Cookies always taste better after turning in application packets! Its official. My RIT packet is in. Now I can really start to focus on the next quarter and teaching.
In other news I continue to be amazed by my megapixel camera phone. The last few pictures have come directly off of that.
I have to confess to often being in complete awe of imaging technology. Joel Snyder, my photo theory professor at Chicago, once remarked that no matter how many times he’s seen it, he’s still amazed watching the latent image emerge on exposed photographic paper that is placed in developer. Having spent a bit of time in a darkroom, I understand that uncanny reaction.
I often experience a similar feeling when I watch a press at work. Such was the case when I stopped by RIT’s Printing Applications Lab today to watch a class project being run on the Goss Web Press. It’s strangely breathtaking to observe an image appear, color-by-color, on a web of paper flowing at breakneck speeds through a press. Faster than the eye can see, for this press operates at a speed of multiple feet per second, each layer of ink — black, cyan, magenta, yellow — is applied, in perfect registration, as the paper flows from tower to tower. The paper then disappears into a drying unit and then emerges and is immediately folded and cut.
The press itself is far to large for me to take a picture of. I did manage these two shots using my cellphone. The first is of the web passing out of the magenta tower (no relation to Stephen King’s famed Dark Tower
This is a picture of me and my buddy Quiver. He’s an American kestrel Falcon, the smallest Falcon in North America. This past Saturday, Quiver, Drea and I were out meeting visiting falcon watchers in town to meet for a mini convention and watch the Kodak Falcons.
This is the first time I’ve ever held a bird. Drea has been volunteering for a number of months with Wild Wings Inc. a local non profit group that does raptor educational shows. That’s raptor as in bird of prey, not killer dinosaurs.
Quiver was supposed to spend Saturday on a perch. But he prefers to be held. And the next thing I knew, Wild Wing’s director asked me if I’d do the honors. Hopefully this picture in no way portrays how afraid I was of breaking the bird.
For the most part he seemed happy. The closest he got to a commentary on handling skills was when he pooped on my hand.
Rochester has been hit by an ice storm. This morning I needed to break through a layer of ice to get into my car. There are downed trees and powerlines all over the place. However, this doesn’t even compare to the Great Ice Storm of 1991. That one apparently decimated the region. Folks were without power for over a week in most places as Julia can attest to. So this really isn’t anything to complain about.
In other news, men from the future are here and investing!
busy clippers… Things are just flying by right now. Work has been hectic, but great. (side note: have you ever noticed that I like to write that something’s been crazy, then immediately follow it up with “but good” or “but great.” Sigh, it’s a sign of lazy writing I guess). Learning content for kodak.com keeps progressing.
As for the school, things are really shaping up. The ceiling is down, the lights are up and the floor has been redone. It’s looking beautiful. There’s still a ways to go though and only two weekends left to the festival and grand opening. That’s pretty scary!
Speaking of the school I spent most of last night updating the website. I now remember how much I hate and love web design. I’m still struggling with table rendering across different browsers. IE for some reason doesn’t want to constrain the navigation tables to the pixel widths I specified and I can’t figure out why…. Still, check it out at renMartialArts.com.
Things for the third annual Chinese, Indonesian and Filipino Martial Arts Festival are going great. We have a great line up this year and it should be two great days. Now if things would go smoothly for the Exact Theatre Project I’d be totally rockin’ and rolling. If anyone knows anyone willing to spot a couple thousand dollars to a struggling non profit, please let me know.
Photo de jour
