rit

Phew

Posted on by grahams

This has been a pretty intense movie marathon for me. Since Wednesday, I’ve seen 14 movies, with only one left to catch tonight at the Coolidge. By Sunday night I started to feel all that sitting in my back and eyes; I felt like my eyes were going to melt when I went to bed that night. I’ve seen some great films, though, and have only really been disappointed by one of them. My goal is to write a review for all 15 of the films over the next few days.

FUMN is this weekend, and I have to say that the back-to-back movie marathons might prove to be a bit much for my sanity. As long as people enjoy themselves it will be worth it. Hopefully people in CSH actually are still interested in FUMN and aren’t just humoring an old man. :)

Hearing Aids

Posted on by grahams
Does anyone know of any financial assistance for those needing hearing aids but who can’t afford them?  I figure that someone in my RIT/NTID network of friends might have a clue, because I sure don’t.
 

See, I told you FUMN was Scholarly!

Posted on by grahams

I did a vanity search today for the phrase “fucked up movie night”, and was astonished to find that FUMN was cited in an academic article!

“Besides video and DVD rentals and purchases, the film is still being shown in theatres around the world. Indeed, in January 2001, the Royal Cinema in Toronto played an Ilsa double feature, presenting Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS at 9:15, and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks at its 11:30 PM show. Paradise Cinema in Toronto also showed the double feature. It has also been shown on college campuses. For instance, Associated Students of UC Davis advertised it ironically as “the heart-warming, inspirational World War II epic” for a free-screening, Lewis and Clark College played it during its “alternative movie night,” and Rochester Institute of Technology showed it for “fucked up movie night.””

—  Rapaport, Lynn – “Holocaust Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in ‘Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,'” in Shofar, 22, Fall 2003

I’m not sure what pleases me more, the fact that showing “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.” was enough to get us into a scholarly journal, or that the credit (blame?) for showing the film was given to RIT as opposed to “The Committee”.  =)

On that subject, tomorrow is FUMN #16 at 9:45pm in the conference room below Kate Gleason Hall.    We’ll be landing in Rochester tonight around midnight, and will likely go directly to Nick’s.  Be there or be somewhere else.

Halloween 2006

Posted on by grahams

This year’s Halloween Party at Sean & Kelly’s was as awesome as ever.  It’s always great to be able to able to see so many of my friends since we’ve all scattered away from Rochester.  This year’s party was a bit different than years past, with Master

[info]sophusalexander

now present and accounted for.  Other friends of Sean and Kelly’s brought a young child as well, so a “Swear Jar” was instituted (the proceeds of which go to christmas presents for the children who we damaged).  At the end of the party, I believe there was nearly $90 in the jar (with the typical “fine” being $1).  Not too bad for a bunch of foul-mouthed drunks…

[info]adamfletcher

created the above time-lapse video of the party, starting Thursday night (before

[info]coco_b

and I arrived) and continuing until Sunday morning when people began to depart.  I believe he said that he kept 1 out of every 400 frames, which (if my math is correct, is one frame every 13.3 seconds or so).  You’ll see the perspective change as we moved the camera on Friday morning to a corner-mount on the wall.  I don’t know how much work he put in to preparing for this, but it went off without a hitch.  Yesterday he put up all the raw DV files up on a server, as well as a ~100MB WMV “rough-cut” just so people didn’t have to download a few gigs of DV.  Anyway, I downloaded it all yesterday and cut together a version to stick up on YouTube as well as burn to a DVD.  Other than the “title cards”, everything else you see is Adam’s (all the “real” work).

Buffer Zone

Posted on by grahams

Even though the weather wasn’t interested in cooperating, this weekend was fantastic. A bunch of friends from RIT descended upon scenic Lake Hopatcong this weekend for the now annual Summer Outing. This year we actually camped in the back yard, which was rather full (mostly due to my gigantic tent, though). It’s tough trying to figure out who to invite, etc… The boat provides a good upper cap to the number of people, I’d hate to have to leave people on shore because I over-extended… Heck, a few of the people we were expecting were unable to show. But I guess if we grow too much we can always rent a second boat.. :P

Anyway, it was a ton of fun, we boated, swam, caught a flick (Clerks II), and drank. Another highlight of the weekend was tooling around with Air Hogs, which several people purchased… They are neat little toys, makes me want to get a real R/C plane to compliment my helicopter. This was also the triumphant return of my Helicopter, which has been out of commission for awhile due to a bad crash.

Clerks II was fantastic, way, way, way better than I had expected.. Working long hours again this week to make up for Friday, which I am taking off for Stellafane 2006. Then I am going to hide in Boston for a few weekends to recover from all the recent travelling…

Rochester is still Rochester

Posted on by grahams

In case you were wondering, Rochester in the winter still sucks.. :) Actually, while cold and windy, it is pretty nice out today… You can actually see blue… IN THE SKY!

We’ve just been meeting up with people here yesterday and today… Went to a party last night that was fun, although I was pretty tired from waking up at 6:30am.. :P Today met up with most of the same people and more at DiBellas and then walked around campus checking it out. was finally able to check out the Library, and I got to check out the new offices of , , and Scoot. I finally got to see the sensors they’ve been working on, which was cool.. Talked to Scoot and quite a bit about the cameras and processing they do, it was very interesting.. Now that I have more imaging knowledge I felt like I could actually ask intelligent questions… :)

and I are getting ready for the banquet tonight, which is semi-formal…. Which in CSH terms means business casual, but I’m still wearing a shirt and tie. :)

FUMN the Fifteenth

Posted on by grahams

This weekend was a grand ol’ time… , and I left Cambridge around 5:30pm on Friday and rolled into Rochester around 11:30pm. We checked into the hotel and Matt and I met up with some other CSHers at Nick’s. A few people bitched at me, apparently they felt they needed some golden and lace invitation to Nick’s.. These people need to sack up and stop whining.. I go to Nick’s every time I come to Rochester, and I gave plenty of warning that I was coming up last Friday. I told a few people when we were going to be there, and to spread the word.. If you are offended that you weren’t one of the 3 or 4 people I used to start the “snow chain”, well, get over yourself…

Anyway, after Nick’s I went back to the hotel to sleep, and Saturday was predictably filled with DiBella’s, DinoBBQ, and FUMN. There was also an Alumni Storytelling thing at 2pm on floor… I am not so into them, but organizing them was always a pain in the ass when I was House History director, so I decided to attend just to support my old committee. It turned out to be a fun time… FUMN was a rousing success, I presented 4 films this time, and one of them was rather short (at 45 minutes), so we ended the night “early” at 2am. To be honest, this was probably a good thing, because we still had a really large crowd at 2am, and normally by the end of the night we are down to stragglers, so perhaps I will aim for 2am as the “sweet spot”, but who knows… Anyway, the lineup was:

Weekend et. al.

Posted on by grahams

Had a fairly laid back weekend…. Friday night I just stayed home with , who had a nasty cold (probably the same cold I had, although we had thought she had dodged that bullet). Saturday morning I decided to mount my Sirius radio in the car. It had been flopping around, kind of propped up in the ashtray while I waited for a nice mount to arrive in the mail (the radio came with a suction cup mount as well as velcro, but both those choices seemed ghetto). This mount required me taking the dashboard trim off, which was made easier by employing the dash trim removal tool I got with the new mount kit, but still sucked. I thought I could mount it without removing the car stereo, etc, but that was false hope. With the car stereo removed I was able to hide wires much easier, so they just pop out of the dashboard next to the mount. I also replaced the cigarette lighter adapter that came with the Sirius with some hard-wired power that tied into the car stereo’s wiring harness. I wired so the Sirius always has power, so that if I have to run out of the car quickly but want to finish what I am hearing I can pause the radio (it has a 45 minute live buffer) and shut the car off. I also moved the Sirius antenna from the trunk to the roof, as I was getting annoyed that the wires would move and get tugged whenever I opened the trunk. All in all it took me about 2 hours to finish the job, which includes running back up to the apartment to solder the power leads into the wiring harness, so it wasn’t that bad. The only downside of the experience was that it was pouring rain, so I did a lot of crawling around the inside of the car to avoid getting drenched.

Sunday we caught The Matador with the film club, which was pretty funny. A bunch of us are headed to Rochester after work on Friday for the first FUMN in ages… I’m really looking forward to that (but not particularly looking forward to the drive…).