sweet, sweet nectar

Chalk this one up for the record books: October 25, 2005, 7:30 p.m.

Hot Hot Heat (one of my all-time favorite bands) opens for Weezer (so sweet) and Foo Fighters (rock out!) at the Memrial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon (yeah, that's my hometown). Let me tell you, life doesn't get much better than this. Now, being on the floor and being able to really see them or being that lucky guy who happened to be sitting in the seat next to where Dave decided to sit down to battle Chris with the wicked guitar licks, or to be one of those lucky fans that were just wandering around after Weezer was apparently finished with their set and being right next to the mini-stage behind the sound booth where Rivers played "Island in the Sun"; those are all possible ways to have improved life. Considering that I'm broke and got the best seats I could afford, this concert was totally worth it. And as my roommate said as we were leaving, "I don't care how much it costs; next time, we're gonna be on the floor!" I totally wish that Hot Hot Heat had played a longer set, because, let's face it, I love them! They rock my socks off and I love being barefoot.

Of course, having this be a Tuesday night, and going to college in Walla Walla, WA (which means: 4 hours away) isn't very helpful when trying to demonstrate the life-enhancing experience that I make this out to be. Ditching work and class and traveling for 4 hours with nothing but anticipation is great. Getting out of the concert at 11:15, waiting for the MAX for half an hour, and not getting out of town until 12:30 in the morning: not so great. Driving the entire return trip while your girlfriend and roommate sleep, nearly zonking out a few times yourself, getting back at 4 in the morning, and having solid classes from 8-noon, work from noon-1, and then class again from 2-3 blows fatty-McChunks. However, I will say, it was all totally worth it!

   

bottle caps

Our department's office (Technology Office) has free candy and other snacks. I grabbed a bag of Cheez-It crackers and a package of Wonka Bottle Caps after my "animation" class. I propped that word up in between quotes to emphasize the ridiculousness of the actual class. Technically it's called Web Design: Animation, and is designed to deal mostly with Flash. However, four weeks into the ten-week long quarter we're dealing with thaumatropes, flipbooks, and stop-animation lego movies. This is all well and good as far as an Intro to Animation course would go, but when one wants specifically to learn Flash and how to design elegant and useful "animations" for the web, drawing stick figures on post-it notes is just not going to cut it. Back to my original criticism, I greatly appreciate the work that Cheez-It has accomplished. Those crackers are delicious. However, Wonka has a long way to go with their Bottle Caps. I thought they were supposed to be hard-candy versions of popular sodas; am I missing something? Each new cap I tasted perpetually reminded me of the scent of those fancy bathroom soaps that women feel the need to put on display. My friend Dennis just handed me an orange Runt. Now that's good candy!

intro to video

Big concert coming up. I'm excited. Hot Hot Heat opening for Weezer and Foo Fighters…Oh, you know it's gonna be good! I just hope my girlfriend starts feeling better. She's really tired and stressed out; not doing so hot. She's still looking so hot, but I just need to find a way to help her; to let her know that she's important—to me as well as others.

I'm going to shoot some footage for a continuity piece that I'll have to edit together for my Intro to Video class. My idea is to have an establishing shot of an intersection that's close to town where we'll be looking down a road that converges with another road which ends at a stop sign. A car will come into view, slowly stop at the sign and then we'll get a new view, looking straight on the car, of the driver. He/She'll be trying to decide which way he/she should go and then he/she'll pull out a map and attempt to decipher where he/she is in relation to the hundreds of dots and lines strewn across the map. Then the driver will get frustrated, start trying to fold the map, open the door of the car, step out with the map in hand, thrash the map around, and finally crumple it up and toss it over his/her shoulder and over the car. Then the driver will stick out his/her hand, reach up toward their mouth, pull that "golfers move" where they test the wind and then the driver will formulate a plan of attack on which way to go based off of imagined evidence. The driver will get back in the car, signal to the left, start moving that direction, change his/her mind, slam on the brakes, reverse the car, and go the other direction and out of the frame. All I need now is a car, a driver, a camera, a tripod, and some time. Hopefully I can get to it this afternoon.
We'll see.

fresh start

After being a passive member at Xanga and having an account with MySpace, being on blogspot.com just feels right. It seems so much easier for me to have full control of the backend of this blog site that I just tingle with excitement. However, I cannot manage to get the posting of blogs to work in Camino on a Mac computer. I hope this site will give me really good ideas for my senior project. The project I have chosen is way outside my comfort box, which is really good. However, it will take me quite a bit of time to get used to XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, etc. in developing this project. But, in the end, I think that all of the students in the graphic design, photography, new media, and art majors will really benefit from it and will find it a useful tool for getting their portfolios and names inside corporate doors (if they so choose).

Well, that's it for this amazing post.
More later.
~peace~