Ryan profile picture

Ryan

selfishness is not a virtue...

About Me

..

I'm in the process of updating my profile, please stay tuned, more to come.......

My Interests

* Music
* The Arts (especially video art, and art + tech)
* Photography (opto-chemical and digital)
* Record collecting (vinyl, aka the black crack, cause it's addicting)
* General electronic and audio-visual geekery including computers, especially vintage old-skool computing (a la CP/M, DOS, TI 99/4a, C64, etc.)
* The early days of computer graphics before it got overused like today, (a la U of Utah, Evans and Sutherland, Bell Labs, Triple-I, Scanimate, MAGI, etc.)
* Audio & video technology (i.e. sound recording, video production, filmmaking, etc.)
* Telecommunications (namely satellite television, satellite & landline communications, telephony and such)
* Radio communications & radio monitoring/scanning (my ham radio callsign is N0SXY, and my GMRS call is WQBM912)
* Super8/16mm film (collecting and shooting)
* Similar A/V media such as filmstrips, slides, transparencies, whatnot

I'm planning on building a video/film studio in my second bedroom here very soon, complete with Premiere-equipped NLE (too poor to afford a decent Mac with Final Cut Pro) and 8/16mm telecine film chain (!)...

Music:

Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, u-Ziq, Prefuse 73/Savath + Savalas/Delarosa & Asora, Ian Pooley, Swayzak, MRI, Ralph Myerz, J-Walk, Fila Brazillia, outputmessage, Tommy Guerrero, Nightmares on Wax, Portishead, Kruder + Dorfmeister, Dabrye, Carl Craig, LTJ Bukem, Richie Hawtin, Boards of Canada, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, Meat Beat Manifesto/Tino, 808 State, Luke Vibert/Wagon Christ/Plug/Amen Andrews/Kerrier District, Telefon Tel Aviv, TRS-80, High Contrast, London Elektricity, Danny Byrd, Fabio, Braces Tower, Talking Heads, Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, Gang of Four, The Cure, Dead or Alive, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Echo & the Bunnymen, Devo, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Brian Eno, Merzbow, Christian Marclay, NIN, James Brown, early Kool and the Gang, Fela Kuti, Breakestra, Booker T and the MGs, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys (when Jello was still with the group), Dead Milkmen, Subhumans, Crass, Tortoise, Stereolab, Beck, Calvin Johnson/Dub Narcotic, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Radiohead, IQU, Pizzicato Five, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams, Creed Taylor, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Miles Davis, Donald Byrd, Eddie Harris, Stan Getz, Les McCann, Cannonball Adderley, Weather Report, A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, Grand Wiz Theodore, De La Soul, Fat Boys, People Under the Stairs, Keb Darge, Kenny Dope, Towa Tei, Beastie Boys, Lalo Schifrin, Bernard Herrmann, Roy Budd, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone, Mark Isham, Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Ray Coniff, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Slim Whitman, Jerry Reed, and any other music that does not reek of corporate commercial mainstreamness or gets featured on TRL.Yes, my musical interests are all over the place :).

Movies:

Koyaanisqatsi (as well as the rest of the Qatsi trilogy)
THX 1138
Fight Club
Requiem for a Dream
Paris Texas
Slacker
Static
The Passion of the Christ
The Andromeda Strain
North By Northwest
Falling Down
Taxi Driver
Vanishing Point
2001: A Space Odyssey
Brainstorm
True Stories
Network
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The President's Analyst
The Blob (1958)
any Dirty Harry film
Amazon Women on the Moon
Kentucky Fried Movie
Airplane
The Jerk
The Blues Brothers
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Medium Cool
The Corporation
Westworld (the first film wth CGI)
Pump Up The Volume
WarGames
Sneakers
UHF
The Falcon and the Snowman
Scratch
Modulations

and anything by Tim Burton such as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks, Frankenweenie, Vincent, CatCF...

Television:

I don't have a whole lot of respect for television as a viewer, since 99.5% of TV sucks horribly, as well as being the devil's tool. :). (It's just like Bill Hicks once said: "I can't watch TV longer than 5 minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust. ")

Most of it is just brainless, annoying and obnoxious sitcoms, horrid reality shows showcasing selfish sub-human contestants whoring themselves while backstabbing and cruelly screwing over each other (ughhhh), and overdone, overblown dramas portraying the worst of the human condition in the name of fast and cheap entertainment.
But, here's the other .5% I like:
The Simpsons
King of the Hill
Sifl and Olly
History Detectives
The Weather Channel
This Old House (current & Classics)
Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids
Ren & Stimpy (before it got stupid)
Pee-Wee's Playhouse
Rocko's Modern Life
Nova
Garfield and Friends
The Price Is Right
Hey Vern It's Ernest
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The Young Ones
30 Days
SCTV
Dragnet (both 1950s and 1967-70 series)
Adam-12
and The Computer Chronicles, which is now off the air but back episodes are freely downloadable at www.archive.org (forgive the plug).

Books:

Anything by Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet, Microserfs), Scott Mueller's Guide to Upgrading and Repairing PCs, Orwell's 1984, Stephen Levy's Hackers...

Heroes:

Jesus Christ, since he died for our sorry asses, and came back from the dead to conquer evil and sin, to be our Saviour, in other words.Another hero of mine is the group Kraftwerk, since they took electronic music from its abstract, academic, and clinical form, from academically-oriented electronic artists like Vladimir Ussachevsky, John Cage, Paul Lansky, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (all great artists in their own right), to the dancefloor. Kraftwerk was the first group to make electronic music with a soul.Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter (the founding members of Kraftwerk) revolutionized music by making electronic music more accessible and dare I say danceable, starting in 1974 with a little track called Autobahn. They paved the way for latter electronic artists like Afrika Bambaataa, Cybotron, 808 State, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Larry Heard, (A Guy Called) Gerald Simpson, and Richie Hawtin to thrive. They made music in the electronic sense something to groove and shake it to, instead of studying and analyzing it at a university lecture.

My Blog

Ketchup: the maligned condiment

I have noticed lately that there seems to be this awful backlash & hatred towards one of my favorite condiments, ketchup.  Exhibit A:  There seems to be quite an aversion to ketchup for...
Posted by Ryan on Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:33:00 PST

Rut...

Okey, it's been almost an eternity & a decade since I last made a blog post here, mainly because since then, my life hasn't been exciting enough to make a blog about, neither has it stimulated my ...
Posted by Ryan on Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:52:00 PST

Analog photography isn't...

Lately, I've noticed that most people (especially those who are technology writers writing articles in computer magazines like PC World) are always referring to traditional film photography as "analog...
Posted by Ryan on Tue, 06 Sep 2005 10:45:00 PST

2005 is pathetic

Man, am I such a retrophile or what.  I just realized that this current day and age is a real drag.  Things just arent as kool as they used to be.  As the years progress, things that we...
Posted by Ryan on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Similar band names...

Ok, this blog's kinda stupid, but I had to get this off my chest--it's a list of bands/performers (ranging from excellent to the usual mainstream crap) that have similar names that I've observed ...
Posted by Ryan on Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:25:00 PST

Windows gets the glory, the Macintosh gets chopped liver...

Ok, another rant.Unlike from what I've seen of the computing community of planet Earth, I'm one of the very few people here on planet earth who likes *both* PCs and Macs equally. Usually, the majority...
Posted by Ryan on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST

Similar album covers...

Speaking of similiarities (as with band/artist names mentioned in my last post), here's a site featuring similar album covers as well.  It's called The Knockoff Project, and here is its web site:...
Posted by Ryan on Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:09:00 PST

I am feeling really weird right now....... ;}

Ok, so what happens when you get absolutely no sleep due to having to stay up all night getting all of your cabinets and closets all cleared out and emptied (as well as some general tidying-up of...
Posted by Ryan on Tue, 25 Oct 2005 06:51:00 PST

Tortoise soup...

Lately, I have been listening to quite a bit of the group Tortoise ('ve been a fan of theirs even since TNT came out) , I have to say that their music is quite in line with my imagination and creativi...
Posted by Ryan on Sat, 01 Oct 2005 12:28:00 PST

Pictures!!!!!

Some of you have probably seen me at the local shows here in Bis-bang taking pictures of everyone performing, well I'm now happy to say that I now have them available on the internet!!! Just go to:...
Posted by Ryan on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST