Well, I didn’t feel like signing any autographs yesterday anyhow. (photo taken at Poquito Mas in Burbank, CA)

I don’t remember who asked me whether there were any baseball scorekeeping apps for the iPhone, but a quick search shows that there are several, including a highly-rated one called “iScore Baseball Scorekeeper”.¹

Were I a journalist, I’d note the existence of this and other such apps and would try to spot some pattern that said something about the pace of technological progress, society, our selves. Something about holding fast to old traditions while updating them to take advantage of the devices on which we increasingly depend in this day and age. I can almost hear the report, the calm NPR-commentator-voice, talking with old folk in the stands at Wrigley Field, the sound of peanut vendors hawking their wares carefully mixed into the background to provide a sense of place to underscore the sounds of pencils scratching away, recording the last play.

Since this is a blog, I can and prefer to take the path of cynicism, of snark, and instead I’ll say the following: “Can apps for dedicated trainspotters be far behind?”²³

1. If you’re curious about Baseball Scorekeeping, this Wikipedia article may be of use. [↩]
2. If you’re curious about Trainspotting, there’s a Wikipedia article for that. [↩]
3. OK, I admit that in the past I’ve thought that it might be enjoyable to learn how to mark up a baseball scorecard, but that was just the OCD talking. [↩]

The winds of change. They feel like the Santa Anas.

Note to friends and family: I am officially back in Los Angeles. Working in Burbank for the moment. Hope to see y’all soon.

The shuttle picked me up at 8:25. After tying up loose ends and packing a bit, I fell asleep around 4am. The sooner I can get on that plane and nap, the better.


Traffic heading South on the 405¹ approaching the 10, at around 9am, was ridiculously clear and fast.


I checked one bag, which cost me $20. I thought it might have been over the weight limit, but it was almost exactly at the limit of 50lbs (3.5 stone). I rarely check luggage these days, but I don’t think I’d want to bring only a couple shirts and one pair of pants for a 3-month trip.


The abbreviation for Grand Rapids (international?) airport is “GRR”. That’s incredibly cool. I wonder why more airports don’t adopt whimsical abbreviations.


I arrived at the airport 2.5hrs before my flight, and then the flight was delayed 40 minutes. So there was time to stop for a delicious and nutricious breakfast of carbs with barely-flavored high-fructose corn syrup as a condiment. In LA, such a meal is an act of defiance.


And now I wait for boarding. With any luck I’ll have enough time at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (An airport which desperately needs a new nickname. I can’t even pronounce “MSP”.) to hang with my cousin Andy for an hour.

1. or “I-405″ for you non-LA-residents. We drive so much that our freeways have nicknames [↩]

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It’s a lovely evening here in Studio City, and the sunset inspired me to attempt a quick sketch in Brushes. I got lazy after a while and stopped sketching in streetlights, there were hundreds more. More interesting to me were the sky and smog, and it was fun to try to evoke their colors through the application of tons of overlapping semitransparent brushstrokes.

I added this .brushes file to my gallery, along with a full-resolution and a quicktime export. Here’s its entry:

16.brushes
Jul 23 2009
Brushes (77.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)	MOV (13.2 MB)

Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t¹ ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond².

1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]

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A funky vertical panorama shot and stitched from 3 photographs on my iPhone with the AutoStitch app. The monitor at bottom is my DIY Cintiq, which has yet to be encased and prettified.It’s fed VGA (!)¹ from a USB-DVI adapter.

This non-hardware-accelerated display works fine as extra space for displaying bins.

1. the monitor was an ancient model that a friend was throwing out [↩]

It’s always a good sign when the drill bits and burrs decide to join in on the fun. You can tell the dentist is cool when she’s willing to pose for such a photo.

I had a dental appointment yesterday, and it was a blast! Cleaning, scraping, poking, injecting, numbing, all the old standards were in play.

There was one unique moment. Dental phobias are prevalent out there and I don’t want to contribute to mass panic –but (stop reading now), as it turns out, it’s possible for effects of the anesthetic to take a little trip to places other than the injection site. In my case, my right eyelid and some of the muscles controlling that eye’s movement vanished, and for about an hour there appeared to be not one but two identically lovely and skilled dentists working on me. The double-vision didn’t last for more than an hour. That means less than an hour. The dentist had never seen such a thing. According to other dentists at the facility, stuff happens¹.

I support the pharmaceutical industry’s cooption of the urban colloquialism "phat", as seen in the name of this phat tube of super-fluoride ointment. It beats excessive use of the letters ‘x’ and ‘z’ to connote power and effectiveness.

As it turns out, I had a couple of cavities. They’re now filled up with some awesome white plastic to better match my iPhone. The rest of my teeth are now clean, and have been duly buffed and fluorided. All calculus was scraped off and either went down the suction tube or went down my esophagus to supplement my diet. I got to see my x-rays, and a look at them made it clear that my teeth are actually monochrome, kind of a dark gray really.

If you haven’t been to the dentist lately, I’d highly recommend a trip. Life’s too short to rob yourself of its more intense and interesting experiences.

1. They didn’t use the word “stuff”. The word they used ended in “it” followed by a laugh. It also started with “it”. Ha. What they meant was that they’d seen it before. [↩]

Having a good Sunday with Essie and Ken down in the OC.

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