At the end of April, I’m leaving my current place of work. It feels like I’m jumping off a sturdy diving board into a deep swirling pool of uncertainty; either that or I’m up a certain creek without propulsion. Regardless of the fear factor, it’s a challenge I’m rather looking forward to. I’m going to do what I’m most passionate about which is to teach, mainly in the field of creativity/art/design with computers. I’m also looking for freelance work in photography, web design and copywriting. So, on the slim chance that you require any work to be done along those lines (yes, I know most of you are photographers and/or web designers and/or writers anyway but there’s no harm in trying is there?) let me know.
After close analysis of 150 results from the SETI@Home project, scientists have found nothing to suggest that they contain evidence of extra-terrestrial life. BBC News has the story, although I wish more thought had been put into the article’s rather clichéd headline; “ET Fails to ‘phone home’” suggests that extra-terrestrials originated on Earth, which is not only ridiculous but a complete contradiction in terms.
Last Wednesday, it was widely reported that Allied fighter jets were attacking a column of between 70 and 120 tanks apparently on a suicide mission heading south from Basra. Geoff Hoon later gave a press conference in which he admitted that there were, in fact, 3 tanks on the move. When reports from Iraq can be as spectacularly inaccurate as this, is there any point in following the news?
The adage ‘write from experience’ could be considered good advice to those who maintain a weblog. However if, like me, your daily experiences are based upon a routine of mundane activities – which consist mainly of commute, work, commute, sleep and so on – then you may be forgiven for thinking that writing from these experiences would make for rather dull reading. Lifting experiences out of life’s flux and publishing them as words is a challenge I enjoy; furthermore, it is an approach that can be applied to the activity of publishing images to the web.
A number of years ago, when I started studying and practicing photography, a tutor said something to me so inspirational that barely a day goes by that I don’t think about it. What he said was this: at any one time, everywhere around you are infinite possibilities for making images. At the time, I remember looking out of the window and seeing a car park and some trees and being pretty unimpressed with the choice of photographic opportunities on offer. But it wasn’t long before I adjusted to the idea that photography didn’t have to be about taking your camera to an object worthy of being photographed; it’s also possible to tease interesting images out of the extremely commonplace.
Modern mobile devices give us the ability to publish images of events witnessed at first hand, an activity known as moblogging. On occasion these events will be news worthy, presenting new opportunities for gathering and publishing evidence of such events, but these occasions are rare; mostly, the mobile communications device will be at hand only to record the ordinariness of life. For me, this is potentially the most exciting aspect of moblogging; to resist the temptation of the ‘photo-op’ and instead point the camera at the shapes and textures that constitute our environment.
I can’t help but think that the coming together of the camera and wireless technology will impact on the medium of photography on a scale similar to that seen when Kodak popularised photography with their affordable compact cameras at the start of the 20th Century. We will have to wait and see.
Well, it’s good to be back and rid of that nasty ‘Forbidden’ notice. I think the break has actually done me some good, although it’s quite something to be completely locked out of ones email and FTP for a week or so. I suppose there are worse things to worry about though.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous, he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
– from The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
Dan Benjamin has written some excellent introductory articles on Apple X11 for O’Reilly’s macdevcenter.com:
If you’re a Mac user, you’re outside of the US, and you’ve recently tried to download the free RealOne player, then you’ll know how difficult this task is without knowing the exact URL of the download. Teasing out the free player from the mass of junk contained on the Real site has always been difficult, but now it has been made impossible by the fact that when entering the site, you are redirected to a country-specific page which contains no information whatsoever on how to go about downloading the OS X version. Thankfully, someone has posted some instructions at macosxhints.com on how to tell the site that you’re based in the US (where all the Mac users are, apparently).
I think we can all sympathise with Scott, can’t we? [via t-melt]
Phillipe Petit, the tightrope walker who famously skywalked between the Twin Towers in 1974 is planning a similar feat to take place somewhere in Gateshead. Now, the only culturally significant piece of architecture on which such a stunt is worthy to be performed is The Car Park, but I’m having trouble thinking of another tall structure nearby to which the tightrope can stretch; it’s a long way to the Dunston Rocket.
Three and a half years after the SETI@Home project began receiving data from home computers all over the world, SETI scientists are heading back to Arecibo to take a closer look at 150 specific areas of space that the project has flagged as possible sources of extra-terrestrial life. UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werhimer thinks that there’s a 1 in 10,000 chance that one of the candidate signals will be of extra-terrestrial origin. You may think those chances are slim, but when you consider that the chances of winning the National Lottery are 1 in 14,000,000, those odds start to look quite good.
It may seem a little odd for a book called ‘On Photography’ to contain no photographs within its pages. Despite this, Susan Sontag’s collection of essays remains – 26 years after it was first published – one of the most important books written about the role of the photographic image in our lives. Her latest book, ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, continues this theme but with specific reference to “the contemporary depiction of war and disaster”.
Sontag’s recent 3 hour(!) interview for the American channel C-Span – in which she discusses photography as well as war with Iraq amongst other things – can be viewed here (requires the RealOne Player).
Thanks to The Slashdot Effect and the need for an online database of books to go alongside imdb.com and allmusic.com, the Internet Book List is set to be a hugely popular website. Unfortunately, the Slashdot linkage has meant that most of the books added to the database so far reflect the reading habits of the Slashdot demographic; there’s plenty of Science Fiction and Fantasy on there and little else. Hopefully, the balance of genres will even itself out in time; in fact it will have to if this is going to be a valuable resource of book information.
Here’s the first of three reviews of books I have read recently. Thanks to Mal for rescuing this post from his RSS aggregator cache after I managed to accidentally delete it:
This novel tells the stories of three German people who live their lives in the grip of Nazi Germany. Helmut is a young photographer’s apprentice who, shunning his duties, roams Berlin to visually document the evacuation of a city threatened by Allied invasion. Helmut is patriotic and would join the Nazi SS to fight for his country if it wasn’t for a deformity at birth that makes him ineligible for service. The second story is set during the close of the war and is about Lore, the eldest of four children whose parents are members of the Nazi party. Realising that she is about to be arrested on charges of conspiring to commit war crimes, Lore’s mother instructs her daughter to lead the rest of the children to find safety with their Grandmother in Hamburg and so set they off on a long and dangerous journey across Germany. The final story is set during present day and concerns Micha, a young teacher who is desperately trying to learn about his Grandfather’s actions during the war. Was he a Nazi? Was he a murderer? Micha is unwilling to leave history alone until he finds answers to these questions that directly affect his personal heritage.
Seiffert has tackled the difficult subject matter of life in Nazi Germany with three very human stories. Of course, countless stories about the Second World War have been written, but few are written from the perspective of those were directly related to Nazis or their supporters. All of the characters in this book, either innocent or guilty, are trapped in their own personal dark room; lost, confused, naive. Seiffert writes about complex emotions using simple, clear prose and while this book maybe emotionally draining, its certainly worth reading.
Celebrating World Book Day, I posted a book review yesterday only to accidentally delete it a few hours later. Unfortunately, my back up copy is only partially written so I will re-post it alongside some other book reviews in the near future. In the meantime, I’m going to fix my content management system so these things can’t happen again.
I’m inclined to believe that the renaming of Chimera to Camino is as much a tactical decision as it is a legal necessity. No doubt that when the next stable beta is released, its new name will give it a much needed boost now that Safari is hogging the limelight. I think it would be beneficial to both browsers to keep the competition alive.
BBC Four – perhaps the best of the recent additions to the BBC TV & radio line-up – aired an interesting documentary on Robert Hooke tonight. During his lifetime (1635 – 1703), Hooke made scientific discoveries that rivaled those of his contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton. He was also an engineer and inventor so ahead of his time that he has been posthumously labeled the ‘English Leonardo’. However, despite his achievements, Hooke’s name is relatively unknown; there are no paintings or drawings of him and the only reason we know anything about him is because historians have spent years piecing together his life from what little records exist. Even during his lifetime, Hooke got little recognition for his achievements. One example is The Monument to The Great Fire of London; even though the piece is credited to Sir Christopher Wren, Hooke played an equal part in its design and construction. He even had the ingenuity to enable it to be used as a giant telescope. Here is a chronology of Robert Hooke’s life.
I got on a roll last year; I was a pancake making machine. This year they turned out like small dollops of blubbery matter, not fit to be eaten by any living thing. Maybe I should have adhered to the tried and tested method instead of mixing unknown quantities of flour and milk together with an egg or two. I am good at omelettes though.
Huevos is a great little search utility from Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire. My tip is to add it to your Login Items so that it constantly runs in the background, then use a hot key to activate it from within any application.