Kirk Kittell was here

Ignore everybody

kirk.kittell — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:41:52 +0000

You are responsible for your own experience.

Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.

Thanks for that, Hugh.

I'm not practiced at selling other people's stuff, so let's try this... Dear everyone: go and buy Hugh McLeod's book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. It's available starting today, Thursday 11 June 2009. Don't walk, run, to your local book store, etc. It will be there. Waiting for you.

I'm an appreciative subscriber to Hugh's insights on gapingvoid.com and on Twitter as @gapingvoid. It was "How to Be Creative," the predecessor to this book, that hooked me a few years ago. If you want an objective review about the merits of this book, I'm not the person to give it to you.

I'll leave the biz cards biz to Mr. McLeod

It's a small book. If you're into buying your books by the pound, well, sorry. And it has a load of pictures, namely, the cartooned business cards that are Hugh's notable medium (and this is cliched to death, but: the drawings themselves are worth a thousand words). I didn't know how well that would translate from softcopy to hardcopy, but I'm very happy with what I have in my hands. The wisdom is mostly the same, but I like having the real thing that I can flip to any chapter I like -- at will, at random -- to get a good dose of Hugh's uncluttered point of view.

Ignore Everybody is listed as a guide about how to be creative, but for me it is a guide about confidence. (Perhaps these two are the same.)

There you are -- there I am -- navigating the cubicle canyon on foot, wondering if this is it. There's a small voice in your head that says, "Well, I have this idea that might be awesome," but what do voices know? Voices are going to get you in trouble. But you have everything you need at your disposal to make an end run around your chosen mediocrity. But. What if you don't make it? But. What if you don't have the right tools? But. What if your idea is too small? But. What if you find your voice and it isn't interesting?

That's where Hugh enters. The simple ideas in Ignore Everybody point out that the path ahead of you has been traveled -- not the exact same one, as the chapter "Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside" is meant to explain -- and that there is the chance of success. You just need to do it. You just need to stop thinking that other people are going to see your dream as importantly as you do. You just need to understand that no one is qualified to give you permission except you. It reminds me of the chapter on writing memoirs in On Writing by Bill Zinsser where the author points out that people mistakenly think that they need permission to write about themselves, as if this was something that needed to be approved by the world at large. Then he says, fine, I give you permission to do it, go. That's the kind of lasting feeling that I take from Ignore Everybody. Get the book, and it will help to bridge the gaps of uncertainty that you encounter along your path. It's a swift kick in the tail to get you past your own hangups.

There are no recipes in this book. There aren't any shortcuts. There are forty short, short chapters littered with pithy business card doodles. Like anything done directly from the heart, it resonates.

Now go buy the freaking book.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://kirkkittell.com/trackback/290

Three books from the Pollard: Warren, Malkiel, Plato

kirk.kittell — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:54:36 +0000

I picked up three books this evening from the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell:
New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren. A million years ago -- or maybe just ten, I don't remember -- I was in high school. I remember flipping through the enormous book of a million different stories and poems -- or maybe just a hundred, I don't remember -- that was our English literature book. One poem that caught my eye, although we never covered it in class, was a poem that I simply remembered because it had the line, "Canteen now dry and of what worth." That was the only line I remembered, though I remembered it in the context of, "OK, we've made it here, now who are we and why?" Today I looked up the line -- thanks, Google Books -- and tracked down the book at the library.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. Of course this deserves a terrible pun: I found this book during a random walk down the aisle at the library. It wasn't completely random that I chose it: I recognized it as a respected book on investing. Also, it stood out on the shelves in the section on finance because it didn't proclaim to make me a millionaire or beat the Dow or do any other number of things that I would expect to hear from someone that was just trying to sell me a book (looking at you and your books, Jim Cramer).
Dialogues of Plato, Volume I, translated by B. Jowett (Fourth printing, 1941). Let me explain what I know about philosophy: I don't know anything about philosophy. In the summer of 2005, at the University of Illinois, I had to cross campus to get from my apartment to work at the ElectriCOIL lab. To get there, often I would duck through the Main Library to catch a little shade. One day, they were selling used books, and I picked up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (for a quarter or fifty cents or something ridiculous). In this book, the narrator mentions the dialogues of Plato, as well as several other ideas and books on philosophy. So I saw this book while browsing the shelves, checked to see it was the one with the dialogue with Phaedrus, and got it.
By the way, I'm kittell on LibraryThing.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://kirkkittell.com/trackback/238

Heard on Etherbeat Radio, 18 May 2009

kirk.kittell — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:49:49 +0000

Interesting songs heard on Etherbeat Radio -- saved here so I can find them later and so you can go to last.fm to listen to them yourself:

"Mood Indigo" by Dr. John
"Touch" by Divine Styler
"Potholes in My Lawn" by De La Soul
"Of Course You Can" by Spearhead
"Yerbabuena" by Voo Doo Phunk
"Offspring" by Del the Funky Homosapien
"Experiment Number Six" by Lemon Jelly

I'm kittell on last.fm, by the way.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://kirkkittell.com/trackback/227

New books today

kirk.kittell — Sun, 17 May 2009 02:31:50 +0000

The last thing that I need is more books. Which is why I went and bought a few more books today.
Of course, this time it wasn't quite as financially demanding as it used to be, when I would almost compulsively raid the Barnes and Noble at Seven Corners in Falls Church, Virginia. This time, the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell was hosting a used book sale as a fundraiser. The three books that departed with me cost a grand total of $3 (which included a $0.50 raffle ticket for... I'm not sure what it was for).
It was a good excuse to get outside, walk along the canals in the morning sun, test another Lowell coffee shop (Caffe Paradiso, my favorite out of two so far).
Here are the new additions to my library:

Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. If anyone needs to know why I picked up a Kurt Vonnegut book, even if the dustcover was ripped all to hell, immediately leave this site, never come back.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
The More Than Complete Hitchhikers Guide by Douglas Adams. This book has all four books of the trilogy in one volume. As a former member of the space cadet cult, I was still a sort of outsider because I had never read any science fiction. (I read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson when I was in grad school, but I would classify that one under "geriatric sex," not "science fiction.") I have, however, played a little bit of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the Commodore 64. I'll give them a try. I'm no longer accepted by the space cadets, so maybe the books will be more fun without the corresponding baggage.

By the way, I'm kittell on LibraryThing.

Trackback URL for this post:

http://kirkkittell.com/trackback/220

Site Switch: WordPress to Drupal

kirk.kittell — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:10:48 +0000

Today I made a shift on kirkkittell.com: the site was previously based in WordPress; now it is based in Drupal. I still like WordPress because it was very, very easy to use. However, the sites that I have been developing recently for ISU and ISR alumni organizations are both in Drupal, which is better (in my opinion) for managing membership-based organizations. This site was the last one I had that used WordPress. I changed it so I could develop it along with the others, else it was going to atrophy.

Very exciting news, I know -- thrilling, etc. Things are weird or inoperable here and there, but it happens. You're getting this junk for free anyway.

Also, I've been away for three months because I moved from Texas to Massachusetts. (One might also say I've been away for three months because I've had nothing to say, but that has never stopped me from faking it before; see the other two hundred entries on this site for proof of that.)

Trackback URL for this post:

http://kirkkittell.com/trackback/219

Knocking on Thoreau's Door

kirk.kittell — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:36:16 +0000

Last week, I took a flash business trip to Tewksbury, a Massachusetts suburb tucked halfway between Boston and the New Hampshire border. Selected photos are posted on Flickr. A complete album is posted at photos.kirkkittell.com.

As it turns out, I had four free hours before my flight was scheduled to leave from Boston. Naturally, in a strange place, I was going to try to make the most of it. One of my favorite things about the northeast is the American history that is represented there. The place I really wanted to find was Concord, location of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. I wish I had picked up that map at the rental car office. Or maybe I'm glad I didn't. I couldn't find the battlefield, which I now know is Minute Man National Historical Park. But, on the road into Concord, I learned that this is the home of Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden.

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. --Chapter 2, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"

I bought Walden in Missoula, Montana, as I was passing through on my way from Mojave back to Illinois. I tried to read it once, failed after about 50 pages. Tried to read it again, maybe 20 pages this time. Gave up. It's one of those classics that you understand you're supposed to read for some reason or another, but why? It's clunky and Thoreau is pompous. I put the book away and forgot it. Sometime in spring 2006, I picked it up again. This time it was different. I flew through it this time. Thoreau was still pompous and stuffy, but I followed the thread of the story more than the way it was told. I packed the book with me when I went to France, finished it there in Strasbourg, then performed what I consider to be the greatest compliment: I gave the book away to someone so that they could read it. (Natalie, did you finish it?)

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. --Chapter 17, "Spring"

Megha asked me what Walden was about. I told her it was about eliminating the junk that we quietly shovel onto ourselves every day. Thoreau went to Walden to figure out what unnecessary weight was hanging around all of our necks. There's a ton of it. You don't see it because it's familiar. You don't feel it because you don't remember what you felt like without it. I've had my time alone in the desert and in other places, albeit in shifts. It's good to get away if you can manage it. But, on the other hand, it's good to look into those away places through a window like Walden, instead of wandering out there ourselves. Not all of our load can be dropped responsibly in order to get away to the outskirts. You don't need to get away to have perspective. Read Walden. I recommend it. You won't agree with all of it, but it's a welcome change in perspective; in that regard, you need it.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. --Chapter 18, "Conclusion"

Mike, I offer those last lines from Walden to you as an explanation for why Ed Abbey could -- needed to -- transform from Ed of The Desert to Ed of The City. Maybe you need to step outside of the frame to appreciate what lies within it.

The Week in Project 365 Photos [2009-W07]

kirk.kittell — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:38:57 +0000

2009-040: Free Agent Nation

2009-041: More Ravishing From Above

2009-042: Live Deliberately

2009-043: Eggs

2009-044: Winner Winner

2009-045: Falling from the Sky

2009-046: First Step

EXIF Data Scheme

kirk.kittell — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:09:04 +0000

Pursuant to a previous post, "Photo Backup Scheme," I've settled on a scheme for editing the EXIF data in my digital photos (and sometime in the not-near future, my scanned film photos). The changes I make to EXIF data in my digital photos falls into three categories: (1) corrections; (2) identifying information; and (3) geodata. Before I go on, don't ask me why I do this. OK, I'll tell you: it's a sickness, a compulsion. These photos go further in telling my story than I do, so I want them to be correct. And I expect them to survive long after I'm dead, so want them to explain themselves without me. Yeah. Weird. Kirk Kittell: caveat emptor. I use two tools to modify EXIF data:

Most of the work is done with ExifTool, developed by Phil Harvey. ExifTool operates via command line, which is intimidating at first.
Geodata is added with Geotagger, developed by Craig Stanton.

The first thing I do before editing photos in ExifTool is create an edit folder within the album of interest. The photos that I want to modify go into the edit folder, and I run the ExifTool command on the entire folder. It's much easier to do this than to work with individual photos. Also, if I screw up editing the EXIF data, it's easier to undo the effects if I've just edited a subset of photos instead of the whole album. (1) Corrections. The only corrections I make are to time. My first digital camera was sensitive when it ran out of batteries. If I pulled the batteries out to charge them, the camera would demand to have its time reset when I reinserted them. I didn't always do this; I know this because some of my photos were apparently stamped as being taken in January 2004, almost a year before I got the camera, a Kodak CX7530 Zoom. Each camera has its own set of native EXIF data, specific to the brand, sometimes further specific to the model (e.g., here is the list of Kodak tags). To fix the dates on the Kodak CX7530, I'd run this command:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal+=0:0:0 0:0:0" "-CreateDate+=0:0:0 0:0:0" "-YearCreated=0" "-MonthDayCreated=00:00" edit

DateTimeOriginal and CreateDate are general EXIF tags; YearCreated and MonthDayCreated are specific to Kodak. (2) Identifying Information. Simply, I add information that identifies me as the owner, a general description of the photo, and copyright information.

exiftool "-Copyright=Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0" "-OwnerName=Kirk Kittell, http://kirkkittell.com" "-SerialNumber=0000000000" -UserComment="Saguaro National Park, Arizona" edit

Also, I learned from Patty Hankins that if someone uses your photo without permission, it helps to be able to identify it, which is why I've included the serial number. (3) Geodata. Geotagger is very handy for this. Geotagger works with Google Earth: open Google Earth; center the view where the photo was taken; drag the subject photo into Geotagger; Geotagger adds latitude and longitude geodata to the digital photo. If I take a photo from a plane window -- which happens sometimes -- I also add the altitude (in meters, which is the standard) via ExifTool.

exiftool -GPSAltitude=5000 edit

OK, how do I figure the altitude? I use bbTracker on my phone. bbTracker logs the GPS data on my BlackBerry 8310. If I take a photo out of the window, I make a note on the corresponding point in the track.

The Week in Project 365 Photos [2009-W06]

kirk.kittell — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:33:46 +0000

Hey, this is a late post on this topic, but it's not like I'm running a high traffic site here. Here are my photos for Project 365 from a week ago. Tomorrow I'll post photos from this week, thus completing a manipulation of space-time by separating a week by a day. Or whathaveyou.

Library Stamp Note: The inside of The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie is more interesting than the side, which is shown here.

Dinner Yeah. I cook. Not particularly well, but good enough for a guy living on his own.

All in a Day's Work For Johnson Space Center's Safety and Total Health Day, there were a number of booths and demonstrations, including this one by Clear Lake Kuk Sool Won. I think I'd like martial arts such as this. But. I don't think I'll be in the area long enough to really get into the groove.

In the Dark The best from Shiner -- give it a try.

Outside Mission Control Detail from above the entranceway to Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center.

Spiritus Mundi This is an elegant little sculpture -- and by little I mean huge -- by Pablo Serrano sitting in front of University of Houston-Clear Lake

45678 The latest milestone which I've subjected my car to.

The Big Lebowski at Barack Obama's Inauguration

kirk.kittell — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:14:15 +0000

I love making panoramas. You probably know this already. Today I found this 59,783 X 24,658 pixel panorama (that everyone else apparently already knows about) from Barack Obama's inauguration by David Bergman. Go look at it. Now. It's fantastic. And enormous. Now, zoom in. Zoom in behind President Obama... Wait. Is that The Big Lebowski? Is usaservice.org really just a front for the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers? You make the call. David Huddleston as The Big Lebowski Dick Cheney as... The Big Lebowski? (The first image is a screen capture from The Big Lebowski. The second image is a closeup from an enormous panorama by David Bergman.)