And sometimes, you are given a sign you aren’t even looking for.

For those of you following the saga, I still have yet to rejoin the working world, but this has been far from a depressing time. I have health insurance, savings from before the financial tsunami, the support of my friends and family…I’ve been using this time to explore my creative side – poetry, songwriting, etc, etc. Still, when my father told me about a chance encounter on the subway with a woman running “an internet startup”, I thought something interesting might come of it.

She called him the next day, eager to meet with me after he told her of the web development work I did with Lehman Brothers. Then I gave her a call, asking her a few basics about her company.

“It’s kinda hard to explain. It would be great if you could attend our presentation Sunday night.”

That probably should have been my first clue. But, having been around startups enough, I can understand the need for not giving away too much of your business plan and trade secrets. I was curious enough to sacrifice a night of Masterpiece Theater to find out more. She even offered to pick me up, saying that she believed in “minimizing traffic on the road”.

Fast forward to Sunday evening. She swings by, makes small talk with my dad, and even invites him along to see the presentation. That should have been my second clue. My father is an accountant for an insurance company – what possible role could he play. Curious himself, he decided to hop in and join us. After stumbling about on the Jackie Robinson parkway, we ended up on Jamaica Avenue, around 87th street, outside a cramped little “office”. My third clue. Still, I’m a forgiving guy willing to give anybody the benefit of the doubt.

“I wanted to bring you here early to meet some people we’re doing business with.” She said, introducing me to some casually dressed, relaxed Asians who drank in the warm summer air, looking fresh out of college, without a care in the world.

Their stories were the same – they had worked 12-18 hours as a dry cleaner, a Time Warner technician, a UPS driver, and in 2-3 years, they had made enough money to retire. And magically, the money was “still rolling in”.

My father and I looked at each other. There we were, in the middle of Woodhaven, sunday night, listening to a marketing scam.

Just to be polite, we sat in the first half hour of the presentation, then we suddenly experienced a “family emergency”, and excused ourselves. On the J train back home, we laughed and shook our heads about it.

I’m taking this as a sign. For the past few weeks, I’ve seriously considered leaving engineering, IT, and the finance world behind for the pursuit of some more creative endeavor – my guitar, for example, at which I’m doing pretty well. For a moment, like a dog returning to its own vomit, I considered forgetting everything I’d learned over the past few months to return to that old, soulless (though familiar world). And I paid the price for it – a lost evening and subway fare back home.

Well, these days, that’s a pretty cheap education.

I’ve got to hand it to Last.fm. Not only are do they fill my speakers with new and interesting music, but they even manage to get me out of the house once in a while.

Last week, when I was killing time  browsing my profile, they kindly informed me that Emiliana Torrini (you’ve heard her if you’ve heard the ending theme of The Two Towers) was playing at the Hiro Ballroom on Saturday. Before you could say “Ticketmaster”, I scooped up a couple of tickets and dragged a friend of mine down to Chelsea for a chance to see the Icelandic diva in person.

We waited nearly an hour in an evening so crispy it could cut your fingers. But as is always the case in New York City, the wait was not without event. Turns out the guy in front of me is a Lehman alum, currently working for Barclays Capital. After briefly reminiscing on old times, I found out that his team is using an application I wrote just before being shown the door.

What were the chances? - Ladies and gentlemen – I officially have a legacy!

I suppose that would go over really well in an interview (“See that trading app over there? Yeah, that was me…can you guys let me back in now?”), but as my friend quickly interjected – “Are you sure you want to work there again?”

Who knows? These days, I’ve learned to go with the flow (as long as it isn’t taking me over a waterfall).

But I digress. As we in the standing room tip-toed to get a glimpse of her, Ms. Torrini pretty much sang most of the songs from her last two albums Fisherman’s Woman and Me and Armini, in her hauntingly icy voice that yes, sounds somewhat like Bjork’s. These ranged from folksy (“Lifesaver”, “Nothing Brings Me Down”), to the reggae-influenced “Me and Armini”, to power-pop (“Jungle Drum”, “Gun”). She did an admirable job on all of these, but did best when her backing band hung back, and let her expressive voice weave itself around finger-plucked chords.

She can be a bit of a diva, though (no pun intended?) It was mildly amusing watching her get flustered after one of the guitars unexpectedly went out of tune, and after a fan demanded she perform “Unemployed in Summertime“.

Perhaps the best part – bought a copy of “Me and Armini” from her tour manager for only $10 after the show. I’ve been listening to it all day today – I highly recommend it. This is what the music business should be like – an interchange between artist and fan; reasonable rates for top-quality music, no fat-cat music execs to keep warm.

I could write an entire post about how good a novella The Old Man and the Sea is, but the Pulitzer Prize committee has conveniently done that for me. Suffice to say that reading Hemingway is like living a lucid dream, as ideas leap off the page into your head. And they stay there, like ribs between your teeth after a barbecue. By writing plainly, and not making the reader jump through literary hoops and ladders, Hemingway lets his ideas speak for themselves. And there are plenty in its 127 pages worth remembering.

The titular character is one of my favorites from recent memory. He is a poor Cuban fisherman whose glory days seem to be long past, but he could be any one of us, especially those of us reeling from this difficult year. His spirit is remarkable. He is lonely (though he has the touching adoration of a young boy), he is old, and he is salao , having gone for more than two months without catching any fish, but none of that stops him from picking up his mast, stringing his bait, and in general facing each new day as an opportunity to change his luck.

Being an optimist myself, of course I find all of that beautiful. However even more appealing than the old man’s courage is his commitment to the moment. He draws spiritual energy from his dreams (the lions on the beach at dusk he saw as a youth), but he never lets nostalgia or wishful thinking hold him back, even during his epic struggle with a thousand-pound marlin in the middle of the Gulf Stream:

“You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them, old man. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”

It’s a lesson all of us can do well to learn. How many times have we held ourselves back with thoughts of what might have been or what we could have done, instead of focusing on the present, which is the only time that really counts?

The ending is remarkably bittersweet. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t had the  pleasure of getting that far, but perhaps it (and the whole story) is best summed up by these words.

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.“

Hope has many faces. There are those of us who dream of great things, but the fact of the matter is: most of us have to struggle even to get by. But if we keep up our efforts, even in the face of withering adversity, we have already won a first victory over failure.

Like most good children’s stories, Coraline starts with a disaffected youth – Coraline Jones (voiced expressively by Dakota Fanning), who has just moved to an unfamiliar neighborhood. Her parents mostly ignore her, and the closest thing she has to a friend is Wybie, a neighborhood boy who skulks around in a welding mask. It isn’t long before she starts exploring her new apartment, and stumbles upon another version of our world – one in which everyone and everything she knows seems to be perfect – or is it?

The story unfolds through stylish, colorful, stop-motion animation that may remind you of The Nightmare Before Christmas. One gets the sense that each of the charming characters and creatures was molded to fit its personality, from Coraline’s long-necked, bookish father, to the generously proportioned Miss Forcible, an old lady who reads omens in tea-leaves when she isn’t serving taffy made before the turn of the century. But it’s the director’s use of 3D that truly sets this film apart. Instead of going for the cheap thrills (creatures and people erupting from the screen), Selick uses 3D in a more subtle manner, adding depth to each scene, pulling our eyes further into Coraline’s world so that after a few minutes, you’d be convinced you were watching a stage production or a pop-up storybook come to life. I’d go as far as to say it’s the best 3D film I’ve ever seen – and a perfect guideline of what all movies that make you put on those funky glasses should try to achieve.

And it’s clear that everyone had fun making this movie – when the inhabitants of the other world are showing off their charms to Coraline, there are few scenes where you won’t laugh, cringe (in a good way!), or gasp at some animated sleight of hand. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers in the face of all the eye-candy – the second act dragged on longer than it should, and it felt a lot longer than its 1 hour and 40 minutes. Since it’s being marketed as a children’s film, I might also add that it has its share of very unsettling (though rarely crude or violent) moments that gave me the heebie jeebies. I happen to like the heebie jeebies, and don’t believe in coddling kids, but if your little ones are prone to nightmares, consider yourself warned.

So, if you’re a Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman fan, seeing this is a no-brainer. If you’re not, you will still enjoy the raw creativity and imagination bubbling in each frame. And if you’re making 3D movies – let this one show you how it’s done.

Though I’m a very vocal Mac fan, my first computer was actually not a Mac. My parents, being the practical accountants they were, got a PC – an old Leading Edge XT clone. Nothing builds computer literacy faster than a three-year-old navigating the DOS command line, hoping to find the Reader Rabbit directory. But what I remember most about that dinosaur was the Multimate word processor. Say what you will about Microsoft Word – at least it lets you start typing something within seconds. Multimate had you go through a long series of menus – to specify the type of document, the author, where it should be saved on disk, printing options….my dad never did figure it out. Five years later, having the time and tenacity of an eight-year-old (and still no computer of my own), I soon deciphered it, and learned how to type my homework on it. Needless to say, my parents were shocked and amused with this early display of competence.

Of course, my classmates and my teacher gave me queer looks when they saw my 80′s-esque dot-matrix printouts, but nobody said a word. Money was tight for many in those days, and even basic computers weren’t as cheap as they are now. And besides that, most of my friends were more interested in Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis anyway.

I’ll start by saying that I absolutely love this device. It almost perfectly reproduces the experience of reading an ink-and-paper book, but there are quite a few “gotchas” that you should seriously think about before buying one for yourself.

What I Like

The Size – Though Kindle is far from the sexiest piece of electronica I’ve stuffed in my bag, consider how its size makes it immensely useful. A picture tells a thousand words, so I’ll let my Nikon do the talking:

The Kindle is a little wider and taller than a mass market paperback, but much less thick:

King Arthur vs. The Kindle

It’s much bigger than my iPhone, so it’s not exactly going to fit in my pocket:

Not exactly a pocket device...

But (and this is the important part), a Kindle full of e-books weighs much less than their print equivalents:

Which do you think is easier on your back?

Including a Thomas Pynchon book was a bit of an exaggeration, but still…

The Screen - Kindle’s screen is the closest an electronic device has come to reading an actual paper book. There’s no glare in direct sunlight, and no backlight to irritate your eyes. Of course, this means that you need proper lighting to read it, as if you were reading an ink-and-paper book. Time to bust out the old-fashioned book lights!

Wireless Kindle Store – This is a very big draw. You can browse the Amazon store on your Kindle and buy books directly from the device; they are sent over Sprint’s EV-DO wireless network. This means if you can get a cellular signal, you can browse the Kindle store. You can also buy books on your computer, and they will still be sent wirelessly. You don’t even need a computer to use it! Can you download a novel to keep you busy on your Passage to India? Yup! Can you start Wizard and Glass after traversing The Waste Lands? You bet.

Third-Party-Compatibility – Thankfully, Amazon included the ability to read books from sources other than its store. If you have a Palm Reader, Mobipocket, or .txt file, you can plug in your Kindle via USB and drop the files onto it like a flash drive. If your book is an unencrypted PDF, HTML, or Microsoft Word document, there’s a little more work involved. You can either e-mail it to your Kindle (via a special address) for conversion (at $.10 a pop), or you could e-mail it to a “free” conversion address, which will send you back a Kindle-compatible file you can manually copy.

This generally works well, though it tends to screw up funky PDF layouts. It’s also the single best reason to own the device.

If you’re familiar with Gutenberg.org, you’ll know that it has many classic (in the public domain) books available for free download. Imagine being able to take these classics with you, anywhere, for free! Think Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens….I’ve probably read more Gutenberg books than I have Amazon Kindle Books. Generous authors like Cory Doctorow also release their books via Creative Commons licenses that allow free download. A good deal in this sucky economy.

The Dictionary – This might seem a minor feature, but anytime you’re reading on the Kindle, you can pull up the built-in dictionary to look up a word. Just like your mother told you when you were little. Believe me, when navigating James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this came in handy many times (apparently a last name of “Brady” is no guarantee of Irishness).

The Battery Life - My biggest beef with most mobile devices is the battery life. My iPhone lasts only a day under moderate usage. My laptop can barely push 2 hours. The Kindle can push 2 days, with the wireless radio on, or a week with it off. This is significantly less than the advertised time, but still pretty darned good. This is partly because the Kindle’s screen only draws power when it’s being refreshed.

What I Don’t Like

The Interface – Try not to laugh when you first use the design. The interface was obviously designed by engineers – that’s not a compliment. It consists of a two-way clickable scroll wheel to move the cursor around the screen, pull up menus, and make selections. It’s like something I would have designed to get a C on my Senior Thesis. I’m not asking for an expensive touch screen or voice recognition, but have they even used a Blackberry?

It’s fully functional once you figure it out, it’s just…extremely inelegant. To an Apple-loving yuppie like myself, that’s a grave oversight.

Device Price – This thing cost me more than my Playstation 3, my Wii, both my iPhones, my monitor…I do think they could have created a non-wireless version at a steep discount, since I’m always near the computer, but what can I say? I’m a a sucker for new technology.

Content Price – Kindle books are released around the same time as their hardcover cousins, and usually cost $9.99 for the most popular ones. Classics are around $2, though as I said before, you can get them from Gutenberg.org for free. I understand the publishers need to make money, but seriously? $10? Does it cost that much to upload a file to my computer? The only real reason to pay this much for books is so that you don’t clutter up your house. See the above photo again.

The Screen – It’s easy to read, but it’s monochrome, and the resolution’s not that high. It’s perfect for reading text, but pictures tend to get butchered in the Kindle e-books. It was for this reason that I decided to buy a print edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book – how could I miss Dave McKean’s exciting illustrations?

Refresh Speed – It takes about a second for the Kindle to advance in the book. Depending on how large you set the text, you might advance the book several times before moving on to the next “page”. It’s fine for leisurely reading, but absolutely sucks for flipping through a book at lightning speed. The Kindle e-books support hyperlinks, and there’s a system-wide search feature, but this is a serious shortcoming.

Fixed Layout – The iPhone browser rocked the world by rendering a full website, and letting you zoom into your favorite parts. Not so here. All the content is formatted for the Kindle’s fixed width layout (about the dimensions of a paperback book), making it entirely unsuitable for reading books where preserving the printed layout is important (like graphic novels and highly illustrated textbooks).

What I Use It For

Pulp Novels - Books that I only intend to read once, that haven’t really earned a spot on my (severely limited) shelf.

Travel Reading – When you have to go streaking through Airport Security, it’s easier to pack a single Kindle instead of a couple of books. Not to mention if you get bored, you can always download more from the Kindle store.

Guilty Pleasures – Books like the Kama Sutra and Tropic of Cancer have serious literary and culture merit, but try telling that to nosy co-workers. Not to mention that the Kindle is what allowed me to read the Twilight series incognito. Ah, the power of technology!

That leaves me buying print books only if it’s a collectible (any Tolkien book), heavily illustrated, or something I want to flip through again and again. The Amazon Kindle is a huge step in the right direction for electronic publishing, and I can’t wait to see what Amazon will do for the next version.

If you answered “alien invasion” or “nuclear detonation”, you’re only half correct. The almost primal joy a fireworks display can bring is quite fascinating; it’s as if Disney, knowing our innate need to feel part of something greater than ourselves, has mastered the power of taking us back to the time when we sat on our father’s shoulders, looking heavenwards and realizing that God is somewhere out there.

But I digress. Today’s piece is about recording these displays in a way which reminds you of how spectacular they were.

I like this image. Nothing too spectacular going on technically (1/500 sec shutter at f/11, using my “nifty fifty” lens), but like most good photography, it was all a matter of decent timing – the flare of the torch, the brilliant descent of spent fireworks, and the smoke dissipating in the wind. It fills my head with grandiose notions – the Olympics, the gift of Prometheus, reading an Ayn Rand book…

The only problem is that, for the most part, it’s a static image. The real beauty of a fireworks display lies in the motion of light, as the brilliant rockets ascend, break apart, explode, and fall into the lake. You might think this would be impossible to capture in still photography, but you might be surprised what happens if we get a little creative.

Those of the Pastafarian creed might recognize their lord and savior! The key to conveying motion in still photography is your shutter speed. Most of the time, we only care about making sure it’s high enough (1/60 sec- 1/250 or more, depending on your lens) to freeze the action and avoid camera shake, but what happens if we deliberately choose a slower speed (1/30 or longer)? The dynamic subject leaves trails in the exposure that give the eye a sense of its motion.

Of course, keeping the shutter open longer means that you will have to decrease your aperture (often to f/8, f/11, or f/16) to avoid overexposing the photograph. Or you can use your camera’s “Shutter Priority” mode (often marked with an “S” on the command dial) to have this automatically handled for you. The next time you’re at a fireworks show, try this on your point-and-shoot or SLR camera:

1. Zoom out as far as you can (point-and-shoot), or use a wide-angle lens. (on your SLR)
2. If you’re using an SLR, manually focus to infinity (it’s clearly marked on your lens).
3. Switch to shutter priority mode, and choose a slow shutter speed, like 1 second.
4. When the fireworks are launched, trigger the shutter just before the explosion. Keep shooting as the fireworks fade; you never quite know what you’ll get.
5. Check your shots – if they’re too “messy” (light messily sprayed all over the exposure), try decreasing your shutter speed (to 1/2 sec or less) . If they’re too “static” (your shot looks “frozen” in time), try increasing it (2 seconds or more). Remember, the slower the shutter, the more motion you will capture.

To make things easier, you could lug a tripod or Gorillapod with you, but I prefer to hand-hold my shots. Not only can I move the camera a bit faster, but the added camera shake can make for some interesting effects. Note that if you want to include static subjects like buildings in your picture, you WILL need to use a tripod, or everything will look like a blurry mess (don’t even think your IS or VR lenses can save you!). All these shots were taken at Disney World, during the Epcot “Illuminations” or the Magic Kingdom “Wishes Spectacular” show:

A spongy-sea creature?

A distant nebula?

Who needs Rorschach ink blots when we have funky fireworks! Show them to your friends, and show them how crazy they really are!

Things I Need to Do (or face starvation, bankruptcy, and a possibly lower social standing)

• GET A JOB!!!

Things I Should Keep in Mind

• I am more than the sum of my paycheck, or the title on my business card.
• Don’t judge others. Or if you must, consider how far they’ve come, not just how far they have left to go.
• The only person who should be allowed to make you feel guilty is yourself. But don’t overdo it.
• Think not of the twenty blocks to the subway station, but of your next step. And then your next after that, and so on.
• Inspiration is merely the ignition to the engine of creativity. Both are useless if not fueled by discipline.
• Shopping two days before Christmas is chaotic, deadly, and highly amusing.

And of course, feel free to yell at me if I forget any of these things.

Yes, I realize it was an a completely unfounded assumption. According to UNICEF, more than 25,000 children die every day, and almost 800,000 go missing in the United States alone, many never to return. But what are statistics to the blessed obliviousness of a child? “It can never happen to me”, we reasoned, each calamity-free day serving as testament to our unshakable truth. Of course, that naivete sometimes led us to do incredibly stupid things, but every night I went to bed, I was 150 percent sure I’d get up in the morning. And then the next, and the one after that, ad nauseam.

In some respects, growing up has been like being the protagonist of a Lovecraft novel. Much of my adolescent and adult life can be summarized by a near addict-like compulsion to learn more about this world. This has been a double-edged sword. On one hand, it strengthens me as an artist; pushing me just a little closer to living up to the name homo sapien. At the same time, acquiring such knowledge is not without consequence; as I browse through each blog, book, or Wikipedia entry, I’ve watched that old illusion (on which I based a perfectly happy childhood), completely disappear.

So far, I’ve avoided the madness that marks the climax of such tales. But at what cost? My life, previously governed by the question of “Why”, has been transformed into an existence of “what-if’s”. What if my car skids into a tree faster than Mike Mussina’s fastball? What if I walk down this dark street? What if my employer goes bankrupt? Well, one of those has come to pass, so I’m not entirely a worrywart. But it’s interesting to think about how much of adulthood is based on the premise that something wicked lurks around every corner. Is this what it means to be responsible? Thinking about the ways every decision could kill me has helped me to avoid a pitfall or two, but more often than not, it has served as an excuse not assume any risk – even ones with a potentially great payoff. If I had been thinking less about paying the bills and more about following my dreams, for example, I might have done something more fulfilling than financial software development.

And so I gaze upon today’s children with a nostalgic wonder. As they throw themselves into each new adventure and unopened door with a gusto that seems thoughtless to one of many summers, part of me smiles. The other part wants to shake them and yell “Dangit, don’t you know you could die?!”

“When something is lost, something greater is returned.” I suppose when the great wordsmith Terry Pratchett wrote this, he was telling us to look for the good in the calamity of our life. However, if you’re as disorganized I am, that saying takes a whole new meaning.

Namely, that when you’re scouring your room for something (like an old PSP game), you find something much cooler instead (a $25 gift card). It had no obvious expiration date, and I was suffering a major case of cabin fever, having barely left the house since the end of October. You can guess what comes next.

That’s right – Toys R’ Us, Times Square, two days before Christmas. I am a certified madman.

One might compare the scene there to the evacuation of Dunkirk – a tense order barely imposed on the entropy of evacuating shoppers, most of which are tired, hungry, and seriously regretting their procrastination;  a sense of inevitability as you confront the giant evacuation checkout line that wraps several times around the department floor. There are children, nieces, nephews, and grandkids to surprise this Thursday, and so, economic crisis or not, it is a ritual they endure. Browsing for the best way to blow your $25 requires an ironclad will.

Ah, Christmas in New York. There is that tree in Rockefeller Center, Santa in Herald Square, and lights, banners, and wreaths on every street corner, but there’s even more, if you know where to look.

• It’s waiting on that checkout line, watching with amusement as mommy restrains Junior from picking up every single game in sight.
• It’s staring at the billboards in Times Square for a whiff of news – two wars, a sinking economy, and a Madoff associate who took his own life for fear of being forced to live like the rest of us.
• It’s ducking into the withering cold, carrying half your body weight in oversized shopping bags, pushing your way through the crowds like blood cells in a coronary patient’s heart.
• It’s riding downtown to Union Square, smiling at the booths selling various esoterica – from baby Buddhas to “Baby Seals for Obama” Tees.
• It’s lounging at a table at Starbucks, nursing a $6 latte in a red snowflake-labeled cup, waiting for your friends as the soles of your feet recover.
• It’s knowing that the area will never see such a burst of activity again – until it comes time to return all that swag.
• It’s meeting friends for dinner. “What’re you up to these days?” “Oh, I’m…in between jobs”. In between. Because the only meaningful definition of life is what happens to pay the bills at the moment.

But it’s all a tradition we’ll gladly cling to – holidays are a sort of anchor in the lives of many. Because even if we don’t know whether we’ll have a job tomorrow, we’ll always have Christmas. Here’s looking at you, kid.