Pete Simon

Endeavor to have the kinds of ideas, to hold the kinds of beliefs, to tell the kinds of stories, to create the kinds of art; that cannot be outgrown.

Yewbush was planted at the foot of the driveway, a low-profile marker for wayward cars meandering down a dirt road in the rural heart of Eden, Connecticut.
 
Yewbush was a squat shrub, non distinct from any other; green, scraggly and with angular shape; but underneath the hairy bark of his tiny limbs, ambition coursed. Yewbush could not stand the company of the fair maples, which the landowners so admired. For Yewbush, the malcontent of being small and unnoticeable was an unquenchable thirst.
 
Yewbush looked across the derelict dust of the sand driveway and saw reprieve: the ancient brook that ran through Eden, carrying in her waters the dredged muck of forgotten times; bloody property disputes fueled by small town reputations, deceit and treachery between neighbors; sin seeped through the soil of Eden, into the ancient brook. Of her waters, Yewbush was forbade by natural law to drink, for it ran through the dark ages of the spirit of man. But Yewbush saw that she ran so near, just across the sandy driveway, and thought it destiny that he should be planted close such an awful power.
 
Watch me, Yewbush told the fair maples, and he sent his little roots beneath the sandy driveway earth too the edge of the ancient brook, and he drank deep the stories of Eden’s dark ages.

And Yewbush grew. In three years time, Yewbush became Yewtree. He emerged from the shadows of neglect, coarse and dense, needles darkened, a hundred limbs spread tall and strong, he cast the blackest shadow across the grass tuft lawn.

Surely, he had become a dark thing, a natural outlaw, grown from the sins of the ancient water of Eden.
 
No one had ever seen a tree like Yewtree. No one could believe that Yewtree had grown from bush; he had grown too tall to and horrible to be imagined younger.

What is this tree?  aghast visitors would ask. Alas, it was a small yew bush, but it grew to this unsightly tree! replied the landowners.

Yewtree heard all this but didn’t care, he thrived on the negativity of his new-found attention.
 
Now they notice me, he told the fair maples.

You are a stain on this fair earth, they replied. Though forbade, you drew from the ancient waters. You grew from sin! and they rustled with fear and disapproval of Yewtree.

Scorned by his brethren, Yewtree decided to grow taller still.
 
Once again, Yewtree drank deeply from the ancient brook of Eden. The brook laughed as Yewtree drew her murky waters, but Yewtree didn’t care.
 
This time, Yewtree didn’t grow at all. Instead he became dry. His dark green needles browned, and like a rotting apple, his limbs withered from the center out.

Soon visitors would notice he was even wilder than before, and dead on the inside. This tree cannot stand much longer, they told the landowners.
 
But Yewtree didn’t care, he reveled in the sour looks of all of his beholders.

May all of Nature hear me! I was but a driveway marker, set in sandy earth where derelict dust sweeps and blasts. Now I am a full grown tree, unlike any other, and as coarse and wretched as I may be you cannot help but notice me.
 
Finally, the landowners eyes tired of the foulness of Yewtree.

This tree has grown from a mere yew bush, and though it was impressive once, now it is an unwelcoming sight that forebodes visitors and casts a long shadow over our land. And see, the branches are beginning to die on the inside but they can’t be removed because the tree is too dense.
 
With nothing more to be done, the landowners decided the yew bush would be removed.
 
Then came the morning when Yewtree was to be removed, and all of Nature looked on.

At the first strike of the shovel, the Yewtree recalled his proud life.
 
Unlike you, I have accomplished something in my time, he told the fair maples that grew nearby.
 
Unlike you, I have proven my worth; I am the biggest, wildest, roughest, densest, darkest, deadest bush on earth.

If I could change myself

who would you have me be?

I could be anyone

anyone you want.

Wyclef Jean - Bubblegoose - 3:06 to end

Here’s a tip for the designer who is seeing QR Codes everywhere and wanting to make print-ready ones (AI files).

This is a cynch, but requires both Photoshop and Illustrator.

Start with a QR code image as generated from your favorite generator. I’ve been using  http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Here’s mine:

1. Once you have your code image, load it into photoshop:

2. Go to Select->Color Range…

3. The Color Range selector will pop up and allow you to pic a pixel from your QR code image. Pick a solid black one and drop the Fuzziness slider down to 0:

4. The selector lines will appear around all the black parts of your QR code image. Go down to the Paths tab (also available via menu option Window->Paths:

5. You will see a new path appear in the Paths tab window called Work Path. Do a CTRL-A to select all of the canvas, and CTRL-C to copy:

6. Now open up Adobe Illustrator and wait the usual forever for it to load. When you awake from your Rip Van Winkle nap, create a new document. Make it a square. You can see below that I have the dimensions at 600x600 pixels:

7. Do CTRL-V to paste the Work Path you copied from Photoshop before you fell asleep for 100 years waiting on Illustrator to load. To the Paste prompt just stick with the default Compound Shape and press OK:

8. The Work Path has been pasted into Illustrator ready paths, and if you’re a designer this excites you:

9. Go to the fill in the tool bar (see tooltip in image above) and choose black:

That’s all there is too it!

You can save this as an AI file and any other designer type can work with it.

I’m using CS4 in this step by step but I’m pretty sure this works a few versions back.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful, and I hope a get a OccupyTumblr’s worth of followers for posting something useful on tumblr.

Programming requires an insane amount of patience.

Imagine you’re speaking to a machine that wants to fuck-up in the most incomprehensible ways. The computer is just that: a fuck-up machine, but it’s so well built that it will continue to run so it can fuck-up again.

Actually, it’s coldly effecient at fucking up, like a Terminator unit that is build in so  its arm joints can only punch inward and toward the face.

But the computer’s mistakes are entirely self-serving. Like a goth-kid writing encoding his diary so no one, probably not even his future self, will ever read his innermost thoughts; similarly the computer keeps most of its issues to itself, whereby you must keenly decipher of a set of erratic, and mostly alien behavioral patterns to figure what is out going on. In computing, this is called debugging, and requires even more patience than programming.

Unlike the goth-kid, the computer won’t cut itself, but it will bleed memory until it has none and locks up like an epileptic fit. This is normal and should be expected.

Far from being sympathetic, whenever the computer errors, it does so in the most callous way — but not in the same resentful way of teenagers, where there’s a strong undercurrent of pubescent angst; it’s more like a drunkard when it errors.

It behaves terribly for a unbearable stretch of time until it blurts out something unconscionable, then it passes out. Similarly, the computer will engage in the most egregious mismanagement of assets, spending recklessly on loose processes and consuming unseemly amounts of information until it can no longer hold it’s data/liquor, at which point it will vomit chunks of unparsed text onto the screen without an iota of concern for your sense of decency. It leads a hugely irresponsible existance and will make no effort to improve.

Putting up with a sob drunkard friend is an accurate way of describing a job in computing; the shit you put up with on a daily basis, the verbal (beeping) abuse you endure because you see *some* semblence of worth in keeping the sumbitch around, because the human being you are cannot simply Give Up on another destitute soul; that’s the person<->computer relationship without the human to relate to.