arkitrave :: log

Thanks to Carl for tagging me on a meme which asks what I was doing one, five, and ten years ago.

One year ago:

One year ago my daughter was not yet four months old. My wife had gone back to work, but only 20 hours a week; my daily routine consisted of four hours playing with Naia in the morning and freelancing in the afternoon. All in all, a pretty good schedule, but one that couldn’t last forever. I began my current job in June. Projected career path: Front-end web developer.

Five years ago:

Autumn and I had been married for about eight months. We were living in a shoebox “garden level” studio apartment in an historic 1878 townhouse in the Grove Place neighborhood of Rochester, New York. Tiny, but “plenny-a-chahm”, as the east-coast realtors like to say. Autumn was finishing her Master of Music at Eastman School of Music, and I was working temp job after temp job trying to pay the rent and support the Rochester restaurant economy. Actually, by April Autumn had a job as well, and we were socking away money to buy our house in Buffalo. I was just about to start a four-year stint in architecture school. Projected career path: Architect.

Ten years ago:

Ah, 1996. The year I graduated from high school. I was a music geek, excited to get away from home (2000 miles away!) and start my undergrad in piano performance at the University of Puget Sound. I was busy being a spring-semester senior, doing as little work as possible to graduate without totally messing up my GPA and cutting a few classes here and there, mainly just so I could say that I cut a few classes in high school. I worked part-time at a fantastic Italian cafe, where I developed a taste for great food that my income has always had a hard time supporting. I was also busy with rehearsals for my part as Arvide in our school’s production of Guys and Dolls. Projected career path: Musician/college music professor.

That was a fun nostalgia trip. I’ll pass the meme-torch on to Zach, Mike, and (because he has been tagged already but still hasn’t written anything) Erik.

I just read an article that ended with: “Illegal downloading costs the movie industry 5.4 billion dollars a year.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m sick and tired of these idiotic assessments from the movie and music industries. These overinflated numbers are based on the MPAA’s (and RIAA’s) moronic assumption that everything downloaded would be purchased if it weren’t downloaded.

If a twelve-year-old downloads $500 worth of movies, that is NOT lost revenue for the movie industry. The twelve-year-old had only $10 from his allowance money, and would not have bought the movies if he hadn’t downloaded them.

I know plenty of people who have downloaded a CD from a p2p network and then gone out and purchased that CD. That is not lost revenue either.

Other people download music and decide they don’t like it. They wouldn’t have sprung for the CD if it cost $18 at the store, just to see if they liked it. That is not lost revenue.

Basic supply and demand suggests a tension between what I want to have and what I can afford to have. If music is a free good (p2p downloads), it stands to reason that I’ll “buy” a lot more than if music is expensive. So, the idea that a consumer’s purchasing actions are identical when a good is free and when a good is expensive flies in the face of basic economic principles (not to mention common sense).

I’m sure there is some lost revenue from downloaded music and movies. But to use overinflated numbers for shock value is reprehensible. And shame on the press for reporting this so irresponsibly - the media should not regurgitate the numbers the RIAA gives them; they should check things out for themselves and report as accurately as possible.

Last week I began a full-time position at Aurora New Media (the website still has the old name and logo). Aurora is a full-service software and web development company about 15 miles from Buffalo in East Aurora, New York. It’s a great company to work for, and I’ve enjoyed my first week. Their largest client is Fisher-Price, and they are also responsible for the Buffalo News’ online presence. Incidentally, the’re looking to fill several positions, including developers, network engineers and graphic designers, if anyone’s interested.

I am working as a graphic designer in the Fisher-Price group. It’s a great team of designers, and a laid-back casual work atmosphere with toys everywhere. Did you know there was a Chicken Dance Elmo? (warning: turn your sound down…) I have one on my desk. The work involves graphics and coding both HTML and CSS. It also involves an ASP.NET backend that generates lots of table markup. I have so far escaped coding any tables, but it’s going to be interesting as I try to figure out how to interact with the backend. I’m currently researching how to dynamically generate CSS using XML files and asp, if anyone has any experience or tips on this.

Obviously, discussion of work is controversial, and I will not be writing a lot about my job in this log. I am still available on a very limited basis for freelance work, provided it does not conflict with the interests of Aurora. I am disappointed to be finishing what will be my last project for Nepo Strategies; I’ve enjoyed working with Rob and his team over the past year.

Oh, and it was my birthday on the 14th. Happy birthday to me.

This blog is now powered by Wordpress. I have been talking about making the move for nine months, but time has not permitted it. Finally, the difficulty of cleaning out comment spam, the slow speed of rebuilds, and my preference for PHP over Perl have all led me to make the switch. Not to mention the cost issue—I can’t afford Ben and Mena’s new pricing structure, and I don’t want to keep using an old version of a product just because it’s free.

I’ve been using Wordpress on my thesis blog and my new daughter Naia’s photo blog.

There are a few bugs to be worked out, I’m sure, but I have categorized all my old entries and done the CSS template work. I’m excited to work with Wordpress as I move forward with this site.

Naia Joy Shepherd
30 December 2004
Seven pounds, fourteen ounces
Twenty inches long

Perfect.

I think the minimalist white screen devoid of posts is actually very descriptive of my life right now, but I’m going to break the monotony with a quick update.

I just cleaned out my comment spam. I thought I had closed comments on all the entries before my haitus, but I missed one. Of course, the spammers found it.

Haitus is to be taken loosely. I’m living at school, basically. Modeling 3D in Rhino, which I just discovered. MUCH easier than 3D modeling in AutoCAD.

I have under two weeks until I present my thesis. It will take me another six months to get out of school and get my piece of paper, but the hard part will be over soon. Of course, my thesis blog is the only thing being updated around here lately.

Baby is due in four weeks, and we now have a houseful of bibs, blankets, bassinets and bears. And one “Baby’s First Cell Phone” which WON’T SHUT UP AND RINGS EVERY TIME YOU GO NEAR IT. A gift from a well-intentioned friend who we may just never speak to again.

We’re getting the house ready for the birth, gathering supplies, and preparing the guest room for Mother-In-Law, who is coming on Christmas Day.

We’ve given Baby the schedule. Be born anytime after the 11th of December, and make sure you’re out before midnight on January 1. We’re very flexible.

Raising children: it’s all about giving them choices, right?

They’re getting sleepy

Jim Lehrer just said “Reagan” instead of “Bush”, and took about 15 seconds to list the folks sitting with Bush watching the returns on TV.

I can’t wait for late-night Rather.

Buffalo vs. Toronto

One of the great benefits of living in a bi-national region: the Canadian FOX affiliate apparently thinks Seinfeld and Frasier reruns are more important tonight than election coverage.

UPDATE: LATE-NIGHT DAN RATHER

On the race in Wisconsin:

this race has been closer than Lassie and Timmy all night long.

What we know, or what we would know if it were simply a question here of something to know, is that there has never been, never will be, a unique word, a master-name. This is why the thought of the letter a in diff?¬¨¬©rance is not the primary prescription or the prophetic annunciation of an imminent and as yet unheard-of nomination. There is nothing kerygmatic about this “word,” provided that one perceives its decapita(liza)tion. And that one puts into question the name of the name.

Derrida has died, at the age of 74, in Paris. The father of deconstruction, he invited us, in addition to being thoroughly confused by his writing, to consider binaries that we accept as fact (silence|sound, light|dark, absent|present) and not just reverse them but turn the entire system on its head. His influence in architecture can be seen in the work of Eisenman and Tschumi, and his influence in film, art, and literature is too great to even scratch the surface here.

In many ways, my thesis is a sort of deconstructivist look at silence; I’m suggesting that silence can be materially present, and functioning as silence only relative to a multiplicity of musical materials. The translation of that idea into architecture is what I’m working on right now.

So long, Derrida. The world needs more writers who make us bang our heads against the wall and THINK.

We can see the baby moving and kicking now on Her belly. This is lots of fun, and has led to the following interactive scenario (i’ll mark it up as a list to not be a total deadbeat):

1. poke
2. POKE
3. pause
4. BIG POKE
5. pause
6. little teeny kick

Of course, this scenario can be repeated with good results several times in a row. We feel only the slightest bit guilty about doing this.

Perform for us.

Now.

I am officially beginning the end.

With any luck, and quite a lot of hard work, I will be done with school this winter. My thesis is entitled “The Space Between: Silence and Light as Parallel Compositional Materials in Music and Architecture,” and will likely put most of you to sleep…I’m proposing that since we’ve discovered silence to be an element of presence rather than absence (John Cage), that we bring that idea into architecture somehow. This directly confronts Louis Kahn’s idea that silence is the nonexistent, light is present, and architecture exists between the two. Kahn is poetic, but I’d like to look at it a different way.

My thesis blog is at www.arkitrave.com/thesis, and will chronicle my work throughout the semester. I think best when I’m writing, so hopefully this will help me as I write a book and do a design project.

It’s also my first WordPress install, and so far I’m thrilled with it. Caution: I will modify the default template sometime soon, so it’s still not really up to my usual standards visually. This will change. Send me hate mail if it doesn’t.

I’ll try to stay off the thesis on this log and keep it relegated to the thesis log. Look for a new launch in the next couple days!