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The first few printed images came out ok but I found after printing a few portraits, this only applied to greyscale or bright colors.  Skin tones looked a spot odd as done by my quadtych of Kyle Harris ranging from ghoulish to gangrenous.  I also have a few profile pictures of Randy Booz where he looks like he recently became either a vampire or a mime.  I purchased a monitor calibrator to fix what seems to be the excessive warmth of my monitor and was stunned.  I’ve apparently been producing portraiture for some type of emo mausoleum or possibly a image survey appropriate for the color blind. Sometimes the truth hurts.

So I started printing out stuff to adorn my non-cubical walls at work but all my pictures are nature or people in stereotypical poses.  Either they’ll I ripped off issues of National Geographic or failed to remove the placeholder image from the frame.  I’ve compromised by making picture frames out of a pizza box and picking the oddest poses I could muster.

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I purchased a large format printer and the first print black and white with a single color print I did from it was gorgeous.  I then moved on to other pictures and quickly discovered that color calibration was the bane of amateur printers everywhere.  I went to OfficeMax to grab some testing paper of 8.5″ x 11″ semi-glossy at 25 cents a sheet instead of blowing 2 bucks and a gallon of ink for each botched 13″ x 19″.  The paper appeared to be buy-one-get-one-free deal so clicked my heels as I danced to the counter.

Salesperson: These aren’t covered by the buy-one-get-one-free deal.
Me: Frown.  It was the only one that didn’t have a sign in front of it saying say from the spectrum of construction paper to super glossy so I suppose I don’t have an excuse to get surly.
Salesperson: Oooh, surly good word.  I’ve always liked it. *wink*
*I return with appropriate paper*
Salesperson: Do you know what other work I like besides surly?
Me: No…
Salesperson: *one syllable at a time* Cur-mudg-eon-ly.*Head tilt, eye-brow lower*
*Leave store*
Me: Kyle, did I just get hit on via the word  curmudgeonly from a middle-aged OfficeMax attendant?
Kyle: Maybe, but I’d rather not think about it.
Me: Agreed.

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Kyle, Joe and I decided to visit Bill Schilling in his camp oubliette and we arrived early at Giant to meet up with him so we hit Wawa for superfluous energy drinks.  Joe and I seem completely unaffected by  them but we enjoy the trainwreck-like pull of their flavors ranging from something akin to burnt Mountain Dew to fermented bull urine.  Needing to kill more time we pick an appropriate mix to go with our Rockstar drinks, which I think is made largely of caffeine and drummer sweat.  So what line and so is blairing on the radio when I roll down my window to talk to Bill? “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you…“  from All Out of Love by Air Supply.  Timing, I has it.  To regain our lost masculinity we watched Prescilla, Queen of the Desert and debated proper appletini technique.

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Kyle:  Wow, I think I know why Max goes after Amanda’s iradescent green sock.  He sees in black and white, and what ever that hideous color is.  You must get tired of that crap being left around by your brother’s girlfriend.
Me: That’s my sock, and don’t bad mouth them until you know their glory.

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Why I volunteered to help Kyle move from Florida is beyond me.  Our trip to Penn State still stands out as my worst trip ever.  We left at 7:30 in a GMC Sierra and 27 hours of podcasts for 42 hours of driving.  The trip down was marked by false hope:IMG_0708

I thought this was the furthest south Wawa and shed a tear leaving it, until I saw signs for the next 3.  Boo…

At about 1 AM we encountered an “I-95 South Closed” sign.  Hm…. So we took a detour around

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CAPE FUCKING FEAR!!! I want to become a dentist in this plaza and knock out the light behind “Cape” so I can be the dentist at Fear Plaza.  Later, there was another delay.

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A jack-knifed trailer.  I’ve always been stunned by the jack knifed trailer on an on-ramp.  LIke some how one thinks that throwing the wheel will magically fix your truck once you realize you’re going the wrong way.

I was hell-bent on going to a Waffle House after reading a review in Maxim that they were superior to IHOP.  This died in my chest after Kyle pointed out to me that the car was being cased by four separate people and I spotted two pimps.  Go Carolina!  We switched after 11 hours and in Georgia I noticed a sign where the design was identical to the Brass Ring Cafe in Hopewell/Pennington.

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We arrived in Florida and began Operation:Packupkyleslife.  I wanted to pack-up and return to PA the same day, but biology interfered.  I met Kyle’s cat Dunyazad.  A cat that fits into the category of animals with awesome names that are abbreviated to something retarded, in this case “dunners” or “duny” or something equally dumb.

I had an idea to increase our efficiency on the way back:

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BED SAIL!

Packing was an ordeal with the ultimate goal of “protect the suade couch and queen sized bed”.  I was angry at Kyle for dragging his feet until I realized he was leaving his life behind, frown.  We departed the next day after packing in the rain which only stoked the fires of my determination.

The drive back was awesome in that I got to drive 1100 miles at a maximum speed of 63 MPH, w00t.  Our overnight stop involve Dunderella nearly becoming potty trained.

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We had to pull over about 6 times because something was about to bounce out and kill someone.  I ran out of podcasts around Fredericksburg, Va and was reduced to listening to old episodes of Security Now! and listening to PC security problems from 2005.  Anyway, observations:

Virginia had signs that said “Overheight Vehicle Detector ahead”.  Isn’t that just a bridge?  Virginia also had the best custom plates: “LRIGTAB”, “Uh huh”, “W00K1EE”, “Nerdc4rt” and “FLAMING”.  The last was on a Hummer H3, no idea.  Finally, Virginia had many illuminated signs that said “DUI Crackdown In Effect” with metal signs beneath that said “CRUSH CRIME”.  Best crimefighting initiative name ever.

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Please note that Hell is in comic sans.

Salvation came when we did find the furthest south (on I-95) Wawa.  It was glorious.  Most rest stations had hand blow-dryers.  I much prefer a paper towel but this Wawa had retrofitted a jet engine as a hand dryer.  I was nearly knocked over initially by its force.

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I have more pictures available on my Flickr Feed of this trip.

I’m glad I made the 2200 mile trip alive.  The 800 mile trip to Glen Ellyn will be a cakewalk.  Go 5-Color Worlds!

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Sometime in I’d say 2000, I stated that Sir Putts-a-lot was uncreative or at least failed to express it.  I wouldn’t say he was offended but it’s not exactly a “howdy” either.  He mentioned the next day that he’d created a picture by drawing a large number of small circles.  He then went through in successive cycles and connected close dots and removing others to get a new field of dots.  I called this process uncreative and it’s taken me 7 years to realize I was wrong.

I’d failed to think through the ramifications of that process and I was failing to be sufficiently creative.  I wonder what would have occurred if new dots were added to open spaces.  This procession is the source of Conway’s Game of Life, at least in a somewhat primitive way.  A slightly educated guess also makes me think that dots would be distributed along a power law distribution.  A phenomenon that governs markets, sand grain size and a host of other shit.  The scale factor would depend on Sir Putts-a-lot and probably could have been used as a proxy of his mood.  The Boltzmann function sparked my curiosity of statistical physics as well as leading me to things I’d grow to realize I’d never understand any time soon.  Boltzmann was a scientist ahead of his time but sadly a man of his time.  Science mourns his departure but his is a tombstone I want to see before I die and simply says “S = K log W” (this was written before ‘ln’ became standard notation for natural logs).