slice of life today...which i rarely do

- forgot to close the garage door last nite, which i almost never do, and a raccoon tore the crap out of my garage, spreading trash and various garage things everywhere.

- got up extra early because the damn trashman keeps coming earlier every week, and wow does it smell when it goes for two weeks in this heat, but if i put out the cans out the nite before, the previously mentioned animals spread the trash all over my front yard, and just barely made it, the big blue truck almost finished next door, a full 15 minutes earlier than last week, something that never used to happen much.

- emailed the two pediatric logos ideas on the left, something i don't get to design too often anymore, to the client who liked them, especially the one on the bottom, and sent them an invoice today too.

- played some guitar, which i don't do nearly as often as i used to, and with the double drop tuning that i rarely use, my voice didn't sound too bad.

- took the motorcycle to the old corporate office, which i rarely go to anymore, because my damn car is still being fixed 3 weeks after some drunk decided that passing me on the highway doing 80mph wasn't fun enough and decided to push in my passenger door instead, where i hand delivered a letter to a vice president (ok his secretary) on how i'd like be a corporate trainer like he was.

- drove said motorcycle like a bat out of hell, which i normally don't do, which is also about how hot it was today wearing a long sleeve button down, which i rarely don anymore, and was almost late for another meeting.

- received nice headshots, two emails and a phone call from an actress who wants to be part of my 48hour film team, which hasn't happen since mary's dream, the storylines of which are coming along nicely btw, especially the ones about the lie-pod, the japanese head, and the couple that falls in love while riding a ferry to work every morning, those being separate ideas of course.

- received a $100 gift certificate in the mail to a fancy restaurant from a former client, which rarely happens anymore since my former clients are dropping like flies this year, see wanting to be a corporate trainer above, but who i did some personal work for 6 months ago, designing his parents 50th wedding anniversary invitation, that i totally forgot about.

- my aches and pains from a slightly overzealous workout, which i rarely do, two days ago, were pretty much gone today, as was as the red wine full body hangover from the most excellent sicilian gourmet club foodfest.

- all in all, not a bad day, which have been a bit rare of late.

posted by bluematrix at 05/30/06 21:44 | link | comments (2)

The Thursday Thought...

If it makes you happy...then why the hell are you so sad?

posted by bluematrix at 05/25/06 09:49 | link | comments (1)

i have given myself a small creative task. a weekend quest. a collaborative endeavor. on a whim i entered, and just barely got in to a national contest that is coming to my town whereupon i will be producing a short film beginning on june 9. it's called the 48 hour film project. the gist of it is that you have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a film up to 7 minutes in length.

the tricky part is that you don't know what genre you will have to work with until 15 minutes before the start of the project. so if you have this great idea for a spy flick and you draw the musical genre - you're hosed. also they make everyone use one line dialogue and one prop that they hand out right before you begin.

all the films will be shown at the fancy shmancy tivoli theatre here, and the winner gets an HD camera and goes on to represent their city in the national competition. while i've done music videos, a multimedia rock opera, and some corporate videos, i've never done a 'film'.

i'm having my first meeting this thursday to meet some of the volunteers i've contacted who signed up to help on the 48 hour website, and to discuss our game plan which is basically to have at least a kernel of an idea for all 15 genres so i'm not totally starting from scratch come genre picking night. should be an interesting experiment in creativity on the fly - and in sleep deprivation. give me a coupla 4 packs of red bull and bring it on.

posted by bluematrix at 05/22/06 14:49 | link | comments (4)

The Thursday Thought...

Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.

posted by bluematrix at 05/18/06 10:13 | link | comments

for those of you who don't enjoy writing, you're going to want to skip this entry. but since i've been writing more creative shtuff lately, i'm enjoying getting some tips from the pros. and since most of the people that read my blog, write in their own, i thought i'd share a couple of gems i picked up from stephen king's 'on writing'. not that i'm a big king fan, but the guy does know how to write - and to get read.

'Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.

I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty. If you find instruction manuals majestic, I guess it does.

How about this: "My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun." Oh, man-who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea-sweeter and more forceful, as well-might be this: "My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I'll never forget it."

You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it's broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void.

The other piece of advice I want to give you is this: The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They're the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. With one exception: dialogue attribution. Just to make sure we all know what we're talking about, examine these three sentences:

"Put it down!" she shouted.
"Give it back," he pleaded,"it's mine."
"Don't be such a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said.

In these sentences, 'shouted', 'pleaded', and 'said' are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions:

"Put it down!" she shouted menacingly.
"Give it back," he pleaded abjectly, "it's mine."
"Don't be such a fool, Jekyll," Utterson said contemptuously.

The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones. Some writers try to evade the no-adverb rule by shooting the attribution full of steroids. The result is familiar to any reader of pulp fiction.

"Put down the gun, Utterson!" Jekyll grated.
"Never stop kissing me!" Shayna gasped.
"You damned tease!" Bill jerked out.

Don't do these things. Please oh please. The best form of dialogue attribution is 'said' as in 'he said', 'she said'.

posted by bluematrix at 05/15/06 21:08 | link | comments (1)

The Thursday Thought...

A girl today in Soweto, South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read.

posted by bluematrix at 05/11/06 10:02 | link | comments (1)

i've been working on a screenplay about a software program that becomes sentient, and my research keeps leading me to examine my own consciousness. and the more i look, the more interesting it gets.

but it's a slippery subject - even defining what a conscious mind is is hard. one place to start with is to contrast consciousness with the unconscious state (sleep itself being a subject rich in mystery and complexity - see my entry on 2/14/04) which we recognize as a body at rest and the mind mostly turned off to outside stimuli. but since most most animals have conscious and unconscious states, i guess what i'm really interested in is self-consciousness, a higher and more reflective state in which we formally recognize our own consciousness.

all of our fellow animals, while they are awake, use their senses to bring information about the world around them into their brain for processing. we can even determine different 'emotional' states in many of the higher animals - a frightened puppy, a cat purring with contentment. so just being awake and being able to experience emotional states is not enough to judged 'self-aware'. maybe it's just degrees of processing complexity that allows us to be aware of our selves specifically as 'tim' or 'tom' versus 'a cat' or 'a dog'.

even before we open our eyes in the morning, our cpu/brain, bounces quickly from one thought to the next, lingering here, then shooting off there, like a pinball. some thoughts trigger physical reactions, others are somehow deemed worthy enough to be preserved into long term memory banks, but most are just vapid bubbles in the ever moving stream of consciousness, stepping stones that are tenuously, but definitely connected in some way to either the previous thought, or to a physical stimuli that occurred right at that time.

a meditation technique i've had some success with is concentrating on examining the individual bubbles in this stream of conscious thoughts. i am always surprised with the insight it gives into the workings of my mind. first you find a quiet place, with as little distractions as possible. then relax yourself with a few deep breaths. i find i usually have to overcome the inner critic who instantly brings to my attention how silly the whole idea is, but, following thru on courses of action that lead to positive exploration has become more important to me. especially as the fruits of these explorations enrich my understanding of myself and my world. so after a few breaths, i close my eyes and in the darkness i try to concentrate on each thought as it comes in. i try to not make judgment on any them, nor to immediately get rid of one just to get to the next one. i take time to calmly note each one individually, then gently let it go of it and before calming reaching for the next one in the stream. it's also important not to delve into any one of them too deeply - just note the thought and move on. in the beginning they are usually reactions to external conditions like a bird chirping, or an itch on my leg. and the inner critic often speaks up, still trying to throw water on my efforts. but once the physical conditions are duly noted, lightly examined and released, my mind becomes much more aware of the stream itself and i am often surprised with the insights i find.

though the act of writing it down drastically slows both the speed and the direction of the stream, below is a crude re-creation of a recent attempt, and shows the stepping stone effect nicely...

" closing my eyes feels good as i'm tired - don't be a wuss, keep concentrating - 'concentrating' is a weird word - oingo boingo's weird science was a good addition to that new playlist i made this morning - i'm spending too much time on music lately - i wish i had more work - but i had a good first quarter - this meditation is not about worrying about work again - no, but it is a thought and i am examining it - but it's an obsessive thought lately - but obsessing is not something i want right now, i have noted the obsession and am moving on, byebye - nice redirection self - a breeze has picked up, i feel it on the hairs on my arm - remember the breeze when you were running yesterday...

this could go on and on as long as i am awake, and does actually, its just that i'm not conscious of it. but here's the cool part. in becoming 'self' conscious and aware of the stream, we can begin to not only observe the stream of our thoughts, but also recognize unhealthy patterns, which can then lead to actually altering the disturbances to the flow of daily lives.

posted by bluematrix at 05/07/06 11:03 | link | comments

i've trained a few pets in my day. growing up, my truest companion was 'heidi', a big german shepherd, and that dog (like the breed in general) was smart. my uncle, a trainer, taught his giant german shepherd, max, to answer the phone (the caller would say who they wanted and max would go fetch the person) and could go to the person in the room with glasses on.

cats are famously independent, but i trained sigmund, a black and white cat i had for a long time, to come when i called it. but i never had any luck with smaller animals. 'crash' the party hamster i had in college wasn't real smart. neither was 'foxy' the box turtle, but both were good partiers. 'wild hare' the boa constrictor and 'boris' the tarantula later in college were both not very pet-like to begin with and seemed unlikely to be trained to do anything just to amuse its silly human owners. though watching them eat was highly entertaining. boris was a paper weight most of the time, but in late summer and early fall he would quickly pounce on just about any insect in you put in his cage, breaking it half, sucking some of the juice out, then quickly wrapping it in silk before placing it in the snack corner of his terrarium.

which is why i was so impressed with what i read this weekend about 'albert' the worlds smartest goldfish who has learned to fetch, swim thru hoops, and play soccer. dean pomerleau, a software engineer, was feeling a bit guilty because his daughter wanted a puppy and he brought home albert instead. so he decided to try out some dog training techniques on said fish, built a food delivery system (food being the great motivator in all animal training). within weeks albert was scoring tiny goals.

building on his fishy success, dean has established the first fish-training academy, written an ebook on piscine education, and is thinking of starting a world cup soccer tourney for fish. i'll bet the finland team will do well.

posted by bluematrix at 05/01/06 10:05 | link | comments (2)