Throwback - Mayfest 2010

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Joe Blum films and participates in the Syracuse University 2010 Mayfest held in Walnut Park. Click to see "Mayfest according to Joe Blum" on the Newshouse site.


Despite the official SU Mayfest 2010 being held in Walnut Park, a sizable number of SU and ESF students continued the trend this year of partying in front of houses along Euclid Ave.


Max Nepstad and Jenna Passmore in Walnut Park.


Syracuse police monitor the Euclid area during the 2010 Mayfest.

You can see a couple of these photos on the Newshouse site: "Walnut Park wins Mayfest, but Euclid Ave. survives"

Moving in Las Vegas

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On Friday the 13th of August I left Syracuse, NY to Las Vegas, NV to begin my year-long term as a Nevada Conservation Corps crewmember. It is unbelievably hot here.

Because we weren't able to sign the lease to our apartment and move in until the 14th, I stayed my first night in the Gold Spike Hotel and Casino. Immediately at the entrance of every building I walk into, including my hotel, are slot machines and seizure-inducing flashing lights.

This was my hotel room (click and drag to rotate 360 degrees):
Surely the bright light coming through that window is daylight.


Oh wait it's actually a spotlight aiming right at my window in the middle of the night.

After moving out of this hotel the day after, I took an expensive Taxi ride to our Oasis Meadows Apartments.


View from our doorstep (we do also have a patio on the other side of the apartment). Incidentally this is also our house number where all gifts and care packages can be sent (3150 S. Nellis Blvd. #2131 Las Vegas, NV 89121).


Some Oasis Meadows apartments.

The size of this living area really surprised us all. It's bizarre that a living community this large has virtually no information available online. In any case, it's a very surprisingly nice place, and our three bedroom apartment is equally delightful, albeit unfurnished.

We did manage to pick up our first items of furniture from a couple of the garbage dumpsters located in the community, including a 1.5x1.5 ft. end table and a huge (in size and weight) 36" CRT television that we all thoroughly struggled bringing from the dumpster to our 2nd floor apartment (no elevators!). Our furniture count is now two, unless you don't count TVs as furniture.

One quickly apparent plus about Las Vegas is how cheap food and alcohol are.

While the apartment is nice and we'd all like more time to get settled in, we begin our NCC orientation tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. and won't be returning to Vegas until later this Friday.

At this point, things aren't too clear on where we'll be going exactly during our orientation week, but we did get an orientation schedule that more or less outlined our activities. It seems that a lot of this week will be spent in "classroom" settings, where we'll be learning about controlling erosion, trail design, layout (brushing corridor, constructing tread, drainage features) and theory, tool maintenance, Leave No Trace, and hopefully how to survive in the scorching heat. It's hot enough wearing shorts, but we have to wear relatively heavy Carharrt pants during our shifts everyday.

Notably, we'll be camping out the entire time starting Monday night at a location called Spring Mountains, which I believe are west and a bit south of Vegas.


Ben, Rosie and Sarah immediately after carrying this remarkably heavy TV to our apartment from by a dumpster. We were so happy to see static, ensuring it was in fact a functioning TV.


Ben, Rosie and Sarah after recovering from carrying the TV to the apartment.

Ugh, our forecast:

It better thunder on Wednesday. Only 30 percent chance? Come on thunderstorm, you can do it!

SIDEARM in San Francisco

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San Francisco Marriott Marquis.

Alcatraz can be seen from Pier 39.

As seen from the top of the lighthouse on Forbes Island by Pier 39.

Heavy fog.

We took this boat out to Forbes Island where we ate dinner before watching Fourth of July fireworks.

Golden Gate Bridge.

Kate Bartlett.

Waiting in a lobby.

Fruit fly infestation

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There were only a few to begin with, maybe four or five that I had noticed. I've had fruit flies in the past, but not to such a severe extent as I have these past several weeks. Even after removing any remnants of food that may have been keeping the population afloat, they stopped at nothing to reproduce and before I knew it, literally hundreds of fruit flies had infested my kitchen. And because I'm living in a studio apartment, my kitchen is also almost every other room in my apartment.

The threat was now greater than I could have ever anticipated. I no longer felt that my kitchen was sanitary, and sitting idly was not helping, even though it has always worked in the past when dealing with fruit flies. They kept multiplying. At first I used regular old cleaning spray to stave the infestation but with lackluster results. Sure it killed scores of them, but it wasn't enough. I brought home some more lethal cleaning spray from work, but this also made little difference. The population would go into hiding until the chemical raids subsided.

I was going to have to outsmart them.

In the photo you see above are a series of traps I devised to destroy the scourge. I made about eight of these and they all worked quite effectively. For anyone who finds themselves similarly in the midst of a fruit fly pestilence, here is what you can do:

  • Fold a piece of paper into a conical shape and then tape the sides so it doesn't unravel. Make sure you leave a little opening at the tip. Or, when you're finished taping the sides, simply cut a small hole at the tip - big enough for fruit flies to crawl into. It's important that this hole is quite small.
  • Pour a small amount of balsamic vinegar into a glass. These bastards love the smell - and I have grown to hate it now that its smell reminds me of hellish hordes of fruit flies.
  • Place the conical paper into the glass as you see in the photos above. Make sure the tip comes down close to the vinegar, but far enough away so that it doesn't touch. Maybe a couple of centimeters or so.
  • Tape the outside where the papers extends out of the glass so no fruit flies can escape out the sides.
  • The flies will be attracted to the smell of the vinegar, go down the paper and into the glass. Yet the fools are too stupid to figure out how to escape. They'll eventually starve or will fly into the vinegar and drown. But not before covering the paper with disgusting fly droppings.

There you have it. The fruit fly population is all but destroyed save for a few individuals who cling to their lives in spite of imminent doom inside the traps.

Oh Syracuse University...

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A rainy day in Syracuse.

I'm probably the only one who hasn't really minded the poor weather in Syracuse lately. In fact I'm kind of enjoying it. It feels so nice and warm when you're inside and it's pouring outside. And considering that I'm indoors all day, it works out nicely. On that note, I should probably venture outside more often.

My internship at ICS is going well and I've been there about a month now. I wrote my first post on the company blog, here, if you want to hear a little bit about what I do there. ICS provides technological solutions for its clients' web needs and has pioneered technologies in web design, content management systems, e-commerce solutions and other areas. I work directly with ICS' clients and this is really giving me a good understanding of the business side of a web development company. And that knowledge is really what I think I need at this point, seeing as how Newhouse doesn't offer any insight in that.

Although I still intend to find a career relating to graphics and/or photography in some regard, I really want it to involve the web as well. It's a bit depressing that I have less than a year to figure this all out. Even more depressing is that I think Newhouse, which touts itself as a great journalism school, is really falling wayside. My Designing Interactivity (the only undergrad web class in Newhouse) professor, Stephen Masiclat, is aware of Newhouse's lack of competitiveness in the upcoming years, as demonstrated by this graph of web traffic of a couple other journalism schools in the nation (from left to right: SU, UFL, Berkeley, Columbia). People aren't really looking at Newhouse anymore and there's a reason (or two) for it. I could go on and on about what I think is wrong with my own VIC department (which houses graphic arts, photojournalism and photo illustration), but I'll save that for another time.



The most recent annoyance I've experience from Newhouse is the realization that, although our photo department currently owns two tilt shift lenses, students are not allowed to check them out for their own use outside of the studio. We're allowed to check out a number of other lenses, but not these. Why? One of my friends came across this video online which was done using still photos and a tilt shift lens. By distorting the focus of the photo, you can simulate a shallow depth of field that makes the photo seem much smaller than it actually is. Check this out:


Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. From the blog of Keith Loutit.

Holy Grail of Beer - Westvleteren 12

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When I was in Amsterdam last fall, my friend Will took me to a bierwinkel, or beer shop, called De Bierkoning which, among other less commonly found beers, sold the three Westvleteren beers Blonde (5.8% abv), 8 (8% abv) and 12 (10.2% abv). I haven't really been appreciative of beers in the past, but then I tried an €18 bottle of Westvleteren 12. Since then, I think I'm starting to become a bit of a beer connoisseur. I've also really been wanting to try Westvleteren 12 again, and just yesterday I finally got my hands on six bottles.

Westvleteren 12 has a bit of an international reputation of being the best beer in the world. It's constantly rated as the no. 1 beer by sites like Beeradvocate and ratebeer (8 and Blonde have ranked highly too), and given this attention, the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece on the monastery in 2007. Westvleteren 12 is brewed by monks in the Trappist Abbey of Saint Sixtus Westvleteren in Belgium.

It is extremely difficult to obtain due to its very limited production and distribution. It's only available at two official selling points: the drive-up sales window at the abbey and at the In De Vrede (In the Peace) café across the street. The current production is 4750 hl annually (for comparison, an average microbrewery in the United States produces 18000 hl annually). The bottles have no labels – all the legally required information is written on the bottle caps.

Getting the beer today means calling the monks at the St. Sixtus Abbey ahead of time and making an appointment, driving to the monastery and then buying a maximum of two crates per person once a month. Its rarity has certainly contributed to its mystique worldwide, and the monks have no intention of increasing production despite demand. In an article in the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, Brother Joris explained that they "brew to live, but don't live to brew." The money they make is just enough to sustain their lives at the monastery (well, monks are also allowed to drink the Blonde ale with their meals). Anyone who buys the beer agrees to not resell it. The monks want their beers to only be available in the area of West Flanders for local and private consumption. But that doesn't mean a grey market for the beer hasn't emerged.

From Wikipedia: "Despite the popularity, the monks of St Sixtus have continued to decline almost all interview and visit requests, and have not enjoyed all of the attention they have received. Non-monastic visitors to the abbey are usually turned away, instead being directed to the visitor's centre opposite where there is information about the abbey and brewery. They have stated a desire to live a peaceful monastic life, and find the resulting interruptions quite intrusive."

The Saint Sixtus Abbey is one of seven Trappist monasteries that produces beer. Only these seven breweries are allowed to label their beer with the Authentic Trappist Product logo that indicates compliance to the rules of the International Trappist Association.