Lt. Zanders reporting to you from the intersection of Hollywood/Los Feliz/Silverlake and the greater Los Angeles area. Formerly from Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Today Audrey and I along with two of her friends went to see WALL-E down at the Regal 13 in the Times Square area. We got there a bit early and audrey spotted this sign with a dialog box on it and I was like no way. Apparently someone's massive LED display down in the Times Square area has a warning for it's owner. That being that the virus definitions are 30 days old and out of date and they have been updated. Of course letting the owner know this interrupted whatever ad or ads running on this display. Even though the dialog box really only notifies you of this and does nothing else other than the option for this box never to come up again. Yeah, that might be a useful thing to check in this case. But no, it's after 5 and the work day is over. It'll be like that til tomorrow morning and people will be pissed.
A video of the display at 42nd and 8th Ave.
A few stills as well for good measure, wish I didn't just have my camera phone on me to get this.
On a separate note WALL-E was pretty great. Really enjoyed it. But really pretty scary, not quite Fallout level scary but scary none the less. Especially with the Buy Large corporation. I was though really impressed with the lighting in WALL-E, down to the little particulates in the air on earth, probably the best I've seen done yet.
So, firstly I would like to show you all some additions to the hallway. It makes it a bit dark but still I like, ominous though. Thoughts suggestions?
I had a bit of time before school started up again to cook cook cook. Decided to cook up a nice London Broil roast. I haven't cooked this in probably like 7-8 years now, it's been a long time. It came out well though so worth the effort. Also, the meat dry aged for 20 days, gosh dang it was good meat, I wish I had pictures of it when it was raw. Anyhow I got some pics of it just about done.
The beginning of the end has begun. In fact its now two weeks in and for some classes three weeks in. I'm only taking three classes this semester. One on java and basically working with massive amounts of textual information. It's supposed to be a hard first 4 weeks and then downhill from there. I was on the verge of head splode. Yeah, regular expressions in java, TreeMaps, HashMaps, and Big O! (I miss watching that show on Cartoon Network, I miss cable, CalArts dorms the good ole' days) But ya, head splode it was like the TreeMap biz today with mentions of the HashTable, gosh, talking about stuff like the amount of cycles it will take to index into a concordance N amount of numbers ends up being things like, N to the 12th power, but then we can get it down to N log base 2 N. It's like gagh!!! Next week it's bayesian filters and the hash. Gonna need some hash to get through that class.
Second class is Sousveillance Culture, which is pretty cool, seminar on inverse surveillance. Pointing the camera back at the Man wherever he may be. Have a good teacher, so it should be a good class as well as a nice compliment to my last class the biggie.
THESIS! Yes, it is here, the thesis seminar. Well looks like from the schedule we're presenting every single week 10-15 minutes or more, with weekly crits. This week we had to present some contextual references and contextual projects, present on parts of our personal statement, our background for coming to this project, and our methodology. Pulled out of course some Michael Foucault about the panopticon and then went all og like that and went to the source. Mista Jeremy Bentham himself, the father of the panopticon, 1780's baby. Oh yeah, if that don't get you excited hell I dunno what would. Anyhow, it actually is quite interesting and I have come to realize on re-reading some of the Foucault that Tekserve's database system and its way it operates is a panopticon. The database is always observable from any point and all work is tied into it along with all marks on productivity. Anyone can see what anyone is looking at, at any given time, or working on for that matter, before or after any sort of transaction. Complete control. Anyhow, that aside the presentation went well, I felt I covered all the points that needed to be covered. I presented for the project references Finishing School's "Today It's Voluntary" and Meagan Collins, myself, and Roman Jaster's street sign project back from 2005. Made me start to miss CalArts thought thinking about the street sign project and the people's.
Back to the Tekserve, had a bit of an issue a bit ago had to take somethings up with the HR. However, I may have a chance at a paid internship with Turnstone Consulting LLC. It's the company of one of my professor's. So, if so more than likely I will be taking "this time to tend to my resignation." I'm pretty excited about this prospect. We'll see.
Other than that, it's been mostly school. I didn't even get to watch the super bowl. But I did find the most awesome commercials aired during it. Audi's. The first is the Godfather one, I love the detail with the oil stains all over the sheets, as if it were blood. Take a look here.
However, the best one though is this one. "Truth in the Blacklist." Showing off one of the evilest cars ever made, the Audi quattro S1, the Group B version. Group B rallying that is, aka unlimited technologies, only need for 5000 car production numbers, unlimited boost = unlimited power, basically the monsters. So the quattro, pretty wicked, 600-1000 brake horsepower, 4WD, 2.1L 5 cylinder turbocharged engine, 0-60 in just over 2 seconds. So, fast it was claimed to drive faster than a driver can think. So, yes the best commercial goes to the Group B Audi spot. Enjoy.
Oh, and I almost completely forgot, news. "Death, Destruction, and the Weather Coming Up Next" is coming to NYC in April. It's going to be screened at the Anthology Film Archive. It's going to be part of the New Filmmakers series, I'm going to show with a group of friends from CalArts both the experimental animation program and film/video program. It should be awesome. Lots of CalArts nostalgia going on lately. Anyways that's it for now, back to it.
One might speculate, does this mean the neighborhood has gone to the dogs? Will real estate plummit? Is crime encroaching or already upon us? I'm not sure if it means any of that to Greenpoint in relation to what I found on the way to class on November 1st. So, what did I find. I found a burnt out Chevy sedan on the street over from where I live. It's nearly in the intersection, definitely in the cross walk, with a charred driver/passenger side exterior and interior, burns to the hood, burnt and broken windshield partially melted, melted driver side mirror, and two flats in the front. Oh ya, and it had it's plates removed and what looks to be the glove rummaged through.
So, one might ask, what the bloody hell happened? One could probably come to the conclusion that something had definitely happen that was possibly just a hair outside of the land of legality, I mean, abandoned burnt out car with no plates, hmmm, seems a bit fishy. Are the police investigating it? Has it been towed? Why no, it's still sitting out there right now exactly where it was found. Of course now it's sporting a nice neon orange sticker from the Department of Sanitation, saying it's a derelict vehicle and is to be disposed of.
However, when that is going to occur is quite unknown at this point since it's been sitting there for now two days and will likely sit there over the weekend and into monday. Who knows? There's a bus stop right there and I could see how the bus driver may be upset since hey can't pull up to the curb as normal. I wonder if the various drivers have already complained about it slowing down their routes and just generally cramping their style. "I got business to attend to." So, what is going to happen to this car and what happened to it originally to put it into such a state? I'm rather invested in it now. I wonder if it will just become a fixture of the intersection, like a neighbors dog or the corner liquor store. I might miss it when it's gone.
Anyhows on an odd tangential coincidence, I've just begun reading the book "Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb" by Mike Davis. I've barely started into it but it has been rather interesting thus far. It's just odd the day I got the book was the day that car showed up. Coincidence or divine intervention???
School has slowed just a hair this week thank goodness. It's been pretty mad and has left me quite ragged. Class continues as do the projects. Oh and I just recently acquired an iPod Touch for a project. It's really quite nice. Hacked it and now it can be my portable wifi stumbler aka spotter for networks and also portable packet sniffer. It also lets me play my NES and SNES games, minesweeper and it can even dice a tomato. Now I'm just waiting for them to bloody get cases for them to stores, gosh dang it. Very annoying. However, it has proved itself to be a quite formidible asset thus for in doing the work of the NNW and just reducing the weight on my back. Oh and the controls work pretty well. I need to start thinking about a paper I need to start researching and writing. It should be fun but how to enter the subject and what to cover is the question and how to cover and research something that isn't really something academic and such. What is this subject. Drift Racing, in regards to globalization, soft power, and hybridization. So, if you got mags, videos, interviews and the like send them my way I'm gonna need them. That's all for now I think I'm gonna play some games.
So, I didn't know this but apparently in NYC this is how the NYPD rolls in regards to bikes. The Gothamist had an article about a recent police raid operation on the excessive amount of bikes in the 6th Ave between 1st & 2nd areas. You can read the details in the article, the thing that gets me though is the fact that they arrested two people who were asking questions about the seizure. The first person apparently was asking for the badge number of a plain clothes officer and the other was asking about why that first person was being arrested. The pic at the top I think has to sum up quite a bit about what I think is going on here.
