Baby Shoes For Sale

I was finally able to see a couple Mark Rothko pieces at MoMA today and I was nothing short of blown away. Looking at a poster of a Rothko, the extent of my relationship with this body of work up until today, simply doesn't do the paintings justice. For me, much of the beauty of those 4' by 8' canvases is the shear size and mass of color, both of which are lost in a $12.95 glossy medium. By letting yourself go into the colors and by exploring the concrete divide between color and the fuzzy boarders of the same, a very cool sensation washes over me.
Having a poster of a Monet means you can appreciate the painting, you can say "wow, thats a good painting." But if you have a poster of a Rothko, its akin to having a photograph of a museum: "hey, remember that time we went to that place and saw that amazing painting? Doesn't this poster remind you of that experience?" And the poster will, but it won't evoke the same powerful, know-it-in-your-gut reaction as seeing a Rothko in person.
I guess what I'm saying is go see a Rothko.

Back at school now and I've made some big changes to a number of things. First and foremost, and the only change which I'll discuss here, is my living situation. Over the past year and a half I've been struggling along with a roommate who snores like none other. This is spackle-loosening snoring we're talking about. Needless to say, my sleep has been less-than-fulfilling during this time, not even my Bose Quiet Comfort 2's could save me.  I decided it was time for a change and put in a request for a different room. I heard very little over winter break and finally, just as I'm stepping off my plane in New York, I get a call saying they have a single for me (a rare occurrence, considering there is a waiting list a mile long for singles). I jumped at the offer. "You sure you don't want to check the room out before you accept it?" the lady asked on the phone, surprised at my eagerness. Within 24 hours my girlfriend and I moved all my stuff out of my old room (without a cart, in the middle of the night, in the snow, yes it sucked) and in to her room. Then, checked out of my old room and into my new one. Then moved all my stuff from her room and into my new room. Think Tetris, but with a few hundred pounds of stuff from monitors to bedding to jackets to food. She is a real sweetheart for helping me move, I couldn't have done it without her. So now I'm in my new room and I love it. I have a wonderful view, I get to see the sunset (which is nice, but it also means I don't "get" to see the sunrise when I'm trying to sleep), and I can see the Manhattan skyline. Its intimate, but not terribly small, and above all its quiet. I love the quiet.

It has been one of those good days. I recieved a couple great grades on some school work, did a lot of errands (like getting a new Hofstra Card, which was surprisingly easier than I thought it was going to be), coded, and got packages from home. In an of themselves each of these things are OK, but when put together all in one day, one good day is created. Getting school work back from professors is, for me, a love and hate relationship. When I get bad grades I find myself not wanting to be in the class, not wanting to participate, and hating the subject for a brief period. On the other hand, when I get good grades I participate more, stay after class to talk to the professor, and generally learn more. I guess this is proof that I function better on postive re-enforcement. Doing errands, too, is a struggle for me. I put them off until the last possible moment. For the past five days or so my Hofstra Card, which lets me in to my dorm, has not worked. It was old and the magnetic tape on the back was almost totally scratched off. I knew I had to go to Hofstra Card Services to get it fixed but I also knew that usually people who work at Hofstra are not nice to you. In fact, it often seems they hate you. Thus, I put off this task for a while, causing my roommates no end of hassle by asking them to let me in to the dorm whenever I needed to get back inside. Today, I went to Card Services and had a new card withing ten minutes. Nobody was mean, nobody yelled, it was just a nice little card-getting expirience. New card in hand, I went to the post office to get a package. Actually, it was two packages (which made it that much better, like hotdogs). In each was a shaver of sorts, one for beard trimming and one for hair cutting. I don't know if you've noticed but my hair has been getting really long and going all over the place. It was getting bad. Bad enough, in fact, that my dear mother sent me these two trimmers to get my self in shape before going home for Thanksgiving. Thanks Mom! Then I got back to my dorm, swiping myself in for once, and started to code some old school JavaScript. I added a cool feature to BabyShoesForSale where the posts are listed by title only, and when you click the title a new div slides down to show the excerpt. Pretty nifty, eh? While it is not much in terms of coding difficulty, it brought me back to the old days of programming games in Perl. I had that sense of creation I haven't had in a while. After all these great things I'm going to sit back, watch football, and eat cake. Tomorrow, do yourself a favor and have a great day.

I am all for Barack Obama, for change, for a new hope, for the inspiration that he has brought to this country. I think its fantastic and I think President-Elect Obama will lead this country to where it needs to go. That being said, I am a little dismayed that this "Internet" candidate dropped the ball so quickly after being elected. I am reffering, of course, to his Twitter feed. There was only one post, on November 5th, after he had officially won the election. There was no post game, there was no tweets of what he's doing now, nothing.

Of course, the man has stuff to do. He should be allowed some time to cool down after what must have been a very tiring two years. However, one can't look over the fact that his lack of tweets can make people wonder: was he genuine about all this social campaigning? Or was it just a political tool? The tool of the widespred Internet base that President-Elect Obama built up is a double edged sword. Yes, it is powerful, but he has to stay on top of it. The tubes are a fickle place, more than happy to work for something they believe in, but will turn and cry fowel just as quickly. Here's to your victory, Barack, and here's to a hope of continued transparency.

The idea of citizen journalism is an intriguing one. Instead of professional writers being paid to cover stories that are in often foreign locations, what if the citizens and locals of that location, who are familiar with the back story and more connected, wrote the news coverage instead. This is the aim of citizen journalism and up until now, the only issue has been how to get the ball rolling and get people to write.

Big media outlets like CNN have tried to get this going, with things like iReport, but then the issue becomes twofold: there is no reward for good stories besides people getting their name flashed on CNN for a few seconds and there is no way to tell a reliable, good story from <a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/03/apple_denies_cnn_ireport_of_steve_jobs_heart_attack.html">a bad one</a>. The solution is to pay the citizen journalists.

Thus, it follows that good writers and good articles should get paid more than bad ones. <a href="http://spot.us">Spot.us</a>, a non-profit based in the Bay Area, has done something just like that, but it is headed in the wrong direction. As TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/10/spotus-experiments-with-citizen-funded-community-journalism/trackback/">points out</a>, there is little reason somebody would give $25, $10, or even $5 to fund a story seeing as people are slowing the $.25 purchase of newspapers which contain dozens of stories. The economic structure of Spot.us just doesn't seem to work, at least from my perspective.

What I think would be a better option is this: drop the non-profit status. There is no point as far as I can tell. Instead, base a writer's pay off of the advertising dollars produced by the page their article is on. For example, if I write a great article about the oil spill in the bay, tons of people will come read it, producing many page views and many advertising dollars. Conversely, a bad article will produce fewer page views and thus less advertising dollars. The solution is simple, just give the writer a cut of the money made on their page. This covers both rewarding writers and it keeps the good writers around.

A quick and dirty assembly of some video I shot on a recent trip to MOMA and New York.

MOMA and the city from Chris Blau on Vimeo.

New Chair from Chris Blau on Vimeo.

Let it be known that I love new ideas, new ways of looking at things. I love even more when these ideas are in website form, complete with a fair helping of web 2.0 and cool minimalist graphics. To show my adoration for new web 2.0 sites I am always itching to get an invite to the betas and once I do I use the new site night and day.

However, after the release of BrightKite and their new iPhone app, I got to thinking. How is it that any of these sites actually get off the ground? Specifically what I'm talking about is social sites (whereas sites like Digg and reddit would work without a major base because the content could be computer generated). With a social site, on the other hand, there is so much dependance on the users to make more users show up and use the service that I am amazed any new sites ever get off the ground. Its only by sheer chance that Facebook and MySpace achieved notoriety while Orkut, which is backed by arguably the biggest presence on the Internet (Google), is relatively obscure.

Then there are special scenarios like Twitter. Twitter is special because it is really only surviving because the elite bloggers, newsmakers, and the like use it. Little Joe the plumber (had enough yet?) like you and me can use it, sure, but will never reach the true purpose of a site like Twitter (because, honestly, we just don't have that many interesting things to say).

Like I said, I only have all this on the mind because of the new location-based social site called BrightKite. From what I can tell, it is esentially Twitter on steroids with a GPS duct taped to the side of it. I'm rooting for it, though, and I hope that the addition of the location-aware services successfully walk the line between being cool enough to attract people and requiring too many expensive gadgets to use fully. Good luck!

Oh, and go sign up for BrightKite.

Over the past week or so there have been quite a few instances where I have caught myself thinking that perhaps I'm watching history unfold, watching the very cusp of today close and tomorrow open. Granted, every time you pour your Cheerios you're making history to some, albeit very small, extent. To that end, I guess, we're always watching out own little histories develop and be recorded in our own ways.

Then, maybe what I'm sensing is more of an anomaly in my history, a high - or low, depending on who you ask - point worth a bold heading in the history books. What I'm referring to, of course, is the final presidential debate here at Hofstra University. Seeing the buzz of news cameras and talking heads and secret service on campus was simply unreal. Some of the most notable points hit me when watching the coverage on TV. It was just odd watching Hardball or CNN and seeing not only places that you've been but also places where you go quite often.

This feeling of being The Witness, then, was not really supplied by being at Hofstra when the debate was going on but rather by watching the coverage and thinking "hey! I've been there!" In short, it seems that the historical aura of much of the proceedings for many - excluding those lucky few who went to the debate - was caused by living vicariously through the Wolf Blitzers of the world. That is, if there was no news coverage and simply two great minds discussing the ins and outs of domestic policy in relation to this great nation they both love, would it have seemed so historical? Would it have seemed like such an occasion?

This post is not supposed to come across as some sort of the-media-controls-us-all-and-we-are-helpless-without-our-TVs kind of thing, but instead an honest look at what, exactly, makes us so excited? Not one of the people who described their exciting night this morning in my political science class had anything to say about the actual debate until the prompted by the professor. It was all "oh I saw this celebrity!" and "I drove Mr. Dodd around!" Not once did I hear anything praising the two great minds debating their hearts out for which the whole event was centered on. Not once.

It has been a few days since the last posting and quite a few things have happened, very few of which I will list here to be totally frank. The post will serve merely as an update to an otherwise quiet week for blogging with more deep thoughts - or, at the very least, thoughts - to follow in the next couple of days.

There is a lot of buzz around campus. From the news cameras to the secret service to horse drawn buggies - which one doesn't belong? - there is a general feeling of excitement and quiet awe on the Hofstra campus. For starters, there are rumors going around that the secret service, in addition to blocking off a good third of the north end of campus, are dressed both as students and Hofstra's own Public Safety. And I must say, there are a few people in public safety garb that I saw today whom I did not recognize. As for the undercover student versions of the men in black, it is honestly hard to tell who is packing a .45 and who is just a regular student as they all have big muscles and short hair (read: the tough guy Long Island look). I'm just happy to report that nothing bad has happened on campus so, perhaps, people like the four black polo'd, khaki wearing, gun slingers I walked past on my way to get coffee this morning are keeping us safe. More power to them!

The restlessness around the debate gets a little closer to home, too. My wonderful girlfriend Brittany was selected, out of the thousands who applied, to be one of the few who gets to go watch the debate live. I'm sure she'll write about it over on her blog and we'll get as many pictures as we can up on Flickr tomorrow night. I'm really proud of her and happy for her, she deserves this big treat after all the work she's been doing recently.

As far as my own thoughts on the debate go, I must say I'm excited. It is undeniably cool to see all the action around campus and to witness history happening right in front of you (more on this at a later date). I must say though, if asked what I think of Hofstra holding the debate on some sort of live television broadcast, I would be remiss if I didn't say something like "yes, I think it is fantastic that Hofstra was selected to host the final debate for this most important of elections but honestly I'm troubled to see Hofstra go to all the effort for this event and still not be able to get the money together to get working washing machines in the dorms". Or something like that.

In other news, my meeting with my architecture professor went well. I left happy as a clam, with that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that you get when a teacher likes you. Without rehashing the whole conversation, I'm just going to say that the sentence "art history is really like the cuban cigar of pre-law majors" was said. Not that I'm looking into law, but that is just such a cool phrase it must be put in the record books. Beyond that, I'm defiantly warming up to the idea of an art history major and, I think, if this professor has anything to do with it, I'll be sold by winter time.

All told it has been a great, yet busy, week out here in Hempstead, NY. Be sure to tune in to the debate!