Week 7 of art school

It's hard to believe that I've through seven weeks of the first semester already.

I am already starting to plan my classes for the spring semester. Registration starts pretty soon, and I need to be ready.

In any case, here is what happened last week:

In ceramics, I decided that my project was too plain, so I added a vertical stripe to each piece. This was done with black slip applied over white slip. I hope it looks good after firing, but who knows. This is the pieces all disassembled and continuing to dry in preparation for bisque firing next week:

Nothing is perfect in this work. Things are all slightly askew, in particular, and there is some surface roughness that I am less than entirely happy with. But overall I have hope they will turn out well once they are glazed. The plan remains to glaze them all with a turquoise glaze over the white (and now black) slip. There is also a chance I will instead use different colours on some of the sections, but I am not all that thrilled with the other colour choices available to us in this project. There are seven glazes we can choose from, but two react badly with black slip (making a mess in the kiln and possibly damaging nearby pieces in the process) and one is the same clear we used last time. That leaves just four new glazes that will work in my case. Oh, and we're not allowed to overlap the glazes either, to avoid drips & runs in the firing process.

Art history - AKA Visual Culture I - was another lecture that will be included in the mid-term, which is next week. That will be my first college test in over three decades. The instructor tells me not to worry about it - she says I will do just fine - but no one does these things calmly. I will be fine, I know, but it does add stress.

Painting class this week was another round of life painting, at which I continue to stink - and a very amusing homework assignment. First, though, the best painting from the in class life painting session:

I told you it was pretty bad. That's on paper, as the canvas painting was even worse.

The painting homework this week is to paint something from a song. Any song. It could be what the song makes you see or feel, or it could be a narrative of the song itself. I've got several relatively obscure things running around in my head as a result, and I am not at all sure which I will choose. Or I might get crazy and do more than one. Dunno. Results of that effort will appear here next week assuming they don't stink too.

Design studio gave us a new project: we're building a model of a pavilion for a garden here in Vancouver, based on something to do with insects: their movement, life cycle, etc. We are not, however, supposed to have the pavilion be a giant insect. I've been toying with fireflies, but I am not happy with the things I have come up with so far. As a result, this weekend has me pondering this assignment again. We get a couple of hours in class to work on it this coming week, but it's due at the end of class, so I need this resolved and worked out. Also, he gave us back our grades on the wire model/movement work, and I got another A. Seems like things are going well in that class for me.

Finally we had drawing class yesterday, and we turned in our assignment from last week. That was a triptych in which we setup a still life and did some interesting things we positive vs. negative space. We were working on manila paper with charcoal and chalk or white pastel (or Conté). Here's what I turned in:

And here's what the still life setup for it looked like:

There are some interesting distortions in in, but I am reasonably happy with the results. Apparently the instructor was as well. A perfect score and a request that she be allowed to keep it for a while (along with several others) to put up on display somewhere. The drawing homework for this week is an interior drawing of a house in one point perspective, with something wacky added to it. I have ideas, but I am more worried about other homework due sooner, so it will wait a while.

I'd say that ended the week, but as dinner was ending I was starting to feel a sore throat come on, and it only got worse over night. I appear to have a cold. Not fun.

I did go out and buy an A/V receiver to replace the dead one, so we can once again drive real speakers when watching TV. I haven't completely set it up yet, but we used it last night and it sounded pretty good. Just a cheap Yamaha in this case - last year's model, even - but it will do the job.

In other news, the weather in Vancouver has continued cool and rainy. We keep hearing fairly apocalyptic weather predictions on the CBC radio in the morning: huge storms that will produce 22-50 mm of rain. You do the math, but it's nothing compared to what we experienced in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

And speaking of those, there was a pretty large fire something like seven miles from our old home last week. Called the Bear Fire, it's in really rugged terrain, and in a very odd area where there are a lot of transients and a fair amount of illegal activity. I was in there a few times when I was a member of the VFD, and it's the place where I was famously told by a local that we should not leave the fire engines unattended overnight or they would be stripped clean. Very weird. Anyway, it's currently listed at 391 acres and 50%  contained. CalFire seems to be getting a handle on it. I have stopped worrying about it. I think they finally got a little rain down there as well, which is good.

That ends this week's update, I think. With luck this cold will pass quickly, I'll get painting & design done this weekend, and the art history test will go well. Time will tell.

Downsizing The Entertainment Gear - part 2

Those who read my earlier post about the entertainment stuff know the situation.

What has gone on since then is pretty simple, really.

I followed through on the HK equipment and got a set of freestanding Elfa shelves to use as a new rack for it and the few things I am keeping.  The rest of the old gear has been hauled off to a place in San Jose that will go over it, fix what they can, and sell it all on consignment.  No idea what I will get for it all, but it is out of the house and we have much more air and floor space as a result.

Other than the HK receiver requiring that the TV be on when you change input sources (I guess it has to tell you it is doing something via the screen, even though the front panel notifications are more than adequate) it works perfectly, and sounds great.

I did a lot of digging on wall mounts for the speakers as well, and that is a project coming soon.  There will be a picture in the end, I suspect.  More when I know it.

Downsizing The Entertainment Gear

As per my previous post from sometime back in the dark ages, we are remodeling our kitchen.  In fact, we are almost done, and the results are great.  But, of course, once you start something like this, you discover a slew of other things that need doing.

This post is (I think) the first in an ongoing series of posts about a very specific problem... making a big, ugly, but reasonably nice entertainment system much smaller and nicer, without blowing the budget too far out of the water.

For that to make any sense, you first need some background.

I was an audiophile at one point in my life.  While I never spent thousands of dollars on most of my gear, I own reasonably nice stuff that dates back to the audio equivalent of the Cretaceous period: aka the 1980's and 90's.

Well, that over simplifies, because not everything I have from then still functions or is used.  I long ago gave up entirely on vinyl.  (Why it is making a come back I have no idea.)  I never wanted or liked tubes either.  (Distortion is distortion.  If you like the way your tube amp sounds, that's fine with me, but I don't really care about it.  Solid state amps might sound a tiny bit different than tube amps - particularly when pushed hard - but at my age, and with my ears - the idea that I will hear any difference is laughable.)  Tape is dead, too.

Digital is the way to go, and I remember the days when people were happy to buy albums that were recorded on digital masters.  Now no one talks about that era... and everyone who cares about high fidelity is doing vinyl and tube amps and (maybe) putting green marker on the edges of their CDs (Google that one if you're too young or your brain is failing an you no longer remember it.  Snopes.com is a good place to start.) and other things I think are bogus.  Just give me reasonable quality gear and simple lamp cord to connect the speakers.  That's all I want.  (No, really.  Anyone buying high end speaker wires, power cables, or power conditioner boxes is being ripped off.  A fool and his money, you know.)

Anyway, despite going digital, life is more complicated now, particularly in the area of video, which isn't something I have had to mess too much, but that is changing.

Enough rambling.  Here's what we had in the big pile of entertainment gear when the kitchen remodel started:

• A Rotel receiver.  About 100 watts per channel (only 2 channels).  Irritation: stand by mode (rather than being totally off) and an annoying pop that is emitted to the speakers when you first power it up from being fully off.  It's done that since it was new, alas.
• A Marantz 5 disk CD changer.  (I have chewed through and spit out so much Sony gear, particularly CD players that whine after a year or two, that I will never, ever, buy anything made by Sony.  That is irrational of me, I know, but I simply won't go there.  Every single thing I  have bought that was made by them has irritated me in a big way, except a phone answering machine that we finally ditched because we wanted to avoid the tape.  Yes, really.)
• An LG blu ray player.
• A Philips DVD player.  (We keep this only because somewhere in our DVD collection there is one disk that causes the blu ray player to choke.  Everyone tells me I am crazy and that should never happen, but it does.  The problem is that we don't know which disk it is now.  We might just ditch the DVD player and the problematic disk when we find it, but that hasn't happened yet.)
• A Nintendo Wii.  We are not big gamers, but some of what is available for this machine is fun.
• A Philips 32" somewhat high def CRT TV.  1080i was the best it could do.
• A Sanza Fuze mp3 player.  (I have a long standing hatred of all things Apple because they have hacked me off in a manner similar to Sony, as mentioned above.  I don't buy Apple gear as a result, and thus will not and do not own and ipod or an iphone.)  For the Fuze I also have a dock sort of thing that will let me connect it (via 3.5mm or RCA jacks) to a stereo device.
• A pair of KEF 105/3 speakers.  These were the biggest single investment in anything audio related in my life.

Note that I have spared you the ancient separate integrated amp, the separate tuner, the turntable, and the cassette player.  All junk now, and all gone (or going).  And you can learn more than you want to about me by noting that I never bought a separate pre-amp and power amp(s).  Could have.  Didn't.  Money has always had better uses for me.

So, the first thing that happened during the remodel is that we had to move entirely out of the upstairs for a week while floors were being refinished.  That meant that the TV had to move too, and being a CRT it was big, heavy, and did not fit on top of the dresser in the bedroom.  Too deep to go there, and there was nowhere else to put it.  That meant we got rid of it and replaced it with a Samsung 40" LED TV.  Low end Samsung... this isn't expensive stuff... I think it cost $600 or something.  Cheap in the modern world.  Amusingly, though, the Samsung has a very narrow bezel, and the old CRT had a very wide bezel.  As a result the new TV is only about 1" wider and 1" taller than the old one, but increases the viewing area substantially.

We are happy with the new TV, which has worked, looked, and sounded just fine (to us) so far.

Next up, the floor refinishing ended, and we moved things back upstairs.  Very quickly we determined that things had to change up there.  (Remember, we're tearing up the world, and change is a given.)  The first thing that was obvious to us was that the TV had to be wall mounted so we could get rid of the TV cabinet that had been under the old CRT.

I researched for a while and selected a Cheetah mount that gives me 26" of extension, so I can move it a fair distance, and mounted up the TV on it.  Not bad, but now the sound quality is poor.  Dialog in movies is hard to make out.  (Note, we aren't running the sound through the stereo... just using the speakers in the TV.)  It turns out that when the TV was on a stand and sitting on a dresser or TV cabinet, it sounded good, but when hung from a wall mount nothing deflects the sound towards the listener, and the net result is less than ideal.  Grrrr.

In addition to that problem, the KEF speakers, while they sound wonderful, are way too frigging big for us anymore.  We barely use the stereo as such, and having those huge things taking up floor space and looking gigantic is just not what we want.

Time to downsize.

The first step was to do a ton of digging, looking for ways to simplify life.

Every manufacturer has moved to HDMI these days, which I guess makes sense, but neither the Wii nor the old DVD player have HDMI outputs.  Now, depending on the choices we make as we go forward, the DVD player could just disappear, but the Wii we'd like to keep.  That means making it cooperate with the new TV setup, however that works, and that is something of a challenge if we put an AV receiver in the mix.  (Most AV receivers that cost less than, say, Greece, don't do video upscaling or convert non-HDMI inputs to go out over the HDMI cable. So you wind up connecting everything from the source to the receiver, and again from the receiver to the TV, creating a rats nest of wires and having to tell the TV to change input sources every time you change input sources on the receiver.  PITA.)

Looking at this logically, the first problem was the Wii.  How to make it talk simply is step one, and today, finally, I found a cheap answer.  I hope.  There is a Chinese company named Lenking that makes inexpensive video conversion equipment.  Among other things they make this Wii to HDMI converter.  It plugs into the back of your Wii and gives you an HDMI port.  No power supply, nothing funny, just convert the composite video and RCA audio outputs of the Wii into HDMI, and upscaling to 720p or 1080p.    Reviews on Amazon vary about how well this works and how well made the device is (or isn't), but for the $21 I just paid, I will give it a try.  (Most amusing are the reviews from people saying that the converter from company X failed, so they tried one from company Y. They are all clearly made by just one original source, folks:  Lenking in China.  The US distributors merely silk screen on a logo and sell the things.  Get a grip.)

Anyway, assuming that Wii converter works when it arrives, then the next step will be to replace the guts of the world.  At the moment I am leaning towards replacing nearly the entire setup (receiver, speakers, blu ray and DVD players) and going with this blu ray AV receiver from Harmon Kardon.  This would do everything we need and has AUX inputs for the CD changer and mp3 player, so it may be the answer.

If we go that way I also need three adjustable shelves on the wall below the TV mount, but that is trivia.  I'd need to arrange to attach the center channel speaker to the TV mount, which should be possible, I guess, and wall mount the left and right channels.  The entire thing is much smaller than the current setup, and should be much nicer to look at, while still having reasonably good sound quality and all the features we need.

I think.

But one step at a time.  First we try the Wii adapter to see if I can make it work, which means I can avoid AV receivers which to video upscaling, which is good.  Then I reassess the world and see where things stand.

If anyone reading this has any comments please feel free to leave them.  I know I am out of my depth here, and any information is appreciated.