lucky

yesterday evening found me pedaling a bike along an old jeep road, wending my way through meadows and stands of aspen up meyer's gulch to the outlook between boulder and eldorado canyons. the climb is steep and long, a little less than 3 miles, and pedaling close to fifty pounds of metal and rubber up this trail seems like the pursuit of a crazy person. the views behind me are worth every bead of sweat every heavy breath. the great expanses of the central plains stretch out beyond the abrupt edge of the foothills... the continental divide looms in front of me, backlit by the setting sun. hues of heather and gold, set against shades of green from sage to pine, pick up the last light of the day. it takes less than ten minutes to descend from the bench at the ridge back to the trailhead... the feeling of leaning through sweeping turns at ground blurring speed pulls me towards home, back through the meadows and past the old abandoned homestead, or barn, or whatever it used to be that sits off to the side of the trail. things i complain about during the day, or whichever particular bit of red tape i got stuck with earlier, are all just minor annoyances when considered against the privilege of experiences like this.

back at last

hey all,

i realize that it's been quite a while since my last post... at least a month. i have been in taiwan most of that time, and L.A. for a part of it too. i've been bouncing around boulder for the past few days just trying to regain my footing here and get things in order before the semester starts. i'll be teaching the two lab sections of structural geology this fall, to 42 kids. i still need to complete a draft of my paper in the next week or so. i have to finalize my thesis committee and schedule my comprehensive exam for the end of the semester. i'll be taking advanced geomorphology and participating in a reading seminar on the same subject... since neither my own advisor nor any other professors who specialize in structure or tectonics (any of about 6 people now) are offering any courses or seminars on those topics, at least none that I haven't already taken. i'm off to run home and grab reciepts and a brunton compass from my trip, then back to the desk. more (and more upbeat) posting to follow....

~t

pre-visualization

visualization is important for all athletes; it allows you to see where you're going before you get there... to see yourself completing a task and thereby enabling you to complete that task. two pics follow, one is pre-vis... the other is completion.




that's me at keystone, sending a small drop (~6 feet?)...

~t

melting

hey all,

sitting in my office on this sunday afternoon, because it's the only air-conditioned place i can be and pretend to be productive at this time. wunderground.com was reporting the temperature for boulder as 102.8 degrees farenheit until five minutes ago, when the temp dropped to 99. it's $#@!ing hot here. my house is a relative inferno, and there's not much i can do about it until the outside temp goes down, aside from doing something silly like buying an air conditioner (which i refuse to do, at least at the moment). ... i can say they cost 139 bucks at the home depot though... not like i was looking or anything.

~t

wow, simply wow...

for your daily dose of tasteless humor in the global political arena, check out this cover of wprost magazine (polish), as reported by the bbc.

bbc story here

new place

some quick pics of the new place... note the hardwood and gas range... sweet! no art on the walls yet, still trying to figure out where to put things.. two kurodas, a kuniyoshi and two other contemporary japanese prints (i can't remember the artist at the moment), as well as a bunch of my own photographs. still need to stop by the boulder restaurant supply store for a few things and the lumber store for some raw materials... need to build a table (rectangular, long and thin, to go under the chandelier in the living room) and a futon frame (the metal one i have is crap). that chair design in a previous post is still on my mind, but i probably won't get a chance to really get to that for another couple of months... thought about modeling the legs of the table after those of the chair though... maybe?

~t

back in black (and white)

hey all,

i know it's been a week since my last post, and i've been pretty lazy about posting regularly, but hey... it's summer.

so: updates... yesterday it was 99.5F in town here, i finally bought tickets for taiwan, i'm still reviewing comments on my paper from my advisor and still trying to move things over to my new place, bit by bit. the title of the blog is due to the fact that i've been shooting in b&w recently... something i always get away from, but always come back to, since without the distraction of color the true nature of photography comes through, the study of light and texture and form... take the following picture, pretty boring if it was in color, but the simple tones of black and white capture the shades and reflections of light, the shiny surface of the ugly textured walls in my old apartment contrasted against the matte finish of smooth skin, and the bright white of diffuse light vs the shocks of black in hair and shadows. i just like the simplicity of greyshade. hopefully there will be some more b&w pics pretty soon.



chris and cheney in the old place...

~t

chairs

i like chairs. rather, i like well designed chairs that have appreciable aesthetic appeal. i've even made a couple chairs in the past, including things made from interlocking hardwood frames. i've been knocking around a few sketches recently, and today i decided to take the next step, putting together a little scale prototype made out of cardboard. the proportions are still a little off, but the basic design elements are solid, and i think i will try to take this to a full size m.d.f. prototype sometime in the next couple of months, with the ultimate goal of doing this in a wood laminate. my favorite pieces are the cross beams, which are identical in shape, but flipped relative to each other to create the sloping seat. the pics don't really do this 'justice', but hey... it's just a piece of cardboard.




~t

one of those days

fugh. today has sort of been one of those days that makes me wish i had become an architect or graphic designer. academic red-tape bs has been plaguing me for the last couple of days, but today i was dealt the coup de grace, in the form of a cruel twist of fate related to my financial aid from this last year. it's nothing i can't fix by relegating myself to a strict diet of ramen and tofu, and collecting on debts from roommates, but it's still a pain in the ass.

in deference to my graphical urges, i spent the last half an hour meditating on an old still life photograph of mine by tweaking it a bit in photoshop to come up with the image below. i may end up printing this out in large format and using is as decor in my new apartment. hope you like it - "untitled" digital photograph, 2007.



~t

form follows fiction

it never ceases to amaze me how concepts and creations of science fiction frequently end up coming to fruition in the 'real-world'. communication satellites, space travel, cell phones and robotics are all things which we take for granted, but which all were born from people's wild imaginations of the things which might someday be possible, at a time when none of these concepts were anything more than 'science-fiction'. never mind another underlying unifying theme of all of these items, the birth of the practical applications of these gizmos as the public sector offspring of the brainchildren of the military industrial complex cartels.

it's one thing for for a concept like a dick-tracy wrist video communicator to be realized as something like a motorola flip-phone... the concept is similar but the form is constrained by cost and technology... but it's entirely another thing for new robots rolling off production lines to almost perfectly mimic characters out of highly stylized japanese anime series. i'm referring to vecna technologies' new "bear" (battlefield extraction assist robot)... a robot that utilizes dynamic balance behaviour (like the segway personal transports) which allows it to balance upright as well as roll on tracks while supporting the weight of a soldier with a high 'strength' hydraulic upper body, and sports a teddy-bear head to reassure the wounded (seriously). the funny thing here is the fact that this is something that is almost exactly out of shirow masamune's anime, "appleseed". see below, and see for yourself.




~t

bitchin' thumbs-up award

i have been having an absolutely awesome day so far. i got up at seven, fully rested for the first time in what feels like weeks.after a quick breakfast of naan and yogurt, i headed downtown with my mountain bike on the roof to meet up with some friends for a ride. we decided the night before to meet up early and head up to nederland (up the canyon from boulder) and ride some of the trails up there... which I had not ridden before. the ride started with a long road climb at ~9000 feet, followed by a short, rocky downhill to another road. we headed back up into the mountain along a narrow 4wd path, cut across the side of one of the peaks. after nearly a thousand vertical feet of punishing climbing, we paused at the top to soak in the view and revitalize a little before heading onto...

a single-track decent of near-mythical awesomeness. still dazed from the lung-popping climb and under the gentle influence of the beauty and bounty of this place, i could barely believe the sensation of ripping down this narrow ribbon of dirt veneered with small chunky rocks. the gentle berms around corners allowed us to descend at the limit of our abilities, at speeds faster than i would have thought possible on that trail. the surrounding aspens, mottled gold trunks lit from the canopy of soft spring foliage, blurred by so quickly it was hard to pick out single trees. half way down, as the trail eased back in pitch just enough for me to breathe, the adrenaline and endorphins pumping in my veins caused me to yell out at the top of my lungs.

the riding wasn't over though, and after one more short hard climb, we were blessed with a winding loam single track that cuts through tall pines and crosses meadows with views of perfect lakes, shored with aspen and backed by the still snow-capped indian peaks wilderness. wild flowers lined the sides of the trail and a huge red-tailed hawk swooped across the trail, its rust red tail and arced wings back lit against the sky by the sun, alighting on a branch of one of the taller pines. it was one of those rare moments that just brings a goofy wide grin to your face and makes you thankful for being fortunate enough to bear witness.

now it's off to the boulder creek festival downtown, for music and food and just hanging out. i could go to the office i suppose, but this day is just going too well at this point to spoil with something like that. if you're unlucky enough to be stuck in a city somewhere i feel sorry for you... i wish i could share these kinds of experiences with all my friends out there, as people here have been nice enough to share them with me.

~t

tarka dal

hahaha.... i can't stop laughing about what just happened.

i had a wicked (yes i said wicked, i lived in new england, maine peeps back me up here) craving for indian food tonight. the Tandoori Grill is our local neighborhood indian joint, rated the 4th best restaurant in boulder, and it's just up the street from my house. i rode over on my bike, ordered onion kulcha and lamb vindaloo and gave my name to the maitre d', "tarka... t-a-r-k-a".

he glanced up at me, "oh, heh, we have a dish named after you here... tarka dal." he went into his schpiel about the lentil dish flavored with spiced ghee; i interjected, "ah, yes i know.. i've had it, it's good."

i sat down at the bar to wait for my food over a stella, and chatted with the other person there, who had also ordered to go right before me. we sat for about 15 minutes, drinking our beers and reminiscing about the east coast and the differences between boston and new york. our respective orders came out and whilst the maitre d' (who was also playing bartender tonight) was standing there, the waiter who brought my food out called my name, then paused... spelled it out, "t-a-r-k-a", and glanced up at me; "oh, heh, we have a dish named after you here."

~t

i need an HDDV camera...

check out 'the collective' and their mountain biking videos, 'the collective', and 'roam'. until then however, check out this flick i put together from shots and vids off my digital camera of biking throughout the last year. yes this is really how i ride, maybe now folks will understand what i'm talking about when i say something like, "yeah, i totally ate sh!t (crashed) maching (going really fast) around a sweeper (wide radius corner) at 30mph (25 mph)."



~t

spoooky

totally random pic from my cell phone, not sure when i took it. it hardly looks like me, but i actually like the image, harsh and noir but almost plastic in some ways... for some reason it reminds me of karl lagerfeld ads.. too bad i'm not sporting one of those crazy high-collared shirts in this.



~t

about time

...i finally got to work and banged out this paper. i've been at my office since 6:30 cranking on this draft of my independent study, which i've imposed a personal dealine of 10:30am on. Figures need captions, notes need to be prosed and my paper outline tells me that for the conclusions i need, "simple statements -(just make something up)". isn't it great to know the standards of science are held in such high regard by the up and coming generation of thinkers?

i actually have a cool conclusion (well... observations really), at least something that i think verifies the hypothetical basis for the study, so i don't actually have to make anything up. i'll be working (continuously) on this same paper for the coming months, with an eye towards publishing a journal paper from it.

(>>note! 1:50pm, same day. funny how a few pages of notes can be magically transformed into 25 pages once the prose-hose gets turned on. i still feel like this draft is short, and i imagine the final final will be a little closer to 30-35 pages. then of course the whole damn thing will have to be compressed into about ten pages for any sort of journal submission.<<)

~t

roll-cast

as i sit here, typing typing typing, i have to get up to stretch my legs and get something to eat. i yank my ear-buds out and with a flick of my wrist send a perfect loop down the cord, casting the thin wire onto my desk. i want to escape, to run ride drive to the nearest creek. i haven't been fly-fishing since last fall, and the urge to get out onto the rivers is not something i can ignore for much longer... sending those perfect loops down a rocket-tapered line to gently pick a dry fly off the surface of the water without so much as a ripple.

~t

red

can't concentrate on work... random picture instead.



~t

cosmonauty

heh, this is too weird/cool not to throw on here.



mmm... borsch!

~t