One of my daily reads is lifehacker.com - a productivity site that helps you organize your life and a whole lot more. The other day they featured the 3rd part of their “Show us your Go Bag” series and now I seriously think about getting one of my own.

I have an attache type case, and my photo backpack, but not an everyday carry everywhere pack. So for my birthday next month, I’ll be getting a custom made Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger bag. The custom made part of the bag really pertains only to the color and the material. For the material, I think I’ll go with the ballistic nylon and for the 3 colors, I think I’ll pick Orange, Mocha, and Olive - I really like the earthy combo. And since I’m a lefty, I’ll be picking a left handed bag as well - which I never really thought about until the other day. If I wear my current bag over my right shoulder, it hangs there fine - feels weird to me, but stays in place. Switch to the left side, and no such luck. So it seems it does matter.

Anyway, I’ve been assembling things to place in the bag - some of it will be things I can’t do without, like my swiss army knife, and other things will be stuff I’d like to bring, but just didn’t want to put in my current bag or pants pocket.

Things I’d like to carry with me:

• This awesome pedometer
• Several Moleskine notebooks
• An LED flashlight
• Leatherman
• GPS unit
• A book or two
• Sketchpad + drawing pencils
• Either a new Nikon Point and Shoot camera, or my D50 - D200 stays in photo backpack.
• Plus a ton of other things I’m thinking about

Ultimately I’d like to have a bag I wear everywhere all the time, that contains most of the things I might need. I’m odd like that.

As it is, I’m heading to Kenosha in a few hours for the RenFest so I probably won’t update this until Monday. Happy Labor Day everyone!

When I was in the midst of the Dot Com Bust, being self-employed/unemployed, I worked a variety of jobs; painter, light industrial, mechanical, physical labor, etc etc. But by far my favorite job during that time was an Over the road truck driver.

I really got to see the country, the places and people that truly make up America. It’s not the greatest place, but man it surely isn’t the worst.

During my year or so driving, I had many ‘temporary best friends’.

Truckers, by and large, are a social animal. True, we reside inside a cramped cab for weeks on end with little else between us and the long stretch of tarmac then the alluring sexy glow of the CB radio; a radio which was usually monopolized by the 3% of all drivers that you naturally assume all of us are (were); rude, fat, bald, with very little education and no regard for human safety - surviving on BO and speed.

But every now and then you’d run into someone at a truck stop somewhere, get to talking with them and really like what they offer. Then you learn that you’re both picking up a load at the same yard in New Jersey, and you’re both dropping off that load somewhere on the West Coast, usually LA.

So for the next week it’d be you and him 24×7. We’d hop up to an unused channel on the CB (And in this day and age, it’s the majority of them) and shoot the shit for hours upon hours. You’d stop at the same stops, shut down at the same areas; you were best friends.

Then, 4-5 days later when we’d see San Bernadino you knew you were going your seperate ways. You’d feel a bit bummed about it, talk about hooking up again eastbound, but you know it would never happen. It was just another temporary best friend. Another ‘average joe’ supplying you with your goods.

Although a majority of the trucking industry employs ex-military grunts, I did meet and have as a temporary best friend a huge swath of society - an Astronomy professor for Purdue, someone with a PhD in mathematics, other IT professionals, born nomads, anti-social punks, your average Dad with a wife and kids back home, doing the best he can, all kinds.

I’m impulsive by nature - I like to take chances, to do what others tell me I can’t. And I’m happy to say that I regret none of it, for I wouldn’t be the person I am now if it wasn’t for the people I met on the road of life.

Sometimes on that road, you need to stop and get out - stretch your legs. Take a leak on the median. Take that road without a sign, the one your map doesn’t show.

You may be surprised by what you find - I know I have.

Able to track down friend and foe! Rawr! Fear my awesome search powers! Awe in my ability to string together unrelated words to narrow searches down! WooooO!

Take a look at the following video:

It’s the old old myth of “You can’t fold a piece of paper in half more then 7 times“, which has been debunked several times - though for the most part, it does hold its own. Notice the interesting use of camera angles, how the camera is focused more on her breasts then the ‘experiment’ this so called ‘Science Girl’ is trying to accomplish. Now notice the views - over 667,000. She’s made over $1,000 on that video which is, for all intents and purposes, sex.

Now examine her channel and some of the stellar content it contains

• Models Blowing Kisses
• Sitting when wet
• Lifting weights underwater
• Aqua pushups
• Taking off bra with shirt on

And other such amazing videos sure to blow your mind! Now these videos get sent out over to Digg, Reddit, and the other social networks where the primarily teenage viewer base sees such tantalizing titles and immediately have to click and watch, then rate the girl ‘with teh tig ole bitties’ videos up. With the way MetaCafe’s Producer Rewards work, once you hit 20,000 views you start raking in the dough. So far this has net the bimbo and her anonymous cameraman almost $3,000 - and the majority of the movies are a month old or less, so that’s about $300 a day.

$300 a day

FOR NOTHING

Not even any nudity, which I could understand getting paid for.

IMPLIED NUDITY

It blows my friggin mind!

5 days, 15 hours, 12 minutes and 35 seconds smoke free.

113 cigarettes not smoked.$23.50 and 20 hours of your life saved.

Yes, I quit smoking. For good, hopefully. Though every time I post about it, I seem to pick it up again - but I haven’t gone this long without for quite some time - luckily I was insanely busy this weekend, so I suppose I didn’t have a chance to dwell on it and now it’s to late!

In about 2 hours I’ll be at the fair, and I’ll be there until about 7 tonight. If you’re out and about, feel free to stop by and say hi to me from 3 - 6pm in the Education building at the MNArtists.Org booth!

Pictures and more when I return, as usual!

And next week? Well that’s the Ren Fest. Not the one in Minnesota, we’re going to the larger one in Kenosha, WI. I’ll get to go back to a place I lived once, yay

Yesterday Nikon announced 2 new cameras; the full-frame sensored D3 and the D300. The D3 is an upgrade for the D2, and the D300 is, surprisingly, and upgrade for the D200.

Of course they would announce new cameras just a few months after I picked up my D200. Though I’m still considering it. I’m going to be starting an eBay blitz soon enough, get rid of a ton of old computer hardware - some of it worth a decent amount of coin. If I include my D50 in there, I’m sure I’d have more then enough to pick up the D300. The one big thing I like about it, beside the 51 points of autofocus, is the new  Live View system - live view allows you to preview what the camera sees in the LCD - that makes grab casual hidden shots a lot easier. I don’t know though, I want a new laptop too.

Through LifeHacker.com I just learned about a NetFlix for books called BookSwim. I can immediately tell you that we’ll probably be signing up, and probably for the $36/month 11 books out at a time plan, since we seem to inhale them. This ought to keep our bookcases a little thinner though, so I won’t complain to much!

Our windows are 8 feet high by 3 and a half feet wide. There are 5 of them (Well, 7 total, but 5 connected to each other), and each window is separated by 15 squares. That’s 140 square feet of space that’s visible to the street. So, self, here’s the deal - build us a clock that stretches up the entire window.

Then, expand on that and make it scroll messages.

Then, set an alarm set and snooze button that’s wireless, and put it them in the street next art crawl.

Then, be awesome.

Don’t forget future self.

Oh, and you guys out there, come see me Friday before 6pm in the Education building at the State Fair - I’ll be working the MNArtists.org booth, as usual.

I really need to invest in some studio lights now, as I have 3 potential models I’m working things out with now, 2 of whom contacted me because they liked my work!
At first I didn’t think I wanted to do any model work - but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have some creative ideas that I’d like to try that involve other people - why not get some models into the mix?