’s work on XKCD from Monday:

http://xkcd.com/1331/

That is all.