Local Interest – Page 29 – Matt's Homepage

Deckchair takes flight in Oregon

July 10, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Oh happy day!In a recreation of the original flight by Larry Walters in 1982, a man in Bend, Oregon repeated the feat this weekend. Here’s a bit I enjoyed:

Even at two miles high, Couch said, he could hear cattle lowing and children talking. He heard gunshots, which worried him. A black butterfly flew past. He passed through clouds. He said they were fluffy.Couch stopped when he was down to a gallon of water and just eight pounds of ballast. Concerned about the rugged terrain outside La Grande, including Hells Canyon, Couch decided to come back to earth.

Man I love Oregon! Story link

Indy 500!!!

May 29, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Oh happy day! The 91st running of the Indy 500 was on Sunday. It was kind of an anti-climactic running this year with it stopping for several hours of rain delay and then being called after more rain 50 or so laps before the end. However, local Oregon hero Danica Patrick got 7th. She is from Lake Oswego and has gotten a reputation for being a fiery personality. She got her start racing carts at a cart track my old boss practices at just a few miles from here.

But I love watching the race – more now than before. Mostly because I grew up in Indiana and it always brings back fond memories of finishing chores with my brothers/dad, or having a BBQ or some-such while the tv or radio played the race in the background. On days during the race, if you drive through Indianapolis, you can easily hear the race 25+ miles away from the track. The thunder and roar of the Indy cars is that loud. It’s called “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” because it still has the largest attendance and worldwide radio/television audience of any single-day sporting event.

Even as a kid, you could see the state bend itself as Indy approached. We had neighbors who’d paint their trucks with ‘Indy or Bust’ and drive down. Radio stations go nuts with their latest hair-brained Indy contests (on contest involved singing “Up, up and Away in my Beautiful Balloon” for 3 hours in the porta-potty’s at the track). One fellow shaved the radio station’s call letters in his hair, etc. Folks would talk before and after about the race. But it really was always about getting together and watching the race, BBQ-ing, having a few beers, and enjoying the first big event of summer together. Makes me all nostalgic.

On a different note, a lot of Linux folks raised money to get the Linux penguin put on one of the cars. Unfortunately the Linux car #77 was the first to crash and finished dead last. There’s some irony there for you race fans.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/29/linux-car-first-to-crash-at-indianapolis-500/

PAX – The Penny-Arcade Expo

August 28, 2005 admin Comments 0 Comment

Well, I had the weekend off, so I decided to go visit something I hadn’t been to in a long time – a gamer’s convention. How I do miss the sights and … smells of the oft under-hygiene-oriented gaming world.

PAX is run by the Penny-arcade guys (www.penny-arcade.com) and they have the convention each year in Seattle (www.penny-arcade.com/pax). So I loaded up the car, plunked in the latest Harry Potter audio book (17 cds!) and headed to Seattle. They had 3 big focus points: console games, pc games, and the old traditional board/tabletop/model/card/DnD games rooms. For $20 it was a very worthwhile, affordable, and well-run event.

There were a lot of free-play console and pc stations to just jump down and start playing a lot of the latest games – all networked and ready for fun. I found this to be really cool feature because there were lots of games there that I’d heard about, but never played (Katamari Damacy was one I had been dying to try). In the PC world, there were lots of high-end boxes and laptops donated by local companies trying to drum up exposure -for you to free-play games on (Half-life 2, CS source, BF2, etc). I have to say I stayed true to my addiction and kept playing Counter-Strike Source most of the time; but I got to do it on some truly outrageous hardware. Playing CS source on a 17″ ATI x800 laptop (which I had considered buying) was a great experience. CS Source with a sub-10 ping time at 1600×1200, full detail, 4x anti-aliasing at a 80+ frame rate is something you don’t get to do very often.

They had tournaments on all the different games all day long – both console and PC. Mario Kart derivatives, CS source, etc, but what is most amazing is it was not just the newest stuff. I wandered into a Quake 1 tournament at one point. I didn’t even know people still played that. For each tournament you played/won you got points to redeem at their redemption spot. They also had arcade games there – various DDR’s as well as other ‘interactive’ games of this sort.

Fun as that was, it wasn’t all just games. I arrived just in time for the two guys who do Penny-arcade to draw Monday’s strip with the crowd. They answered questions and did the strip from concept, sketches, to final mock-up in front of us. That was cool because they only use Photoshop. They had a merchandise room and folks giving out all kinds of stuff – T-shirts, stickers, etc. I did manage to get an event-shirt which was pretty sharp.

I got a few autographs as well – including one of the penny-arcade guys. I met the guys that did Red-vs-Blue (www.redvsblue.com) series and got the signatures of Griff and Gus who did the famous Mac gamer video. They had a really funny t-shirt (with a famous quote from the series “I would just like to let everyone know that I’m a girl, and I like ribbons in my hair, and I want to kiss all the boys.”) but they were out of my size. The guy from TechTV (Kevin Pereira) was there doing a lot of interviews, and he was everywhere. Every time I looking up I found myself in the line of camera fire – you might check out and see if you see me in the background somewhere. Finally, they had a Karaoke contest at night (which was hilarious), a classical pianist come in and did an arrangement of FF7 music, and then some rap band. I passed on the rap band because I thought they sucked; but that was me.

I didn’t leave till 11pm which meant I didn’t get back into Portland/bed until 3am – but it was worth it. Oh wait, and I didn’t even tell you about the board-gaming folks. Oh my, that was an experience in humanity in all its smelling glory. I guess I’ll have to add that later…

First Thursday

July 8, 2005 admin Comments 0 Comment

Every first Thursday of the month, Portland opens its art galleries for visitors to look and have wine/cheese. It becomes a big walking fest between galleries, shops, and usually ends with people eating at the nicer restaurants in the Perl district.

I went last night and it was a beautiful weather – lots of people walking around and talking. I especially like the little independent booth shops on a section of blocks they close off for artists who just plop down and start playing music or selling stuff they have made. I find the street displays the most interesting and they are run by students, local folks, or just dabblers who make all kinds of creations. One of the interesting things to observe is the pretentious some of these art shows (and those that attend them) can become.

It’s amazing to me how almost laughably dressed and self-important some of the visitors and artists become. While I’m no pro, my hobby has been in photography and I have sold some of my work before so I went in to see a photo show but it left me extremely unimpressed. If I had given a child a camera for 5 minutes and let them run around underexposing/blurring/overexposing stuff I would have gotten the same outcome. While I have seen good modern photography that is really cool, when I think of masterful work I think of someone who has so mastered the techniques and principles of their medium (techniques and properties of their paint, photo process, musical technique, etc) that they have transcend just getting images down on a merely functional level (simply being able to portray something).

Masterful artisans have so integrated the techniques of their medium that they are beyond the functional and can manipulate the emotional responses that those functional elements can create. The artist can create a deep feeling or truth about reality/the human condition/truth of life/love/etc. But when you have something that looks on all levels like it failed at even the functional level (ie. looks like they didn’t even know how to use a camera) it is really hard for me to get over that to the transcendent level of communication. I need to see in the work that the person has a mastery of the functional process before I can believe their violation of those principles was intentional or just putting on the facade of great talent (i.e. can they even take really beautiful photos of ‘normal’ stuff?).

I have seen work and artists that can pull me into that transcendent experience; but it happens so much less often with works that are focused on form alone as the communicative element. I hate sounding like an old fogie, but man, some classical works can, and still do, bring tears to my eyes. It’s been a long time since I’ve had form-based art do that for me.

Yet, there is a lot of joy in walking around with those that try and are learning to hone those skills – I for one greatly enjoy the creative and imaginative hearts they have. I’ll certainly keep going and learning from these creative souls; it’s just that it is so silly when one thinks they are much better at what the do than they really are. A healthy humility goes a long way in keeping us striving and yearning for bettering ourselves and our work whether it be art or our lives of loving others.