Busy People Accomplish MORE

The last 24 hours have been non stop movement!

It started last night when I saw the email from OSKA. It wasn't a definitive interview offer, but a request for more material: renderings, models, and sketches.

Now, anyone who knows me knows the latter two are not a problem. I am a laser cutter that runs on biofuels, and I crank out sketches like no one's business. Renderings however, were going to be a problem. I had put my best one in my portfolio, and looking back at the ones I used for my final project, they really just weren't going to cut it. I got back from the meeting around 9pm, and after bouncing around the walls for an hour or so (OSKA was interested in my portfolio ??? MY portfolio??? my PORTFOLIO ???) I got down to business of either cleaning up the existing renderings or creating new ones.

Around 5am, I set Kerkythea to render a fairly good quality image, and it was taking forever, so I decided to go out on the Tati bike ride. Yes, on zero hours of sleep. It was a fairly simple drills day, but there was an awful headwind on the way back. I tried one sprint, and then my legs reminded me about Sunday.

Back home, Kerkythea was STILL RENDERING! More correctly, anti-aliasing, but it was taking forever. I'm so glad I have two computers with CS3 installed. Anyways, I somehow managed to pull together 2 new renderings for one of my projects in Sketchup and Kerkythea, 2 diagrams from Rhino and V-Ray (!!! At last !!!), sketches of all kinds, the Mediatheque model photos, altogether in a very raw format which I sent off by ONE PM. Hopefully they'll be looking more for content, not layout ...

I caught the 1:45pm train to the Loop to go to Wired NextFest with Knute. It was really good to get out of Hyde Park and away from my computer screen. The projects were also a lot of fun!

The gateway exhibited the "Suitcase Pavilion" designed by Virginia Tech students: it can be carried in a suitcase!


Flowers bloomed where we stepped. It felt like Fern Gully but you know, technological.

CRAYONS for big kids! These "solid ink" cartridges don't require ink cartridges and thus creates much less waste. The ink prints by melting on to the page. We could write with them like crayons, so I wrote "yellow" with yellow all over the pamphlets (I'm 5 years old at heart).
They're video games, but rather than hurl bullets, you fly flower petals over green fields. It's supposed to be a retreat for those weary of urban stress.

Brainball is pretty hilarious. Two people duel by wearing straps measuring their brain activity. You win by pushing the ball at the center over to your foe with your "calmer" brain activity. Knute and I tried twice: I won both times. Clearly I had a huge advantage because I was zombie-esque from zero sleep. What was really funny was this random guy in the audience asked if he could try going against me, and I'm like, sure. I won. And then people were talking about tactics, and I'm like, dude, just don't sleep. It creates the perfect Zen-calm apathy.

And then I came home and my legs REALLY complained about Sunday. It feels good to have gotten that good of a workout. And it's also great to know that there are firms out there interested in my portfolio :D

Oh, and at Intelligentsia Coffee Shop, I took this sign to be a good omen (OSKA being in Seattle and my having biked there and all):

5 Days of Sprinting Later ...

This week marks the beginning of my sprint training for Fall Fling coming up, ie, OUCH.

Monday's ride was Metropolis Coffee Shop and back as always, but Tuesday we did some more bike handling drills and intervals. Wednesday was supposedly our recovery ride. I rode up at a decent clip, but on the way back, I somehow wound up pulling into a headwind in front of the cat. 4 men with Bernard. I got into the drops because I was starting to hit the wall, but then Bernard did too(!) and the rest of the guys were like, Yea drops! and sped up ... I got dropped by the time we were going at about 25 mph. Thursday was the practice crit in Calumet Park. The first lap was fast. There's this guy who looks and acts almost exactly like Chad, but whose name is Jeff and confuses me who rode with us one lap, and he set a fast pace. Afterwards though, we worked on pack riding which was really cool because I'm finally learning positive team tactics, as opposed to being on the receiving end of negative team tactics. The counterclockwise rotational drafting was precise like clockwork by the end of the ride. And today was ostensibly the slow recovery ride, but I ended up sprinting 5 times. The first time, Katie sprints past me saying: "J orders to sprint," so I tailed her for the flat stretch directly north of Lakepoint Tower. She's definitely a faster sprinter than me, so as soon as she gains confidence on bike handling, I have a feeling she's going to be amazing. The other times, I just saw people going fast.

I learned a little more about the club yesterday when I went to pick up some knickers (at last!) as part of the team kit. I've been a part of eclectic bunches of people before, but this is just absurd. There's the professional hair stylist from France who travels and competes in hair styling, a retired businessman philanthropist who wears jeans and hoodies and tutors young kids in person rather than just give them gobs of money, biomedical pathology (?) phd student who's being recruited by eminent universities across the country, ecclesiastical scholars who knit in their free time, triathlete ranked 3rd in the nation for his age group, and ... then there's people like me (normal ...). I feel like I need to discover the cure for cancer or win the Pritzker Prize the fit in with these people, but at the same time, what's really unique about them as a whole is that they're incredibly low-key about how amazing they are. For example, I heard this all second hand from J rather than from them.

In other news, I'm puttering along with my Rhino renderings. The site is completely modeled, and the schematic massing and circulation diagram is just about done. I'm so glad I was able to get a hold of a copy of a really clear tutorial because the interface abbreviates a lot of things I feel like it shouldn't, such as IOR for Index of Refraction. Then again, I like that it uses very technically precise nomenclature and units rather than arbitrary numbers because it makes it more realistic. Its camera for example is based off of the settings of a manual camera: f-stop, shutter speed, film ISO, etc. which are pretty standard in real life.

During the week I also met up with some more old friends. I serendipitously ran into Shira Peltzman from UChicago Lab School, and it sounds like she's been keeping pretty busy too. She went from photography to cinema studies, worked for a non-profit in India, and she's off to London soon! Wow. And then Knute (a friend who lived in my dorm freshman year) and I walked around the Fulton St. Market Area in Chicago. I want to try going back there soon. I liked the feel of it. He and his girlfriend have been in Macomb, waiting for her to finish school, learning about ceramics, and participating in Americorps.

Keeping busy :)