mike.whybark.com

Playland

Greg just sent this along and I crossposted it to SIFFBlog:

Hello Friends, friends of friends, family, and neighbors,

Forgive the spam, but Frenetic Productions is going live! I've told many of you that I'm a filmmaker - and here's the proof.

To thank you all for your support and encouragement over the past couple of years, I would like to ask you to join me for an important event. I would also appreciate it you would forward this invitation to anyone you feel might be interested in attending or learning of this exciting event.

FINDING PLAYLAND
December 1, 2009 - 7pm
Shoreline Community College Auditorium
16101 Greenwood Ave N
Shoreline, WA 98133

We will have DVDs available for sale at the screening for a reasonable $10 each.

View the FINDING PLAYLAND trailer at http://www.findingplayland.com

FINDING PLAYLAND is an hour-long neighborhood documentary exploring what it meant to work and play with the family at Seattle's long-lost Playland Amusement Park.

Playland was a regional amusement park on the shores of Bitterlake, just off Aurora avenue at 130th St. in North Seattle. Open from 1930 until 1960, generations of Seattle kids were thrilled by rides such as the Shoot the Chutes and the Big Dipper. Regional amusement parks such as Playland were a characteristic feature of American urban centers at this time and Playland's story reflects opportunities and changes in American history. FINDING PLAYLAND uncovers a lost funhouse of Seattle's regional heritage.

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Frenetic Productions is an award-winning Seattle-based film production company. Our most recent release, THE VIOLIN MAKER, took honors at the 2009 International Documentary Challenge and has been screened at the Port Townsend Film Festival. The film is available to view in its entirety at our website:

http://www.freneticproductions.com

Friend or fan, follow us on Facebook and Twitter!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Seattle-WA/Frenetic-Productions/157140361297

http://twitter.com/freneticprod

Stormy

Man! That storm last night was really something. I was too tired to wake up and appreciate it properly, though. Still, giant thunderstorms are one of the things I miss about the weather from elsewhere. Haven't walked around the house to check for deadfall yet but I bet there are some downed trees and limbs here or there.

ROLLOVER

I have conquered the rollover bedevilment. Huzzah!

Not as planned

Today was a hamster wheel of falling behind.

First, I woke up at 5:30, thanks to the time change. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but around 1 pm I really started feeling it.

Then, my first-off activity in the morning is scouring Craigslist ads and prepping responses. There were so many this morning that I did not wind up until 10; I try to be done by 9. From 9 to noonish I am scheduled to work on this portfolio-dev site showcasing a local filmmaker's award-winning doc. I have been making good progress on the site and my work objective today was to deploy a a vanilla HTML version of the site with linked nav elements before I slap some chrome and lorem in place tomorrow. Just as I started to crank, the phone rang, and it was my firewood delivery.

The wood was as promised a full cord of mostly cedar, a bit weather-wet but not unseasoned. Cords are an inherently variable measure. It's whatever volume of wood you can fit into four feet by four feet by eight feet. Ideally the wood is tightly stacked to fit that volume, but in practice dealers can make more money by stacking loosely, so it's common to receive significantly less than 128 cubic feet of wood. This guy stacked his material super tight for delivery and may have actually bonused me. The upshot of this is that while I had budgeted an hour to stack the wood, it took two hours. So at noon I was two hours behind on my work schedule.

Things progressed along these lines all day. Various disruptions and commitments stole another hour and a half from the afternoon, notably shipping some telescope parts, and at the end of the day I wound up with just over an hour in on one of two projects slated to use six hours. I have to tighten up!

Home office

New home workspace set up, streaming iTunes all over the house. Sweet!

We have a full basement and there are two tiny 'bedrooms' on that level of the house. When we moved in, we set up one room to use as an emergency guestroom and the other room is where I dumped all of the stuff from my office in the old apartment. Since the rooms are so small, the place where my gear and files and such ended up in has not seen much organization, although every now and then I have taken a crack at it.

Anyway, since the extra guest room is empty, I just set up in there, got an Airport Express working and I'm off!

I have promised to gut and organize the other room; Viv even asked me about taking down the wall between them, which would produce a very spacious basement office indeed.

Tap tap

Well, it has been a while, hasn't it?

For a few years this blog has been more of a quick blog, mobile photos and such, than the long-form essay blog it began as.

Some changes have happened that will permit me to spend a bit more time on the blog at the moment, I'm happy to report.

For starters, my ex-employer ran into a cash flow problem and cut 2/3 of their staff, including me. It was somewhat unexpected but I helped develop the business plan that included eliminating my position and I'm satisfied that my leaving the operation was the correct course of action both for me and for the company.

I am actively looking for work and have been overhauling my various online resumé assets. Part of that initiative involved finally upgrading this blog from MT 3.x to MT 4.x, which went well enough. I have also wrangled the majority of my visual assets into one location, at long last.

Here is my online portfolio, as it stands. There are a couple-few things to do:

build a comprehensive web-dev section; what I have ready to show is pretty damn weak
cross-link scanned images of published articles to online-searchable text
adding clips from my tenure at Now Playing magazine
wrap a 'best-of' subset in embeddable presentation tools

I have been carefully reviewing online advertising for available positions over the past month and the average number of listings for which I am nominally qualified has been about ten per day. I like those odds.

As I wrap up the tasks above, I have begun several portfolio-development projects for friends and acquaintances. I can't blog about them in specifics, but they include:

design, development, and deployment of a publicity and promotional site for a short film about a well-known musician
design, development, and deployment of an online credit-education tool for a non-profit organization
business process review and recommendations for an independent multi-channel merchant with an eye to creating that merchant's web presence and online customer-service tools

Of course, there are innumerable house projects to address as well. I'm thinking I'll be posting more often here for the short term at the very least.

lisa

lisa

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

tis the season

tis the season

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

in Lowe's defense, there -are- some Halloween decorations tucked away in there.

double encore

double encore

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

pogueskpnl

pogueskpnl

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

volunteer

volunteer

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

This huge, thriving tomato plant was a volunteer from seed which was left over from our old compost pile location. We are supposed to get the first frost in a week or so, so I have it wrapped in the hopes we can get the uncountable number of fruits off it in a few weeks. Looks like a roma.

Smelt! Boy did they ever.

DSC_0100

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

Saw fresh smelt for $4 a pound, thought I would give it a shot. I made waaay too much batter, and cleaning the fish took about an hour and a half, but it was tasty! More pix in the set at flickr.

Pawsum meets fire

Pawsum meets fire

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

Pawsum spent about an hour just watching the fire, trying to figure out what it was.

New specs

Photo on 2009-09-29 at 19.13 #2

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

Manually crossposting to the blog from flickr. Gotta get that set up for all the photobooth posts.

sawbuck: project of the day

sawbuck: project of the day

Originally uploaded by mwhybark

collapsible sawbuck from scrap wood originating in our deck demo. The saw was made in Indianapolis by the Atkins company.