I Am Still Alive

I’ve spent the better part of the last half hour watching the launch broadcast of Wolfram|Alpha. Their control room looks straight out of the Apollo 13 movie and the hosts (Stephen Wolfram and others) look more than a little uncomfortable on camera. It’s been a fun, odd broadcast.

I am thinking that I will possibly launch Arlo in a live video broadcast from the apartment here in San Francisco as well.

Since moving to San Francisco, I’ve been poring over Bay Area arts resources as informal research for expanded local Artlog coverage and for my own benefit. Receiver Gallery’s Mission Gallery Guide PDF is as pretty a map as I’ve seen anywhere.

In an editorial at Wired Science, Erle Ellis writes about dismissing the term ‘nature’ and understanding that humans have been modifying environmental conditions for a long time.

“And it’s time for a ‘postnatural’ environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?”

I dug the piece. Ellis hits it square here. Sure, we shouldn’t blame the environment for environmental changes for which we are responsible or seek to restore some fantastical idea of a pristine natural world.

“If we want these places to look like they did before us, we will have to constantly recreate them. It will be a huge job for us humans to keep nature “wild.”…We humans can totally trash the planet and still survive. We already have in many ways.

Don’t like it? Stop trashing it!

Use renewable energy. Clean it up. Repair it. Get to work. There is plenty more mileage left in this spaceship Earth. Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.”

I also want to read more about landscape ecology (Via @alexismadrigal)

I’ll be here in San Francisco this weekend, but Artlog has a booth at this week’s Affordable Art Fair on 34th St for a sale of prints by artists Maya Hayuk, Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza, Dan Funderburgh and Justin Fines.

We’re also selling a print at the booth by Gilbert & George on behalf of the Brooklyn Museum – 100% of the proceeds go twoard the museum. More info on Artlog.

If you are in New York Thursday through Sunday, come by the fair to see the work and to get a demo (the first demo!) of Arlo.

Actually not the strangest packing decision I made for this move.

H, F & J walk us through Unicorn Graphics(!) newly launched Wood Type Museum highlighting type by Hamilton Manufacturing Co, Vanderburgh and Page.

It’s harder to find Page or Vanderburgh type these days (or possibly these manufacturers didn’t label the type – look on the side of the A’s), but you do come across Hamilton cuts often enough.

In addition to being beautifully designed/cut faces, they are impeccably made from good materials (aged, treated end-grain boxwood, cherry, mahogany, or maple). When you buy wood type, you end up paying a premium for Hamilton fonts. I’ve bought and printed with lots of type over the last few years and Hamilton wood type is usually worth the price (though wood type is typically always vastly over-priced on ebay).

I really dig the simplicity of the effects for this video. Just a good idea executed well.

Edgy, monochromatic music video for Friendly Fires, directed by Clemens Habicht. The band [was] transformed into Skeleton Boys as a nod to the track’s title, with the aid of double-sided sticky tape, fans and trillions of bean bag balls.

Packed up and heading to San Francisco.

I am officially relocating to San Francisco on Monday and got a jump on the move by planning out my new apartment (at 20th & Dolores) with Google’s SketchUp. I pretty much do this every time I move into a new apartment/office (which admittedly is rare) or do any renovation.

It end up downloading and firing up the newest trial of SketchUp about once every two or three years. It’s usually nice to see how the app has changed over that period. SketchUp is largely responsible for my first introduction to Ruby (and actually any kind of programming). Years back, when I was in my senior year at Wesleyan, I wanted to model some woodworking projects before building them and tried to do it in SketchUp. The UI then was really tedious to use, but it had a Ruby console that let me model the projects programmatically. That console was powerful and I got really into Ruby. Gosh, about a two years later Rails came across the wire as I was starting to do a lot more web development. That must have been late 2004 or early 2005. Tak built the first incarnation of the web store at I Am Still Alive around that time and he wanted to try Rails out. I started tinkering with Rails at about the same time as we were working through the code for the store and have been developing in one Ruby framework or another pretty much exclusively since.

That being said, SketchUp’s interface has in the intervening years become much, much easier to use. The model below took all of fourty minutes to put together using the console, the UI and the components library. It also got me stoked for the move.

More after the jump

Torontoist posted a nice article about Wayne Reuben and a man named Douglas (pictured above) – two guys who hand paint the signs at Honest Ed’s department store in Toronto.

There is another gentleman, sitting on a stool, bent over a drafting table, finishing the sentence “As Advertised…” Wayne introduces him as Douglas. He’s been here twelve years and he and Wayne make up the store’s signs department. Each department of the store—menswear, groceries, etc.,—used to have its own team of sign makers, Wayne tells me, but now their ranks have dwindled down to two. It used to be that every sign hanging in every storefront was painted… “It’s a dying practice,” Wayne says. “Honest Ed’s is really the only store that does it anymore.”

via The Ministry of Type. Also, it’s worth having a look at this one up close

I am moving up to San Francisco on Monday and am going to experiment with not getting a television for a bit. I have the suspicion that I can squeeze all the screen-based entertainment I need out the internet. PBS just put streams of a lot of their shows online and it promises to get me most of the way there (along w/Netflix for streaming & DVD and Hulu).

I reckon I’ll watch sports with friends at their places. And even though these services make it easy and I have a really nice monitor there is still considerable rooting around for programming and almost no equivalent to flipping channels to find something new or just interesting enough to waste some time on.

I’ll see how it goes and whether I miss the television “experience.”