2004 August 11 // The Daily Render by Nikolas R. Schiller

The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

|| 8/11/2004 || 6:33 am || Comments Off || ||
wow …its really finished… for now

I have spent entirely too much time working on my website! But DAMN, I am really proud of how it looks now. I added a whole slew of new pages. First off, I created a services page, which I hope will drum up some new business. I feel that I will be updating this page with some more explicit information shortly. I also added a bunch of new renderings which I’ve been waiting for some time to put on-line. The whole “Lenz Project” has really churned out some amazing images! And they keep getting bigger too! The last few designs have rendered at 10,000 X 7,500 pixels (about 300 megabyte TIFFs!)- which means they’ll make some amazing posters someday. When I first started rendering designs I’d make them 1600X1200, and after the 9 day rendering of the “recycling room,” I have become a lot more patient and now the graphics are just getting larger & larger. Now the only drawback is obtaining free satellite imagery that is large enough so that I can render the XXL sizes without massive pixilation.

I am now experimenting with taking the whole Lenz template and elongating the sphere to create an eye. It looks like the next series will be the “Eye in the Sky Project” :) After compiling all the images together for the design page, I opted to make the new design page four pages instead of one. I didn’t know that I had that many graphics, but at the same time I realize there are a few that aren’t even listed on the page itself! (I like the way that page looks with the “earth,” Baghdad, the Pentagon, the Vatican, and Mecca- but I don’t really care for the moon rendering there, but oh well) I also split up the video page into two sections. Doing all of this made me realize that I beginning to build up a decent body of work. Next up is redoing the “site map,” because the XML portion that I toiled away for hours working on last year has been replaced by this blog. I think I am going to make the White House the link to the services page. I’ll post updates when they are completed.

In reference the last post, after checking my website logs (rather excitedly) I ended up getting 5 hits from the U.S. Capitol Police. Nothing from the Department of Homeland Security or the State Department. The U.S. Capitol Police didn’t look at anything on the website except for my animation, my blog, and of course they downloaded my resume. Judging by the speed at which they ran through the pages, it was more of an investigation of Nikolas Schiller than an analysis of my animation. However, I was glad to see that during one of the 5 hits, someone actually looked through the complete analysis. Nonetheless, my encounter with the U.S. Capitol Police Investigations Division Task Force was a lot better than the two reporters with the Common Denominator who were detained! The whole irony is that even the Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police sees no specific threat to Hill. Its 3 year old intelligence! What was that? Did you hear a boy crying wolf in the distance?

I sincerely believe that the next “attack” is going to happen either during the RNC or just before the elections. I really hope that it doesn’t happen before the elections because that means that Bush will have very good chance of winning. If there isn’t an “attack” between now and the elections, then Osama Bin Laden will be captured right before the elections. Its win|win situation for Bush. Regardless, I honestly think Kerry will have the election in a basket and Bush Jr. will be just like his father.

Speaking of elections, the political hardball I’ve been the most privy to as of late has been with Adam’s campaign. This week we are contesting the fact that Adam’s challenger is using the DC government website for his reelection campaign website. I got to be quoted in the press release, but judging by the few hits I received today it wasn’t sent out to many people or the reporters chose not to cover the story. [update: this was not written to insinuate that anyone did not do their job properly] Nonetheless, its my first time appearing in a press release. Next up for the campaign is to make a nice looking promotional campaign video. I have all the footage to make something now, I just don’t have the creative drive at the moment- or more like the framework for which I want to make it. I’d like to work with someone on it rather than going at it alone. Anyways, this Friday I am going to be out in Ward 7 again campaigning without Adam for Michele Tingling-Clemmons (candidate for DC City Council WARD 7). I’ve enjoyed going to Ward 7 & 8 this last month because its shown me a lot more DC than I ever have seen in the last 5 years…errr, well the east side of DC that is. I want to do another event in Adam’s Morgan though! Next month we’ll probably have another one :)

Well the sun is coming up and the vampire must go to sleep. Or should I just stay up? Eh, there is a drum & bass event tonight at Club 5, but I don’t think I’m going to go. I should, I need the exercise, but I’m just kinda bored seeing the same folks every time I go out. We’ll see about it…

|| || 3:10 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
terrible beauty

a line from the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Blog

We are connected by that suffering. I didn’t know Cat’s aunt, or Loretta’s husband, or Andrea’s husband, or David’s brother, or Derril’s daughter, or Kristina?s sister. But I now know Cat, Loretta, Andrea, David and Derril. What we have shared has been beautiful and special, a terrible beauty. I don?t know the families that are in anguish and grief, both in this country and in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a result of the current wars, but I pull this stone because their losses are no less significant or tragic than the losses we have experienced. Too many people have died.

It is a terrible beauty to be connected by grief. I have spent the last hour reading their about the Peaceful Tomorrows “Stonewalk” from Boston to DC. If I had the money, I’d definitely like to walk for a day. It would be hard work pushing the stone, but I bet it would be cathartic.

My terrible connective beauty to 9/11 does not involve the death of any of my family members. Yet it is very interesting in regards to spatially connectivity.

I was in DC, my sister Serena was in NYC, and my other sister Noel was in The Hague. Serena was on a business trip in NYC and on September 10th her secretary called her asking if you would like to take flight 93 to get back to San Francisco earlier in the day. She opted for the later flight out of Kennedy. On September 10th, I flew home from Saint Louis after spending a weekend with girlfriend. I still have the Saint Louis Metrolink ticket stub.

After safely flying home into DCA, I went to class, and then in the evening at 7pm I took a nap. I had a beautifully terrible dream that I still remember to this day. I was on top of a building and there were two planes “dancing” in the sky. They were doing circles that no airplane could not possibly do, and one started to come toward me on the rooftop. I ran toward the edge of the building and jumped. I fell through the air flailing my arms and right as I hit the ground, I was transplanted to the exact same spot on the rooftop I had just been. (I remembered it was like a “game over” video game sequence where your car falls off the road and your new car instantly appears at the center of the road) This time I turned around and ran down the stairs toward the basement. As I rounded the first flight of stairs a plane crashed into stairwell, but instead of explosions, it just poked its nose into the stairwell. The nose turned out to be a turret of a gattling gun. I ran down the stairs and as the gun began to fire- the phone rang. It was 10:42pm, my girlfriend was calling to see how I was. I told her about the dream.

The next morning I woke unbelievably early at 9am and turned on the TV to CNN. I called my Mom & my girlfriend and stayed glued to the television. There was a report of a car bomb at the State Department. It turned out to be a hoax. I went to the top of the stairs of my dorm and looked out the window and could see the Pentagon burning off in the distance. At 1pm I left the confines of my dorm room and walked to the heart of the campus. The first person I ran into was my friend Solomain, who was originally born in Afghanistan. He had told me a story a year prior about how when he was 5 he had to put cotton in his ears to combat the sonic boom of fighter planes over his house. He also lost two of his uncles during the war. They are the nameless civilian casualties of war that the “stonewalkers” are telling others about as they drag the memorial everyday this month while en route to NYC.

Terrible beauty such is life that brings both joy and pain. Yet one must experience both to live fully.

|| || 6:14 pm || Comments Off || ||
and so begins the “eye in the sky” project

Now I am rendering my first photoshop manipulation of a satellite image. I reflected & flipped a satellite image of an oval shaped lake to make a 4 paneled mirror. Its going to look cool. Best yet, by doing this the satellite image is doubled in size allowing for the final rendered image to be twice in size. Next one up in about 8 hours.

The Daily Render By

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future.