Archive for November, 2005

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Zero Project preview at the Open Circle Theater

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

Tonight I had the pleasure of going to a cinema preview event being put on Ear To The Ground Theatre. My friend Alissa was a major part of the piece and had invited me to see it. The Zero Project is a physical theater experience that explores the concepts of zero and infinity. I took along my (now not so trusty) camera and got some great shots.

Through the hoop

To my distress my 10D started giving me a strange error midway through the performance and it would shut down suddenly and display “Error 99″ on its display. I could remove the battery and start the camera up no problem but it would display the same error. I tried switching lenses to see if that might help - but nothing.

Luckily a bit of research on the net is showing that the error is most probably from dirty contacts. There is a lot of discussion as to what causes it but several people have commented that by cleaning the contacts on both the camera and the lens you are using with a pencil eraser the problem will be fixed. I’m going to try some test shots in the morning and hopefully the problem is fixed. With my sisters wedding coming up I both need a camera and can’t afford a new digital back!

Flickr

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

I made a Flickr account a long time ago but have done virtually nothing with it since. After being prodded by a few friends I’ve decided to play with it a bit more. It’s actually pretty good timing particularly given that since I’m exploring all sorts of new design ideas with Futurist now and finally have full HTML/CSS control over my blog I can integrate my Flickr photostream into the site with little fuss.

So the real question is will Flickr “stick” in my life, or will I end up letting my account get dusty again? Only time will tell. Share your comments about Flicker or post a link to your photostream and I’ll check it out.

Hello world!

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

Welcome to my brand new (reused) home in cyberspace. My old blog has reached the end of it’s life and I’ve decided to embark on a new project with a new focus. Futurist now is dedicated to not only my day to day life, but also to the trends and technologies that shape our society as a whole. As technology advances I am finding free, open source software becoming more and more important to me so in this first post I would like to thank some of the numerous people who have made this possible:

Hopefully this blog will grow and flourish over the coming years. New media and the ability to share ideas is becoming a new reality through the internet and I hope that Futurist now can keep up.

Code for food?

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

Codeforfood.org comes from a rather interesting chapter in my life. It was during the middle of the .com bust and I had all but hit rock bottom. After being unemployed for more than 18 months I had come to the conclusion that desperate times called for desperate measures. In an effort to get noticed amongst the throngs on unemployed tech workers here in Seattle I decided to put a bit of a twist on the cliche homeless guy standing on the street-corner begging for work and do it myself. I bought this domain to have a place to direct the media and potential employers that would be interested in looking at my resume or credentials.

It’s funny that this site would turn into a primary blog given that the original codeforfood.org site had a blog like format. It did not actually employ a proper CMS system however as the entire weblogs revolution was still a year or so off. I coded the entire site in static HTML, updating and adding to it every night as my journey continued. In the interests of posterity I have preserved the original code for food webpage.

So I suppose that begs the question of why I am recycling the domain and letting it rise out of the ashes of my old weblog Sparktoblog! and become my primary little niche in cyberspace. It’s simple really - I’m getting interested in coding again, although not professionally. After landing a position as a Recruiter during my code for food publicity stunt I let my technical skills dwindle over the next four years until I rediscovered web development when I created Sory Electronics in response to Sony’s malicious DRM rootkit. Given that our societies future is looking evermore technical I want to at least do some small technical thing to try to keep up with it all.

So here I am, Wordpress, Photoshop, and a good text editor loaded up on my powerbook and ready as I ever will be to face new challenges in cyberspace. I might not be coding to eat anymore, but I sure will be enjoying coding more than I did all those years ago when I stood on a street corner holding my sign.

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