mikebeauchamp.com - ramblings

The "Hackers On Planet Earth" conference was great of course. The remaining days I had in NY, I spent doing a little poking-around. For months I talked about finding Nikola Tesla's laboratory on Long Island, something I had wanted to find ever since I saw spooky pictures of it years and years ago. Since I was so damn close, I figured I'd use this opportunity to actually find the place.

From Brooklyn, I took the subway to Jamaica and then hopped on the Long Island Rail Road all the way to Port Jefferson. The LIRR is a standard rail line that covers pretty much all of Long Island. Trains run regularly a few times a day and the fare was around $14 for the nearly 300km round-trip. If Via Rail operated like this, you would be able to hop on a train whenever you wanted and get to London for under $10 or Toronto for under $20.

Port Jefferson was just an average small town, complete with super-paranoid-old-white-people. I asked this guy at the bus stop what the population of the town was and he asked "why? why would you want to know that?". So I told him I was just curious, so he asked "Why?? What, do you want to blow the town up or something?". He then asked "Why, where are you from?" so I answered "Why do you want to know that? You want to blow the town up or something?". They must not get many visitors there.

So I took the bus to the location of the Tesla lab, which was in the exact place it should have been. Ever since the whole Cross-Canada bicycle tour, I've been really amazed at navigation. The fact that I can look at some maps and satellite imagery online, make a quick drawing and some notes.. and then find myself travelling to these places in real life is such a strange feeling. Before I go on these types of trips, I really become familiar with the area through maps and then they really just stick with me and everything just seems to come alive. It's as though the whole world is just a video game. Anyways, after a few hours of work I managed to get some great shots of the exterior and interior of the building. The digital shots I took are online in the Images section, and the 35mm pics I took will be up once I get around to scanning them at Cake's. My parents also liked a few of the pictures, so hopefully soon I will be making a 16x20 print for them.. which should be an interesting process.

I also shot a few other local abandoned buildings, and the pics from those places are also online in the Images section. I checked one out last week after seeing "The Magnificent Seven" play at Phog, which was pretty damn scary. The only way I could find in the building was through a window on the second floor, and the cement floor itself had a lot of huge holes in it. I really do have to get a better flash light before I go anywhere else.

On Thursday I went and saw Huladog play. I plan on going to see them again today, since they play there every week. It's pretty cool that there's a 7-9 piece jazz band that plays regularly here... makes me want to learn how to dance.. sort of. When I left from seeing them last week, a few clearly drunk girls came up and started talking to me. After I unlocked my bike, one asked if she could sit on it for a picture. So I agreed, and of course she fell off the bike and hit her head on the pavement. While she was laying on the ground giggling like a.. well.. like a drunk girl that just conked her head on the pavement but is too drunk to feel it, I was trying to help her up while her friends just kept saying "oh, she's fine". After that one of the friends started talking with me, asking questions and touching my leg and arm. After a few minutes of questioning, she asked me "Are you catholic?". After I answered, she asked "Why not?". Then after that, she asked "You don't love Jesus?". This went on for a few minutes until she started asking me for my phone number. I asked her why she wanted my phone number and she said "So we can go to church together". At least the pizza they gave me was good.

Cake was in B.C. for 2 weeks, which really sucked. For the 4-5 months we've been dating, one of us has been out of town for almost 2 months. Not that it's a complaint or anything, since getting to see your g/f after being away for a few weeks always makes it worthwhile. Thank God for cool Atheist girls.

After spending the last few days at Cake's, I had to go to CJAM since the archives computer that I'm supposed to be working on has had some trouble, which of course complicates stuff for me and all the troubleshooting has just been tacked on to the list of things I have to do for the station, while the pay seems to have remained the same. I gotta say, that I'm quickly getting sick of all the "Ambient Marketing" or whatever you want to call it that the Windsor Vespa shop is doing. From supplying scooters to a bunch of magazines for people to pose on, to parking them outside of the student center at the University with business cards conveniently located on the seat. Granted, the whole student center was in pimp-shit-to-students-mode, with all the tables usually used for campus clubs being filled up by cellphone and makeup vendors.

Last week I brought a resume to Bicycle World. Not exactly sure if I want to work there, since it's way out in South Windsor. I'm hoping to hear back from eyebeam about the fellowship I applied for. I'm hoping this new website serves as a bit more of a portfolio for some of the stuff I've done, and will maybe help me get this fellowship. During their questionnaire, they asked what sort of large project you would like to work on. So I actually suggested doing a fully open source suite of tools for campus radio stations to manage everything from streaming, archiving, website, database, etc. They were probably expecting something a little more "edgy" I'm afraid.

Anyways, I have a few more years of ramblings still to add to this section, several new sets of Images should be up within the next few weeks as well. Then I will start working on getting up the rest of the audio, and finally getting the video section up.. then I will also be transferring the Cross Canada Project stuff off the wordpress installation into this site.

Time to go through more of the Cross Canada Project movie footage. I've decided to do a huge index of all the footage and start editing the movie from scratch, so for the past while I've been going through all the footage.. which has taken a lot of time. I've also started recording music for the soundtrack which started out surprisingly well and then came to a halt after I ran out of musical ideas. It seems as though this movie is going to take forever to make... I guess I should just realize that only a small amount of people are probably going to see it, and the ones that do see it won't be nearly as judgmental as my perfectionism.

Previous Rambling - Next Rambling