Shooting a comic strip

Darryl Gold and Derek Lang (me) in Lego Form.

I finished work on the paid gig and started work on a fun gig for Darryl. He's having a zine launch next friday and was taking in submissions with today (technically yesterday) being the last day to submit something. I thought I'd dust off the old Lego from the Macho Baby! short and make a comic strip.

Originally I wanted to shoot a photo novel for the magazine but that would have taken more time, money and setting up. With the Lego it was pretty easy to slap together a set and have props in a short period of time. At least I thought that would be the case.

While putting together a mini set to look like rural Ontario (in Lego form) I realized I had misplaced a bunch of my trees. I know I have more of them but what did I do with them? Did I pack them in some other box? Probably. Since I didn't have time to look for them I used the trees I had and moved them around randomly for each different angle.

The process was a bit time consuming but fun. I uploaded the final page early this morning.

For more info on the upcoming friday event go here.

It's been how long?

Charles... alive and well.

It's been over four years since I last saw Charles. Due to events that occurred and that fact that I had the wrong phone number that gave me a "This phone number is not in service", I thought he had died. Then out of the blue, a few days ago, I got a message on facebook.

We met up today and caught up over lunch. Turns out Charles is not only alive and well, he's married.

Today I also met up with Rick, another person I've haven't seen in quite a while. Although I do keep in touch through facebook and have bumped into him on the street recently. We met up for dinner. Rick had helped me out with my latest computer problems and I wanted say thanks by taking him out for food.

My computer was crashing quite a bit. After a lot of experimentation and sleepless nights I had found that the RAM had fried in the computer due to the increase in heat in the apartment. The RAM was faulty (as other machines in the apartment worked fine) and once I replaced the RAM with older 512meg sticks the machine worked fine.

Rick had been emailing me through facebook throwing out suggestions of what it might be. When he suggested the RAM it all fell into place. After all I hadn't upgraded the machine since the last project and the room was a lot cooler back then. I hate it when computers crash and was pretty relieved once the computer was back online.


Rick enjoys some fatty Starbucks drink.

Disclaimer

The iced tea in question

I saw Kung Fu Panda today. Just before the movie started there was an ad for a new Iced Tea called Vitao by Nestea. I thought the commercial was pretty creative, cool even. A bunch of people dancing to light coming out of iced tea bottles. The brand stuck with me and after the movie, on the way home, I went into the local Subway sandwich shop where I saw bottles of it available for purchase.

The drink was pretty tasty. It was "Fuji apple" flavoured. On the top corner of the label it reads "Natural Health Product" and "Natural Fuji Apple Flavour". Now normally I'd just drink it and if it didn't taste like aspartame not give much thought and buy more bottles of the stuff to drink, but because of the "natural" labels on the bottle my brain automatically thought "What's the catch here?".

Kind of like those alarms bells that go off when you watch a commercial for a mining company advertising that they plant X number of trees per year... "How many forests are they destroying by strip mining?" my brain automatically asks.

I started to investigate the naturalness by reading the bottle's ingredients. The two lines that popped out were "Do not exceed 3 bottles a day" and "Consult a health practitioner prior to use if you have a liver disorder, develop symptoms of liver trouble, or if pregnant or breast feeding.". What the heck?


A photo of the side of the bottle.

What the heck is in iced tea that will give you liver trouble? How is this a "Natural Health" drink? Are these instructions on the bottle something I should take seriously or is it just the beverage company writing stuff on the bottle to protect themselves from legal action taken by some guy that consumes the stuff on a more than average basis and gets sick? Kind of like the disclaimer on the chainsaw box that reads "do not stop in genital area". Why don't they just add "Do not use for drowning purposes." just in case?

And I thought the sardines in blueberry juice was odd.

The Outside World

Baby McDermott laughs at one of my many facial expressions.

Today was the first time in what felt like months, literally, where I felt like I had been able to go outside and just do nothing. Since coming back from London back in Feburary I've been pretty lucky to have consistent work. The only down side is that consistent work also means consistent solitary confinement in front of the computer. While this is not a difficult task in the winter when it's cold, it's a bit more demanding in the warmer months when other events and interesting things are taking place.

I delivered the final project data last night. It opened up a grand day of going out and doing nothing but socializing, seeing people I haven't seen in a long time, and wander around town to see if anything new presented itself.

The day started off by meeting up with Thomas and his daughter for lunch. She is five months old and is also the marker for the approximate amount of time since I last saw Thomas.


An aphid playing possum

From future bakery I walked over to Yonge and Bloor and then down to Monster Records where Roger noticed I was wearing an aphid. After knocking off my jacket onto the counter we looked at it. "Is it dead? Oh wait, it was just faking. See it's moving!". We gently scooped it up onto a piece of paper and let it go outside.


Lounging at Monster Records


Wall o labels


Sorry Laine, I couldn't resist.

After catching up a bit with Roger I walked down to the camera stores on Queen street passing by this walking crackberry and an odd light installation at Dundas Square.


Lights at Dundas Square

Downtown camera had a flash on order but the one I checked out didn't seem to work properly. It was just after 6pm and I had managed to get into the store before they locked the doors. Not wanting to hold them up I told them I'd return tomorrow.

From there I walked toward the Tibetan restaurant a bunch of people were meeting at. Anya from the last photo rampage had organized a group eating session. The restaurant is located at 1439 Queen street west. Just a bit west past lansdowne.


A guy jumping off a garbage can on Queen street

On the way there somewhere near Spadina a guy was just finishing some kind of performance with the grand finale being the act of jumping off a garbage can while doing a somersault.


The tibetan foodies

By the time I arrived home my feet were killing me. I think I need new shoes or maybe I should just not carry so much stuff.


Sometime around 4:30am.

I started backing up the project on my computer and started hearing noises coming from the backyard. When I went to investigate I saw five little raccoons and a big mother. They were in the garbage cans next door.


The mother raccoon confronts me "Whaddya lookin at bub."


The family of raccoons make their escape.

Just out of range of my SB-800, you can just barely make out their silhouettes on the backyard fence.

The ice cream truck

The ice cream truck seen from a small child's POV

One of the perks of living in the "new" neighbourhood is that there's an ice cream truck that stops almost right outside the front door. This whole weekend has been really hot, considering last week night have gotten as cool as 2 degrees (C).

Put yourself in a room that gets baked by the sun, add heat given off by five computers, and tiny windows. You've been sitting in that room for 20 plus hour intervals. Hacking away, baking away. The ice cream truck looks pretty good now doesn't it?

I bought a banana split, three blobs of ice cream, one drenched in chocolate syrup, the next in strawberry syrup and the third in pineapple goo. And just when things couldn't get any better... it started to rain.

We've been getting reports of incoming tornadoes, even hail, none of which Toronto saw (that I know of). What we did get was a bunch of rain. It came down in buckets. Only the rain only lasted for about two minutes. The end result was more humidity ands not not much a cooling down effect.

Around 1am we received lighting and thunder and about 2 hours of rain. During about half this time I attempted to photograph the sky, hoping a bolt of lighting would pass through the lens. As soon as I put my eye to the lens a bolt passed through from one corner of the frame to the other. It was perfect. Unfortunately I had not pressed the shutter button. Boo. I stood in the kitchen looking out at the sky for the next 40 minutes, until the lighting started to die away, taking photos at 30 seconds intervals. Below is the best picture I managed to get within that time frame.


Lightning... oooh... aahhh...

The Bugapede

The Bugapede

It's the early morning. I'm still up trying to get stuff to render. My machine no longer crashes. Turns out it was the RAM. I think it was fried. I'm now running the machine on the old 512K sticks....

Just when it started to look like Pumpkin was the only model in the house I went to move my pelican case and viola, Mr. Bugapede! Okay I don't know what sex it is, I'm not sure how you can tell or what to look for or where to look, it's not like a spider with "boxing gloves" after all. Spiders with "boxing gloves" are male by the way.

It kind of surprised me as it moves pretty fast. Luckily I had a jar near by. After capturing it by anticipating it's move and placing the jar down on it, I slid a piece of paper under the jar and flipped the jar over. It didn't take long for me to realize that the bugapede couldn't crawl straight up glass (see UK field research).



I placed my Nikon SB-800 off to the side of the jar then carefully took the lid off. With my 105mm macro I creeped in. The bugapede started running at me. I jumped back. I then remembered that it was still 10 centimeters away from the lens. Sheesh.

The nice thing about the bugapede being in a jar is that you can rotate it to lit it from underneath, it was trying to climb up the side of the jar, or from the side. The photo above and shows details in the eyes (cool!) while the bottom photo puts more emphasis on the translucency of the little guy.

After the small impromptu photo session I took the jar up to the top of the street and let it out in the nearby park near the Danforth .





Does anyone know what the actual name of this bugapede is? Although I like the term bugapede (bug with legs) I thought I'd ask. Please refrain from using smart alec remarks like "It's name is Fred.".

update

Thanks to the information provided by Thor Volokwyn, this in fact is a house centipede. More info can be read here.

Hot day, cool basement

Pumpkin relaxes in the coolness of the basement

Today is a type of day I miss living in a basement apartment. Ack, it's hot and it's not even really summer yet. Living on the second floor I'm a bit worried that my computers will overheat (that might explain why one of the computers keeps crashing but didn't during the march project).

Pumpkin, the cat is pretty bright. He had followed me downstairs while I was doing laundry and never came back up. When I went back downstairs to transfer the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer I found the cat lying under a table in the cool shade. I suppose the whole basement is cool shade.

Meanwhile I've opened up the computer and am running it with the motherboard exposed. If it doesn't crash then chances are it's the heat.

Why so many cat photos?

Pumpkin loaf

If you're wondering why there are so many cat photos recently it's because I haven't gone out in a while. Before that I was posting photos of Kyoko and her mother's cats as I was taking care of them while they were off in Japan.

The cat photos taken recently are because I'm bored and waiting for some images to render on the computers (for work). Figuring I should get outside at least a bit, I'll wonder out onto the back deck and photograph whatever is there. Usually it's Pumpkin, the cat from downstairs.

Cats and old Jeans

Camera depth of field test

Do you own a cat? If so have you ever noticed how cats will tend to sleep on a freshly cleaned laundry pile or your black clothing? I was outside today on the deck doing a depth of field camera test when the cat started meowing at me. I decided to try something. I went inside (with the cat following and meowing at me all the way), grabbed a pair of black denim trousers, and plopped them on the deck.

The cat stopped meowing and sat on them. I continued the camera tests.


Uh oh... Here comes trouble.


Pumpkin uses the old jeans

The jeans were less than a week old before they tore. No, I'm not that fat... yet. I noticed the material was really thin denim compared to my other ones. Maybe I'll take the jeans apart and make a cat pillow out of them. Then again the cat seemed to like them just the way they were.

Egads, the sun.

Agh... the sun.

I spent the night babysitting a computer that kept crashing. I think it's got something to do with the software accessing memory. The animation I'm working on is due today at 9am. I've been rendering the animation piece meal since 10pm. Basically rendering out individual frames until the machine crashes, rebooting, then rendering out more frames until the final frame gets spit out.

Whatever happened to letting machines just chug along until they were done?

While this is not my first all nighter. This is probably the first one in a long while that I've pulled because of a computer. On the bright side the sun coming in the room makes a nice warm photo even if I am half asleep.