Category: NaNoWriMo 2005

Should I make the bellows myself or buy a bellows?:

That is the question. I have been pondering large format images but realize I have zero interest in working with sheet film. So the next best thing is a large format camera with a roll-film back. And since all that works out to is a bellows with ground glass at one end and a lens board at the other, how hard is it to build one?

Probably harder than I imagine, though there are lots of plans. The bellows is the tricky part, I think. The instructions seem a tad vague and hand-wavey and you’d think that photographs taken by photography enthusiasts of photography equipment or technique would be, you know, better. Should kvetch until I do it myself, I suppose.

I expect I’ll document the complete folder -> pinhole camera transformation soon. I’m about done, once I get the cable release affixed.

I stumbled onto this site thanks to Kottke, and it made me lust terribly for a pinhole camera of my own. This looks like a great way to get into large format photography without a lot of expense. There’s something eerie about how time — the long exposures — makes people invisible.

I also found a site that offers tips on how to make a pinhole for an SLR, so you get the metering, winder and a light-tight case, and a lot fewer questions (large format and pinhole cameras tend to attract that sort of thing).

And if it works, you could do this:
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day – home:

Anyone, anywhere in the world, who makes a pinhole photograph on the last Sunday in April, can scan it and upload it to this website where it will become part of the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day celebration’s online gallery.

Health insurance and the paradox of choice:

Health insurance and the paradox of choice
It’s that time of year again, when we get to change health
care plans. There’s nothing like spending
a day trying to figure out whether a 90/70 PPO plan with
a $500 deductible and 80% home health care is better
than a 90/70 Managed POS plan with a $750 deductible and
90% home health care benefit (not to mention the
Blue Shield and Aetna variants) to make you appreciate a
a one-size-fits all single payer plan.

But how does anyone make any money with that?

My Back Pages / Byrds /
We Were Both Wrong / Dave Edmunds / Repeat When Necessary
I Hope You’re Happy Now / Elvis Costello / The Very Best Of Elvis Costello (Disc 2)
Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis) / Robyn Hitchcock / Globe of Frogs
Point Of No Return / Elvis Costello / Spike Bonus Disc
Celebrate / Simple Minds / Themes for Great Cities
Beautiful Day / U2 / All That You Can’t Leave Behind
The American / Simple Minds / Themes for Great Cities
Molto vivace / CSO-Fritz Reiner / Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Op. 125, “Choral”
Lovefool / The Cardigans / First Band on the Moon

1.5 did too, but this is a different problem.

Ado (the developer of ecto) has the fix here.

Now we’ll see if they have fixed trackbacks yet.

Some days I wonder if the right wing isn’t dissatisfied with re-fighting Vietnam over and over again but also wants to relive the Watergate years.

So be it.

I noted this rating on a site and submitted my own to the test:

Some of the information was useful (is this really illegal in England?), some of it amusing (This website is reasonably popular (approx #3,495,718 in the world)).

TypePad was offline for 13 hours t’other day, and I followed up some link that led to this exchange . . .

Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details:

“Six Apart has received millions of dollars in funding but has chosen to spend more generously on PR then technology.”

I don’t usually respond to these kinds of ad-hominems, but this is just demonstrably false and makes you look silly, Paul [not your humble scribe — ed]. Your blog’s not on TypePad, I’m not certain that you’ve ever contributed to the TypePad community (or to any other community around Six Apart platforms), and so it seems almost impossible to me that you could fairly judge how resources are being devoted. Given that you’re on a platform which lacks literally dozens of features which TypePad supports, it seems likely to me that your ignorance of our technology informs your statement.

I dunno. If you read the comments in the interview, I don’t see that 6A the company is any better at communicating with its users than 6A the couple working out of their back bedroom.

Q: Did you consider sending out e-mails to every TypePad member to let them know that they wouldn’t be able to post and their latest posts might not be available?

A: <snip>I spent all day commenting on blogs today. Other folks here at the company have. Jay Allen I think a lot of people will see out there. A lot of people have been on IM and on Skype and on phone calls all day too. We talked about if we should do a big Skype call with a bunch of people but finding something that we can setup in a short amount of time that scales to millions of users or millions of listeners is pretty hard. I think in the future we’ll see what we can do about that too.

So the big name people — Anil Dash and Jay Allen — commented on blogs and some other folks did IM and Skype stuff. How many people does that reach? I think I have asked before that their mt-users mailing list was for: I guess the TypePad community gets the same treatment.

Continue reading “learning from your mistakes. or not”

Looks like the seamless upgrade works just fine but none of my 1.5-era themes are usable. It looks like the theme-switcher is somehow to blame: if I simply rename my preferred theme to one of the two that come with the installation, I can see it.

<more fumbling . . .> it seems to work now, but not for all themes. Your mileage will certainly vary.

The detailed upgrade steps (ie, not for the impatient) are here. Little things like backing up your database are covered there.

I don’t even know what the alleged benefits are, other than 2 being a higher number than 1.5 😉 That’s always been enough for me.

Salon.com | Tainted conservative:

“The time has come that the American people know exactly what their representatives are doing here in Washington.

Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by special-interest groups? Or are they working hard to represent their constituents? The people, the American people, have a right to know. I say the best disinfectant is full disclosure.”

Tom Delay, 11/16/1995