One of the issues I had planned on putting in my last post (Not Proud to be an American) was my continuing frustration at the way all the other issues I was frustrated about were being responded to with a flood of lies, obfuscations and just plain weasel speak: From the White House, from federal agencies, from the Pentagon and so on. Just remarkable.

And today there is just another gem, from the current head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertof. According to Chertof, the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was “breathtaking in its surprise.”

Surprise? WTF? Are my tax dollars paying this guy? How can a storm the size of the frickin’ Gulf of Mexico sneak up on you?

Don’t get me wrong – the US of A has a lot going for it and, in spite of its faults and screw-ups, still has a lot positive going for it in many different areas.

It’s just that, over the last few years, there have been so many serious – *ahem* – stumbles that country has taken that, taken all together, really leaves a bad Taste of the USA flavor in my mouth.

• Iraq War – Back in the 1990s, when Sadaam Hussain had the nerve to invade a foreign country (Kuwait), the US got its undies in a bunch and helped push him out of that country that was not his. How dare he! Flash forward a decade, and the US is invading (Iraq) – and we expect to be greeted with open arms and applauded by the rest of the world. How’s that working out so far?
• 2004 Presidential Election – This is why people like me hate politics. Attack ads, half-truths and outright lies, a street fight broadcast 24-hours-a-day by every cable channel available. Blech. If James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were alive today, they’d be booking passage back to England.
• Abu Ghraib – Call it what you want, we are torturing people there. Period. Yes, Iraq, this is the type of democracy we’d like to foist upon you. That’s a big thumbs up, right?
• Guantanamo Bay – Holding prisoners for months without charging them, giving them no legal representation and so on. Disgraceful. Yeah, there could be bad guys there – but bad guys here, such as the BTK serial killer, get their day in court, a judge, a jury, a lawyer. OK, maybe they’re not prisoners, they are instead enemy combatants. Again, we’ll withhold basic democratic rights from you to help uphold our country, which champions basic democratic rights. I think my logic meter just had a seizure.
• The Clusterfuck that was and is the “relief effort” to help those harmed by Hurricane Katrina

The last one – the nearly week-long delay before large-scale efforts were made to help the folks down south was somewhat the last straw for me. It leaves me frustrated and exhausted. Frustausted.

It’s not like this disaster sprung out of nowhere like an earthquake or series of tornadoes. We were watching this storm system for days – it was as big as the fucking Gulf of Mexico, fer christ’s sake. With that size and trajectory, it was going to hit something (a lot of something) in the US, and whatever it hit was going to basically evaporate.

How come there were not trucks with non-perishable food and water lined up a few hundred miles away, so they could start heading in as soon as the storm passed? Convoys of troops on bases just waiting to go in. I mean, what the hell? They knew what to expect.

I’m not even (at this point) interested in the blame game. Was it FEMA’s fault? Was it FEMA’s fault, but they were hamstrung because of budget cuts? Leadership failures by mayors, governors or the president?

Who really cares? Even if you find someone to blame, it’s not going to put those meals missed Monday – Friday in the bellies of people holed up in the hole that is the Superdome in the Big Easy. It’s not going to unrape victims of the chaos that followed the hurricane or bring the dead – that didn’t need to die – back to life.

I just really don’t get it. Maybe we could have prevented 9/11 if we had done this or that, I don’t really know. I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to that one.

But this hurricane was anything but a surprise. If formed relatively (a week, not in an hour) slowly, moved slowly, and the airwaves were saturated for days with various vacuous talking heads saying this was going to hammer the Gulf Coast. The mayor of New Orleans ordered the mandatory evacuation of this very large city.

People knew some serious shit was about to hit.

Yet it happened, and it seems like everyone stood around going, “Damn!” but didn’t respond with help.

Not a good decade to be an American.

OK, that headline made little sense, but here’s what I mean: I spend most hours of every day somehow connected to the internet/computers. Either actually coding for web sites (including back-end feeds etc), testing sites, in meetings planning for issues revolving around internet activities. And so on.

During the course of about a decade doing this, there are a few tools/conveniences that are not absolutely necessary (hence, luxuries) that I just can’t conceive of parting with.

As I’ve stated many times before, I’m somewhat platform and tool agnostic – yes, if I were a graphic artist, I’d be on a Mac, and if I was just doing back-end work I’d be on Linux (or some *NIX) and so on. I’m not a Microsoft fan; I’m not a Microsoft basher. Same for Apple, Sun, Google, Yo Momma and so on…

That said, here is my oxymoronic list of some indespensible luxuries, in no particular order:

• Broadband – I have cable at home; at work we have redundant pipes that make T1s look like slowpokes. Not only the speed, but the always on. Especially the always on.
• Remote Access – I don’t mind working 28 hours in a given day, but sometimes it’s nice to do it from home. Just for the scenery break. I’m doing it now: Worked my 9+ hours today at the office; reached a logical break point and headed home. Feed the cats, ate some dinner, and am typing this as a test script runs on my (test) work server. Everyone wins.
• Keyboard with controls for my computer “jukebox” – Recent addition for me. I listen almost exclusively to cuts on my computer I’ve ripped from (my own, OK RIAA???) CDs. The controls on the keyboard make it easy to mute, move forward and back and so on. Hands never have to leave the keyboard; eyes don’t have to stray from the screen (and ruin that coding flow!!!).
• Big-ass/quality screens – I stare at a screen all day; I’ve always made a point of buying good and large screens. Not only do they save my eyes, but they make me more productive. At work, the 17-inch flatscreen is nice, but I’d be more productive with a large one. Enough to justify the cost? Depends who you talk to…
• Multiple computers – Right now, I have four boxes sitting in my home office: Two linux boxes (new and old) to my left, two windoze boxes (new and old) to my right. Could I do it all with one? Yeah…sorta. The windoze and linux boxes server two different purposes (work place/graphics and server/backup, respectively), so that’d be hard to fill with just one. The redundancy is the difficulty of moving all your crap from the old box to the new box. The instinct to to horde all the old stuff, just in cases… That part is a luxury (stupidity?), I’ll admit. OK, maybe a convenience, but the two different platforms serve two distinct needs for me.
• Photoshop – This is the single biggest roadblock to me just chucking Windows and running Linux for everything. Yeah, the GIMP is good and getting better, and Picasa is – as I’ve mentioned – impressive (and I don’t think it’s available for Linux). But Photoshop (and ImageReady) just kick everyone’s butt all over the place. Quark used to be like this, until it shrugged of the efforts of Photoshop-maker Adobe to make a dent in its marketshare. Oops. My bad…

I’m not (in this entry) making political, economic or vehicular judgements, but here is the reality:

My sorry-ass 1997 Ford Escort sedan (yeah, a real chick magnet) was filled up today.

At the tune of $30+.

Ouch.

This isn’t an SUV, it’s a dumb-ass car that takes me to work and back.

$30 bucks? Ouch….

This is a test

If this works…good! Or, interesting.

Publishing from Word. Hey, gotta give it a try, ja?

Update (few mintues later):It worked, and worked easily. I’ll have to do some tests with pictures and other stuff, but this may be a good solution for non-Web Monkeys (I’ll do most of my posting in what are basically text editors so I can control the HTML).

Now, a Dreamweaver extension to Blogger, that’d be cool. Satisfy the normal users, and the geeks who could still code in HTML with WYSIWYG front if desired.

Hmm.interesting…but the MS characters and no-break spaces hosed my XML parser. Not a viable solution.

I’ve been messing around with Picasa (the photo tool, not the similarly-named artist you dweebs!) lately, and I’ve two major impressions to share:

1. Damn near as good as Photoshop for the basic stuff (think Photo Elements), at a lower (uh, zero bucks) price.
2. Serious UI issues/concerns

I’m working with Picasa v2 on a P4 Windoze machine with a lot of RAM and disk space; your mileage may vary.

Re: Point #1: Yes, free product that does much of what the basic Photoshop commands do: Crop, filter, grayscale and so on. Pretty impressive, actually. I had downloaded Picasa v1x shortly after Google acquired Picasa and was not impressed; this has now turned around. Very mature app.

Re: Point #2: There are UI issues. Now, I’m fairly savvy with computers and graphics programs, but it was HELL to figger out how to copy (not move – copy) a picture from one area to another. Part of this issue is the new search/storage motif, as exemplified by Gmail and the upcoming MS Longhorn/Vista, where files can live anywhere, and are tied together by aliases and so on.

Fine. But in this case, I want a folder (for example) for pictures I shot in August. The raw images. I’ll examine same, and COPY (not MOVE) the same to a repository that is “stuff I’ve uploaded” – so I can process that copied image to the specs of (again, for example) my blog without touching the original. Hey, I may need that 4M original image for some other reason…

Picasa makes this difficult. The regular “drag and drop” (with shift or control key so the + sign appears) or export feature pretty much just MOVES the file, which is not my desired result.

I think I’ve “cracked the code,” but why should I have to?

Still, Picasa is looking like a winner for basic importing and photo browsing; my personal jury is still out on the Photoshop-ish qualities it does/doesn’t have – I just haven’t worked with it that much.

Further bulletins as events warrent…

On the way home from work one night, I was listening to NPR. And they had an interview with some founder/CEO of a company that is in the business of hauling away computers from big companies. Retrobox.

I.e., the companies pay Retrobox to take the old computers, wipe the drives and dispose of the nasty stuff in a good manner. In part, this is driven by ecological concerns, but more by legal concerns such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and HIPPA, which sorta forces companies to NOT divulge data.

OK, the other trick to this Retrobox company is that it takes the computers and – before disposing of them – tries to refurbish (sorta) the machines and – if successful – sells them on the site. Some revenue split happens between souce company and Retrobox.

I was intrigued – I’ve checked local ads and all that (and I’m in the burbs of Chicago; there is a lotta stuff out there), but I could not find what seemed good for me at a good price.

I wanted to upgrade (uh, replace) my current linux box (Pentium Pro, 200Mhz, 128M) with a better box. All the ads I’ve read are too expensive, because they give you MS Office etc.

So I did a Retrobox seach. Got a nice P3, 1Ghz, 1 GIG RAM for about $200.

Took about two weeks to get here; so what?

Put Fedora Core 4 on it; transferred some files, and I’m good to go!

Highly recommeded (I’m looking at blade servers now…)

Old:

New:

After about a half-dozen or so years, we finally got a new stove for the kitchen. Goodbye 1950s, hello 21st Century.

Looks good; works well. Whatever.

The old one was a Caloric (sounds like a dietary supplement, doesn’t it?); the new one is a KitchenAid, of dishwasher fame.

Again, whatever. If goodness or badness ensues, you know I’ll report on whatever.

Two very similar subjects;
two very different
visual effects.

My first post-college job was as a commercial photographer, a career that spanned a decade and led to some pretty interesting situations and stories. The vast majority of my commercial work was in color, from 35mm though 8×10 film.

My personal work, however, remained all black and white. Oh, sure, I shot a lot of color slide film on trips and color print film for family events, but my personal work – for fun, for art or whatever – remained almost exclusively black and white.

I’d go into the woods with a heavy 4×5 view camera, a huge wooden tripod and a bag with a couple lenses, filters and a couple of dozen sheets of film.

Yep, two dozen sheets tops.

And – on most days – that was more than enough, for many reasons:

• Knowledge that only a handful of shots could be taken made one choose subjects carefully and compose with deliberation
• The primitive nature of the view camera slowed down the entire shooting process. You had to set up the camera on the tripod, focus under a focusing hood, manually meter (or guesstimate) the exposure and then stick a film holder into the back and manually fire the lens.
• Just lugging the equipment around slowed everything and took its toll physically. We’re not talking point-and-shoot photography here. The exact opposite.

But I loved it then; I’d still like to do it, but I won’t – I’ve gone digital.

After pretty much being out of the game for over a decade – and doing little to no photography in the interim – I got a digital camera and have been having a blast with it.

But that’s not what I want to write about today.

I want to talk about how digital photography – with is basically the overwhelming choice today and will be the de-facto standard tomorrow – is killing black & white photography.

I don’t mean this in an old fuddy-duddy “Blasted cars! I liked walking 12 miles though the snow to work” way. Just a lament that acknowledges how the reality of today is causing the death of something I care about: black & white (BW) photography.

How is digital killing BW photography?

• Digital cameras are color cameras. The is no film choice, just a sensor (CCD – charge-coupled-device) that has RGB (red/green/blue) receptors.
• While most (many?) digital cameras have the option to take pictures in gray-scale mode, why would anyone – even me – bother? Shoot in color and then – later – convert to grayscale in just about any image-editing software (Photoshop et al) if desired.
• Even with the grayscale mode, the picture quality is the same BW or color in digital. It’s all the pixels, my friend… In film, BW kicks color film’s butt all over the place. I remember the first time I printed shots taken with a high quality BW film of a model I shot in a studio. WOW! Every eyelash, flecks of darkness in her iris all there. To get the same quality in color you’d need to move up from 35mm (which I was then shooting) to either 2 1/4 or 4×5 formats.
• I loved the weird BW films – especially the infrared and recording film stocks. The former rendered skies and water nearly black, any sunlit foliage glowing white; the latter had a very grainy result which was a great effect for some subjects. While you can approximate these effects with imaging software, one of the pleasures of these oddball films was the surprise factor. Even if you were really good with the films (this is especially true of IR film), it was often impossible to really tell what the end result was going to look like. Shots you think would be brilliant would be flat; the shot of a glass of water, for example, could turn out complex and beautiful. Digital with color is more WYSIWYG.
• When shooting BW, there is a certain mindset – you look at things differently. Because that red rock won’t be red – it’ll be a dark gray. You (should ideally) look at things more abstractly because, without the color, a subject is only gradients of gray and the composition. A bright red rose in color is easy; much like sunsets. To make either interesting in BW takes some effort.
• In the same vein as the preceding point, there are subjects that just work better in BW than color precisely because they are reduced to gradients of gray the composition. Weathered wood – a side of a barn, driftwood, fallen tree … – works better in BW (to me) because all you see are the subtle shadows and grain; you’re not distracted by the color. Take the pic to the right – I took this about 25 years ago, I remember a lot of details about the location and so on, but I can’t remember the colors. But what if the brick behind the chairs was vivid red? The siding color blue? It would detract from the what the BW photo currently is – two chairs. In BW, that’s where your eye goes: Right to those chairs. I call this pic my Laurel (fat) and Hardy (skinny) chairs pic. Some pictures can really only be in BW to have the desired impact. The same is true for color photos, I agree. It’s just that we’re losing BW…
• Part of my sorrow with the loss of BW is the death of the darkroom, as well. While I’ve developed and printed color, this is really something that I always left to the labs. It’s hard and temperatures have to be precise, chemicals fresh (chemicals are more toxic, as well). But part of the beauty of BW was taking that negative into the darkroom – that unassuming negative – and coming out with magic thanks to one’s darkroom skills and the arsenal of darkroom tricks. The dodging and burning, using straight Dektol or going soft with Selectol, posterizing, the vastly different interpretation of a negative two Agfa BW papers – Portriga-Rapid vs. Brovira – could bring to a print. And the smell of fix and glacial acidic acid…

What does all this mean? I don’t really know, but I do think we’ll see less and less BW photography.

Which is a shame because a good BW photograph – from Ansel Adams through Diane Arbus to Robert Mapplethorpe – is something we need more of. They – and a cast of a thousand others – have provided beauty that is of this world but just one step removed.

Removed of color.

There really isn’t all that much that I can add to the discussion of today’s terrorists’ bombings in London, except to say that it does appear to be the work of madmen.

Or those, at least, lacking the baseline rationality that I assume (yeah, I’m not two [sic] bright…) exists throughout the world.

Yet at the same time, it was no surprise. We are so wired on the War on Terror and taking off shoes/pants at airports, surrendering our nail clippers at same and watching the rainbow turn into a nationwide terror alert system (currently at Orange, for “I’m scared shitless, but I still have a change of underwear”) that we expect the other shoe to drop.

I just don’t know. *sigh*

To me, Billmon put it all in context:

You knew it was coming even if you didn’t know where it would hit. And while the shock isn’t as great as 9/11 (how could it be?) the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare that just won’t end is even stronger now. Because you knew.

[snip]

The same old nightmare, in other words, this time with an English address. And the same sinking feeling as before. Because you know it will happen again, even if you don’t know where.

— London Calling, Billmon.org