Rubin Starset

I need a personal photo project again. I need some rules, some sort of challenge. Should I give 365 self portraits a go again, or try something new? If so, what?

On the second day of CONvergence, I thought it was a good idea to act like a zombie would, by falling down a flight of stairs in a fit of blood and brains. Qarly tells me that I had this grand idea well before I got rip roaring drunk, while I'm pretty sure it was more like midnight.

Any how, some point in time that night my multi-tool slipped out of my pocket. Yes, I lost my Leatherman in Minneapolis. On returning back home, I promptly rode out to REI to grab a new one (my 4th Charge Titanium) only to find that they no longer carried it. Hopping onto Amazon I found what I wanted for a fair cost and ordered it.

Today I got my smiling package, popped it open, and found this huge ass tin box. Guess the model of the Charge I like is now some sort of limited collectors item, too good for a plastic heat shrink display case. Not too sure if I want to keep the flimsy tin box or what.

Suggestions on what I could do with it?

While riding to Bart tonight from my mom's house, I noticed that the track I was listening to off of my iPod sounded like it was encoded at something under 64 kbps. Sort of like the sound of music if it was under cartoon water, for those of you who haven't heard anything encoded that low.

Any how, I noted the song in my head and skipped to the next shuffled track. Same thing, sounded super low quality and horrible. Next track, next track. Everything sounded wrong. Waiting for the train to come I reset my iPod, everything still was playing like shit. While riding to the city I went ahead and restored my iPod.

During the restore I plugged in my Sennheiser ear buds into my laptop to make sure something didn't happen to my music library. Boy was I spooked when I got a lot of the same garbage audio. I quickly sighed when I pulled the ear buds out and held my laptop to my ear, everything sounded fine.

So some how my ear buds are now translating great sounding audio into trash. I've had the pair for over a year and am happy to say I'm done with them. Just wish they kept up another two weeks.

A coworker showed me a pair of Motorola S9s. They fit pretty well on me, except the back sticks out about an inch away from my head. They sound great and put out a lot of sound, Bluetooth static wasn't noticeable when music was playing. They also double as a standard cell phone headset. I think I'll be picking one up along with an iPod Bluetooth adapter in the coming weeks. Kind of getting sick of my head not being able to turn because the cord to my ear bugs got stuck somewhere.

For a while last year I wanted to do this project where I documented every time I observed someone sucking at driving. After I had enough photos I would have either posted them some where, or hosted some impromptu bull shit art gallery showing. Ultimately the idea was this would all be ironic and hypocritical in the eyes of many of my friends, due to the gossip meme that I myself am a bad drive, which would have been the point of showing off the photos.

Any how here's the lot of what I shot with my Hiptop's shitty camera while I still had a car.

Around 5 or 6 years old now. On its last legs, or flaps. Any suggestions on wallets that aren't made out of leather?

• Slowly quitting Twitter, going to only read/post from my Hiptop (i.e. when I'm mobile). Taking Twitterific off my machine and possibly blocking twitter.com on my laptop. Why? Because Twitter makes me too connected, I accept this sort of 140 character connection as being a replacement to something more. All and all, knowing about everything my friends do all the time, in very short and non desrcript ways is making me feel like I know them less.
• Start posting in my journal more. Lay out my thoughts, create a log of what I'm doing, using that to reflect on when figuring out what I want to do in the upcoming future. As I've told some very very close friends over dinner and through the air waves tonight, "Our lives are boats floating in a vast ocean, and journals are our sails that cary us through."
• Take more photos. I might start a new 365 project, I don't know, but it fucking needs to happen.

• Actively push to hang out with my friends. Be weary of those who find it an annoyance when I push for a set time and date. Being friends means making time for those around you.
• Be present for my friends, give them my full attention, try to make a solid connection each time interaction happens. Seek these interactions out, they mean so much more then just simply running into someone.
• Social interactions are 3 friends max at any one point in time. Any more and I politely leave. Why? Parties are a garbage way of interacting with your friends. You cannot be present with them when you're thrown into a barrel of alcohol, music and random people you may or may not find interesting. It's getting to a point where some of my friends see these interactions as being a suitable fill in to actually hanging out one on one, eventually seeing parties as an easy way to hang out with others over setting time aside for one on one interactions. I.e. killing two birds with one stone doesn't work here.
• Limit interaction and dialog over AIM. Simple but very oh so fucking hard.

Palace Hotel, Market and New Montgomery.

Gone yesterday.

Low-Intensity Conflict.

Another one part of my sister's final.

Part of Auzeen's final.

I modified the Twitter placer holder page that gets displayed whenever Twitter is in its normal sate of not functional/broken. This one addresses the real problem with Twitter.

Just got this in the mail today. Don't have a good can opener at work, guess I'll just have to wait till I get home to pop it open.