????????

can anyone explain this to me?

nostalgia

Baby RB, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

used my Dad's new scanner to digitize and preserve hundreds of photos, negatives, and slides. The whole process takes some time, but sure threw me back.

Turns out as much as I like the ease and convenience of digital photos, they will never rival their film counterparts. I'll be scanning and uploading more soon.

comic bookin'

indianaJones03, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Had tons of fun today making a short comic book using my camera, RB's LEGOs, and Comic Life. If only I had more time.

dodos live

merry!

Holiday GSD gargoyles, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Merry Christmas!

Over

Pod aftermath, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

It was one long tough semester, but it's over. You can see the aftermath of over a week of nearly live-in conditions at studio. Near the end any non-essential item on my desk simply got brushed to the floor and ended up accumulating quite deep. I think I may need a trash can dedicated solely to my desk.

centroid

Architects love diagrams. Projects live and die by them here in architecture school.

This is an interactive diagram I made to show the "Centroid" of the Harvard undergrad housing (sans frosh). I won't explain too much except to explain that "weighted" means that the calculations take into account the number of residents, so a more populated house will affect the centroid more than a sparsely populated house. Unweighted is then just the average by location only. Also see if you can figure out how to turn on and off houses and edit their populations (note: the population numbers are accurate for most of the houses as of this year).

p.s. See if you can find the bug in the programming. I could probably fix it…if I wanted to.

collective

Really looking forward to the new album due sometime soon (next month I think).

back

So as I probably should have known beforehand, I never really had enough time to revamp neutralsurface. So I've decided to accept this for now and work with what I have (which really isn't that bad). Maybe I'll try more frequent, but smaller posts? We'll see what happens.

travel

A good friend of mine has a part in creating travelforchange.org which hooks hopeful Obama volunteers with people who donate their frequent flier miles to help them get where they need to be. I thought I'd put a link out there and a little plug. Apparently there is a surplus of sponsors and a shortage of volunteers. So, if you want to campaign for Obama and fly for free, this could be your ticket.

NS2.0

neutralSurface will be back soon new and (hopefully) improved.

fireworks

deep red, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I normally hate photos of fireworks but for some reason I always take photos of them anyway…and so does everyone else. I took some photos of the firework show at the fourth of july celebration on the Boston Esplanade over the weekend which were the best firework show I've ever seen by far. They kept going and going. I set my camera on the ground, using my shoe as a tripod, and kept shooting sight unseen. What came out I think was pretty nice. Almost painterly. Still, I apologize for the copious number of firework shots added to the already bloated number floating around already.

ugly 3.0

Firefox-UI, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Firefox 3.0 has been out now for a short while and I have to say that it's pretty good. I made sure to install it onto my computer at work right away and of course there's no comparison to internet explorer which blows many-a-goat. However, it's taken me until tonight to upgrade to 3.0 on my macbook pro. I normally only use firefox on my MBP to check a certain bank account that does not recognize safari and insists upon firefox. Anyway, in the spirit of giving the new software a chance, I downloaded and installed which was a fairly painless process. It automatically helped me upgrade my piclens, and adblocker add-ons and migrated my old bookmarks seamlessly. So far it seems fast on the web, and I hear those old nasty memory leaks from 2.0 are gone (although I'll believe it when I see it), but I can't get over how ugly and wasteful the ui is.

I'm not sure where to start on this one. First thing that jumped out at me was the mismatching (in color AND gradient) bookmark toolbar. It's probably the same gradient as the bar above it, but it's compressed into a third in the Y direction and is visually jarring. Then there are the out of date round corners around all the buttons and input boxes. I mean, that was the kind of thing that was cool when 'skins' were all the rage. Just take a look at windows media player, so many curves and bulges it doesn't know where it's going. The font is also very sloppy. It's on the cusp of being too bold…or is it just fuzzy around the edges? I can't tell. Either way it's not too readable. But probably my biggest pet peeve of all time for any program anywhere, especially browsers, is wasted space. You can see in the screenshot that the fully expanded safari navigation, bookmark bar, and tabs take up less space than firefox in the default 'small icon' mode. Also, the aforementioned rounded buttons make for a lot of wasted space between them, and on top of that they're not even necessarily evenly spaced. Included in this space waster category is the tab bar, why are there gaps between tabs?! Okay, so maybe if I have one or two open and there is extra space can there be gaps, but if I have more tabs than will fit in the bar shouldn't the gaps go away? Nope. Apparently not.

Anyway, I can already hear you saying: "well the beauty about firefox is that you can make/install a custom 'theme' (read: skin), and make it look however you desire." …True. But if that's the case shouldn't the default theme be so bare bones, tiny, but still functional? And besides, I'd just look for a theme that makes it look like safari anyway.

I think I'll just stick to the real Safari for now.

edit: Anyone else notice that scrolling with two fingers on a MacBook Pro is sort of laggy?  It's not instantly responsive unlike any other program I've used.

spaceball

spaceball or what, originally uploaded by guckstdu.

Today at work I had to put together a large number of photos of bike parking facilities as part of a precedent study that we're beginning. So naturally I turned to flickr to find some images. However my attempts to drag the images into a folder were thwarted with the annoying "spaceball.gif." What is "spaceball?" I really didn't check, but I'm fairly certain that it's a 1x1 fully transparent image that is stretched over the protected image on a CSS layer that sits on top. (If anyone wants to correct me on this, feel free). Anyway, I looked into the page's source file and was able to get the urls for the images, but that was slow and tedious until I got the idea to simply add the url for spaceball.gif to my adblocker plugin. Once I did this, I was able to drag and drop any image from flickr with no problems.

The url to block the spaceball is here: http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif

Also, in all my flickr journies I've found that I really do not like HDR, digital B&W photos, and stupid "BESTEST FLICKR FOTOS EVAR!!1!!1ONE!" type groups. Please avoid them. For everyone's sake

sasquatch

confetti, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

If you know me, you know I like concerts. and what's better than a concert? How about fifty concerts?! In the past I've shirked my schoolwork for a weekend to drive down I-5 to the deadly heat of the Mojave for the Coachella music and arts festival for two or three days of 100°+ weather and nearly non-stop concerts. It's where I saw Daft Punk in their legendary return show and the debut of the now legendary digital pyramid and Justice in their first ever live (non DJ) set. It's also where I was introduced to, and frightened by, the Animal Collective and Hot Chip.

But this year Coachella's lineup looked a little less than inspiring and my attention turned northward to a similar, but smaller festival out in the middle-of-nowhere Washington state. Sasquatch has three stages to Coachella's five or six, but the venue is a natural amphitheater that overlooks a surreal gorge with visibility for miles around. There really isn't much to compare it to except for maybe the grand canyon (which is actually much, much larger). For me there were three reasons to make the cross-country trek to the gorge: The Flaming Lips, The Cure, and friends. The Flaming Lips don't play that many shows, but when they do they are supposed to be spectacular. The Cure, who is basically just Robert Smith is so old and drug addled that I'm in constant fear that he wont last much longer and I'll never see him live. But also I really wanted to see friends who have made it a tradition to go to sasquatch every year.

The first day of the three day festival was a little rocky as it rained intermittently throughout the day and really let loose during REM. But during a sunny patch MIA played a really great set which included pulling up tons of concertgoers onto stage. The second day started off slow as Trish and I waited in line to use the shower. The line, which wasn't extraordinarily long, ended up taking nearly two hours. But fortunately there was water left and we didn't miss anything noteworthy. That day we ended up seeing Rogue Wave, which hit a technical snag but was able to pull through, and the nearly forgotten, but loved, Presidents of the United States of America. But the highlight was definitely the Cure…For me at least. Having been thwarted at an earlier attempt at seeing the Cure in NYC late last year, I really wanted to see him before he finally kicks the bucket. They played some good songs and a lot of lesser known ones to start which would have left me okay, but perhaps not entirely satisfied. And then they went ahead and played six encores entirely from Boys Don't Cry. Those really made my night. The third day was the best weather-wise and it became apparent that I was developing a sunburn on my face from the high-altitude sun exposure. There were some good performances that day and near the end we went down to the stage level for the final acts to position ourselves for the Flaming Lips. The Mars Volta played second to last and I wasn't even sure what to expect even in terms of music. From the instruments they prepared it could have been a delightful mix of styles. But from the moment they started to play it was pure agony. There was no rhythm, no hook, no cohesion. Every instrument was competing with the next to be the loudest and the fastest. And then there was the vocalist who was strung out on something and thrashing around onstage throwing a cymbal and an electric fan out into the crowd and fighting a cameraman for his camera. The display crossed the line that separates theatrics into recklessness. So what did I do? I pulled out one of the complimentary magazines handed out earlier and began to read right down in front of some of the fans that were trying to push past. But all was forgotten when the Flaming Lips came on to close the three days of shows. It started with a descending UFO which the lead singer (Wayne) came out of and got into a clear plastic bubble which inflated around him and then walked down onto the crowd itself. Also, the whole time there were people dancing on the sides of the stage dressed as telletubbies, and at some point a giant inflatable sun and astronaut came out as well…for no apparent reason. Also, the generous use of confetti was much appreciated as were the enormous balloons put out onto the crowd. It was all very entertaining and satisfying in the end.

All in all I had a great time. I guess the next time I do anything like this though I'm renting a hotel where the shower line should be less than two hours.

whaling

Surface Zoom, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

It's been too long since updating here basically since I've been incredibly busy with the ending school year, a brief trip out the west coast and everything in-between. Anyway, I'll try and catch up a bit starting now.

A few weeks ago Trish and I went on a whale watching cruise from the New England Aquarium in boston. After a week of planning and postponing we finally made it out for the Saturday afternoon boat. The boat took us about thirty miles offshore into the Atlantic to a marine preserve where humpback whales do their feeding. I didn't know what to expect, but I didn't expect to see so many whales and so close up. Before the boat left we heard someone ask how many whales the earlier boat had seen which was apparently around four. However we easily saw over a dozen whales including a cow and her calf. The trip was great until the boat turned back to shore and I began to get a little sea sick. But I did what I've always done in that situation, sleep. I find that as long as I can sleep I can pretty much shake off any motion sickness. Definitely a great little tour.

done

plan, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

This monday was the final review for our fifth and last project of the first year. In order to build the final models I estimate that I spent around twelve hours on the laser cutter cutting over three-hundred precise individual pieces out of chipboard. I remember making fun of those pale kids hunched over the computers in the basement cutting out sheet after sheet of whatever for a model. I thought I would never be one of them. But after spending hours myself hunched over the slow computers with blackened fingers inhaling chipboard smoke and toxic plexi fumes I am no longer above anyone. I also spent quite a bit of time getting cozy with the CNC router in a semi-failed materials experiment. Now I have a few days to catch up on sleep and try to figure out my summer before the last round of finals hit next week.

flamer

Flaming Manholes in Harvard Square, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

on a bleary eyed trip during an all-nighter to 7-11 for orange juice and breakfast burritos I encountered the most exciting thing to happen in Cambridge for years: A flaming manhole on Mass and Dunster. The light rain, thick smoke and early-morning light made it pretty spectacular. The whole thing looked like a tire fire with the occasional burst of Black Cats. But perhaps the best part were the dozens of firemen and emergency personnel standing and sitting around nonplussed as they waited for the fire to go out on its own. Fire on the street + no one hurt = awesome. //extra bonus for having both cameras on me.

sections

partial model, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

This is how I'm dealing with curver's remorse…at least in 3D.

I'm slowly but surely pumping out my final production models for my second semester core class. The GSD has a lot of resources (CNC routers, multiple robot arms that no one knows how to use, plotters everywhere, 3D printers, and frickin' laser cutters), but when it comes to crunch time, everything is always taken. So you have to be crafty and slip in and get things done in the cracks and be ready to jump off of whatever it is you're doing and run down to get pieces of your model laser cut. It's insane and not conducive to sleep. But if all goes well we should all have very nice projects. Still being alive at the end would be a huge bonus too.

sixDays

This is curver's remorse. How am I going to make/ draw this?, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I have to figure out a way to make this badboy out of materials that are by nature flat. This may hurt.

raw

Butcher Block, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I made this board out of 1" x 2" maple strips and I'm planning on routing out a site plan in 1"=64' scale on the cnc cutter. Crossing my fingers that I get a CNC time slot, and that the file works, and that the board doesn't split, and that it's worth my time. It's deceptively heavy.

sketchup

Sketchup, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Going through stuff for my portfolio I ran across this little badboy from the first "Build Your Campus in 3D" competition that our Stanford team won last year. And it looks like there's a new one going on now too.

E&E

P1010102, originally uploaded by Stanford Architecture.

I came across this photo in the Stanford Architecture photostream of what I presume to be the new Architecture studio in the brand new E&E building in the up and coming SEQ II. Somehow, two of my models (from the same project) made it over from Terman to the new space. Pretty sweeth.

string();

string operations, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I've been working with string for the latest project which is fun, but may also prove to be my demise. This is part of my study "instrument" where I test the operations I've set apart: Pinch, spread, and bridge. We'll see what develops.

MoMA

rhinoWall, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

So the GSD took us to MoMA in NYC for a day and a day only. They took us to see "Design for the Elastic Mind" or something like that. Overall the exhibit was underwhelming. All the projects seemed to be undercooked and I guess I just expected more. Anyway, while the trip was fun, it definitely put us all behind our already tight schedule.

fractal

fractalSite01, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

In order to begin our last project for our first year core studio, I made an actionscript program that imposes a semi-random fractal over our site. What the script came up with was pretty interesting…at least I think so

in china

Chinese Elevator, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

You may have noticed, (though probably not) that neutralsurface was down for a bit last week. That's because I was switching name hosts from yahoo! to godaddy which appears to be a better service. So far so good. I also finally resolved the issue where neutralsurface.com ≠ www.neutralsurface.com and got josephbergen.com to redirect to neutralsurface. I don't know if the internets can handle all that, but so far so good. Soon I should have a dedicated portfolio site up to show potential employers. I'll work on that with all the spare time I have.

Animation

Just a simple rendering with very little post processing that I had to do for my digital media workshop. Nothing to get excited about.

Link

project #4

bottom of topo, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I've finally completed my fourth project, and despite being confident in my ability to get things done in a timely and efficient manner which would allow me to sleep before the critique, I was definitely up for two days straight and working up until the last minute. I'll post more images as I sort through the rubble on my desktops (real and computer)

card

FGG Card Front, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

This came a few weeks ago but I haven't gotten around to documenting it until now. I made some oil paintings for the architecture office (FGG) I worked for two summers ago. The last two paintings were done at a job site just west of Palo Alto which sat in an amazing valley with incredible views. Anyway, I recently got a pack of a few of these newly printed cards and they look great!

Wishlist

Wishlist, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I have a major technology weakness. Just take a look at my desk and you can see all the random electronic gadgets I acquire. I have so many already, and yet I could still use more. This is totally unreasonable, but it would be incredibly nice. Yes, it's the price of a pretty nice new car, but can't I wish?

squared

Site Squares glued, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

I've been working on building a 1/32 inch scale topo out of chipboard. My genius idea was to make it with tiny (~3") squares. So after sitting down in the basement cutting the topo with the laser for around eight hours, I was stuck with popping out, keeping track of, and gluing thousands of small to tiny pieces of cardboard. But as I'm getting closer to finishing, I'm glad I did it this way…I think.

tranCISION

Escondido Freeway page, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

The book that I was part of, "Division & TranCISION," was published recently by McCall Design. The book turned out great and is a perfect finish to a great summer internship. I kind of want to revisit some of the ideas we explored during our research.

rebuilt

Door new, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

After much toil I have finally managed to reconstruct my first semester door project. I replaced much o what was wood with plexiglas. The plexi allowed me to be much more flexible and accurate with the wire and pullies. And actually I like the new version better than the first. Maybe it was good that the original broke…

Laser

laser hands, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Last night I was supposed to be finishing up a map/model which is made of plexiglas etched on the laser cutter. Down in the basement there are three laser cutters (Ebony, Brunette, and Redhead), but two of them were broken to start with. Ebony for some reason only had AutoCAD 2004 installed without the plot driver for the printer, Brunette would not turn on if you paid it, and at the time I went down, there were some random Koreans cutting out plexi name tags and crosses out. Not wanting to cause a fuss I signed up for a later time, got some food, and came back later. When I got back I had to kick some dude off the laser and I set up for an easy and quick cut. However, when I tried to focus the laser I discovered that the bed would not move up or down and instead emitted a horrible grinding noise. So what did I do? I stuffed other pieces of material and a sketchbook under the bed to prop it to a more acceptable height. My first attempt was botched and while one corner was in focus, the other parts were not, and the laser burned but did not cut. Finally, the thirty minute job took around three hours. When I went to make my final two cuts to finish my broken door model, the laser wouldn't even move into position to focus. So I packed it up and went home, leaving the 0/3 lasers working. Why is everything broken?

bob's

bob's round 02, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

On my trip to San Francisco last month I made a pilgrimage to Bob's Donuts on Polk street. As usual it was delicious. So delicious in fact that I ended up eating around 10 over the course of 24 hours.

studioWorks

door02, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Finally sat down (for like twenty-four hours) and put out some renderings for studio works. Unlike my botched model, these turned out okay.  This image is from my door project (see previous post)

(As always you can click the image and be taken to my flickr stream)

Broken

Pile, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

So in preparing my door model for studioworks I got a little overzealous with the drill press and the whole thing imploded. I think it had a lot to do with not having nearly enough sleep while operating heavy machinery, but whatever. Anyway, all is not lost and I plan to rebuild over the weekend. Yay for more work…

StudioOne

Side view of door, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

Posted some photos of last semester's work. Unfortunately (or really, fortunately actually) I have much more work to do to prepare stuff for studio works. I'll post those once they're done.

homeboy

I remember this was one of the "experimental" videos that they showed us at SFAI for a class back in 2001 before it blew up on YouTube (before YouTube in fact). Back then it was a rare possession. Not so much anymore. Still hilarious though! This may be the only thing I took away from the class and at least it's pretty sweeth.

Water

Water Tower, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

For our energy class final we had to design something that had something from a shipping shipping container…or something. We were placed into small groups and then assigned a location (with some kind of extreme condition associate with it) somewhere in the world for our containers to live. I was assigned to New Orleans and so I got to work on a container that would deliver fresh water and living quarters. I came up with this little deal that opens up to make a water tower that supports a passive solar water heater array and create a shady sleeping porch-like space inside. Maybe not the most exciting, but it's done, and in the end isn't that what it's all about?

Plexi

Plywood and Plexi, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

One of five materials projects I made for a class. This one I made by putting a square piece of plexiglas on a bean can in the oven on low and then taking a nap. Probably not the best idea in the world, but it worked.

320GB

Guts, originally uploaded by neutralSurface.

It's been too long since I updated, so I figured that this was an appropriate time to do it. I just completed an internal hard drive upgrade to my 2.33GHz core 2 duo MacBook Pro. Firstly I upped my 2GB of RAM to max of 3GB (the extra GB outweighed the benefits of dual channeling). And just today I replaced my stock 160GB hard drive with the new Western Digital 320GB Scorpio 2.5" Drive. I then restored everything with Time Machine and everything is back where it was pre-upgrade (except my wallpaper was reset to the default for some reason). The actual procedure involved quite a few screws, but aside from keeping track of those (a piece of tape made it easy), it was a fast (20min) process which resulted in going from a cramped 5 free GB to ~150 free GB. So far so good.

It's interesting to note (at least to me) that I now have a total of 1.23 terrabytes worth of storage sitting on my desk (actual formatted space brings the number down a bit though). I know this number sounds ample to me now, but I'm sure a few years down the line it will seem puny and inconsequential…until then…