ode to Peter

my Brother ….

By henry john

The lyrics for the early 70's hit song Daniel' were written by Bernie Taupin, Elton Jon's writing partner. He explained the inspiration in a story about soldiers in the early 70's, coming back from the Vietnam war'. they were these simple sort of down home" country guys, who were generally embarrassed by both the adulation and, depending on what part of the country you came from, the animosity that they were greeted by. For the most part, they just wanted to get back to a normal life. finding it hard, what with all those "looks" and the "monkeys of war", that they carried on their backs.

Taupin took it from there and wrote it from a younger brother's perspective; he made him disabled and him just wanting to get away. I made it Spain, basically, because it rhymes with plane.". When Elton wrote the music for this song, he chopped off the last verse because he thought the song was already too long. The deleted verse explained that "Daniel" was a Vietnam vet who returned home to the farm after the war, couldn't find peace, and decided to leave America and go to Spain. With the last verse chopped off, it became a fairly vague story of two brothers who part ways, although Bernie Taupin says that losing the verse wasn't a big deal. Stowing away to France. was Elton's way of entering a creative environment

free from distractions - there was no entourage and no phones.

If I'd written "that verse!" 

it would be from my brothers perspective. I was the older brother Peter had as a kid. and Growing up under my wing he was protected, I could lord over my younger sibling, you looked up to me, I, was brilliant, Bold and fearless

look at me the wrong way and I likely busted you up. 

I had a temper, to say the least.

Then something happened. 'something had changed. The part where Elton sings;  "your eyes have died..." I now see from your perspective, how it was. I had vision, I could see... but looking into my eyes must have been painful. Because I was no longer there. The brother named Henry Jr. after your father; was gone. the Henry spearot was replaced by the guy that thought it was OK to crash your pickup with no apology.

I am sorry, for all the pain I caused you!. I was so far away for many years, further west than you,  it allowed you to have, or build in you memory of me, the brother of your desire. You told stories about  the big brother you once had.

Then! 

I returned.

Technology in the Art World!

Working with technology has alienated me from the art's community for many years since college.  For my undergraduate studies I received a Bachelor in Fine Arts, taking a hit from a traditionalist for using an airbrush in an illustration program,  It was considered a commercial artist tool, and did not belong in the same room as charcoal and oil, although running an air-compressor the sound factor I felt was the only thing that set them apart.

I was wrong, I guess until one of my pieces got accepted in the student art show, and asked to be in a national competition.  Additionally it was portrayed in the newspaper to help promote the show.  It was photographed essentially representing the illustrations one might expect if they wen to the Gallery Show!

It really dawned on me yesterday at the Faculty Orientation Day at one of the campuses I am teaching at, when deciding to pick which of the faculty development courses I would attend.  One of my cohorts tagging along with me to the next venue, asked 'which one I was going to' and responded to my choice with reluctance and sighing said "oh yuck a technology thing, aye!"

My hart sank,  I did not want to have an afternoon with earful-wining about how technology-this technology-that, nobody communicates anymore, the computer is ruining everything.  No real art comes from a computer.  I did not want to spend the afternoon not listening, and having to try to win over the creative soul of another.  Jump on in the water is just fucking fine! How about you jump off what every you want, just don't land on my parade.

I would rather spend my chum time in forward dialogue.  I am toying with really interesting tools, I'd like to share my experiences, and not have to explain why, and or how I got here.

Discovering:

VR Oculus  Quest 

Purchase (LINK)

Open source painting programs

• krita
• fire alpaca
• my paint
• pixlr
• Gimp

Open source operating systems

• android
• Linux

Cloud

• oneDrive microsoft
• PCloud
• Box
• Cubby
• Dropbox (Please use this link to download the latest version)
• creative cloud adobe
• Autodesk Drive (Student)

3D Printing,

online tutoring
autodesk
audacity
screencast-o-matic

ITTT

My first App

My first app was written in the most popular programming language at the time. The program I wrote was written in C. Yep I took a college course in Programming Language at West Valley College in Saratoga, California and learned how to write mostly accounting programs. At the time that was what was hiring most college graduates of a software nature. Computer graphics was just not that popular yet, and it was years before Adobe would move on from hyper-card to Director and eventually Flash. Scripting was not separated out from coding yet, it was one in the same, or still considered part of the programming skill.

What I was attempting to do I later found was doable right in DOS, but I did not know there was two flavors of text, or two editing modes in a text editor. The one I knew of was ASCII, and the one I did not know of was Binary. I was using a line editor (edlin) to write scripts for batch processing, and needed a script to run inside of a script.

Today’s typical graphic artist would understand running an action in Photoshop. For repetitive tasks you can program Photoshop to run an action to do a single, of series of steps, by a single click. Furthermore that action could be run on a folder of images, etc.

I needed to modify a sequence of images. Actually, I needed to modify the creation of a sequence of images. In the beginning it was just to see if I could do it, and later it caused me to think of how it could become useful if I could.

Back to the place I was going with all this, I learned how to program in C and wrote an application that I sold for $5 a copy to Jay at a a user group meeting at Siggraph in 1988. The name of my App was "CRASH" had I done research I would have picked a name that was better suited. The App was later described as a time code calculator. But because it was the first of its kind the short name was drawn from what you would be recovering from when you used it. My colleagues and I were computer graphic animators, we would spend countless hours setting up the computer to run all night, sometimes days at a time to create motion graphics for our clients. Many times in the wee hours of the middle of the night, the computer would "crash" thus the name "CRASH.EXE".

If you learned to "nap like an animator" you would sleep, and continue sleeping, as long as you heard the snap of the tape-deck when a single frame had completed its edit. If while dozing realized to much time had past since the last edit, your computer crashed and you would need to wake up and reset the computer to pick up where it left off.

Yes it would have been easier to run the computer saving each image and in the morning dump them to tape, but who had a hard drive that large. Mine was currently the biggest at 150 megabytes and it would fill up half way through a typical five to seven second commercial. So running the animation all night to tape, was the most effective method at the time.

The problem I could solve with my App, was if you could figure how to fix the frame the animation crashed on, how would you then figure out where to start the edit again. Or, if you had the last frame the system successfully completed and edited to tape, where would you begin to look for the problem the computer had computing that single frame. The App when run would ask “Do you have the last frame the computer rendered or do you have the time-code the last image occurs on video?” in either case would then ask what time-code to you begin editing the animation to tape, assuming that you started with frame 1. (Frame 1 = 00:10:00:01 Frame 73 = 00:10:12:13)

Sometimes it was just the one frame, and just starting it up again was a consequence of the computer just needing a break, or more realistically a memory flush, it was confused by numbers the programs were not clearing its cache and memory leaks would often cause certain combinations to over-load the memory, a restart would do the trick. If that did not work you go on to the next, and the next thing until finally you would get that frame rendered, and the animation running again. And return to napping again.