Month: December 2006

taking a look at JPG Magazine and their rules, I note this:

Photos must be in JPG format, at least 2200 pixels wide or tall at 72dpi (so they look great in print), and under 10mb each.

2200 pixels? Sheesh, I usually go to 1000 on the longest side when I scan. I guess I could go larger, but wow, that seems big. My digital shots are “right-sized” as I think I choose the largest/highest resolution available. Feh. Hope I remember to change this when I sit down to scan next 😉

5.jpg

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

Dunno how but this shot of the mailbox proved I did remember where this house was.

Scanned half a box of color slides tonight: that’s all for now. Little more than a box left of the color stuff, then I’ll see if I can find the rest of the B&W stuff I know is hiding somewhere.

Anyone in Atlanta feel like updating this shot?

I think I have answered it already (no), but I’ll lay it out anyway.

I was digging through boxes of slides last night, looking for stuff to scan that doesn’t suxxor, and I found a box of images I took at Cafe 458, a restaurant in Atlanta for the homeless. At the time, it was a place for homeless men and women to enjoy the simple dignity of choice, of being waited on, as patrons. It seems to have moved on a bit, now offering weekend brunch for all comers.

At the time — this would be 1992 or so — I went in and talked with the folks who ran it and took some pictures. I later talked about doing some more work with them, but they decided it was counter to their mission of allowing these otherwise marginalized folks to just be themselves. They didn’t ask to be everyone’s social work thesis, after all. So I left it at that.

Now I find I have this stuff, fragments of a couple of rolls of images, color slides — I didn’t do black & white for some reason, else I might have found them sooner — and my first thought was to scan them in and make a Flickr set out of them, a little documentary exercise to go with my Women’s House project (I found some color images of that as well).

But on further examination, I think I’m obligated to keep them out of the public eye. I may scan them in and see what they look like. Maybe there’s nothing there. If I did upload them, I’d have to let the folks at Samaritan House know and give them an opportunity to use them, and then keep them in the friends and family area.

Agree? Disagree?

Final Exam:

One of the great things about working at the Patterson School is that my classes are small (10-15 students) and consist entirely of skilled, engaged, and informed graduate students. This gives me a lot of latitude in the kinds of questions I ask, allowing very broad inquiries without running the risk of getting senseless or off topic answers. Here was my final exam for National Security.

Instructions: Answer one of the three questions. E-mail your answer to me. Your exam is due in two hours.
1. The US Defense budget for fiscal year 2007 stands at $470 billion. Is this enough? Too much? How do we go about assessing this question?
2. Evaluate the following statement: Neoconservatism didn’t fail; it was never properly tried.
3. What’s at stake for the United States in Iraq? What does the United States risk by staying, and what by leaving?

The answers were very good, with roughly a third taking on each question. One of the answers to the second question was publication quality. Good times.

I especially like #2: funny stuff, if you grew up in the days when Communists lurked around every corner.

I’m not sure the drive that came with this TiVo is actually bad. I put it in another external enclosure and now it seems to work just fine. So my purchase of a 160Gb drive may have been unnecessary. But the power supply is next to be replaced, and the evidence is stronger there.

I never knew they were this puny:

Each of these TiVos has a power supply that is rated 38W max. By contrast, every other TiVo manufactured has a power supply with a max rating of 61W-78W.

Your run-of-the-mill PC has, what, 300-400W output? I understand there were cost and noise issues to consider here (wonder why no one came up with a Mac Mini-style design?) but still, that seems pretty marginal, even when you consider how little the system has to do.

If this doesn’t work, I’m selling it. Watch this space.

Earmarks And Irresponsibility:

But here’s the kicker: most of us probably know that budget resolutions have tended to be passed very late recently. For me, at least, it was just a general impression of dysfunction, not a pattern I’d tried to nail down. Look what you find when you do:

“It has been nearly 20 years since congressional failures left the government to be financed under spending guidelines and formulas rather than line-by-line policymaking. But to federal budget experts, this year’s breakdown was hardly surprising. Not since 1994, the last year of Democratic control, has Congress actually passed all of its spending bills. (Emphasis added.)”

The Congressional Republicans have done Democrats a great favor by making it so easy for us to seem competent by comparison. But they have done the country no service at all.

My household is directly impacted by this, as our chief source of income comes from a government service wage-earner. Raises for government employees are delayed as result of the outgoing “Do Nothingest” congress and when they are approved, they will be taxed at the highest rate — 28% — rather than the marginal rate of the wage-earner’s usual salary.

Thanks for nothing, you power-mad morons. Oh, we’ll get it back in a tax refund — in 2008.

Jerks.

There’s a poll to vote on (with heavily skewed responses, 😉 ): consider this an open thread if you have other ideas to bring up.