Art & Photography
This camera really intrigues me. It’s “affordable”, medium format, and classy looking.
I’m glad to see it has some metal parts. The plastic ones in Lomo cameras with all the light leaks really hasn’t done much for me. Though I haven’t really given them much of a chance.
For sale is my Canon XL1s Standard Definition (SD) camera that records to MiniDV video tape. It can use multiple lenses and connects to a computer via FireWire. I’m asking $850 $600 for all of this. At this point I’ll negotiate the price. Make me an offer.
I am the first owner of this camera. The XL1s is in very good condition and operates just as it did with I took it out of the box. I’ve only used it lightly for a few shoots. It sat in a bag in my smoke free home for several years not being used. It comes with a few items.
When I got it I decided to buy a manual lens instead of an automatic one. Mainly because I wanted to shoot in a film style. (The XL1s can shoot in a 16:9 ratio.) There is a motor on the lens that will provide a smooth zoom. But you have to focus it yourself. It has served me well. A nice piece of glass.
Also included is a like new PortaBrace camera bag. This bag is made for the XL1s. It’s light and does a good job protecting the camera. Its easy on your body with a soft shoulder strap pad. These bags are used by professionals and last forever.
I also have two batteries for the XL1s. One standard size and one large. Both hold a charge. There is the battery charger power supply combo too. Plus a remote control for the camera that came with it. Then there is the Canon XL1s manual in good shape.
I’m selling this only to buy other film equipment. I am a trustworthy seller who wants to find someone who will love using this equipment and pay much less than I did.
A full set of pics with good details is available here. All of these items are offered for sale together. I will write SOLD on top of this post once it’s gone. I prefer to sell it locally. Best way to contact me is via contact form.
Specifications
Camera Body (via Canon website)
Lens
Canon Manual Video Lens
16x Zoom XL
5.4-86.4mm
1:16
Gota put this here to remember in the future. A comic who I never thought would talk about Dr. Who. But now that I’ve seen it it makes A LOT of sense. Warning: Contains adult language. SHOCK! It’s f’ing Eddie Bloody Izzard!
About twelve and a half years ago I spent my thirtieth birthday in New Orleans with a wonderful old friend. She took me to a burlesque show and I had a great time. It was a really hot NOLA night.
Bellow are some notes I made then. I found the piece of paper with these notes stuffed inside a copy of the Sun Ra biography Space is the Place.
Is this a movie you’d like to see? Might you donate on Kickstarter to see it made?
9.24.00 New Orleans Shim Sham Club & Juke Joint “Shim Shamettes”
Two main groups of characters. The Strippers & The Musicians
Question One
Is this movie: a) Documentary b) Docu-Drama c) Dramatic Fiction
Question Two
Is this a) a script b) a road map c) an instruction manual
Original thoughts: Strippers and musicians lives before, during, & after their performances. The “show” is in a review style lasting an hour or more. NOT the nonstop grid on a poll and watching football stuff. This is set in the 40s – 50s seudo-past.
III Most Shots of the scenes will describe intermittent lives of the strippers and musicians separate from each other. These two groups will not appear together in a scene interacting until the end of the movie.
Goal of separation is to express the segregation of these joints. The clientele are white men who come to see white women strip and hear hot jazz made by black men.
Another important point that the movie needs to make is that the “conductor or director of the characters action is the musicians and the music they play.
Structure of movie Ideas
Cuts from scenes of strippers working, living, partying, getting in trouble to musicians doing the same. Hot Jazz soundtrack sets all temp of cuts. Sometimes literally on the beat or a musical temp changes occasionally when the strippers shake their hips and breasts to the beat.
Note: This is one part of a freeform blog post series. It’s goal is to get a big idea out there. To workshop it. It may not be complete. It may end abruptly. You have been warned. 🙂
Here in southern Orange County, NC, aka Chapel Hill and Carrboro, land is very expensive. Thus housing is expensive. Fact is profiting from land sales is a very old occupation. Every since land stolen from Native Americans was deeded by King Charles II to wealthy Englishmen this property has been a key wealth source.
Before the University of North Carolina was constructed land around it has been held in high value. Now in the 21st Century it’s very hard for working people to buy a home.
I think there is a answer to this problem. It involves building workforce housing, homes for people who work and have good jobs, and not making a big profit doing it. Maybe even taking a loss.
During my research to make Carrboro Coworking thrive I did the math to construct a office building. Plus I’ve talked to others who have done similar math. The bottom line is building anything here in Carrboro is expensive. To do it and keep it alive, in the traditional way, you have to make a profit. Not just a modest profit but a big one.
One of my bigest personal lessons running a business was big profit must be your goal. Not necessarily because you love money and want a lot of it. But because without serious cash on hand you can not meet the challenges of being in business. Such as unforeseen costs or borrowing more money than you have to take your business in a new direction. At the end of the day my business ended because I ran out of cash. I did not run it to make a big profit. That was because coworking is not a big profit business model.
So it runs counter to established business ideas to start a venture that could not make a big profit. First you may think, “Why not start a non-profit?” Nope. The term Non-profit is a misnomer. Even tax exempt organizations that are formed to help others must have a positive ballence sheet. They usually do this by having more money on hand than their expenses are. That is just breaking even. To succeed at their missions non-profits must “profit”. Even in their own way via grants.
My idea is to create a new hybrid socially responsible organization that builds without a big profit on each project. All with the blessing and approval of equity investors.
But how?
Back in 2006 when I started Tweeting I began a seriously long stretch of destraction from my blog. I have written posts since then… but the great volume of my public writting has been under 140 characters. Twitter isn’t the only distraction. There’s Facebook, Google +, Flickr, and various others.
Recently Anton Zuiker sent out a idea that got me thinking about how much I write here. So I’m going to start a series of posts to keep me going. Hopefully the momentum will help me write interesting stuff often. Then there’s this reminder…
@brianr & I gave a Blogging101 talk to UNC Health Sciences Library in 2006. SRO. bit.ly/IPNjS3
— Anton Zuiker (@mistersugar) May 7, 2012
Quite a timely tweet because I may help teach some blog classes again. Figured I better get back to it if I’m going to help others. 🙂
(More non-meta posts to follow.)
The World Health Organization reports that around three billion people cook and heat their homes with an open fire that burns biomass such as wood and coal. That’s HALF of all people in the world! Nearly two million people die prematurely from illness attributable to indoor air pollution from household solid fuel use. Eighty five percent of those people who die are women and children.
Those are staggering numbers! How many of us in the developed world knew about this? I mean the last time I lit a wood fire was on a recreational camping trip. Not to eat my next meal.
You may wonder why so many people burn wood, coal, or dung for heating and cooking. Simply it’s because these are often the only resources available and affordable. People use what they have to survive. Oftentimes they go to great lengths, like walking many miles, to get fuel such as wood.
Fortunately there are clean stoves that can greatly reduce the poisons that are emitted when heating and cooking with biomass. These stoves are based on the Rocket Stove. It’s design helps combust all the material that are being burned. That way it doesn’t end up in the air.
One example is the StoveTec Stove developed by the Aprovecho Research Center. They have models that burn wood, coal, and pasteurize water. They range in costs from approximately $90 to $115 USD. But you can buy one for someone in need for only $15.
For some of us in the US these stoves could be a great alternative to the gas grill you have out back. Do your part in reducing the demand for natural gas in the US. Use waste wood instead and put the remaining charcoal in your soil for the garden. Plus you can put fewer greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and help slow global warming.
I’m going to get one for someone who really needs a clean stove and try it out myself too. Join me!
Tech for Good 001
The Aprovecho Institutional Rocket Stove (Video)
This is cross posted from Chapelboro.com. Thanks to them for allowing me to post it here.
I was reading the Wikipedia page of David C. Sutherland III and discovered he illustrated the first edition rules of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. (Seen to the left.) Very cool to find a peice of the puzzle that is the history of creative work done for early RPG.
This is one of the books I owned. Long gone. Really wish the original was still around. Ah childhood nostalgia!
I just discovered Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman aka SICP aka The Wizard Book. It’s a computer science text book that introduces computer programing. It uses Scheme, a dialect of LISP, as the example and basis with which to teach.
I’ve been on the hunt for a computer science book I can click with. I’ve read/skimmed a lot of them. I mean A LOT. Both in print form and on-line. For some reason my mind has a real hard time staying focused while reading about functions, lists, arrays, operators, etc. But this book feels different.
Maybe it’s the magic analogy at the beginning of the first chapter that inspires me.
We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer’s spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.
Or possibly the call from Alan J. Perlis, the first recipient of the Turing Award, to keep computing fun. (Whom the book is dedicated.)
“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.”
Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922-February 7, 1990)
What ever the reason I am some how starting to feel as if I get it. Get computer programing that is. I bet that the decade plus of reading a little bit here and a little bit there is adding up. But I have to thank MIT and this awesome free book for helping out. Getting a real foundation of knowledge is making a difference!
Now to leap over the wall my brain has built and release some code I’m proud of.
(Full free text of SICP is here http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/)
Chapel Hill and Carrboro are related but they have significant differences. I love them both like family. I feel like their little brother constantly annoyed with one or the other but will remain steadfastly in love with them both till the day I die.
Many of my fellow Chapel Hillians do not understand these differences. They see Franklin Street and Main Street in Carrboro as one long business thoroughfare. It’s not. I don’t mean to pick on Chapel Hill residents, both students and townies, but if you don’t spend a lot of time in Carrboro you wouldn’t know. The Towns have very unique histories that contain deep seated differences forged in race, class, and ideology. All fueled by the money and intellectual power of the University of North Carolina.
Yesterday I had a great conversation with several Chapel Hillians. They where a retired Town of Chapel Hill employee, a downtown business leader, a few University employees, and others who I do not know well. Our gathering was random.
At one point someone said, and I paraphrase, “Why does Chapel Hill and Carrboro have separate fire and police departments?” A smart gentleman that knows what he’s talking about said, “When we’ve discussed it the final conclusion has always been, ‘Hell no!’.” I took that as a definitive answer from a real source in the know. It also happens to be how I feel about the situation.
For the past four years I’ve been running a small business in Carrboro. It would NEVER have launched without the Town of Carrboro. A Alderman, a Economic Development Director, and the Mayor and other Alderman made it possible. Though the Town of Carrboro Revolving Loan Fund I was able to give this business a real go. This is a resource the Town of Carrboro has had since 1986. The Town of Chapel Hill just got a Economic Development Director a few years ago and gave out it’s first business loan recently.
The best way for me to sum this up is Chapel Hill follows Carrboro’s lead. Carrboro sets trends in numerous areas. The arts, environmental protection, economic development, transportation with many bike lanes, and more.
As far as I can tell the major start of Carrboro’s leadership is in the 1980’s when a few liberal folks where elected to the Carrboro Board of Alderman. Previously the board was dominated by local white men who held much more traditional values. Before the Carr Mill closed for the last time Carrboro was primarily a working class white Town. In the 1970’s it’s affordable housing attracted ex-students and others to migrate their from Chapel Hill and beyond. Soon a very new type of community formed in Carrboro and made it a very different place.
I need to do more research on this. To my knowledge there are no documents that explain just how Carrboro came to be the visionary leader it is. I only surmised this by knowing Carrboro didn’t always have the liberal reputation it has now. With that rep came a big dream for the future. One that has come true in many ways.
Note: For those who have lived here longer than I and know more historical facts I welcome your tweaks and corrections to my assertions about our local history.
Brian C. Russell 