Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School

There is this cool thing in Brooklyn (and around the world, now) called Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. You basically go to a cafe, pay a modest fee, and sit down in front of a stage where a model or two comes out and poses for you. But it’s not your typical life-drawing class model doing boring poses. These models dress up in fun costumes and there is always a theme, and sometimes as the session goes on, the clothes come off. The people who attend the anti-art school may purchase food and beverages and beer and compete for prizes and free booze. It’s pretty sweet. Molly Crabapple started Dr. Sketchy’s, and she and her cohort introduce the models and provide some humorous entertainment in the breaks.

I went today for the first time. I had heard about it a year ago and wanted to go ever since. Here’s one of my sketches from today, of the model Little Brooklyn, a burlesque performance artist who regularly does shows in the East Village. I thought she looked familiar, but just now looking through the pictures on her site, I realized I had seen her perform a Halloween burlesque show a couple months after I first moved to New York City. She had an awesome spider hand puppet and she acted as though she was stuck on its web and completely terrified. She seems to like the animals though, because today she was half-dressed in a gorilla suit. Oh, and those things on her nipples are red, sequined pasties (to match her awesome red glitter lipstick) so this image is Safe For Work.

There I am in the green shirt!

I definitely want to go again. It’s a great exercise for people like me who need a little push sometimes to get creative.

What’s in a hostname?

It’s really important to name your machines so you can anthropomorphize them and talk to them.  Some names are more satisfying than others.  Sometimes you name a computer and it just feels right, and other times you hem and haw and just pick something so-so so you can move on.  I named my new MacBook Pro Kowalski and feels positively badass.  Everyday I will be working with the lead character from Vanishing Point.

Portrait of a Beardo

That’s about two weeks of growth.  It doesn’t always photograph well because I have a salt and pepper beard, so there’s plenty of blonde in there that doesn’t show up.

Mr. Mac Geek or how I learned to stop worrying and love the beard

My new employers were gracious enough to buy me a 17″ MacBook Pro to use for work and I’ve spent the last couple of days working on it and replicating all of my OS X applications and customizations over from my iMac. I have to say that I’m loving both Leopard and this machine. It’s my first Intel Mac, my iMac is a 2Ghz G5, and this thing is at least twice as fast as my G5 if not more.

Having a good laptop on which I can get real work done, with a sizable screen and comfortable keyboard, is a huge boon. I’ve never much liked working from home. It’s very motivating for me to get up and go to work, and I like being out of the house during the day. Nothing makes you feel like a shut-in quite so much as never leaving the house. I’ve always preferred to go out and get my work done in coffee shops and now I can do precisely that during the day. There’s a great place right down the street called Edgehill Studios that has an awesome coffee shop with big bright windows and modern furniture that’s not too comfortable so you can sit in it and get work done.

For Halloween this year I went out as Rick James Lipton, an amalgamation of Rick James, bitch, and former Parisian pimp James Lipton. For the role I grew a beard and I’ve kept it.

As I was sitting, working on my new MacBook Pro, wearing a corduroy sport coat, Threadless t-shirt, jeans, and bright red Reebok running shoes, and sporting a beard it occurred to me: I look like a total Mac geek. It’s unavoidable. I might as well go back to the year 1999 when I looked more than a little bit like productivity guru Merlin Mann.

Folks, don’t miss my supercool Casio calculator watch.

Admittedly, I wish I knew where that watch was. I’d probably still be wearing it.

A new beginning or why I’ve been so quiet

This past week was my first at a new job. I now work for BubbleUp. We’re a web startup focused on websites, web applications and internet marketing for the music industry. I’m very excited about it and having a blast so far. We’re a small company, headquartered in Houston, and I’m working from home and coffee shops here in Nashville. I’m 1/2 of the company’s Nashville presence right now, which we hope to expand in the future into an actual physical office and additional employees. It’s nice to be a part of a young, fast company after so many years as a cog in the academic machine. I’m working as their Systems Administrator as well as doing development work, and it is my return to some regular programming responsibilities that has me the most excited. It has been too long since that was a daily part of my job.

The first month at any new job is always very busy as you try to get up to speed on a new company, a new set of systems, and a new set of expectations. BubbleUp is a very small company and so that has been greatly magnified for me. So if my contribution here is a little bit light, it’s only because I’m working my butt off! But for a change, I’m happy to be doing that.

Visual phantoms and binocular rivalry

I’ve been published in my first scientific article. It is on studies of the interactions between how the visual system selects information to process further, and how it constructs perception like in the case of visual illusions. We used “visual phantoms” in conjunction with binocular rivalry to try and answer our questions.

Look at the two sets of gratings in the image and try to cross-fuse them. Remember those Magic Eye illusions? Do whatever it is you did with those to see the hidden pictures. If you do it correctly, there should only be one white cross in the middle, and your perception of the two gratings should change every second or two. You will also see faint impressions of the gratings continuing in the gap.

I won’t discuss the science here, but you’re free to download the paper if you’re interested, at the Journal of Vision’s website linked above.