Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
I think the Church, the institution, has a lot to do with that. Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a scientist and Christian mystic who was forbidden to publish by the Church for his entire career. A discoverer of Peking Man, the Omega Point and Noosphere, his posthumously-published works did much to relate reason and religion. Catholic dogma and reason don’t seem good companions…
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NYT has an article today about Corbis, the photo agency Bill Gates started when he imagined people would want pictures to fill the giant LCD and plasma screens that would take the place of conventional pictures on the wall. Corbis has become, together with lartger competitor Getty, a massive rights management business that has, along the way, changed photojournalism.
Corbis has gone the route of making the photog pay all the expenses up front, as an independent contractor, and shares the photo sales. Getty, on the other hand, still pays day rates and expenses, but keeps all of the sales. Corbis gets more established and stock photogs, where Getty gets young people trying to make a name, who need the plane tickets to hot spots.
Of course the net has brought ‘microstock’ sites – I even have one, and believe it or not, it brings in a few hundred dollars a year on average. I’m even working – very slowly, some evenings and weekends – on a bigger archive, using free Google tools. We’re learning to use Lightroom, of course, to manage the images…
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Turns out that it’s a bit tricky hitting the balance between edema, or brain swelling, an artifact of radiation therapy which results in the partial paralysis of my left side, and steroid dose, which shrinks the edema, but causes weakness in big muscles, like the ones in my legs.
Yesterday I had the mix balanced about as badly as I can recall recently, leading to falling 3 times. Twice at Adobe (once in a nicely carpeted hall, thank goodneess), and once in the street, on a traffic island: my left ankle just gave away and down I went. An Adobe colleague helped me up the one time, on the 6th floor deck, and a San Jose Dash bus driver pulled over while I got up and hobbled over to his bus – I might have missed my CalTrain otherwise.
My oncology team has recommended a new steroid dose, and says it will take 72 hours to kick in. So I guess I will spend today working from home, nursing bruises and skinned knees. I’d be happy if something started working again… I do feel a little better this AM if not quite stable…
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