For those of you who requested shots of the dual monitor setup I've described, here it is.  With desk space and/or document stands to left and right, you've got a lot of simultaneously viewable space.  The top monitor allows you to see about a page and a third while word processing.  Make sure your monitor and computer will agree to do this if it's what you want.  Some don't support the vertical (portrait) orientation.  Geek on.

Last time I checked in about my computer life, I was a newly converted raging Linux hippie.  Having labored years to optimize a stable and uninstrusive Windows XP environment on old hardware that was only getting older, I started messing with open source OS options, eventually settling on Ubuntu.

Well, it was a mixed success.  You can find the earlier post to read about the travails, but let's just say that I was not prepared to forward the requisite patience and time under the hood.  I just want to drive.

Backed up, unplugged the tower.  Now I'm back at good ol' Mac OSX, sharing the computer my better half was using exclusively before. 

What have I learned?  All operating systems have good and bad aspects.  Working with more than one leads to insights that transcend the limitations of each.  Mastery crosses platforms.

Will I go back to Ubuntu?  Perhaps, but I'd like to do so on hardware built for the OS.  Video and audio card and device config and codec compatibility were my main gripes with Ubuntu (though that's not the only OS with these kind of problems in an age of proliferating obscure video codecs).

Will I go back to Windows?  So long as I can keep using XP, I see no reason not to rebuild the old tower (yeah, alright, maybe a new video card and some RAM) and all the drives I have for it as a media server for the living room.

Do I love Mac OS?  Sure.  It's elegant, more fun, less cluttered in managing hardware, system resources, and security.  But it's still got a management curve.

The main thing is to operate a little behind the curve.  I run XP, not Vista, Tiger, not Leopard, and only stable Open Source OS options.  It's more stable, less expensive, and the bugs are better worked out. 

Now, can you run Mac, Windows, and a Linux flavor all on your Mac?  Sure.  If you buy a leading edge machine with buffed out chip and memory and that's what you want to do with your system resources.  For my money, multiple recent ancestor generation harware elements running different OS's gives an optimal combination of redundancy, freedom, and value.

Check out an educational video I shot last year for Muslim Advocates.  I play an FBI agent.  The video shows people how to protect themselves and their families if inappropriately and aggressively questioned by law enforcement.  Ethnic profiling, how to respond to a knock-and-talk, airport issues, etc., are all covered.

Also, it showcases my shorter hair and goateed look, now defunct.  One for the archives!  It's something like 10 minutes; I'm in the first half.  Enjoy!  And remember:  they need a warrant.

My relationship to technology, particularly electronics including computers, has been pretty rocky.  I've owned both of the major kinds of computers in both desktop and laptop forms over the last 20 years of operating system chaos and market fragmentation.  I've owned two smart phones, five other cell phones and four different offline handheld PDA's.

For the last seven or eight years, I've been on a paper calendar.  Nothing beats it for the combination of speed, weight, and display area.  I cannot schedule anything unless I can see all the days of the month and their detailed schedule information and notes all at the same time without switching pages or screens.  Maybe a tablet pc or a...no, no, they all weigh too much and don't open fast enough.  I mean, the time I spent synching my old PDA's and smart phones to my computers was some of the worst time I've ever spent, hours and hours of it, reinstall this, check this compatibility issue, blah, blah.  So I'm a bit of an anti-tech or tech-seems-to-hate-me guy. 

So when my PC started acting all funny and I looked at future support prospects for XP, which consumes system resources and is slow as snails and crashes and won't go up to the next service pack and all the rest that you all already know.  Then I looked and at the costs associated with moving to Mac OS.  Then I became sad.  Then I took the leap.

I backed up all my data, started researching, and pretty soon installed a completely new open source operating system on my now seven year old P4 1.7 GHz tower with the ASUS motherboard.  PC-BSD was touted to me as a real easy open-source install with no need to get into the command line or terminal to install packages or drivers manually.  This is something that I figured would really freak me out.  It is a very under the hood kind of thing.

In the early stages of failing with this project, I thought I had a bad hard drive, so I got a new one (they are cheap these days!) and had to get into the physical guts of the tower.  Crap, here goes nothing.  Eli is under the hood.  Yikes.  Fortunately, I've been inside a computer before.  And now that my data was all backed up, I felt like there was little to loose by experimenting.

The adventure has taken a few hours a day for the last week.  I tried three open source operating systems, multiple video and audio card swap-outs, md5 hash matching, and repetitive reinstalls.  Things do often not work the first time.  PC-BSD did indeed function, but had poor video support and was clunky.  So I ventured into the Linux world and am posting this on my seven year old tower but now under the aegis of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution.  In order to get the latest Flash player, I did have to do some research and delve back into the terminal and type a couple of commands to install the download, but after a mild to moderate amount of flailing, I made it work. So I am back out from under the hood and happy that, beyond an inexpensive hard drive, I am still running on my old hardware.

I am sure there are many more adventures to come, but to have resurrected my machine, running faster and prettier than ever before, and for free, is making me very, very happy. 

On a tip from my fantastically intuitive coach, I purchased some traditional black leather-soled shoes today.   Together with the sleeveless undershirts (okay, they're "wifebeaters," let's just say it), I feel like I'm playing grown-up.  The middle section of the upper is deerskin.  These puppies are dope.  They are doing good things for me.

On the one hand, they connect me kinesthetically and viscerally to an old school fashion and body sense history.  Worn down by our chairs and our cars and couches, our bodies crave cushier shoes, looser cuts.  But it's perhaps largely compensatory to pain from holding that puts the structure in a position to receive continued injury.  I'm all for cushy shoes, but moving toward a more fluid gait, mobile spine, and a dynamically aware core, I can feel the truth and power of walking in the traditional leather soles with the hard heels that click and slam and peck their way through the world. 

Not as impressive on carpet, however, as there is no more clicking.  To wear them in, I bandaged up for the first several outings.  I've worn them in gradually and they are nice to have in the mix. 

New images on the home and photos pages.  It was time.  No longer looked like the dude in the photo!  More to come as I sort through.

I'm stoked on the above-numbered configuration of my favorite local jeans brand.

Low boot cut seems the thing these days.  The bells aren't as big as when I was a kid, so they feel stylish rather than ridiculous, even with sneakers.  The straight slim 514's aren't bad, either, just a little less flare but they seem to ride about as low.  The old 501's still have a place in the stable, too, though they are starting to seem archaically baggy.  While I think that looks good on some, I am done swimming in my jeans if only because it feels weird.

Hooray for denim.  I was wikipedia surfing and noted that denim means de Nimes, as in France, where it was made.  Jeans supposedly derives from Gene, or Genoa, where this kind of fabric was also made.  Dungarees from an Indian port of similar name from whence some other sailor pants originated. 

Seriously, people, when the notion of some modicum of career success stateside ever starts to seem surreal, get yourself in a Pacific Rim mindset.  Sure, our economy may collapse, but the rest of the world will want to see the plight of America depicted over and over again.  It's been a long-standing dream to have some kind of a Japanese audience and now, millions.

Monday night, I played a doctor in two different documentary reenactment pieces for Nippon TV's "World's Astonishing News."  The show has had something like six big seasons and shows in a primetime slot back in Japan.  I hear that it sometimes contains gameshow elements.  I showed up at a medical center in Daly City, and soon the lobby was filled with maybe 25 actors and crew.  We made our way up to a women's clinic and turned the extremely large waiting room into a sort of green room.  The crew repeatedly referred to this as “the base,” as in, “Okay, we are done with this shot.  You can go back to the base.”

Most of my scenes shot right away.  The crew was fast.  We sat down in position and our lines were related to us verbally.  Then one quick rehearsal and boom, takes.  It is to be dubbed in to Japanese.  Energizing and fun to work on these little pop-quiz bite-size pieces of action.  Sometimes, for something that would take a very little time to say in English, we were instructed to draw it out because they knew that the Japanese translation would take longer to say in overdub.

The director (Tommy baseball jersey, jeans, stubble) spoke only Japanese and relied on his 1st (track jacket, jeans, adidas, blue-tinted, black-rimmed glasses) to relay his instructions.  The 1st AD spoke beautiful English, very mellow, exacting guy.  The cameraman, wiry, wry, backwards cap, did some crazy swish pans between doctor and patient using a stool as a human tripod head between us.  The grip’s (jeans, baseball cap, cardigan, Chucks) white-stripe-on-black-leather belt was too loose so I loaned her my Swiss Army knife with the leather punch.  The remaining crew guy’s role was uncertain, but he was similarly styley.  Mostly 30’s, maybe director in 40’s.  They just worked together beautifully.  Kathy, the production manager, producer, representative of Duo (the local production company), something, very good communicator, kind, direct, effective.  She brought it all together.  Never did get the names of the crew.  [Raised Kathy on her cell today and she gave me the director's name:  Yuji Matsuno.  Thanks, Kathy!]

At one point, the director and AD had become separated while shooting a scene in a big file room set up like library stacks.  Unable to instruct me verbally about where he wanted me to go during the scene, the director just grabbed me and moved me around like a game piece.  Several times between takes, the director would come in (small clinic, he’s usually watching on a monitor from an adjacent room or hall), and talk to the actor directly for, say, 20 seconds.  Then the 1st would say one or two sentences in concise English.  We wrapped the location in five hours.

I hope I get to work with these people again.  I had a great time and really fed off the fast-paced verité shooting style.  No sound also makes shooting a completely different experience.  Gone are anxieties about airplanes.  No more screaming “Quiet!”  No room tone.  No slates.  No endless lavalier wrangling.  The only yelling to be had on the set was when the director called out “Arigato” (“thank you”) instead of “cut” to end each shot.  Very pleasant atmosphere. 

 

 

Full moon Friday night is the teenager flashback to prom night scene and so goes the goat.  If it comes in the mail, I'll be using Color Mark comb-in grey hair cover to complete the look.  Gonna take some creative lighting to get back to 18 years old, but I'm confident it can be done.  Heh-heh.

Losing the goatee on or before 11/1.  New photos up now.