Hey, I said it was stupid.

At first, his replies were very short, but he really settled in, and went for it after a few minutes.  He caught up with how the other party was doing.  They seemed to be doing alright.

Then he started talking politics.  The Cell Phone Shitter is amazed at how close the race is, and thinks that if the Dems would have gone with someone completely beneign, they would have this one cinched.  He also thinks they’re just spouting whatever rhetoric necessary to get elected.  As if this was not true of their opposition.  He doesn’t really support McCain, but the Shit Chatter is afraid of a Democrat Congress being unchecked with a Democrat in office.

Whether I agree with his politics or not– I dont– What a shit head.

(Eric at the organ.  Photo by Adam Flaherty and his InternetPhone.)

Some time back in July, my longtime friend, Tim Collins, asked me if I wanted to record keyboards with his band, “The Sea Captains.”  If he could provide the rides to and from the Manchester Airport, I’d be there and be square.

I flew up on Wednesday night, hopped in Tim’s pickup truck for a two-hour drive to Portland, Maine, and was greeted at Tim’s one bedroom apartment by band co-founder Adam Flaherty and two other band members, Zach and Marty.  It was a clean-cut white guy convention.  We had a night cap beer, a quick Mario Kart session, and went to sleep.  Rock and roll!

We woke up early, ate some cereal, and drove to meet John Wyman, the producer, at his recording studio.  It’s a lone white house on a country road, with sound-proofed, boarded-up windows.  He moved in not long ago, and everything was custom built to his specifications.

The first order of the day was to listen to what had already been done.  He played three tracks for us: two rock songs and a Christmas song.  Everything was done save for the keys, some background vocals, and various little additional parts.  The songs sounded great.  We discussed what I’d be doing, and went right to work.

(Similar to the keyboard at John’s studio.  Photo by Daniel Spils.)

We started on the X-mas song, since it was the most straight forward.  I sat at the Rhodes electric keyboard in the recording room, while John and the band sat in the studio.  I could hear them through the headphones, and they could hear everything I said and played. I started out playing along with the whole song, mistakes and all.  When they got a feel for what I was doing, we broke the song into little sections, and recorded each one.  I got caught up here and it, but it went smoothly enough.

In my head, this is what they were saying in the studio:

Zach: Who is this hack?

Marty: This is garbage.  We’re wasting our time.

Tim: I thought he’d be at least mediocre, but this is just plain garbage.

Adam: This is mostly Tim’s fault.

Zach: Just hearing this makes me want to quit the band for good.

As far as I know, it wasn’t like that, unless they’re really good liars.

We listened to the song with the keys.  The band liked it.  I was relieved.  I also felt like a rock and roll super god.

We moved on to a rock and roll song.  I suggested we break out the organ.  John’s organ is this really old double-stacked thing, which hooks up to this person-sized speaker cabinet.  I like playing loud instruments, so this was a lot of fun.  I’ve never really played an organ in any serious manner before, so John and the band had to coach me towards the ’sound’ they wanted.  This song took me a little longer, but they got what they wanted.  After the organ track was done, I layed down a synth track to double what the guitar was doing in the verse.

The rest of the day was spent recording backup vocals, sleigh bells, a xylophone, guitar.  A girl came by, and recorded some beautiful sounding violin for the Chrismas song.

At the end of the session, we all went into the booth, and recorded group backup vocals and hand-claps.  That was a blast.  Amazing.  So much fun!

Then, in a flash, we went home, got a couple hours of sleep, drove back to the airport, I flew home, got a shower, and went to work.  My ‘Rock and Roller For a Day’ experience was over, and I was back to my working shlub life.

A Message to The Sea Captains: If you ever play a live show, where a song can be played in about fifty takes, I’ll be your piano man.

A dangerous act:
Google Image ‘toe‘ at work.
Alt-F4 really fast.

The place is on 10th and Arch in Chinatown, right near “Hour Lab Pretty Picture Photo,” the photo processing place with the one of the worst designed signs in the city.

It was my turn for Breakfast Friday at work this morning.  And, boy, was I late.  On my way from my house to South Square, I dashed in front of a stopped bus.  I caught eyes with the bus driver:  Pink hair, big smile.  I stopped.  She LAAAUUUGHED and so I did.

“YOU STILL RUNNIN’!!”

I waved goodbye and sped off.

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I loved it.

Better than the hype.

The car was stopped in front of the intersection.  The guy waved me in, “Come on, we can still catch it.”  Thoughts of all the terrible things that happen to people in movies when they get in strangers’ cars raced through my head.  But he looked nice enough.  I got in, and the chase was on.  “I used to live at 24th and Grey’s Ferry.  That happened to me all the time.”  We exchanged pleasantries and nose laughs.  It didn’t take much to catch up to the bus.  I saw my chance.  We shook hands, and I opened the door– the bus drove off again.  I got back in really quickly, and he caught up once again, “If this light is red, I can catch it.”  It was.  “See ya!”  I threw open the door.  The light turned green.

I felt my spikes dig into the track, the bang of the slamming door a starter’s pistol.  I burst out of the blocks, a track-star reborn.  The bus accelerated, but so did I.  Reaching the back, I pounded my fist against a window. I rocketed past the bus as it slowed to a stop, turned, then walked up the steps.

The driver, with a big smile and an explosion of pink hair, burst into laughter.  “You was faster than the bus!  Oh my gawd, I can’t believe that!  You was flyin’!”  The passengers joined in, laughing, commenting, “You get on this bus, you just gunna be late!  Might as well run the rest of the way!”  I was laughing, “I caught ya!”

I sat down near the back, and made tiny talk (it’s even smaller than small talk) with the people on the bus.  We didn’t get into politics or energy policies.  It was mostly about me being fast.  The bus driver kept laughing to herself, which made me laugh back.

When we got to 9th Street, the bus was mostly empty.  I walked up to the front for my stop.  “You made my morning, my whole day, that was amazing!  All of the passengers loved you, they was all talking about it the whole time.”  On my way out I joked, “You wanna race?”  She said, “You’d probably win.”  I waved goodbye and have a nice day.  She stuck her head out the side window, “I love you, that was so great!”

Besides sweating this early in the morning in work clothes, it’s not a bad way to start the day.

First, I made a rub out of salt, pepper, baking soda (it crisps the skin, by drawing out moisture), paprika, cumin, cardamom, coriander, brown sugar, and cayenne. The chicken sat in the fridge for an hour and a half while I prepared the grill. Remember how my grill was stolen? I got a new (used) one from some Penn girl via Craigslist. It’s a lot crappier than the one I had, but it does the job. It was set up in standard-issue indirect cooking fashion, with hardwood charcoal to either side, and a water-filled drip pan in the middle.

The chicken took about five hours to reach the proper temperature. The skin was crispy, the meat was tender, the rub tasted great. When I carved the legs, I nearly didn’t need to use the knife. The connective tissue had practically melted in the slow and low cooking.

This is the best whole chicken I’ve made all year. Juan and I ate it outside, with our hands. Talk about ‘Speed Eaters.’ We killed it. Delicious, moist, amazing, great, adjective, tender, falling off the bone, gaaaaaaahhhhhh.

I’m a new fan of Girl Talk [wikipedia] the mash-up musician who’s album ‘Feed the Animals‘ [wikipedia] is a pop culture music bomb for your ears. And it’s free for download here. He appropriates music from across all generations and chops it up into dance anthems for those lacking an attention-span.

Go get the album and dance your face off.

I think I found my Friday Night Anthem for the next month or two.

We just upgraded computers and software at work.  We’re now running these beastly 8 core, 8GB RAM machines with Max Design 2009.  I ran into some problems during the switch from Max 9 though.

The other night, I was stuck at work, trying to get these files ready to render.  At around midnight, a funny (terrible) thing happened.  Everytime I sent the file out to Backburner, it would crash.  I went into troubleshooting mode: Saving As, stripping the file down to nothing (sexy), and building it back up from there.  It turned out that ANY camera– VRayPhysicalCamera, a Max default Camera– would crash the file on Backburner.  Oddly, it rendered fine with a single computer.

I searched the Google Machine to find that a couple other people had posted about this as well.  But there was little help to be found.  I discovered the answer after my night of sleep, dreams of 3D teapots lingering in my head.  I had spent three hours trying to fix the problem in vain.  Autodesk has issued a Service Pack (SP1).  Install it, and the problem goes away.  Simple!

I hope this post finds some late-night Googlers racing towards their own deadlines.  Good luck.

Thanks for taking my call today, I appreciate you suing FedEx instead of the competition. If you have a question or you notice your need to ship going up, fell free to call me, I am in the office from 7:30 till 4 everyday.

They’re so gracious for a company that’s being sued. Tom Hanks from ‘Castaway’ would have given this guy a promotion.

I came back home to find green beans growing on my green bean plant that I started from seeds.  Across the back yard, another story unfolded to kill my excitement.

My grill is gone.  I just bought it.  And someone stole it.  I don’t picture backyard thieves being big charcoal grillers.  It takes time, money, and work to successfully light and use a charcoal grill, and stealing is the easy way out.  I hope the person who stole my grill burns themselves terribly using it.

The whole process was only a few days from beginning to end. That process is documented in the form of a the little video below.

Read about them at Pitchfork,  or listen at their MySpace page.

Here’s an easy way to use Google Maps, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max to generate a pretty good site plan for architectural visualization.

First, find your site in Google Maps. I’ll pick a random part of Philadelphia. Take a screen shot, using the ‘Print Screen / SysRq” button on your keyboard, which is above the number pad. Do you really not know how to take a screen shot? And you’re doing visualization work? Come on, now.

In Photoshop, make a new document, and paste the screenshot in there. Crop it.

Tyler, Chris, and Tom can see their house from here! They aren’t going to read this!

Next, in Photoshop, do this: Select –> Color Range.

Use the eye dropper to select the areas where houses should be. Then click the Eyedropper + (Plus) tool in the Color Range dialog, and do the grass area and parts like that dark grey on the bottom right side of my image.

Manually fix up any gross areas.

Notice how poorly that’s selected. Fix that.

a) Click the ‘Paths’ tab. (It’s in the same box as your Layers.) b) Make a work path from selection.

You’ll notice, it’s imperfect.  Try some different tolerances with your Make Work Path.  Undo your previous click, then this time when you click the Make Work Path button (b), hold down the “ALT” key at the same time.  Try a tolerance of 2.  You can try anywhere from .05 to 10.

From the Photoshop Help Center:

Tolerance values can range from 0.5 to 10 pixels and determine how sensitive the Make Work Path command is to slight changes in the selection shape. The higher the tolerance value, the fewer the anchor points used to draw the path and the smoother the path. If the path is used as a clipping path and you have problems printing the image, use a higher tolerance value.

Okay, you have your path.  Time to get it out of Photoshop and into 3D Studio Max.

In Photoshop.  File –> Export –> Paths to Illustrator.  Save your .ai file.

In Max.  File –> Import –> Select your file (.ai at the bottom!) –> Merge Objects with Current Scene –> Single Object

The simplest thing to do right now would be to go to put an Extrude Modifier on this, and call it a day.  We might as well complicate it a bit.  Let’s make this prettier.

Step 1: Clean up.

There are some stray vertices.  Select ‘Vertex’ under your Editable Spline.  Delete the little guys that are just floating around randomly.

Step 2: Resize.

You might want this to actually be to scale.  If you know the size of one of the blocks, or an area on the map from point to point, make a box that size, and scale the map up to meet it.  What I did was much more clever than that.  I went to Google Maps, right clicked on one point –> Directions from here.  Then on another point –> Directions to here.  It was 0.2 miles.  A little basic math reveals that’s 1056 feet.  I made a box that size, and scaled my map up to match it.  Nice!

Now go to the Tools in Max, and do a Reset XForm.

Collapse your stack to an Editable Spline.  Now you have a properly scaled site map.

Step 3: Sidewalks & Grass.

In these instructions, I’m assuming you know how to use Max reasonably well.  This stuff is too basic to provide a million little thumbnails.  If you don’t get something here, it’s definately in the Max manual.

Add an Extrude modifier to your Editable spline, the height of a curb, about 5″.

Add an Edit Poly modifier.  Select the Polygon Sub-object.

(We’re in the Edit Poly options now…)

Down in the Polygon Properties, Do a Select ID for 1.  That should grab all of the top polygons of your map.  If it doesn’t, select one of the top polygons and identify it’s ID.  Select that ID.

Under Edit Polygons, do an Inset.  My sidewalks are 5′ wide.  I don’t know if that’s right, but I’m sticking to it.

If you want to differentiate the height of your grass from the sidewalk, Extrude it either down or up, depending on your preference.

Step 4: Materials.

You need to set your Material IDs for a Multi/Sub-Object material.  In your Edit Poly modifier, under Polygon Properties…

(Make sure that ‘Clear Selection’ is checked.)

Select ID 1.  It should select your Grass and Sidewalk.  Click Shrink.  Now, only your Grass is selected.  Set that as Material 5, which is an empty material ID.

Select ID 1 again.  Notice how the sides of your sidewalk aren’t in that ID?  Click one of those sides.  Mine are ID 3.  Select ID 3, and make it ID 1.

Now, when you Select ID 1, the whole sidewalk should be in that ID.

Click a polygon on the bottom part of the sidewalk.  Mine are Material ID 2.  Select ID 2.

Delete these Polygons, you’ll never see them.  They’re a waste of resources.

At this point, I would consolidate my materials to just ID 1 and ID 2.  If you’ve come this far, you can do this.

In your material editor, assign a Multi/Sub-Object with 2 Materials to your site plan.  Throw on your favorite concrete and grass materials.

That’s it.  Put down a ground plane, map it with asphalt for a road.  Slammo, instant site plan.  Well, not instant, but close enough.

Watch out, the video’s loud.

The bus driver who wrote this sign clearly does not understand how to use quotes or punctuation. There are many ways to read this sign, but I’m going to translate it this way.

First, you’re meant to see “No Eating” and No Drinking. He literally means that you can’t drink on the bus. No water, no juice, god help us, no booze. But what is he trying to say by putting “No Eating” in quotes? Should we read this as if he’s saying it? Sometimes we use quotes in a wink-wink kind of way. To what innuendo or second meaning could he be referring?

On this bus at all! Sure, this isn’t a complete sentence, but who has time anymore in this hectic work-a-day world? At least sort of connects to sentence b4. Make sense. Sort of.

“Stop.” My first inclination is that this bus driver knows the cleaning staff where I work. They have a similar sign-writing style. By putting stop in quotes, I’m not sure if I should or not. Did George Washington or another great man or woman say “Stop” once, and the bus driver is trying to invoke that instance? If so, where is the bibliography. Maybe it’s on the back of the sign.

Or maybe the bus driver just ain’t that bright.

Just as the asparagus risotto finished up, I seared a couple of big scallops to ride along with the creamy rice to dinner.The risotto recipe and techniques comes from Mark Bittman’s show “The Best Recipes in the World.” The video which accompanies the recipe shows Mario Batali demo-ing how to cook perfect risotto, while Bittman offers color commentary.  I’m definitely a convert to Batali’s less stirring method.  Instead of using stock, I used the water I blanched the asparagus in, which was seasoned with salt and a garlic clove.

MB featured a couple of scallop treatments on his blog the other day, which brought me to the seafood counter at DiBruno’s.  Boy, scallops sure are expensive at just under $20/lb.  Four big ones cost about $12.

I missed the mark by about 10-15%.  The asparagus tips were a little too al dente, the rice just past al dente, and the scallops a pinch underseasoned.  Next time, I think I’ll nail it.   If I can afford the scallops.