Isaac Bowen

It is not enough

Sat May 12 00:00:00 -0700 2012

Got distracted with a piano today. I need a proper Device, to record this kind of thing.

In other news: the Masquers have produced The Sound of Music. More than that, they have completely and unabashedly succeeded. Counting Sister Berthe and Uncle Max among my literal kin, as I do, I went to see the opening performance on Thursday night - it is surprising, the talent that’s out here.

Reassuring, even. And I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a reason to be hopeful, that art of this calibre stubbornly shows up without permission.

Memories Are Sacred

Mon Apr 30 00:00:00 -0700 2012

Spent a few hours this weekend in the Cermak industrial district.

You have to get back on the horse.

Mon Apr 23 00:00:00 -0700 2012

You have to get back on the horse. Somehow, and I don’t know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on: these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror. Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

– Tycho, Penny Arcade

Improbable nights

Fri Mar 16 00:00:00 -0700 2012

This post is coming to you from the future, because in my delirium last night I forgot what the date was.

Or had been, I guess.

At any rate, the photos from last night have been processed for some reason, and are now available for your consumption. You have your choice of Flee (which I recommend out of bias, and now has some fanciness like infinite scrolling), or Flickr (which will give you the same data, but with a faint and mournful sigh).

Nights

Thu Mar 15 00:00:00 -0700 2012

Wandered out for some night photography with the Bulgarian. Only 98 stills, which means they stand a decent chance of being processed within the next six months.

Nearly done.

Tue Mar 13 00:00:00 -0700 2012

Almost done with the wedding pictures. One more pass before the final upload.

Turns out working a conventional 40hr week puts a damper on creativity. Or, leastwise, makes it easier to mentally call it quits at 7pm, taking a pass on making in favor of actual rest.

This is a problem.

Flee

Sun Feb 26 00:00:00 -0800 2012

Flee (yflee.com) exists because every other Flickr viewer is either cluttered or cludgy. The code’s over yonder at GitHub, should you be interested.

(It also exists because four years ago I offered to build such a thing for a friend, and felt that it was probably time to check it off the list.)

For the technically-minded who didn’t feel like clicking that GitHub link, this is a fairly simple Sinatra app, backed by memcached and deployed on Heroku. Good Sunday-afternoon-project material. Things I did not do: plan for any resolutions less than 900px across, support photosets, include any kind of content discovery tools. Though I may stick to that last point.

Use Flee for yourself: the app generates galleries for any Flickr account by using friendly subdomains, giving you a clean, elegant gallery, free of branding. (Mine’s at isaacbowen.yflee.com, for example.) You can start at yflee.com.

Enjoy.

... and dip.

Sat Feb 25 00:00:00 -0800 2012

Eventful week, quiet weekend. The wedding pictures are nearly complete - another dozen or so shots left, for roughly an 80hr project. Well worth it.

In other news, yours truly is now playing engineer over at Threadless, that thriving mainstay of crowdsourced creativity. Started on Monday, had an awesome first week. This place is something special.

For your consideration:

lucky-fm

Thu Feb 16 00:00:00 -0800 2012

This gap between posts is irregular, to be clear. Things are happening.

But, in an effort to produce a Thing, distinct and in isolation, I now present this:

lucky-fm is an effort to do something at least casually useful with Last.fm’s track.findbyaudiofeatures API, apparently unrecognized as it is. I ran into this by accident while thumbing through my feedreader - they made something similar for Spotify, and as far as I can tell that’s all anyone’s said about it.

I’m not a data guy by trade, but the potential of this stuff is inspiring.

desktopography-dl.rb

Wed Feb 08 00:00:00 -0800 2012

Desktopography, for the unitiated, is a thing of wondrous beauty.

Some of us compulsively collect this kind of thing. This population segment has an intersection with those who automate the hell out of everything, why not.