I am … unhindered by talent

Presenting trophy and check, originally uploaded by Nic’s events.

I never got around to posting this at the time, but back in October one of our teams (The Algonauts) from UMM took first in the annual Collegiate Computing Competition hosted by the fine folks at Digi-Key.

The students won tons of swag on the day (including $200 each for the winning team). Curt Huot from Digi-Key came down to UMM today to present the traveling trophy (which we get to have in our display case for the next year) and the check for $3K to the CSci discipline, all because the Algonauts took first!

Front, from L to R: Tyler Hutchison (holding the trophy), me (receiving the check), Curt (passing along the check). In back, L to R, Andy Korth, and Scott Lembcke. Daniel Selifonov (the fourth team member) was (and I’m not making this up!) too pumped about working on a homework assignment with his group to come down and be in the photo. These crazy students… I obviously didn’t take this shot - thanks to Michael Korth for sharing his photo.

I did take a ton of pictures on the day, a few of which I cleaned up and posted on Flickr (including the Victory celebration below). I also dumped a bunch of unedited shots on my events Flickr account.

Again, big congrats to all the students!

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I’m not sure I believe it either, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Somewhere in the last few hours I crossed 40,000 views on my Flickr photostream in about 1.5 years on Flickr. Pretty amazing, especially given that the total (rough) equivalent of views in the previous 15 years would have been no more than a few hundred (and that’s probably being generous).

Wow. Thanks to everyone who’s been encouraging, and everyone who’s shared their great work for us to all benefit from. I’ve “met” a lot of very cool people through Flickr, and it’s definitely appreciated.

The illustration shot is from the recent production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat (featuring Sub-Evil Boy as a minor minion). It was an excellent (and very fun) production. The quality of the school drama here in Morris is very high, but it is still school drama and one’s never sure what you’re to get. WeatherGirl and I laughed ’til we cried in more than a few places, and I was actually looking forward to seeing it a second time. Well done all!

If you want to see lots more from this (unedited and uncleaned), visit my events stream.

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I’ve tried to take at least some pictures while I’ve been here with my parents, both because I obsess that way, and because I want to record at least some aspects of this terribly important moment in all of our lives. I’m struck, though, by all the pictures that I didn’t (and won’t) take; images that I won’t forget soon, but which I’m not going to try to capture.

Some of it is just not very pleasant. Chemo makes him throw up (as it does many people). I’ve watched a fair bit of that while we’ve been here, although nothing close to what Mom’s helped him through, and these moments definitely fall in the “I wish I could pretend I hadn’t seen that” category. There are probably powerful images that could be made of this distress, and one could argue that going through this is a key part of the fight against the cancer and therefore worthy of documentation. But some other photographer will have to do that. It’s my dad, and I need to be giving him a hug and helping him wipe his face, not taking his picture.

Some of it is the sounds that still photography just doesn’t capture. Extreme discomfort can be a very noisesome beast, and there’s been plenty of that, with more to come. Harry Smith would probably tape the whole thing, but I’m passing on that as well.

Some of it I would love to capture, but just haven’t, and probably won’t, because it’s not easy and I’m only willing to go so far to record the moment. Mom stroking his forehead in the near dark, helping him calm down after a bad spell and encouraging him to go back to sleep. Her hand on his back; his hand in mine. Little glances; fleeting expressions; moments. In the end, the little signs of why we’re fighting this thing.

Sometimes you have to live, wading through the experience instead of recording it from the shore. I keep reminding myself that now is a good time to live.

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• Victory!!! (4)
• My father has become a foot soldier in the war on cancer (4)

Lifemask, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

I got to see Dad’s radiation therapy setup Monday (day before yesterday) and went with him to chemo yesterday, and of course I took (more than) a few pictures. This is a mask they made that literally pins his head, neck, and top of his chest to the bed/table while the radiation machine does it’s thing. The red crosses are alignment marks, and the black outline along the neck and jaw are where the radiation is actually being delivered.

They used to make all those marks (the red crosses and the black outlines) directly on the patient’s body, and you had to keep them through the treatment (7 weeks in my dad’s case). Now they build masks or molds and put the marks there, which would seem to be an improvement :-).

If you blow it up you’ll see that there’s quite a lot of noise. It wasn’t terribly bright in there, and I was imposing a bit before the next patient, so I was in a bit of a hurry. Such is life…

I’ve got some other shots uploaded to Flickr, including shots of the radiation machine itself where Dad’s mask looks like a white C3PO :-).

Huge thanks to the nurses that gave him this level of access and patiently answered all my questions.

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Science buzz!!!, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

The photo is of a neat sign at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. Their Science Buzz program creates an on-line space where scientists make themselves available as a resource.

Because we’re just really cool, we currently have a couple of folks from Morris who are doing that very thing, talking about different excellent sustainability initiatives out here.

Greg Cuomo is currently on the spot answering questions about Morris’ nifty wind turbine until 20 Nov, and Troy Goodnough (UMM’s sustainability coordinator) will be taking questions from 21 Nov to 21 Dec about the UMM gasification project.

This is cool stuff - check it out!

Turbine, fog, and sun, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

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Different sorts of futures, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Our friend (and UMM alum) Dan Flies [Flickr] [blog] was out for a visit over the weekend, and he brought his huge pile of new camera gear, including more than a few lenses that I covet. I got to play with a few; this was shot with his Canon 100mm macro, which is definitely on my christmas list :-) !

There’s a crop that focuses more on the little seed caught there on the top that I might play with and post later.

Thanks to Dan for the visit and the use of his lens!

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Corn and sunflower (butterfly is optional), originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

The last of a set of pictures of monarchs in the garden from back in September. While it’s still quite a bit warmer than “normal” for this time of year, the flowers and butterflies are all gone, replaced by flocks of honking geese.

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I previously waffled on about how cool Goodbye, Babylon is, but I just stumbled across this wonderful photo of (part of) the set on the Dust-to-Digital web site and had to share:

Having had this for several months now, it has grown to be one of those few “must take to the desert island” sorts of collections for me. The breadth of styles, the quality of the performances, the recording quality, the wonderful book, and the cool packaging are all just amazingly spiffy.

OK, I’ll calm down now…

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I’m reading a strange and often incoherent book by Nick Tosches called Where dead voices gather. For all it’s jumping about and disconnected tangents, it’s actually a fascinating take on the minstrelsy of the 1800s and early 1900s, and the transition from minstrelsy and vaudeville to the country and blues are central to what is often called “American roots music”.

In and amongst all his ramblings I just got to this great quote:

As to the true origin of the cakewalk, it is believed to have begun at about the same time as minstrelsy, around 1840, with slaves parodying the formal dances of their masters. These burlesques came to be mimicked [by whites] in minstrel shows. After the Civil War, when blacks entered minstrelsy, they assumed parts in the minstrels’ cakewalk. As Terry Waldo puts it in his book This Is Ragtime: “By the time the ragtime era began in 1896, the cakewalk was being performed by blacks imitating whites who were imitating blacks who were imitating whites.” I’m sure the gist of this wonderful little observation can, with not much squinting, be applied to the whole of popular culture.

Ah, what wonderful stuff. It reminds me of this excellent essay, “When wrong is right”, written by Ed Ward as a companion piece to the PBS documentary on John Lennon’s jukebox. In it Ward argues that one of the great strengths of the Beatles’ music was that they tried to copy the American R&B they loved and failed. In failing, however, they created new combinations and opened new doors:

This is what makes artists artists: they take little bits of things from here and there and put them together in unexpected combinations that seem new and original. Some of them are pretty obvious: one of Little Richard’s trademarks is the “Ooooo!” he interjects into a lot of his hit songs. Richard got it from the world of gospel, where it’s a standard of Alex Bradford, among others. The Beatles grabbed this little trick for themselves, and it’s all over their first recordings: girls went wild when Lennon and McCartney stepped up to a single microphone, shook their mop tops, and went “Ooooo!”.

Makes me want to go off and butcher a good song or two… :-)

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OK, this is never going to show up :-(. WordPress keeps munging MPR’s JavaScript, and I just don’t care enough to resolve the problem. You can go directly to MPR’s results page or to the Secretary of State’s results page or any of a zillion of other sources. Be honest - you didn’t need me for this, did you?

It was presumably just a matter of time, people (Minnesota Public Radio in this case) are now providing web widgets that people (like me!) can embed in their web content to provide election results as they come in. So now I can come to my own blog to see the counts (once they start in about 1.5 hours), allowing me to avoid all the tedious punditry that tends to attend results. If you are silly enough to come here for results, I promise to keep the tedious punditry to a minimum.

As I post this, nothing appears, which I suspect is because there are no results available yet. Hopefully when 8pm (central time) rolls around a box o’ results will magically appear below.

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