A (Not So) Black & White World

31 Mar, 2006
Posted at 23.38 PST

 

It’s not something most people pay any attention to, but color photography is a lot older than you’d think.  Various techniques for achieving colorphotographs date back to at least the turn of the 20th century.  For most of us though, color photography dates to maybe the 1950s, for that was when it really began gaining in popularity.

History is a subject in which I’ve always had a great deal of interest, especially that of Europe and North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Along with Cultural Anthropology, it’s what I studied most in college.  There are a bewildering array of forces at work in the today’s world, and it is flat-out impossible to gain anything even approaching a gestalt of the world around us without an understanding of the origin and reasons for those forces. 

Until very, very recently in historical terms, human civilization didn’t change all that much from its beginnings, be it ancient Iraq in the West, or China in the East.  And when it did, it did so slowly, often over generations.  This is something difficult for the modern mind to grasp, being immersed from birth in constant change.  The daily life of the average person in 1750 was not all that different from the life of someone living during the height of
the Roman Empire. But then in the late 18th century all hell broke loose, so to speak.  For a variety of reasons cultural, historical, economic, and others both known and unknown, the Industrial Revolution began gathering steam—forgive the pun—in Great Britain.  Its impact was so profound that the life of virtually every human being on the planet has been utterly transformed in an unprecedented short amount of time.

Popular history dates the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to James Watts’ steam engine.  While its roots go much deeper to forces set in motion sometimes centuries earlier (no invention springs forth from its creator like Athena from Zeus’ forehead), the steam engine does provide a convenient place to consider as a starting point.  Out of that steam engine—and the transformations wrought in the English society and economy  by it—comes nearly every object in daily life, including the computer being used to display this.

And the computer, by way of the inventions that lead to it, brings us neatly back to the subject at hand:  color photography.  Computers would be useless to people without displays, whether CRT or LCD, and display technology has its roots in the effort to create a static snapshot of what the eye sees—in other words, photography.

Photography, like the steam engine, was one of those transformative technologies of the Industrial Revolution.  We take photographs for granted today, but the ability to capture a moment in time and transfer it to a piece of paper is one of the more astounding feats we as human beings have pulled off.  Think about it a moment.  You grab your camera, digital or conventional, press the button, and what have you done?  You have in essence frozen in time a piece of reality.  No wonder we like them so much, they address a deep-seated desire in humans to remember events clearly, and enhance one of the fundamental differences between us and all other animals on the planet, namely an ability to transcend the eternal now.  Language, the defining difference between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom, is what provides the framework for our minds to structure time and memories.  Without it, we too would be stuck in the eternal now, unable to form the long-term memories upon which our personalities rest.  (Yes, I know, there are exceptions.   But the general truth of the statement is valid).  And photographs provide a means of leveraging our talent for language into the realm of the visual, which is fortunate as we are at heart visual creatures.

One of the most intriguing elements of photography, is that it captures reality very much in the same manner we see it.  Our memory doesn’t work like a video camera.  Instead most memories exist more like snapshots, brief moments that for whatever reason have stuck with us over time.  Photography dovetails nicely with the way our minds work.  What is interesting though, is how photographs give us a sort of pseudo-memory of events that we have never seen.  Their power is evident in how we perceive historical time periods and events.  When you see the phrase ‘World War II,’ or ‘1938,’ the images that pop into your head are usually black and white.  Interesting, no?  But when Rome, or the Middle Ages are brought up, the images that come to mind are generally color in nature.  It seems an odd trick at first, but makes sense when thought about.  Our mind’s eye images of periods long ago are generally influenced, or even defined by, old paintings of historical scenes.  But then came photography, which singlehandedly replaced the painting as a means of recording moments in time.  So all our pseudo-memories of historical events and daily life suddenly go black and white around 1850, and stay that way for the next hundred years.

In 1929, those forces set in motion by the Industrial Revolution spiraled out of control.  It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but its severity is hard to imagine today.  The Great Depression dragged along for ten dreary years.  In the United States, one of the results of our desperate efforts to get a handle on what was happening was the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.  The effectiveness of the many programs put in place in the struggle to end the Depression may be open to debate, among them the WPA and other make-work programs, but while their effectiveness may be argued, the results of many of them are still with us.  One of the many programs instituted in the late 1930s was a government effort to capture a visual record of American life and also document the mobilization effort as we prepared for war.  Its practical value may have been low, but it did provide a means of support for many photographers that otherwise would have not had work.

Kodak introduced color photography as we know it in 1936.  It was rarely used however, as the the film was expensive.  Prices remained high enough until the 1950s that most photographers avoided it.  Most, however, doesn’t equal all.  Color photographs of the period may be rare, and their quantity overwhelmed by the sheer amount of black and white pictures taken during that time, but some effort has been made to bring them together into their own collection.  And when you see them together, it is hard to overstate how they change your perception of the time period.  It’s one thing to know the world did not exist in black and white back then, but it is another thing entirely to actually see it in color.  If, like me, you value history, they are well worth viewing.  Thanks to the Library of Congress, it is now possible to do so, and they even provide free for the taking 100+ MB scans of most of them.  They aren’t color corrected, and due to their age often have dirt, scratches, and other imperfections on them, but they will nonetheless utterly change how you envision the time period.  I’ve found them so intriguing I’ve lost several hours to simply wandering through the collection, and have been taking the most arresting of them and cleaning them up.  I’ll begin posting them to the Graphics Factory over the course of the next week or so.  The link is below.  I hope this little tangent gives a bit of…framing…to the photos.

American Memory

 

 

Ramblings/History | Permanent Link

eBay: Freaks on Parade

31 Mar, 2006
Posted at 22.51 PST

Another bit from the other half of the site, an entry from last year.

So I’m selling an old iBook on eBay, and I get the following email:

“Hello seller, I will like to buy this item…cus i have been looking for this kinda item that will be packed..and will be exactly composed like this…..I want to buy it ..and will like to pay you in cash via Money Order…But i will like you to ship this item as soon as you have recieve a confirmation e-mail from Western Union that the money order has been confirmed… I also promise to add you an extra $350.00 to the reserve price of the item …to end this auction early for me….cus i need it very urgenttly…. i sent the information of this item to my customers for Year 2005 …and i have had enough of good offers from them..so i woun’t like to miss the offers from them nor will i like to loose any of my customer…So send me your address for the payment…and the total amount exclud shipping …I will like to handle the shipment myself by using my fedex discount account. Thanks”

I’m mostly amused by it, as this sort of thing is a well known scam on eBay.  It usually involves sending the item to Africa, but hey, at least he’s trying for a little variety.  At any rate, I’m amused enough to respond—and post the response publically on the item’s page—maybe it’ll let others know I’m not interested in ending auctions early and completing the transaction through email, not least of which is because it is against eBay policy.  Here is my response:

Are you insane?

Even ignoring the suspicious nature of the request and the blatant abuse of grammar, spelling, and ellipses, it is unethical to end an auction early solely for the convenience of a single person. In short, please find the nearest large body of water and jump into it.

Concise, unlike my would-be scammer’s rambling missive with its strange mix of misspellings and tense changes.  Why waste words, no?  And that, I figured, was the end of it.  It’s not often one gets to respond to something so unethical with a snidely humorous response—and get to feel a little self-righteousness to boot!  So I was feeling a bit pleased with myself. 

 And then it got better.  I got a response. 

hey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! u fool….how dear u mail me with all these words…..or are u blind….am
trying to help u how muderfuker…bitch

Now  I am terribly tempted to play this through, but my sense of better judgment forces me to decline, sadly.  I mean…well…wow.  It’s apparent I’m in over my head.  After all, he uses lots of exclamation points!!!!!!! (Remember children, one will do)  And notice the use of ‘u’ in place of the word ‘you.’  Ooh, how l33t.   (And how terribly professional).  How can one respond to such an erudite display of wit and education?  Truly, I am humbled by this individual’s obviously superior intellect.  Out of my league, don’t you know?  Now that I’ve been so eloquently put into my place, I guess I’ll just have to take my toys and go home. 

Or, I suppose I could post this little exchange to the web, and put this idiot’s words and blinding display of intelligence up for all the world to see.  Yes kids, eBay can be fun! 

And remember:  one’s station in life is determined by his or her mastery of the English language.  Let this be a lesson to you.

 

 

Ramblings | Permanent Link

iBook HD Replacement

31 Mar, 2006
Posted at 22.45 PST

I was cleaning up the graphics side of the site, and ran into this bit: an excerpt from an email I sent a friend in London concerning the finer points of installing a new hard drive into an iBook long ago:

•The top shield has basically two sizes of screws, so it’s not as intimidating screwing it back on as it might first seem. The only exception (usually), is an extra small screw that goes in the corner at the top of the battery bay. If you get confused as to which holes need screws (assuming you didn’t mark the holes with a felt-tip or something similar), just rest the top case back in position and see if the screw holes in it have a clear path. If they don’t you’ve put one into the wrong hole. Easy to correct.

•The little metallic cloth doohickey/grounding strap at the top beside the display coming off the LVDS (Low Voltage Data Signal) cable screws on top of the shield. [If you’re curious, this is the cable that carries the actual digital signal to the LCD. The backlight is powered from the cable that attaches over by the RAM slot). The other cable, the one that attaches down by the HD is actually the mic cable. I have no idea why it attaches way down there.

•Don’t forget the reed switch magnet just above the battery bay inside the cd tray; it has a nasty habit of snatching the screw from your screwdriver. [The reed switch is a magnetically activated metal strip switch inside the display. It’s what signals the iBook to go to sleep when the lid is closed. Wave a magnet by the right hand side of the display and watch your machine magically go to sleep].

•Those four screws that are in the battery bay and CD slot?—the slightly larger two go in the battery bay, but no harm will come to the machine if you accidentally reverse them.

•Slip the top case back on over the DC-in port first, then the other sides will slide/snap down without too much issue.

•Don’t forget to attach the keyboard before screwing down the RAM shield! (I do this all the time, most irritating to have to unscrew the thing again, and a source of neverending amusement to my  coworker when he hears me say “Shit!” when reassembling one. ;-)

•AirPort card goes in text side up/Apple symbol down.

•If the iBook doesn’t power up the first time you press the button, don’t panic. Wait a second or two, and press again. It’s not uncommon. I think it has something to do with the power management unit being cut off from all current, but am not entirely sure.

•You can make the little round top case magnet jump around and chase your screwdriver pretty easily. This is vastly amusing, especially if you make little ‘Grrr, Grrr,” noises like a small dog.

•Your coworkers will likely laugh at you, not with you, if you do this.

•I speak from experience.

•Nudge the cables that come off the display back into place up under the shield’s edge as you’re putting the bottom case back on and it’ll sit easier. (This is another surprising Apple touch. Those cables are protected by wrapping them in capton tape. And because there’s a teeny-tiny chance they might show in the least bit, Apple paints them gray to match the case).

•Paying attention to the placement of the plastic shield around the ports can save you from having to remove and reseat the bottom case. (The bottom case’s edge goes under the ports shield).

•If you want some insanely strong magnets, take apart your old hard drive. If it’s been sounding as if there is a ping-pong game going on inside of it, the data is basically toast anyway. There should be two inside—they activate the read/write arm, plus a perfect mirror of a disk.

As you may have surmised, the means by which I make my living have quite a lot to do with Apple laptops.

 

 

Ramblings | Permanent Link

Stranger than Fiction

30 Mar, 2006
Posted at 22.43 PST

You can’t make this stuff up.

Second best headline ever. This, of course, is the best headline ever.

 

 

Ramblings | Permanent Link

American Pride

28 Mar, 2006
Posted at 21.05 PST

 

You know, there have been times when I’ve been embarrassed to be an American. Chagrined even, when our government or a citizen has pulled off a particularly ham-handed maneuver. But I can honestly say that until now I had never been ashamed of being American.

That has all changed.

The news of the behavior of some of our troops in Iraq has shocked me in a way I’d never thought possible. I do not consider myself either naïve or particularly worldly. Yet I understand that being reared in this country does not in some magical way make me or my fellow Americans somehow better than others, merely luckier. And I’m also aware of the 1971 Stanford University study that painted an unsettling picture of what the average American was capable of when placed in a guard/prisoner setting. But I had hoped that we weren’t really like that.

The Stanford study isn’t new. What it showed in no uncertain terms was that the very question of how the average German could take part in something as horrific as the Holocaust was a failure to understand the the question itself. The horrors committed by average Germans in World War II were not caused by some endemic failure of the German character, but rather by something inherent to humans in general, into which the Nazi régime simply tapped.

This failing of the human character does not make us as a species inherently evil; but knowing it exists, we must guard against it. And the fact we DO know about this tendency in ourselves makes our failure in Iraq to institute a mechanism preventing it even more horrifying. It would seem we have fallen victim to our own pride—a pride which made those in charge unable—or unwilling—to believe that Americans were capable of committing such acts. (At least I hope it was misplaced pride. The thought that those leading us in this war they’ve so eagerly prosecuted might actually consider the Iraqis subhuman is too saddening even to contemplate). It is KNOWN that strict controls are necessary in such a situation, that we as humans when placed in situations involving such a disparity of power are prone to abusing that power. Why did we not have such controls in place? This isn’t rocket science. We know how to prevent such abuses of power.

Make no mistake about it, there is NO excuse for violating the prisoners’ basic human rights. No argument can be made defending such behavior without undermining the very concept of human rights. ALL humans have them. Even suspected terrorists. To deny other’s basic rights and dignity is to become guilty of the very thing against which we are supposedly fighting. Is a contempt for human rights not a defining characteristic of the terrorist mind?

One of the saddest things about this whole sorry mess is that each and every one of the Americans shown is most likely a decent human being . Lord Acton was correct, power does tend to corrupt. The acts committed in Iraq were not made by monsters, but by humans acting in a monstrous fashion. The capability to behave in such an inhumane manner exists within all of us. A little simple oversight on the part of those in charge could have easily prevented this. All it takes to prevent such atrocities from occurring is a framework of expected behavior, and the discipline to hold people to it. This does not excuse the behavior of those taking part in those horrifying photographs, but knowing what we do about human behavior, it also places the blame squarely and equally upon the shoulders of the commanding officers as well. The abuse of the Iraqi prisoners is just as much their fault as it is the guards involved. A commanding officer is responsible for the actions of his men. This is an old and honorable principle, its usefulness proven over the course of centuries.

Shame.

I do not like this feeling.

 

 

 

Ramblings/Politics | Permanent Link

Animated Marble

28 Mar, 2006
Posted at 20.51 PST

The Animated Marble has its origins in the Ultimate Marble desktop I released through the Graphics Factory way back in 2002. I knew at the time it would be popular, but had no idea just to what extent it would be downloaded. I was tremendously flattered to see others liked it as much as I do. Over the past two years it’s been downloaded nearly 20,000 times—and generated enough mail that I now refer to it as “that damn globe.” :-) I’m sure that doesn’t count for much in the bigger picture, but for this little dusty corner of the web, it’s impressive.

I’ve always had a fascination with spatial relationships. Maybe it comes from being left-handed in a right-handed world. But when the idea of a translucent globe came to me, I wasted little time in tracking down the resources online to pull it off. I was actually somewhat disappointed to discover several months after releasing the desktop that the World Book application included with Apple’s consumer level computers had a nifty globe viewer that allows you to do this same thing. Oh well. So much for originality. At least I conceived of the idea independently.

It didn’t take long after its release that I began receiving emails from people outside the Western hemisphere asking me to make one with a little less of a Western bias. I never did though, partly because of laziness, but mostly because I’d put a lot of effort into finding an angle of the globe that showed off all the continents. Asia’s so damn big that it completely obscures the other side of a see-through globe. And what’s the point of a see-through globe if you can’t see what’s on the other side? The only other real option is to put the Pacific front and center, but even that’s stretching it.

Then Apple released Mac OS X 10.2. It introduced a rather nice cross-fade between desktops, and I knew then that this would be a perfect subject. The task of actually creating a multi-framed
desktop put me off though. It’s not that it’s difficult—it isn’t—but that it’s boring. It’s surprised me that I haven’t run across animated desktops since 10.2 was released. It seems (to me, at least), rather obvious a thing to do. Everyone remembers flip-book animations from grade school, right?

 

 

Macalicious | Permanent Link

O Brave New Layout

27 Mar, 2006
Posted at 08.07 PST

You know each time I wade into CSS, I feel an overwhelming urge to pull my hair out. It’s not that Cascading Style Sheets are so difficult to grasp, it’s just that so much time goes between my forays into CSS that I have to teach myself how to use them yet again.

It’s enough to chap your ass, you know?

Regardless, I’ve now finally begun unifying my written blog with the layout and apperance of the main graphics site. Some things still don’t work correctly, mainly the permanent links at the bottom of each entry. For whatever reason, they’re failing to make use of the new CSS. Eventually I suppose I’ll figure out why. Fixed.

So why the changes? I was pretty pleased with the old layout afterall. The old one didn’t fit in with the main site’s layout though. It was my first attempt at a page design suitable for blog entries, and I liked it, but it was pretty much a ripoff of a WordPress or Movable Type layout, I don’t remember which. I later took what I learned and rebuilt the graphics end of the site using the same principles, but with my own design sensibilities rather than someone else’s, tweaking the layout to suit my needs better. And that was a design with which I was extremely happy. Happy enough with it that I haven’t bothered with any significant changes in a year and a half, a new record for the site.

I’ve been meaning to backport the design to this blog ever since I finished with the graphics site, but have repeatedly put it off. Mainly this is due to the odd chimerical nature of Macalicious.net. The graphics end is driven by hand coded pages, but the blog is driven by Blosxom, an open-source plug-in based perl script that generates pages on the fly. Marrying up the two halves is something I didn’t have the patience for until recently. My interest in pulling the two halves together has grown though, and so I’ve finally begun the process. Now that I’ve gotten this half up and running I’ll soon propogate the new layout back to the graphics end. That’s gonna be a whole lot of fun, I can tell. Sigh.

 

 

Errata | Permanent Link

Belle and Sebastian, Redux

26 Mar, 2006
Posted at 19.26 PST

Just got in from Belle and Sebastian’s last show of their North American tour here in Seattle, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. It’s remarkable how much they’ve changed over the years. They’ve been tagged with the “twee” brush rather heavily, and I guess I’d have to say it’s been somewhat deserved, what with the violins and harpsichords turning up here and there in their songs, but the sound to which they’ve evolved is a far cry from the days of “The Model,” or “The State I Am In.”

I’d go so far as to say their sound has become more mainstream, if I felt I could make that argument. They haven’t really, but it’d be fair to say the band’s sound is a bit more standard pop than it was. There’s rather a strong 60s garage band/gospel influence going on that I find really interesting. And while the electric guitar wending its way through their recent offerings is somewhat startling given the band’s past musical history, I can’t say I dislike it. It’s wielded well.

At any rate, as any fan can tell you, it’s not Belle and Sebastian’s music itself that sucks you in, it’s the lyrics. Lead Stuart Murdoch delivers wicked keen turns of phrase that you don’t really notice till you begin paying attention to the lyrics. And I’m pleased to say that wry sense of humor is still present in the group’s music, and provides a welcome continuity to a sound that has been evolving at quite the unsettling pace for the past two albums. And more power to them. I wish more bands would take the time and effort to push back at the boundaries their fans expect of them. It has to be a bit frightening to strike out so strongly in new directions, and I admire the gumption.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise tonight was the group’s song set for the evening. It was nice to see them pulling some of the more obscure songs from their back catalogue, such as “Electronic Renaissance” (not something I’d ever have expected to hear in concert), and “Slept the Clock Around.” It would appear, according to Mr Murdoch anyway, that they try to avoid repeating songs they’ve played before in the same venue—even though it’s been over a year. Rather thoughtful.

Opening for Belle and Sebastian tonight were the New Pornographers, out of Vancouver. I’d seen them last autumn at the Showbox in downtown Seattle, and I hate to say it, but the lack of Neko Case this time was evident. While they certainly proved they can hold their own without her, her presence does lend a certain energy to their performance that is otherwise missing. Ah well, she’s just released a solo album of her own, and I suppose she can’t be blamed for needing to focus her attentions on it. At least I’ve now gotten to see them twice in concert. Given the slapdash nature of the group, I keep expecting to hear it announced they’re going to call it quits, though I keenly hope they keep getting together periodically to record new albums. They’ve got a sound that is wildly infectious. Check ‘em out if you’re not familiar with them.

 

 

Music | Permanent Link

Unification

23 Mar, 2006
Posted at 22.30 PST

Don’t be surprised to see the blog go down, go crazy, look funny, or otherwise be a bit strange. I’m going to soon be attempting to unify the blog and the graphics side of the site. Sigh. It’s gonna be a frickin’ pain in the ass.

 

 

Errata | Permanent Link