Fungible Convictions

Today I switched fungibleconvictions.com from Go Daddy to a new registrar and host.

I was willing to give the company a chance to come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It did, slightly. But it’s much too little too late.

I’m not all that interested in patronizing a company that equivocates on such ill-conceived legislation. The option to remain anonymous to governments, the need for the internet’s structural integrity, and the non-negotiability of freedom of speech must be defended — most of all by the intermediaries between content-creators and end-users, intermediaries like Go Daddy who, as much as any government, are in the technical and moral position to protect speech and due process.

I finished In Parenthesis today. On the bus to Harvard to meet for lunch. See Mass Ave behind the page?

It’s a book that deserves to be pointed out, read with your lips moving, photographed even, but withers when talked through. Share it only as a secret.

A compliment to Abe Stein’s post “Baseball, Time, and the Value of our Humanity”, in which he suggests that we should welcome the length of baseball games, or at least agree that it’s not a threat to the game.

Coupla things…

1) It’s important to acknowledge the relative brevity of games before the mid-90′s. For the majority of baseball’s history, a game longer than two hours was considered over-long.

2) The economic pressures nudging teams to longer games are huge. Related to #1 above, for about half its history — during an era when its attendees were made up of urban, adult, hourly-working men — baseball was a daytime sport. Games had to be short, if still pastoral in their aesthetic. But as the population changed through the 1960′s and the target market (and stadium locations) skewed more toward suburban families, a baseball game necessarily became an evening event, with a 7:35 pm (later 7:05 pm) game’s horizon stretching out toward midnight.

Meanwhile, while I haven’t heard an owner say it outright, a four-hour game is two more hours of concession stand sales and TV commercials. NFL owners, unable to lengthen games, do use that logic to try to lengthen the season. But unlike baseball players, football players have a lot to lose (their bodies, their minds) through more play.

None of that contradicts anything Abe says. In person, a four-hour game — with breaks between pitches, between innings, between action — is four hours I get to spend talking to my dad, my friends, my wife. Or, on TV or the radio, it’s church — a priest and a deacon reinterpreting the same stories for modern times, with familiar if distant characters that build, challenge, and reinforce our faith.

You weren’t that easy.

“I’m not much of a talker.”

Matter of fact, people took that to mean you were tough — as in a nut to crack.

Yet it was a crack, in your voice, that I’ll remember about you most, two words offered to the air at Grandma’s memorial — “Oh, Nina.” — like you’d arced an arrow over our family and it’s taken all these years for it to find a place to land.

You weren’t that easy, but you were so very good to us. I’m glad you’re where you want to be now, getting your well-deserved reward…she must be thrilled:

In my job, I often create publications and posters. I often have too little time for from-scratch illustrations, but fair-use conventions give me a chance to adapt elements of existing works.

One example is a photorealistic subway map I just designed for the cover of my department’s newsletter.

The job was relatively easy…it took me several hours worth of work to figure out how to do it, but with these steps it’s something you can do in less than an hour, shuttling back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop…

1. Get a transportation agency’s subway map as a PDF.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) makes a high-resolution PDF of its system map available.

PDFs, it often turns out, preserve layers. Open your PDF in Adobe Illustrator, and you should find the original layers are editable. (If yours aren’t, sadly you’ll have to consider hand-deleting the original text.)

From there, you can customize the map, replacing stop names with your own text — in my case, faculty and grad students’ names, research themes, etc. (The MBTA, like many transport authorities, uses Helvetica as its typeface.)

2. Apply brushes for a slightly worn look.

Save your file and open it in Photoshop. Use a large charcoal paper brush with the opacity set low. Important: anything that you want to appear on the “paper” of the map should be done before step 3. In my image above, you may be able to tell I incorrectly applied the brush after step 3, giving the appearance more of dirty glass than of worn paper.

3. Create the illusion of perspective.

Save the Photoshop file and open it in Illustrator. Experiment with Illustrator’s rotate tool (Effects > 3D > Rotate) to find a 3D perspective you like.

4. Apply the “tilt-shift” trick.

Save the Illustrator file once more and open it in Photoshop. Follow this separate tutorial on creating the illusion of tilt-shift photography, which gives images with good depth of field the illusion of miniturization, or more precisely that your eyes are just inches away from a set of objects. The tutorial above walks you through making a central swath of the image in-focus and the rest out-of-focus, just as things appear when you look at them up close.

And that’s it! Did that work for you? Leave questions in the comments.

It may be August, but I have to start prepping material to drive my mother-in-law insane at Christmas.

Me: “Toots, explain ‘Christmas Is Coming’. You’ve got a fatted goose. But you’re telling me to put a penny in the old man’s cap? Not even…you’re saying put in half a penny. And if I don’t have half a penny, just say ‘god bless you’? BUT YOU’VE GOT A FATTED GOOSE. At least give the guy part of the drumstick.”

Michael (father-in-law): “You know the Kingston Trio did a version of that song. It’s all about booze.”

Scorecard from the Puff ‘n Putt, Montauk, NY. [Large version.]

In honor of summer, courtesy of J.M. and E.H. circa 2001.

Four months ago, in a private post, I wrote about the frustration of searching for a house and doubting whether our then-two, soon-to-be-three failed offers were a sign we were being too rational:

[W]e’d probably be in a house by now if we let irrationality take over just once—if we reacted with a crazy excited emotion to a perfect kitchen while ignoring the crap elementary school, the old boiler, and the hand-carved headstones in the basement marking where cat corpses have been buried in the foundation. And after twelve and a half months, I don’t know if our—especially my—adherence to auditable decision-making has been a good thing or bad thing.

It was a good thing!

Yesterday, Lindsay and I closed on a great house.

It’s a single-family house; on a semi-dead-end street (the street runs up to a major park but winds just a bit to connect to another small road); we’re a short walk to the great elementary school, to bus stops, to good friends’ new house, to a BBQ joint. In fact, we’re bookended by BBQ: there’s the restaurant down on the main road, and our friends tell us the town has barbecues in the park.

The year of bad luck came in handy to make the good. Our three prior failed offers meant we knew exactly what to pay (we beat out eight other offers) and we had all our paperwork in perfect order, making for a quick P&S…so that when an offer $18,000 above ours came in two days later, it could only be relegated to backup offer status.

We’ve met a few neighbors and have been offered babysitting services already (one step at a time, folks).

The house itself indeed needs work, but nothing overly terrifying. We’ll have to replace the hot water heater. We needed a structural inspection to make sure the cracks in the foundation needed simple sealing—which they do—rather than major work. And in the grand tradition of my house-hunting spreadsheet, I’ve already made a home-improvements spreadsheet with the 80 tiny items mentioned in the inspection.

<Side note>
If you’re looking for a stellar inspector, go with Morgan Cohen. Our family was warning us that most inspections aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, but then they saw Morgan’s report…so yeah, go with him, though only if you’re good at letting the sheer number of things he finds wash over you and concentrate on the things that need addressing immediately.
</Side note>

Besides the mortgage aspect of “adult stuff we haven’t had to handle before”, there are some other things. We’ll have an energy audit so we can be eligible for tax incentives when we switch to gas heat. We hired movers well ahead of time and will pay them in cash rather than hire friends two days before and pay them in pizza. We have to learn new vocabulary: flashing, disposal gasket, soft mortar joint, and, most importantly, “get the scotch, your father just finished the sheetrock”.

But after so very long, so many open houses, so many offers, we have the house we were looking for.