This was another one in NYC. Almost seems like if there is a crane inspector there, he or she is seriously incompetent. These freak me out because I live under two cranes constructing the Trump Tower Waikiki next door.

I had a shoot with Amy the other day (before she moved back to the mainland). We did a couple of interesting things, but I really wanted to try a conceptual shot. The result is here:

I saw this on the cover of Popular Science the other day. It's an electric unicycle (yup, unicycle). My brother and I had a unicycle when we were kids, and it was the most horrendous thing to ride (the tiny, uncomfortable seat was the worst part). At least this thing has two central wheels and handlebars. The intent is to produce a highly efficient personal vehicle that doesn't pollute. It's probably not as dangerous as it might seem, since it uses the same sort of principles as the Segway to achieve balance. It was invented by an 18 year-old in Canada, so this is another thing to blame on Canadians ;-)

The image above is my interpretation. The prototype has an orange body (which is probably good since it would be easier to see in traffic).

Somehow a centipede got into my apartment this evening. I heard it first before I saw it. It had gotten into the box where I store most of my camera equipment, then it found it's way behind my bookcase. It hung out there for about an hour before finally making a break for the kitchen floor. Those things move fast, but I was able to kill it with the nearest blunt object (a flashlight). Scary! A pinch from one of them will put you in the hospital!

I just woke from something like 14 hours of sleep (half lucid, half unconscious -- the latter being the actually restful bit). It was the second day in a row that I actually woke up on top of my alarm clock. I guess my feral back brain felt that squashing the clock under my stomach (can't sleep at all on my back) will muffle the sound enough to fake out my prefrontal cortex. My feral back brain, apparently, is not smart enough to actually turn it off. Obviously I, or rather the prefrontal I, must come up with a new solution. I'm thinking about buying this. I suppose I should thank my feral back brain though -- after a couple of weeks of about 3 hours sleep a day, I probably needed the rest.

I just got a new member card from Kaiser in the mail, so I assume that means I've been approved (the accompanying letter said nothing of the sort). So I guess that means I can see a doctor in 2 weeks. Meanwhile, the lump and bruise have gone away, so I will have nothing to show the doctor. I'm not at all sure it was a hernia after all. Who knows!

I just found the link on Netflix to view my rental history (hidden in plain sight on the queue page). I thought I would share some stats on my viewing history:

• I started renting in December 2005, and the first thing I returned was Stargate SG-1 Season 6 disc 2
• I stopped renting in May of 2007 (still paying for the service) because I got Murderball stuck in the DVD-ROM drive of my laptop and I didn't want to reboot to get it out. I finally rebooted in November, and started renting again. Six months uptime! I love my Mac :-)
• I don't remember renting these movies: Batman Begins, World in the Balance, The Future of Food, and Is Wal-Mart Good for America? All of these where rented just before I moved to Hawaii so maybe I was stressed out about that or something.
• I couldn't get through Videodrome (returned 04/28/08) because the special effects were just so bad. I refuse to give it a bad rating because it is weirdly original (just unwatchable).
• The worst movies I rented (all getting just one star) were Summer Catch, Weird Science, and Boa vs. Python (so bad it's really, really bad; though it does have one of the best kiss scenes ever)
• Those were not the worst movies I've ever seen. The top honor for that list goes to The Notebook, which I unfortunately subjected myself to in a theater surrounded by senseless, weeping women. It was not romantic, it was just insipid. I hate, HATE that movie.
• The best movie I rented, and my favorite all-time movie, was Eraserhead, which I finally rented in February of 2006. A poster for the movie was pinned up in the back room of the bookstore I worked at, so I had been curious about it for a couple of years.
  
• I have rented and returned 242 movies through Netflix (yikes! I need to get a life)
• To see 242 movies at current Honolulu ticket prices, the total cost would be $2,299.00!
• I paid approximately $420 to see those 242 movies over the course of 2 and half years (yikes! That's the cost of a longboard!)
• To buy those DVDs, I would have paid approximately $3,360. Phew. Of course, that would mean I would have a lot more useless crap lying around. Renting is much more environmentally friendly.
• In the same span of time, if I had paid for cable (proud to say I have never actually gotten cable service), it would have cost somewhere from $1,500 to $2,100.
  

Alright, haven't posted in awhile; need to get back to more regular postings (and less depressing postings!)

"Rio Sinter" is a sci-fi story I started a couple of years ago. The characters and story arc were almost instantly fleshed out when the idea came to me, and it's something I've really wanted to write. I just think it is a worthy, original, realistic, hard science type of story. I've been really excited about it since the beginning. Getting it down on paper has been problematic.

The hard part to writing most stories is choosing where to begin. If you start too soon you bore the reader while you get to the point, and if you start too late you end up mired in back story, boring the reader. With Rio Sinter, I was starting too early, and trying to make it exciting to compensate. It was still a bit dull.

Last night, somehow, I had an epiphany. I watched the movie "Orlando" (based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name), and was blown away with the simplicity of how the story (a very odd, essentially sci-fi story) was told. It was economical storytelling at it's best.

I felt released from the previous beginning of my story. I was clinging to it because I liked it, thinking I needed it to establish setting and character relationships. I restarted the story, from where I should have started it all along. Instead of filling in back story, I'm layering imagery and scenes, and building up a sense of where the characters have been, which lets me focus more concretely on where the characters are going. Personally, I think it is greatly improved, though perhaps it still won't withstand the harsh scrutiny of my writing group.

I finally got around to fixing the floating flower embellishment on my blog. Let me know if you still have issues with it :-)