the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I just finished a pretty big collaborative project and made use of the free online storage at Box.net. 1 Gb doesn’t sound like all that much, but it worked quite well. Good throughput and fast access; it was pretty useful to have as a staging area for shared files.
Worth a look, especially at that price.
You might not walk into a store if you knew the proprietor was a kook, right? Well, if you see blog posting like the one below, you need not look at any of their items.
Super-cheap DIY Holga cable release socket:
Photographer Travis Gray came up with this awesome and cheap mod to add a cable release socket to a Holga. Check it out!
The glue on mine is drying right now. What a great idea.
Neighbor Dave Neiwert shares his experience listening in on a choral performance by orcas. He makes regular summer trips to the San Juans to look for them but this adventure was improved by the addition of a hydrophone.
Watching them from shore in the clear light of day, moving efficiently past us as they drove out to the southern end of the island, it struck me that how we experience wild, mysterious creatures like killer whales has a lot to do with our own expectations of them.
You know — we want to believe that the whales came by, for the first time in three days, to greet the singers on shore. We want to believe that they can somehow divine what we’re doing and interact with it. And people experienced with orcas will tell you that these kinds of small coincidences, in fact, just keep mounting up with them: appearing or behaving in a striking way at a striking time. As though they can read our minds, or sing a chorale in imitation of one onshore.
Scientists know this is illogical, and in the end it’s just another kind of anthropomorphism, projecting our own wishes onto a creature that in reality is perfectly neutral and oblivious to us. In our eagerness to embrace what we might share in common with these creatures, we too readily dispose of what makes them unique. We fail to respect the whales for their whaleness.
Still, none of that can change the reality of the actual experience and how it felt. It sounded like a chorus of angels, and I was blessed to hear them.
I wish he had recorded it somehow. I might have to look for some samples.
and the picture in the Toycamera.com Galleries prove it.
What fascinates me is how these remind of pictures I saw as a kid, with those old instamatics or even earlier. The softness, the colors (even with modern films) make these appear timeless. The black and white stuff is even harder to date.
Check them out if you have a chance.
One of my regular correspondents writes: :
I’m interested in seeing w’happens, here.
Apparently what happens is the aggrieved party gets to write his own retraction/correction and take a cheap shot at my ability to read tables. So my friends tell me: I’m not going to read it, based on their advice. I called the OpEd page editor to let her know exactly what kind of personality she is amplifying through her paper’s reach, ie a guy who calls up my house 5 times, in hopes of my going out and hand-correcting the day’s press run of papers, perhaps.
Talked to a couple of people who have had the misfortune of interacting with this fellow, and from their accounts he is one of those predicable pundits who can be relied upon to spout a given opinion, with a leavening of arrogance. One of my informants, after a moment’s reflection, summed him up as “a lonely man.” Tells me all I need to know, I think.
couple more pictures from some rolls I got back today (rolls? you mean, film?)
These colorful wheelbarrows couldn’t be passed up. The trademark Holga weirdness is in effect — little lens flare, some focus oddness.
So the RIAA, greedy as always, now realizes it could sell more licenses to listen to songs if Apple were more amenable with its use of DRM. Now, who do you suppose came up with the idea of an encryption scheme to prevent duplication of media files?
Daring Fireball: Interoperability and DRM Are Mutually Exclusive:
So what Apple could do to achieve ITMS interoperability is simply remove the DRM from the music it sells via ITMS and deliver the files in non-encrypted AAC format. Users would be happy, as they’d get files unencumbered by FairPlay restrictions. The manufacturers of other digital music players would be happy, because AAC is an open format; they would not have to pay a licensing fee to Apple or Microsoft or anyone else to enable their gadgets to play these hypothetical non-DRM-encrypted AAC files from ITMS.
But that’s not what the music industry wants. Yes, there exist legal download stores that sell music in MP3 format (e.g. eMusic.com) — but they don’t have content from the major record labels, because the major record labels refuse to allow their music to be sold for download without DRM. The music industry’s insistence upon DRM is what put the ITMS in the position that Apple now enjoys; the record industry is decrying a lock-in advantage that they themselves handed to Apple so they could deny their customers (i.e. us, the people who listen to music) the interoperability they now say they want.
I expect Apple would be happy to get out of the DRM arms race, as more people would buy from them (DRM being a sticking point for many music listeners). I wonder if this will come up in the next discussion of license renewals?
Tanker Inquiry Finds Rumsfeld’s Attention Was Elsewhere:
The topic was the largest defense procurement scandal in recent decades, and the two investigators for the Pentagon’s inspector general in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office on April 1, 2005, asked the secretary to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth.
Rumsfeld agreed but complained. “I find it strange,” he said to the investigators, on the grounds that as a government official “the laws apply to me” anyway.
So much for government of, for, and by the people. The rest of the article is interesting for its portrayal of how little value the civilian leadership places on accountability and measurable execution of goals. And yet we constantly hear the refrain, if we had business people in government, things would be run more effectively. As if business doesn’t have it’s share of incompetent blockheads.
Hmm, more here — with pictures. Great minds, if I may flatter myself.
