Drag the Circles June 13, 2006
Posted by Phineas in : Irrelevant , 1 comment so farSomething non-verbal to do.
http://www.thecleverest.com/content/attractors.html
Rasterbation June 8, 2006
Posted by Phineas in : Irrelevant , add a comment
Everyone at work had fun Rasterbating today.
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/
If you have 16 sheets of paper, a printer and plenty of toner, go nuts.
Signal Noise Illusions June 6, 2006
Posted by Phineas in : Irrelevant , add a commentI confess I do not have spam 100% eradicated from my life. I quarantine it, but I still sit there and scan for false positives. I will probably eventually learn that the 1% of false positives (or less) aren’t worth the time spent hunting for them, and just start purging them ruthlessly.
But because I sit there and scan them, that means I have to devlop my own mental filters and algorithms to distinguish spam from something real. Spammers use these ingenious and often humorous random email/name/text generator tools to make each email seem unique, so I have to ask myself, “Gee, do I know a Dexter McGillicutty?” (I wish I knew a Dexter McGillicutty). Since random names will occasionally look familiar, I immediately get suspicious. Every now and then they pick a real name, or half a real name, or even a word I was just thinking, and it’s eerie. It’s hard not to believe that the occasional hits aren’t somehow special, or less random than everything else.
I rationally know this to be an illusion, and a product of the fact that I am seeking something recognizable, so when I find something recognizable, it’s like I have found what I was seeking, therefore it stands out, contributing to the feeling of relevance. But knowing this and feeling it are two different things. It’s an interesting signal-noise phenomenon, but it does piss me off that my brain is being jerked around like that.
The Cowboy Of Hope June 4, 2006
Posted by Phineas in : Music , add a commentWell, I guess I’m ready for this site to go public. It’s a little blog documenting my musical opus, i.e about a dozen or so songs. From 1983-1997, I managed to bang out a song every now and then, and coax some friends to join me in the studio to see what would happen. This stuff is long on audacity and pretension and thin on skill, but I hope that the audacity and originality pull it through for most new listeners. More than anything, it’s just a document to share with my friends (”Hey, you guys! Remember this?”). But if new people, strangers, stumble herein, well, do so at your own risk and please try not to laugh at me.
Cowboy Of Hope (Songs By David Keith)
There Are Many Here Among Us Who Feel That Life Is A Joke
Posted by Phineas in : Photos , add a comment
These are photos I took at a concert in Hattiesburg, MS, in November 1982. To get in, my friend Ron and I decided we didn’t need no stinkin’ tickets. We devised a brilliant plan to cheat Cheap Trick out of the outrageous $7. The concert was held at the coliseum on the USM campus, which during the day was an open facility for students (gyms and some campus offices). So we decided to just saunter in in the late afternoon and then hide while they locked it down in preparation for the concert. So we hid out in the toilets for many, many hours (time was cheap — $7 was hard to come by!). When we heard crowd noises we waltzed out into the main arena whistling Dixie. It was quite a while longer before it seemed like a regular concert sized crowd. But finally, we were rewarded with free rock and roll. I snapped these shots during the show. I’m sure I have more somewhere if I could only find the negatives! These are scans. I’m neither a great photographer nor a great scanning artist, so this is just for the record. After the show, we hung around even longer while the audience cleared out. When it was nearly empty, the band came out and actually helped the roadies break down the gear. Ron chatted up Robin (no pix of that, sadly) and then we finally left, getting more than our money’s worth out of that show.
Paranoid in Bahrain
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Shot of me feeling paranoid in Bahrain. From 1989. I had no specific reason to feel paranoid, but that was a hard year. I was teaching English in Saudi Arabia, and this trip over the bridge from Damman to Bahrain was meant to be like a party weekend, because you could legally drink alcohol in Bahrain. But it was no spring break either, and the girls were far from gone wild.
Ken and David, Brooklyn, 1995
Posted by Phineas in : Photos , add a comment
Just some foolin around w/ long exposure settings on my old Pentax K-1000. Nice moody image of Ken’s Brooklyn apartment in Greenpoint (from around 1995)
