catching up

[chris raettig <chris@raettig.org>]

i'm hoping to have some time at the weekend to update my personal site. 
its become a bit of a trend recently for me to be too busy living life
to document it. given the efficiency of the tools i use, and their seamless
integration into my general life that means i'm pretty damned busy. 

i have been doing some behind-the-scenes work, attempting to restructure
in advance of some significant changes to how i organise the site. these
will become apparent whenever they're ready. i bought a canon g2
[http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong2/] recently, and hope to be
able to document my world pictorially as well as with words. i'm still
getting to grips with it, having never really owned a camera before. in
part because i work with some of the best photographers and lighting
people in the world i've got a burning desire to now invest in hundreds
of different tripods, flashes, gels, slides and lenses. i should probably
work out how to take pictures first. there is a whole section in the 
manual on picture quality, but not once does it mention that you have
to point the camera as something that looks nice. 

by hooking together a powerbook, my gnu/hurd box and the g2 i've managed
to create a really nice webcam system. i'll no doubt be using this
for upcoming events. i may have to pick up a few more g2's so that
we can do live webcam events with the benefit of professional
post-processing, a high-def cmos, quality lenses, zoom and flash. dedicated
webcams will always be lagging behind what a decent conventional digicam
can do. 

it looks likely that i'll be in paris for a week sometime in july, 
masterminding a series of live events around the city relating to
couture fashion shows. if i'm as well prepared as i ought to be, and
given that the events are unlikely to be longer than an hour each, this
may well provide me with a nice mini-holiday and a chance to snap
some more pictures. especially given that travel, accommodation and nourishment
is on someone elses dime. i hope to journal my own side of the process behind
those live events. i may or may not require a technical assistant
for that week, so if you're a london-based geek available at short
notice for some pocket money; stay in touch. 

i may also be taking the opportunity to visit a couple of artists out
there, to install cameras as part of another upcoming showstudio
project similar to 'studio monitor'. the plan is to install cameras
in the workplaces of a bunch of artists for a month. we're calling
it "watching paint dry". 

another webcam event on the cards takes place in an opulent public
lavatory. really.


other things that have been going on recently;

acting against the rip act extensions. 

i was at the festival of inappropriate technology [http://www.xcom2002.com]
for a while. i managed to catch up with a couple of people, and not
get mugged for the several thousand pounds worth of electrical equipment
i was carrying despite wearing bright green trousers. i was very sleepy
and needed to chat with a friend so i didn't stay for the later discussions.
but despite the early sound problems it was a great event, and i look
forward to next year. the presence of the british go association was
welcome, if not a little unusual. i'm still having nightmares after
seeing the full horror of william shatner singing 'rocket man', and
carrie fishers infamous song from the star wars christmas special. 
oh, and the keynote by gary le strange was.. surreal. a nice touch
were the liberal scattering of 'steal music' badges. i somehow
managed to acquire a complete back-history of mute magazine 
[http://www.metamute.com] which i had to enlist help in toting
round for the rest of the day. it will have pride of place next to
my lacerated stack of wired back issues. now. does anybody have the
complete works of mondo 2000? (seriously). 

sadly no pictures from the event itself. but i did manage to meet up
with cambridge conehead and mmorpg entrepreneur adam;

[http://chris.raettig.org/closet/2002/06/18/adam_martin2.jpg]

and pete, an old friend of mine from secondary school;

[http://chris.raettig.org/closet/2002/06/18/pete_waterhouse1.jpg]

sadly adam wasn't very keen on pete reciting from my copy of dr. seuss'
'oh, the places you'll go'.

[http://chris.raettig.org/closet/2002/06/18/pete_and_adam.jpg]

but it's deeply profound stuff. the broad message, in a nutshell being;

life will be great, you'll climb and climb, but it'll also be shit
quite a bit of the time. 


note that i'll be using inline photographs extensively through the site
as soon as i've finished restructuring, and worked out how to take
pictures that dont look crappy.


i met up with a few other ex-bluewavers at a get-together based on
steve [http://www.cookstour.org] being in the country for a week.

i've got a few pictures of that, though i was a little flash-happy. 


i have been working on a lot of warmco stuff. mainly programming, sales,
and meeting up with other small companies. our views on collaboration
really seem to be bearing fruit. 

over the last week i've rattled through an amazing number of mud patches,
though my inbox is still stuffed with them. i'm also tinkering with an
interesting engine which makes it trivial to build games using
any programming language. imagine unix directories representing objects,
and any executable files within those directories representing 
methods. it also hooks into the unix user management systems enabling
two things that have been on my wish list for a long time; straightforward
ssh integration and *character mode*. as i've been expounding on mailing
lists for years, a shift to character mode offers a surprisingly wide
variety of benefits. 

impswan [http://impswan.raettig.org] should be fully operational in a
day or two, along with the linux browser test suite. i really just
need to find the time to make them live. i'm spring cleaning my data
so there has been much tower of hanoii with hard drives. 

i managed to take a week off following the jubilee weekend. i did
sod all for ten days, and it was utter bliss. 

i /will/ finish writing some preparatory notes about geektour. i'm just
not quite sure when. after spending today a little too close to kew
gardens for the sensitive nasal passages on my hayfever-ridden face,
i reckon its time for bed.