It’s weird. I’ve been a business man my whole life, confident in my endeavors, doing the sales and marketing thing. When it comes to my art/photography, I have no idea how to price anything or sell it. I don’t know how to place a monetary value on art, especially if it’s mine. I just create it cause I love it.

I got an email out of the blue from someone that wants to purchase my Skull Stone painting as seen to the right. I was super flattered and stoked that they would consider even putting it up in their house let alone pay me money for it.

It has definitely inspired me to paint more but not for money, more the fact that something I created did something for someone else. That’s why I’ve always loved art and playing a band. It’s an opportunity to connect with other human beings.

Anyway…I hope to do more stuff that people like. I know I’ve felt connected to other artists because of their art, without even meeting them. Good stuff.

So recently I took a drive to Point Lobos near Carmel, CA and snapped some shots. I don’t usually do the standard nature/landscape type photography as it usually bores the shit out of me (sorry to all you landscape photoggers out there). I’m just not intrigued with the artistic/photographic expression of most. I guess that makes me an art snob.

Here’s a few shots I took while I was there just so I had some record of my visit. Point Lobos is a gorgeous place with good walking and/or running trails, and such an excellent view of the sunset to the point of being ridiculous. I’d highly recommend it. There were a couple areas for my more abstract photography but I didn’t have time. Next time I’ll go more head down there and explore the place with my own shtick in mind.

These are some shots I took for a Mother’s Day present. I had each of my sons pick out a picture of their mom holding them while they were. I then took photos of them and framed them. I think they turned out really great and got some much appreciated compliments from other photographers who’re way more skilled than me about it being a really cool concept. Enjoy.

I still feel like it’s missing something but none the less….this is my first dealio using my projector. My next one will be more thought out. The premise of this is just how war takes in the young man, chews him up, and spits him out as an old veteran with not much left but his thoughts and what’s next in his life.

This weekend my wife is out of town for a break from being a mom and wife of a wacked out husband (me).

I’m looking forward to getting some quality dad time in with my boys. Lately I’ve been working so much that I don’t know where Friday ends and Monday begins. My schedule is a whirlwind.

Hopefully I can get some good photos in. All the kids have point and shoot cameras and love to go on little excursions where we take trips together along the coast and snap some shots.

I’m hoping that we can figure out some other good activities outside of the standard (yet relaxing) time at the pool and the beach and late movie nights with popcorn. It’s all testosterone this weekend baby!

-R

Ok…so maybe I wasn’t completely drunk, but taking some time for myself, having a shot of whiskey and a couple Guinness pints before hitting the streets of Santa Cruz for some photography and hang out time, was a much needed ordeal. Lately, I’ve been working so much and on such fast-paced projects that I think parts of my brain are shutting down. I have like 3 unfinished paintings that I just can’t bring myself to even take off the wall and set up on my easel. I pretty much had to force myself to take some photos this particular day.

I’m definitely in some weird life-changing phase right now, some good, some weird, some negative. Thank God for my band, forcing me to play drums twice a week. It’s helping to keep me going, jogging my right brain as much as possible.

Anyway..enough of my hoo ha. Below are a couple pics from this weekend

-Rich

I’ve always been a fan of B-movie viewing. There are shitty B-movies, and then “quality” B-movies. This one was definitely quality in my opinion. An interesting premise actually but the effects and the lead role played by none other than the WWF wrestler, Rowdy Roddy Piper, was a key component.

I think the quality of the premise/idea exists here because John Carpenter was the director and he’s a bad ass.

Basically Roddy Piper’s character is a “down on his luck” transient construction worker guy, looking for work in a new town/city. With eerie hints that something is going on like random abstract transmissions on Televisions, weird sonic noises sprinkled throughout the city/movie, it’s obvious something subversive is going on.

Roddy stumbles into box of Sunglasses he found from a suspicious looking church. When he puts the glasses on, all of a sudden every other human’s face walking around the city is actually alien and billboards, magazine covers, etc. are all short messages like “OBEY”, “DON’T QUESTION ANYTHING”, “SLEEP”, and more.

During the whole movie he finds other humans that know what’s going on and they’re the underground humans plotting to identify/overthrow the aliens. The humans invent conact lenses that behave the same as the sunglasses so that the aliens don’t know they can be seen.

The ending actually sucks. They manage to break into this underground base the aliens have set up, they shoot some dudes, blow up a control center and some other shit. At the end Roddy Piper makes it to the top of some apartment building, where sits some giant glowing glass tube responsible for running the whole alien operation of the city. He’s able to destroy it with one gun shot. You’d think aliens smart enough to pull off the deception they pulled off would be smart enough to hide the most crucial technological part of their whole effort in a more protected private place with guards all around it…..but hey..then it wouldn’t be a B-movie right?

Onward…

This is my test blog post using the Flock “Social Browser”. Basically it’s goal is to effectively pull together all your standard social communities into a browser experience, automatically pulling in your feeds/accounts/etc. from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. The main issue I see with it so far is that there’s no MySpace add for it. That seems silly to me.

Anyway. I’m blogging this post right from within the Flock blog post client and I was able to have it detect my blog type (WordPress) by just giving it the domain, it figured it out, probably looking to see if standard Wordpress URL existed, etc.

I was also able to add my gmail and yahoo mail accounts to it and easily use them through the browser alongside my social sites.

I’m really liking this so far and will grill it a lot harder of the next few weeks.

Peace and Grease.

-Rich

There it is…on the left side of http://www.47project.com.

A bunch of my geeky photoblogger friends kept pushing me to installed this app. I resisted only out of laziness and my forced overdose of widgets and web 2.0. I have to say though that as a blogger, a photoblogger, and most importantly, a photographer. This app is truly awesome.

Created by Alex Rabe, this app is spot on and the cool thing is that it’s one of the first apps created by an engineer that I’ve seen in a while that actually looks nice, and presents my photos gracefully…as opposed to half the apps out there that are cool functionally but look like holy hell shit from the web design school of 1992.

I would highly recommend this app for anyone who Wordpresses their lives online for everyone to see because now you can accomodate your blogs nicely with photos. It has everything you’d want in a Wordpress app on the administrative side as well. Tons of configurable options and amazing tools for managing your galleries, uploading images, customizing the alt/title tags for SEO.

I can tell, being a web developer/SEO/Analytics person that great care was taken in covering those bases as well.

Peace Out!

So I’m a huge fan of Tim and Eric, their humor, ideas and shows. My wife stumbled on this awesome video some college students had put together that basically takes the same sense of humor and turns it into some dark German techno music video about a character whose plagued with having banana hands. The tangents and content in this video are out there and abstract and completely ridiculous. The overdubs are awesome and the music is even better. Another brilliant video from young minds bringing me to tears of joy…..also reminding me how abstract my sense of humor is.

My wife and I recently got a weekend off from the kids to go do some photog in Monterey, CA. Here’s a couple shots I took on our trip.

We had a great time. The weather was phenomenal and the planets were aligned for some great shots. You can see more at my FLICKR PAGE. Enjoy.

The Issue:

The sweet smell of social napalm in the morning. Gotta love it…or hate it…or just have a headache from checking all 95 social network accounts that you created for various niches you’re interested in. I have a Facebook account. I have a MySpace account. I have accounts at skateboards.com, surfboards.com, and snowboards.com. All these I use to connect with others but for various reasons. The maintenance is overwhelming if I want to be active on all these. When I say active I don’t mean like the 14 year old kids talking non-sense all day on MySpace. I mean like the professional collective I’m part of on these sites to discuss art, photography, politics, education, parenting (I have 3 sons), social psychology issues, etc.

I do want to continue to be a part of the communities/collectives that I’m part of but I wish I didn’t have to work so hard to update them.

Possible Solution?

Companies have already created widgets and badges for MySpace, Facebook, etc. to put on their various sites but I’d like to see a couple things take it a step further. A standard social networking API that uses a core simple standard dataset for photos and their info, interests, hobbies, avatar, etc. that you could manage from a NetVibes-esque portal, serving as your admin console to manage all your pages at once from one place. One might think companies would avoid that so that they could continue to “stand out” from other social sites but my argument is everyone has a social network now using various 3rd party out of the box social networks. The criteria on most of these is generally the same as far as the data set goes so why not standardize again the dataset/vars for the base information on all these sites, similar to what was done for ecommerce and passing variables to companies like verisign, authorize.net, etc.

If someone could just do this for me by tomorrow morning that would be great, then I wouldn’t have to upload photos 8 times, update my avatar 8 times, update my status 8 times, etc. It’s already nice that text’ing Twitter updates my status on my own blogs and Facebook. Too bad I can’t roll that concept across all social network sites.

</SocialNetworkingRant>

Recently at my job I got to deal with one of those manager/employee types who LOVE to assume who is responsible for an issue on our corporate web properties, the FIRST thing they do is fire rockets up as high as they can. They do this with no consideration for others, the people working on the web team, the project managers, what else is going on outside of their current gripe, etc.

There’s a term for people like this but I can’t think of it at the moment.

Instead of investigating an issue further, they immediately report it to the top of the mgmt. food chain so that they look like they’re go-getters, the ones who appear to be ‘cards on the table’. The reality is that if you have an issue with another team, etc. It’s always best to get together with that team/employee and talk about your frustrations, the issues that have come up, and then work together to fix them. Otherwise, you just look like a whiny bitch…..

</bitching>

I’m just wondering how long it’s going to take for everyone to widgetize EVERYTHING on their web page and THEN what’s next? When will  we be able to access netvibes.com functionality and web 2.0 widget options but point our netvibes page automatically to our own domain and then we edit the layout/css the same way we can with our wordpress blogs on the look and feel side.

I mean there are flickr, facebook, digg, wordpress, blogger type widgets and we’re all getting to the point where our personal site really needs to just be a portal showing all of our feeds/blogs, account info for all our social crap, LinkedIn account/resume info, etc. NetVibes.com has definitely started that ball rolling.

If we get to the point where everyone’s homepage is a widgetized layout/look and eventually Google let’s our widgets get fully indexed, then what is next? If we get to the point of full realization of the personalization utopia, where non web people can drag and drop the content they care about all over their personal homepage and then it’s done, what else is there to do? If someone would just tell me, I could start investing my money.

-Rich

I just watched this film the other day. Directed by Su-chang Kong, it was touted as the “Blade Runner” of Korean films.

The Good Stuff

This film had some nice special effects without overkill CGI crap..hardly any CGI actually. The fight scenes were pretty good. The cinematography and editing was artistically interesting as well. There was a very creepy vibe to the whole thing that made you want to see more. It was creepy in a more ghostly way and less of the dark industrial cyborg stuff we all came to know in Blade Runner.

The Lame Stuff

My main issue with this movie was that the storyline and dialogue construction was extremely confusing. It was sub-titled BUT I’ve watched many a foreign film - French, German, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese - you name it, but I don’t think there was a language barrier here…it was a communication barrier with the audience. It was almost like watching a movie that had the dialogue lifted from another movie’s script.

Accompanying the confusion was some cut scene/editing stuff that was out of left field. You weren’t really sure what scene you just walked into and couldn’t tell where you were based on where you just came from or from the initial looks on people’s faces when the scene started.

In The End…

If you don’t mind nice scenery and an acid trip of a dialogue, I’d recommend this one. The story would make more sense if you were stoned out of your gourd.