Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
Video and audio are big topics at this year’s Southwestern Photojournalists Conference, as is the topic of failing newspapers and mass layoffs. It’s a conference about story-telling, and there are many gifted story-tellers here. Takes me back to my photog days…
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Picture from the Southwestern Phootojournalists conference last night in Fort Worth. We’re having fun…
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Scene at the Stanford-UCLA game tonight. UCLA won. Linda is in a good mood…. 10:24:47 PM
We’re busy today, packing for the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference, we’re also squeezing in the gym, shopping, gassing the car (so Linda will be set while we’re away), brain training, a tutorial on a new web site system for our church, and now, of a sudden, Linda wants me to go to the Stanford-UCLA basketball game tonight.
One problem is that I keep getting interrupted from one task by another: while unloading groceries, I noticed our breakfast fruit needed replenishing so I started washing and slicing. Walking through the garage with the groceries, I saw there was wash that needed folding. And that was before I went online. The net is the kingdom of the interrupt… 3:34:51 PM
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We headed off to the Menlo Park Library this morning, which friend Scott says is a very pleasant place to work. I had the netbook, Leica, iPhone, Kindle and all my other tools in my trusty (if beat) official Wall-E satchel. I was going to apply for a library card, and hook up to the Library’s wireless service, and then work on a new photo project.
The check engine light was on in Linda’s car, so the plan was to hit the library while the guys at Menlo Chevron checked it out. But, lo, we were greeted at the library with the sign you see here: Tuesday is the only weekday that sees the library open at noon. Sheesh… 11:22:19 AM
Spinning my wheels, it seems, today: got home just in time for the mop-and-vacuum-cleaner chaos of our house-cleaning crew to descend, off their usual schedule for some unexplained reason, so went back downtown to do a few chores, none of which worked out particularly well. I did bump into Scott, and one of his consultancy partners Russ Jones, so we had lunch at Caffe Borrone, which, as always, was booming. Scott and Russ tipped me to the Safari 4 beta which has a cover flow interface for history and bookmarks… 1:41:15 PM
This is Lester Burdle: we met near the Caltrain station yesterday after my trip to the City. Newly arrived from Indiana, he asked if I knew where the nearest homeless shelter might be.
I was embarrassed: I knew about the Shelter Network, which our church, Trinity, supports, but I couldn’t help Lester figure out which bus to take or give him even more than vague directions. My Leica had somehow not made it on my City trip, so I snapped Lester with my iPhone, part of a project that I have in mind as my lenten offering this year. Lester thanked me, and limped off to ask some other folks… 2:03:08 PM
Automation: the two (now 3) pictures in this post were automatically exported and sized via Automator actions. I select a photo in in iPhoto, then run the action from the Scripts menu, and a resized photo appears (usually) on my desktop. I’m so proud… first timestamps, now automated photo workflow… 2:27:52 PM
My new Kindle 2.0 just arrived. It comes in minimal, completely recycled packaging (yay!) and only took a minute to move content – half-read books, newspaper and magazine subscriptions – over to the new machine. It’s iPod thin and light, and I like the new page turn buttons and nav device much better than the 1.0 version. The old one is going to precocious cousin Thomas in Potter Valley… 5:06:16 PM
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Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, MySpace… is there a place for blogs anymore? Any reason to maintain one? Reading Twitter this morning (@jcposner describes it as a ‘flash-mob in a whorehouse’). I find myself wondering if blogs, after 14 years or so, are headed the way of newspapers.
A rough decade and a half – that’s a long time for a technology these days: it’s no secret that the adoption-to-abandonment curve has become much shorter. Social media sites are competing, pretty successfully, for the eyebalss that the Internet originally peeled away from old media. Email and ‘old fashioned’ web furniture, like blogs, seem to be vulnerable. We’ll see how this all pans out… 7:54:39 AM
We’re off to UCSF in a few minutes: it’s Heidi day, during which we’ll work with physical therapist Heidi Engel before hitting the gym. Heidi’s tough… and that’s good… 7:56:56 AM
The San Francisco Chronicle is dead, a bit sooner than many expected. The Chron is slightly more upbeat about its impending demise, but this patient has been on life support almost since Hearst bought the paper from the deYoung family, who know join Tony Ridder in the category of famous newspaper families who knew when to get out.
Hearst is doubtless taking advantage of the downturn to unload another huge cash drain; i would have thought they would try the Detroit experiment (Friday through Sunday print editions with 24 by 7 web presence) with a much-reduced staff, before pulling the plug. Regrets guys, I loved competing with you when I was at (Hearst’s) The Examiner… 5:07:40 PM
Extrapolating: The Chronicle ran for roughly 150 years, blogs have been going for 15: the current crop of media technology will only have a 1.5 year lifespan, and the Next Big Media Thing will go for 45 days. Most of what we do in the future will be hunt for jobs… 5:24:25 PM
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It’s Monday, and we’re getting ready for a big week. I noticed this morning that I was reaching pretty easily for my breakfast bowl. Another tiny milestone… 7:36:34 AM
The Cube is now on the network, after we moved its ethernet cable to the correct side of the router (doh!). We found radio.root, but not frontier.root. Radio.root opened in OPML Editor but began throwing error dialogs that push themselves to the foreground about once a second. Trying to remember the key board shortcut to comment out the offending code… 12:12:38 PM
Spent a little time speaking with my new acquaintance at California and Birch in Palo Alto this morning over coffee (me) and cocoa (him).
I asked him why his signs have a plea for 26 cents. His reply: ‘It adds up. By the end of the day I can get a meal. 26 cents has saved my butt a couple of times.’ Then I asked if I could take his picture:’Sure.’ I put my coffee cup on the fire plug that’s part of the corner’s furniture, along with two plastic crates, the sign, a tin cup and a wooden alms bowl.
I raised my Leica, focused and pressed the shutter button: nothing happened. The camera’s battery was dead (despite being charged the day before). Annoyed, I excused myself, walked into the camera store across the street, and bought a ridiculously expensive, new, rechargeable battery. Out of the box it had enough charge to allow the picture you see here (and here). We’re recharging now… and we’ll be back to finish the conversation… 1:46:33 PM
MacOS X netbook: an almost legal hack, over at Gizmodo. Looks like my EeePC will run OS X, too (with a bunch of work). But, I’m OK w/Linux… really. From Dan Gillmor et al. via Twitter… 4:01:57 PM
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We’re back in OPML editor using its outline interface, a feature which first debuted, I think, in ThinkTank and More, outliner software that debuted in the late 80s and early 90s. I was introduced to it in the Frontier scripting-cum-databse programming environment on Macintosh.
I lived much of my computer life in Frontier for about 5 years in the early 90s, while I was building and maintaining a homebrew workflow and content management system at the (then Hearst-owned) San Francisco Examiner.
It’s oddly comforting to be using this, by modern standards, dated interface. It is, like many old and familiar tools, (think UNIX command line) quite useful if you have the knack for its small, swivelling triangles (which you see to this day in some MacOS and Windows file system UI) and eccentric menus (it made sense back then). I still have the Frontier manuals, and an O’Reilly ‘animal’ guide on my bookshelf.
What I don’t have, close at hand anyway, is a copy of my Frontier.root file, the database that contains nearly everything I wrote from the early 90s until mid-2006 (I used Frontier, or a a product built on Frontier, called Radio, to run this blog for its first 11 years).
Now we’re using Wordpress, with it’s very nice browser-based editing interface (a feature that I first saw in Frontier and hacked into a UI for gulker.com, before Radio’s more refined browser-based interface debuted). Now there’s a Wordpress connector in OPML Editor that’s got me back, working as I would have in 1995. We think we know where there is a copy of our root file… it’s on our retired, but not discarded, Mac Cube…
Found the Cube (in the spare bedroom), found its power supply (in the garage), found a replacement power supply (also in garage). Hoping to get it on the network without dredging up its monitor, keyboard et al., but it’s not booting… 4:41:44 PM
Tuned into Oscars long enough to make sure Wall-E won best animated picture. Should have been nominated for best picture, period… 7:21:42 PM
Finally: the G4 cube is booting, after trying 2 different power supplies (the Dr. Bott replacement is working) and minor surgey – replacing the PRAM battery – I can’t believe I had a spare. But it’s not showing up on the network. Probably, after a hard PRAM reset, alll services are off. Next up, find monitor and keyboard and mouse… 7:32:13 PM
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It’s been one of those years, so far… two friends have died unexpectedly, and tragically. We’ve just returned from the second funeral. Good people grieving, showing courage, but, ouch… 4:51:37 PM
So, now I’m nerding, sending my attention far away by poking around in a couple of editing environments. I’m writing this post from OPML Editor’s ‘command line’ (or maybe ‘command outline’ is a better description). Getting into serial problem solving, algorithms, docs and logic can put the world at bay for a few hours. It’s not that I don’t want to think about death, I’ve spent a long time there, and am comfortable with the topic. It’s the circumstances that surround death, what it does to friends and loved ones, how their lives change, that’s weighing a bit on me today. And , now, off to San Francisco for dinner… 5:04:27 PM
We ate at Chou Chou this evening, BTW. A little piece of France… 9:57:29 PM
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For some reason, I’ve been thinking about this picture, taken near Annecy lately. Maybe I’m waiting for a thunderbolt to strike… 4:27:38 PM
Still no thunderbolts, or ideas worthy of the reader’s time. Sigh, a blog-clueless day marches into night… 9:23:03 PM
A good day’s blog would have a longish, pithy, thoughtful piece, with a bunch of thought-provoking snippets and links, BTW. In case you were wondering… 9:25:48 PM
Jobs elude ex-Bush officials. Hmmm… is this really news? 10:31:50 PM
Longish and Pithy (for thoughful, come back tomorrow):
pith |pi?|
noun
1 soft or spongy tissue in plants or animals, in particular
• spongy white tissue lining the rind of an orange, lemon, and other citrus fruits.
• Botany the spongy cellular tissue in the stems and branches of many higher plants.
• archaic spinal marrow.
2 figurative the essence of something : the pith and core of socialism.
3 figurative forceful and concise expression : he writes with a combination of pith and exactitude
verb [ trans. ]
1 dated chiefly figurative remove the pith from.
2 rare pierce or sever the spinal cord of (an animal) so as to kill or immobilize it.
Acchhhh… (from New Oxford American Dictionary/Apple Dictionary). We’re really struggling here… 10:53:00 PM
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We find ourselves this morning with a small arsenal of recently-written scripts (AppleScript in this case) to ease the blogging process, not to mention a newly-hacked Automator (another Mac OS ’scripting’ tool) that, along with a couple features in Adobe Acrobat 9 considerably eased our annual tax preparation marathon. Cut way down on the search for deductibles… 10:28:26 AM
A New York Times feature article this morning describes Twitter as ‘subtrivia.’ Complete with journalists dueling for Tweet supremacy… 10:44:11 AM
The first edition of the N Judah Book has arrived. This edition of 25 is signed and numbered by your humble photographer… 1:00:08 PM{ 3 comments }
