I was up at the Abbey Lounge last night in Somerville checking out Dave Alpert, a local singer/songwriter. I met him a few weeks ago at a video-blogger meetup in Jamaica Plain.

I ended up recording the performance on my cheap, iPod fool-you-once-knockoff, defunct Japanese company’s mp3 benchwarmer. It’s got a crappy built-in mic I used, and a line-in that probably isn’t worth a decent microphone that I don’t have anyway.

Any audio crappiness is the mic and my poor mastering skills, not Dave or the free, open source multi-track audio editor Audacity that I used to clean and split the tracks.

A couple tracks from the show:

1. Other Assholes
2. Rude Awakening
3. Lovesong for the Wrong Person

The songnames are mostly wrong, just relating to how Dave described the songs. Lastly, the mic was sitting on the bar, so any thumps or clicks are people setting down their glasses. Any guffawing is probably me—at the jokes, not the music.

I added a new section to the website—books I’ve read; it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I was over at my pal Dean’s place in Jamaica Plain today. In addition to lots of semi-expired foodstuffs he snags from behind the Co-Op next door, he also has the screens and materials for t-shirt printing. Previously I had been helping him up in Lowell filming some promos for his Democracy Player channel, “Telemusicvision”:http://telemusicvision.com; today we were putting stuff on t-shirts.

The design I decided to print was one of the doodles I had done a week or so ago for the DigitalBicycle Project while waiting for Jessica to get done with her homework .

The process basically was:

1. Clean off a screen, which is a fine mesh in a wooden frame

2. Mix together the emulsion, which is a bunch of thick green stuff, with a little bit of yellow photo sensitive hardener. Apparently on their own they like to stain, and together they really like to stain.

3. Scrape this emulsion concoction on the screen very thinly, but enough to fill in the mesh. Let dry a few hours in Dean’s oven—it wasn’t turned on, just a good out of the way place.

4. Print the design out onto a transparency. It has to be monotone-mesh doesn’t do gradients. I tried to get to those little halftone circles like Lichtenstein, but Adobe Illustrator was having none of it-I had designed the thing in Inkscape, my preferred drawing program and was working off a PNG.

5. Get the (now) dried emulsion convered screen. It is photosensitive—not sensitive like photographic paper, but just don’t point a spotlight at it.

6. Lay it down on something black, in our case a t-shirt—this keeps reflections from hitting the underside; place the transparency on top and then we dropped a piece of glass over that, just to keep it flat.

7. Shine a hundred watt light on it for about 40 minutes.

8. The light hardens the emulsion. So after it’s been hardened, take the screen in the bath and spray warm water on it, which will wash any emulsion from the screen that was covered by the design—since this was blocked by the light and thus not hard.

9. Tape off any non-emulsion filled parts that aren’t part of the design

10. Put on top of t-shirt and now scrape some special black paint over it. Lift off and voila. Our screen wasn’t perfect, so we had to use a q-tip with paint on the end to touch up.

11. Let the paint dry. This being Massachusetts in March, we put it on top of a space heater for an our

12. Lastly, you have to iron the design on the shirt, letting the iron heat each part for about 60 seconds. This somehow “proofs” the paint so that it won’t run in the wash.

13. Rock it.

Lately I’ve been spending more time than I should with a great free/open source software illustration program: Inkscape.

Before I get to far into an explanation of the fun and wonder I have with Inkscape let me make a little caveat. I’ve used Adobe Illustrator in the past and never liked it much; I admit though that I never really knew how to use it well.

With Inkscape–it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux–I am very quickly and easily recreate the simple doodles I make during staff meetings. The tools ar quite simple and with a little bit of practice you’ll be making smooth shapes, clean gradients and surprisingly nice art. Seriously.

Inkscape is a vector drawing program, which means that you are creating basic shapes, and then deforming the shapes themselves mathematically. This is different from raster or bitmap drawing programs like MS Paint, Photoshop or The GIMP, in which you are modifying pixels. What the hell am I talking about? Basically, if you’ve ever tried to enlarge a image in Photoshop and had it turn into a grainy mess, you won’t have this program with drawings made and enlarged in Inkscape.

Another plus of Inkscape is that there are lots of great Public Domain/Creative Common graphics on the internet in Inkscape’s native format: SVG. This is doubly cool because once you get your mind around the idea that these graphics can be scaled and still look great, it’s no trouble at all to make ants eating houses or whatever scale destructing things strike your fancy. All with no blocks or jagged edges in sight.

I included an image I’ve recently done below. The graphic of the videocassette is public domain that I got from openclipart.com.

I was in New York a few weeks ago for work/pleasure and stayed at my old roommate Greg’s place near 47th and Lexington. I snapped this one while coming back from B&H Photo where I talked on a panel about digital media distribution.

I commute by train to work every morning. Normally in Lowell the siderails are filled with boxcars. This morning they had left, but not without leaving evidence.

Desensitized to all the brightdangle and claptrap for purchase in the stores these days, I am mesmorized by the things people throw out and can throw out; this piano carcass being no exception.

Jess and I were up at MIT to see a friend and coworker in a MIT Community Players production of Autobahn, a series of 7 one-act plays taking place in the front seat of an automobile, by Neil Labute. She was great, the plays themselves were ok and a little redundant by the end.

Leaving the building we had to tread through some relatively thick snow. We tried to follow the footprints of others, though as the photo shows, some of them were a little less than efficient at getting anywhere.

I snapped this photo just this morning. Lowell, America’s Venice is crossed with canals that have just started to freeze over. The leaky drainpipe is keeping the ice from fully freezing, and the tree is still holding on to some of its leaves.

cankle (cang·kel): n. the lower leg of one whose calf and ankle are not clearly differentiated. Jess and I were out with her coworker Liz and fiance Adam tonight when we heard this gem for the first time. We were talking about all sorts of blending: back acne: backne; gigantic-enormous: ginormous, smother- suffocate: smufficate. How appropriate that we were eating out at Jose McIntyres: an eclectic and moderately edible mix of Irish pub and Mexican food.