For the first time in 20 years, spent some of my winter vacation surfing in Morro Bay. Felt glorious to feel waves crashing over my head on the way out, to smell fresh wax rising up into my nostrils (smell has such an amazing ability to evoke personal history), to drop in on glassy faces I hadn’t seen in decades… like being back in high school, though I won’t pretend it was still second nature.

Note to self: Despite the lies I tell myself in order to not feel old, my body makes its point all-too clearly: I’m not a 17-year-old surfer boy anymore. My lower body is still in shape thanks to biking, but surfing is mostly torso strength, and mine’s gone to seed. Back, shoulders, delts and lats still aching five days later. It would take weeks or months of water hours to return to the comfort level I once had. Still, felt great to not feel like that chapter is closed forever. Small handful of Flickr pix.

For the past couple of years we’ve inscribed our xmas CDs with the words “Merry Festivus.” I knew Festivus was a half-serious, non-denominational “alternative” to Christmas derived somehow from Seinfeld, but had never read up on it. Turns out we’ve been celebrating it all wrong:

An aluminum pole is generally used in lieu of a Christmas tree or other holiday decoration, shedding holiday materialism. Those attending participate in the “Airing of Grievances” in which each person tells each and everyone else all the ways they’ve disappointed him/her over the past year, and after a Festivus dinner, the “Feats of Strength” are performed. Traditionally, Festivus is not over until the head of the household is wrestled to the floor and pinned.

Looks like we’ve got some wrasslin’ to do. Anyway, Merry Festivus everyone.

Back in the day, when I was doing a lot of paper and digital collage work, people would often ask questions like “What inspired this?” or “How do you know where to start?” I never had a good answer for these kinds of questions, because the truth was that I didn’t start anywhere in particular. I started with a scrap of something, and let it guide me to the next piece. Very little method to the madness.

Though I was often happy with the results, sometimes I felt like I was doing some kind of “fake” art. Real artists are inspired from the start, not noodlers, I thought. I appreciate this quote from film critic Roger Ebert: “The muse never shows up at the beginning.” You have to start doing something and trust the muse will follow, not the other way ’round.” On the other hand, total freedom isn’t necessarily a good thing for the artist either. Federico Fellini:

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.”

There’s got to be a germ of something at the beginning, and artists use various techniques to find that seed, to make the muse come to them. For me, that technique often amounted to finding a particular scrap of paper that told the beginning of a visual story, or two pieces of paper that fit together in some unexpected and synergetic way. Sometimes the hardest part was trying to get that initial spark to take light. Once it happened, often the whole collage would fall into place, almost build itself.

Man, I miss that feeling.

nature.com: Humans may not have as many smell receptor genes as dogs, but we do have much bigger brains — and we can use them to become almost as good at tracking scents as dogs can. All it takes is practice.

… although we have fewer odour receptors than other animals, we may compensate for this with an improved ability to analyse scent information with our large brains. We may just seem worse at tracking scents because we don’t practice this skill from birth, the way that dogs do … in a few training sets, humans can achieve something that other animals spend their life being trained to do.

But while our analytic ability may be superior, we still don’t have the same ability to pick up and identify specific scents, like those of a particular person, traces of drugs, or explosives. With the possible exception of the protagonist in Patrick Suskind’s Parfum.

Thanks baald

We’re not big fans of home color printing. Inks drying out, jets clogged, paper jams, fiddling with driver settings for custom print sizes, expensive color paper, getting anything but standard size paper to go through the printer properly… it’s a perpetual pain in the neck.

A couple years ago we ditched our home color printers, keeping only a b/w laser, and started using online services for color photos. We’ve tried iPhoto/Ofoto (both use Kodak printing), Snapfish, and Adorama, and have had superior results and consistency from Adorama. Prints are affordable, on your doorstep a couple days later, and always look great. Why mess around with this stuff at home when you can use someone else’s $.5 million printer? But with mail order, you lose the instant gratification factor.

This gap is bridged by the relationship many online print houses have with Walgreens and other stores. Order your prints online, pick them up at the drugstore an hour later. This system worked out marvelously for us last year, when we shot and Photoshopped our Christmas card, uploaded it to Snapfish, chose a card template, and picked up our cards all in under an hour. Magic.

Adorama doesn’t offer greeting card print options, so it was back to Snapfish+Walgreens for 2006. Things didn’t go so well this year, to say the least. Web site overloaded, timing out on us throughout the order process. Four hour estimate for pickup, rather than one hour. When I opened the box, turned out pretty much everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Our cards were interleaved with another family’s. Once I got that sorted out, found the photograph we had spent half an hour tweaking in Photoshop way too dark, detail-free, and very, very green.

The employee claimed he could print them again, but could not edit or adjust them at all. But he did have a brilliant idea: He was willing to scan the bad image and try to adjust it for me. Scan the bad image? Ever heard of GIGO buddy? I declined.

Finally talked to another employee, who showed me that not only was it possible to edit the print, but allowed me to use the software built into the big kahuna printer myself. But whoa – once I got my hands on it, realized that the problem was not easily solvable. Turns out Snapfish composites your photo into the card template on their end, then sends a fully rendered image to your local Walgreen’s. Therefore, we had no way to adjust the brightness or color balance of the image independently of the card template. And the software had no selection tools to let you tweak the image area separately from the template area. All or nothing, baby.

Got things looking as good as possible, then sent a test print. Promised 10 minutes, took 30. The test print was lighter, but still horrendously green. The monitor on the printer bore little resemblance to images pooting out the other end of the printer. Tweaked it a second time, bringing the green WAY down, and waited another 15 minutes for a test print. This time the color was OK, but everything had gone fuzzy. So now, instead of fiddling with a home color printer all day, I was getting frustrated in the back room of a Walgreens. Ho ho ho. Canceled the order.

But wait, there’s more. I had also uploaded and sent the cover for this year’s Christmas CD. Needed a 5″x5″ result, so sent my finished 5″x5″ through Snapfish to Walgreens, ordering 5″x7″ prints. Figured there would just be black or white vertical bars on the sides I’d trim with our cutter. What came out of the package was a disaster. Somewhere along the line, a human had apparently intervened, found the square image, not known what to do with it, and rotated it 90 degrees. Result – words on the cover sliced right down the middle, image off-center and larger than intended. Unusable garbage. Finally resolve this by generating a full 5×7 rectangle with my black bars already built in. No chance for ambiguity, and the 2nd run worked out fine.

The system worked so well last year, but everything went to hell this year. As if dealing with one giant faceless corporation isn’t hard enough, this is what happens when you deal with two of them at once. No hand knows what the other is doing, and your only interface is with unskilled employees. Next year will be better. Back to the drawing board. Suggestions welcome.

c|net has a small slideshow demonstrating coming technology to pull large cargo ships along with giant kites, reducing fuel consumption. Not quite a return to the days of great sailing ships, but a nod. Since it’s not quite sailing, it will only work when traveling roughly in the direction of the wind, but it still makes me happy to see big industry harnessing nature and taking enviro steps with zero-impact methods.