To the great horror of all my relatives, who were all convinced that their little baby would end up strangled in a ditch somewhere, this winter I decided to take a road trip from Dallas back to Providence. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision, rationalized by my desire to bring a lovely set of mid-century modern dining furniture [thanks, Gramma!] to my apartment. I started out a few days after Christmas, and took two days to wind my way through the South before joining up with the Blue Ridge parkway to head north towards New England. I don't really have a fully-functioning digital camera at the moment, so most of the pictures I took were with my new cell phone, which has a surprisingly decent resolution.

Anyways, here were some of my favorite parts:

• The sendoff. In proper Harris fashion, any road trip must begin with a proper breakfast, and this time was no different. We packed up my rented mid-size SUV and made a small caravan for some down-home good eatin' at Cindi's. Once my car was no longer double-parked by a 16-wheeler Coca-Cola truck, I was on the road!


• The music. In addition to "an indie infinitie" (the awesome mix my brother made me) and three CDs of Gillian Welch from my friend Elana, I burned a sizable collection of my own music for the road. At each hotel I stopped at, I would burn more for the following day. My favorites were the Lost in Translation soundtrack (particularly excellent for misty Tennessee mornings), the Something's Gotta Give soundtrack (surprisingly appropriate for Arkansas), and tons and tons of public radio podcasts like Marketplace, This American Life, Hidden Kitchens, and RadioLab.


• The hotels. I stayed at hotels in Jackson, TN, Roanoke, VA, and Bethlehem, PA. While the first wasn't much to speak of, my second two hotels were excellent finds! The Hotel Roanoke was a restored train depot in the heart of old town Roanoke, complete with smoky pub and swanky restaurant. They gave me a warmed chocolate cookie upon checkin (its a standard DoubleTree thing, I believe). My hotel in Pennsylvania could have been a distaster - my original reservation in Allentown boasted room service from Red Robin - if I hadn't quickly asked for a refund and booked a night at the Hotel Bethlehem a few miles away. Located at the heart of the old Moravian settlement that started the town (on Christmas Eve, mind you), my room at this hotel overlooked a snowy street bustling with shoppers heading to the Christkindle markets. At night I could hear horse-drawn carriages clopping by. It was pretty much tailor made for me.


• The scenery. Driving camera-less through the country was a real blessing for me, because it allowed me to explore without feeling the need to document. My favorite thing to do was get up really early, grab some strong coffee from a local Starbucks, and get on the road in time to see the landscape as the sun was just up. Tennessee was mindblowing - a cold front had blown through the night before, so every body of water I passed by was steaming heavily, and the steam was rising into isolated patches of fog hugging the highway.
  Ok, I lied, I did try and take a few pictures:
  

And, in the end, my new dining table has been a fantastic addition to my apartment! I have to tear myself away from it to go work in studio, and its the perfect place to have a cup of coffee in the morning. I'm even kind of in love with the burnt-orange naugahyde chair cushions.

Total miles driven: 1,931
Average miles per day: 483
States visited: Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island

Happy Valentine's Day! I did actually print these in our type shop, but then was too busy to put them together and actually mail them to anyone. Its an accordion book with some images from my black and white photography class..

Enjoy! :)

Cover:

Inside (scroll to see it all!) :

There are two sides to the idea of Wintersession: a six week mini-semester during the coldest months in Providence, where you are encouraged to take classes in other disciplines. The official rationale is that it gives students the opportunity to take a break, explore other fields, and meet new people. The popular (and probably inaccurate) student lore is that it was instituted to cut down on the number of students trying to kill themselves in the second semester.

There are your usual offerings of photography and screen printing, bookbinding and metal type, but there are also exotic niche classes like chinese brush painting, glass blowing, machine knitting, and metalsmithing. There are also art history courses, language courses, and study abroad offerings. On the surface it sounds like it'd be relaxing and fun. A chance to get away from the normal grind and explore something creative! But even in a mini-class, the perfectionism and drive that this place has a (not always positive) reputation for kicks in. Very few people are willing to accept that they are beginners at something again, and end up pouring all the time and energy they have into pulling advanced work out of a "relaxing" introductory course. You see all this other great work in crit, and you get caught in this upward spiral of pushing yourself to do better for the next one.

My experience this time was no exception: I took black and white photography, and was in a class with mostly foundation studies (freshmen) students who were deciding which department to join next year, with a few grad students thrown in. Relaxation city, right? Ha. I spent hours, days, whole weekends, standing at my favorite enlarger in the darkroom making prints. I became an expert at getting film from its cartridge onto a developing spool in pitch black without ruining it. I became irrationally protective of the vats of chemistry I was using, not to mention the stupid tongs. I ran the battery down on my iPod at least once each day, and went through several months worth of NPR podcasts. I also think I looked permanently stoned for the last three weeks because my eyes were so irritated by the chemicals.

The result, however, is that I have a really nice collection of prints, and an enhanced appreciation of the artistry that goes into darkroom work. I did most of my final project at the Cliff Walk and Ocean Drive in Newport, which is really gorgeous even, and maybe especially, on freezing cold winter days. I also found a little beach called Easton's Beach, which made me smile and think of my new baby (first?) cousin.

I intend to scan everything and upload to flickr, but only once my instructor gives me back my portfolio!

In the subtle-but-important department, this week the internet observed a small milestone.

To understand it, one must know a little bit about domains. Domains are those names you type in the address bar at the top of your browser window, after the http and ending with something like .com or .net. In their simplest form, a domain is an address that you type, hit enter, and your browser takes you to it and shows you their homepage.

But underneath that, a domain stands for the physical address of a web server somewhere — a less attractive, and certainly less memorable address that probably looks something like 75.126.67.221. Its called an IP address, and everything connected to the internet has one, and its part of the mechanism by which computers communicate with one another. 75.126.67.221 happens to be the current IP of this very website, and how likely are you to remember that?

So domains are aliases, serving an important function by making getting around the web easy on the eyes and on the memory. The problem, however, is that you can only make so many combinations of ten numbers and dots. And while four billion seems like a lot, we have been inching closer and closer to exhausting the worlds supply of addresses every year.

This is where our milestone comes in. This past week the world's domain registries began accepting a new style of IP address   one that allows for so many more possible combinations its hard to even understand the numbers. The new standard (called IPv6) allows for something like 2¹²⁸ possible addresses. To give you an idea of how unfathomably huge that is, thats 2²⁶ IP addresses for every known star in the universe! It ought to hold us for a while.