Actually, it’s more accurate to say I’m thinking about living things: there’s Ms. Robin, who, after a brief hiatus, has now returned to the nest she built in our patio umbrella . This will be her second brood this year, and her fourth since she first arrived last summer, apparently approving of our new patio and furniture.
There’s Mr. (?) Spider who, for the last couple of weeks, has reliably built a web from my car door to the ceanothus adjacent to the driveway. I can’t get in the car without knocking down the web, but it doesn’t seem to bother him – he just puts it back up overnight.
Both of these creatures set a good example for me – regardless of the vicissitudes (Mr. Spider has to rebuild his web every day, Ms. Robin’s last clutch of eggs didn’t appear to produce any fledglings) – both keep at their work, doggedly. It encourages me to encounter them each day, busy and engaged.
Being out of the mainstream workforce has its challenges. I find myself more or less completely fading from most former colleague’s ken as they (naturally) cope with the more pressing issues of their respective lives. Much of my ‘work’ involves finding ways to stay busy – I’m trying to bring more order to my photo archive, I continue to work at rehab daily, I give myself photo assignments that match my current state of mobility. Like my mascot, Wall-E, it’s up to me to make sense, and purpose in the world in which I find myself…
We read that Farrah Fawcett died today. I’ve previously written about the connection I felt with Ms. Fawcett. I photographed her a couple of times when I worked in Hollywood in the 1980s, and we both were diagnosed with serious cancers later in life. Many in Hollywood paid tribute to her today…
Yesterday found us wrestling with the disaster that is the American print periodical business, and, in particular with the droves of newly unemployed, or underemployed writers and other ‘creatives.’ I opined that the problem isn’t that writers are no longer appreciated, it’just that the 175-year-old print media business is going down the well-worn path of irrelevance to a changed world.
That process started the day the first Apache web server was put on the internet: the cost of publishing, once measured in the tens of millions of dollars for presses, labor contracts, distribution networks, paper, ink, and, oh yeah, writers fell dramatically.
Suddenly, with the barrier of high-cost production gone, anybody could publish, and 26.4 million blogs have appeared in the U.S. alone, boasting some 78 million unique visitors (aka ‘readers’) according to figures cited by Technorati.
Clearly, market economics are at work here: the amount of verbiage available to readers has grown explosively, from perhaps a few hundred sources to tens of millions, which has the effect of making ‘content’ extremely cheap, not a good thing if you’re a writer looking for a paycheck.
It turns out that there are a lot of people who are pretty good writers, commentators and reporters, and with tens of millions bloggers cranking out copy, readers are likely to find just the viewpoint or topics they crave.
So, we former employees of print and, even, add-supported online media, now find ourselves in the unemployment line with auto workers, steel workers and everybody else whose job evaporated in the New Economy. Creative destruction in action, in spades. Thus we have become ‘malcontent providers’ and ‘discontent’ providers, terms coined by Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller, my former editor at the late, lamented NewsForge. To be continued…
The phrase fairly popped off the screen in response to a post I’d made (citing ‘content providers’) on a list for tech writers. This list, as one can imagine, has been full of grief and worse as the recession forces publications, already strapped by business models that had not factored an internet-connected world, to jettison writers, both staff and freelance, in numbers not seen in memory.
Indeed, even online media ’successes’ are canning writers (and photographers, videographers, graphic artists et al.) about as fast as their email systems can deliver the ‘paperless’ version of the pink slip. To put it mildly, there is currently a significant ‘overcapacity’ of skilled, competent, deeply knowledgeable writers, the very people who’ve so ably chronicled the rise of high tech.
Some colleagues bemoan the fact that such skills no longer seem to be valued – but I don’t think that’s the issue. Readers still greatly prefer clear, definitive accounts of the topic at hand vs. something worse. The real problem is twofold: one is a classic case of ‘creative destruction’ in which a once successful old-line business gives way to a new one, better suited to a new world. In this case, businesses find that focused ads associated with search are a much better use for ad dollars, vs. the old scattershot model of display advertising, once the lifeblood of print periodicals (and early online sites).
The other is a simple case of supply and demand. To be continued, including revelation of the author of the phrase above…
We headed out this morning, once again bent on ‘generating content,’ but today the goal was text (aka a ’story’), unlike yesterday’s mainly photo-oriented mission.
We added our iPhone and trusty, if ancient, G4 Mac laptop to our toolbox with the goal of rating downtown Menlo’s WiFi hotspots. The 12-inch Mac is wonderfully portable but numbers iffy WiFi connectivity among its sins. This is the perfect machine to test hotspots: if this Mac can connect, anything should be able to grab the same signal. We then headed out to test Menlo’s (more-or-less advertised) WiFi hotspots.
Signature Cafe (inside the Safeway – yes, a supermarket with WiFi), Middle and El Camino. Inside the store the signal strength is excellent and stable. Login is easy – launch a browser, click ‘Agree’ on the terms of service (TOS) page, and you’re in, both on the laptop as well as the iPhone. At 11:20 on a Thursday, there were plenty of seats. Coffee is from a Starbucks stand, while the adjacent deli provides sandwiches, salads and soup. Hot tip: the WiFi extends to the outside seating under the arches in front.
Café Borrone in the Menlo Center, Santa Cruz and El Camino. The always-packed Cafe Borrone offers no WiFi, but neighbors Kepler’s Books (south end) and Knickerbockers Tobacconists (north end) have hotspots. As of this writing, Kepler’s network was open, but not very stable in the café, while Knickerbockers was asking for a password. Hot tip: Turkey Works on baguette for $8, but don’t count on a connection.
Le Boulanger, Crane and Santa Cruz. This bakery-cum-coffee shop offers a completely open hotspot free of browser pages, logins or other bother. This popular downtown fast-lunch stop has booths in the west end of the building (where signal strength is best) and often resembles a startup incubator in the afternoon with each booth occupied by a covey of cellphone- and laptop-toting entrepreneurs. We once saw a group who’d brought their own router for a tabletop subnetwork, all cheerfully tolerated byLe Boulanger staff. Hot tip: Cheapest rent in Menlo Park – coffee is $1.80 a cup but you can also catch the signal from the two public benches in front.
Starbucks, Santa Cruz and Curtis. Supposedly offering free WiFi to AT&T customers, I never succeeded in getting either the iPhone or laptop connected, despite jumping through dozens of AT&T browser-page hoops on both devices. At one point I was promised a text message with a personal connection link. My (lousy) cup of coffee had gone very cold, and still no text, or connectivity arrived. Hot tip: Go to Peet’s.
Ann’s Coffee Shop, 772 Santa Cruz, near Chestnut. More than 60 years in the same spot (and with the same menu for the 20 years I’ve lived here) this Menlo landmark has recently added WiFi – though not all the staff know it (despite the sign in the window). My iPhone grabbed the open connection right away, but it took a little nudging of Ann’s DHCP server to get the laptop connected. The signal is good, and stable near the front of the shop. Hot tip: Home-made pies – try the rhubarb.
Peet’s Coffea and Tea, Santa Cruz and University. When you buy something at Peet’s, you can request a WiFi access code. You then launch a browser on whatever device you wish to connect, type in the code, agree to the TOS and are granted 2 hours free access. The signal varies from spot to spot and is not particularly stable – people moving in the room seem to knock the signal down and occasionally off. I find it tricky to type the long, cryptic code on the iPhone. Hot tip: Best coffee in town, not the best WiFi experience.
Our Menlo WiFi hotspot rating: Signature Cafe (Safeway), Le Boulanger and Ann’s are all good, Peet’s is OK, Borrone doesn’t even try and Starbucks is useless. Borrone and Le Boulanger have the best food, Peet’s has the best coffee…
So, as luck would have it, friend Scott and spouse Linda began chatting after Scott, Lily and I finished our walk last Thursday (or was it Tuesday). Anyway, I wasn’t listening, but there was some high-bandwidth communication going on, and both emerged with that cat-that-snatched-the-canary look. It seems that they had hatched a project.
Well suddenly, after a flurry of emails, domain registrations, a new Google Apps account (Scott and Linda are both get-it-done-now kind of people), the project has taken on a distinct ’startup’ kind of feel (and you’re talking to a veteran of 7 attempts at the Next Big Thing). Yet more email flew, prototypes appeared, well, you get the idea. I’m dreading the appearance of the first PowerPoint
Making the proverbial long story shorter, today I found myself in a car with a bag full of cameras and lenses, driving around to ‘assignments,’ many of which were self-generated. In short, I was back where I started many years ago, chasing ‘content’ (we used to call them ‘pictures’) on a tight schedule. It was great.
Mind you, we had some setbacks. I left the house with a camera with a low battery, secure in the knowledge I had a spare in the bag. Secure, that is, until the spare proved to be dead, too.
Back to the house, where we threw one dead battery into the charger, while we uploaded the few snaps we’d made before the electron gas tank had hit the Big ‘E.’ A quick battery change, and we were off to the next gig. We raised the camera, pressed the button… and… nada. This time, we’d left the SD card in the reader back home. It was like leaving the house without film. That never happened in the old days (well, almost never).
Fortunately, we had a few spare SD cards in the bag, and, after a brief, embarrassing moment, finished the shoot. On the way back home, a serendipitous photo opp presented itself. Rust and hemiplegia notwithstanding, we managed to get a picture. It felt really good. Tonight we’re going through the bag – spare batteries, backup body, SD cards, flash, tripod et al. are being carefully assembled…
I’m a black-and-white kind of guy – always have been. I started taking b&w pictures when I was 16 or so, and I’m not about to stop now.
Scott dropped me a line asking me for advice about converting digital camera RGB files into b&w. He’d been researching online and found a bewildering torrent of commentary involving complex moves in complicated software, and suggested I offer a straightforward tutorial on the new (coming soon) Gulker Photo Archive. That’s a good idea: in the meantime, I’ll offer some quick advice here.
1. Start simply. There are as many ways to make b&w conversions as there are photographers. I recommend using whatever tool you have at hand that is capable of making a b&w conversion. I use Apple’s iPhoto application to view and file the images from my cameras. It has, in edit mode, an Effects palette that offers 1-click conversion – you can also use the Saturation slider in the Adjust palette (slide it all the way to the left). Unless the result is just awful for some reason, congratulations, you have a back and white image.
2. Begin editing, gently. In programs like iPhoto (or Aperture or Lightroom) you can make so-called global adjustments, i.e. twiddling the software knobs affect the whole picture, not just parts of it. If your software offers the option of a control with 3 sliders (e.g. Exposure in iPhoto, Levels in Photoshop) use the middle slider to lighten or darken your image. For global adjustments, avoid brightness and contrast controls if you can (more on why later).
Pixel editors (like Photoshop) allow the photographer to selectively adjust areas of the print (e.g., to darken a sky or foreground). Usually, beyond a few obvious adjustments, less is more, in my experience with powerful editing programs. Small moves (and frequent ‘Save As’ versions – so you can backtrack) are best.
You can see the process in the 3 images seen here. Bottommost is the original RGB from a Nikon D5000, above it is the iPhoto b&w conversion, and at top is the current state of the image showing some global corrections (mainly moving some midtones to make the wall more luminous) and one obvious selective adjustment (burning down the sky). I’ll wrap it up here with one (probably obvious) caveat… always work with a copy of your original file, just in case…
We don’t often look at the stats for gulker.com, being content to blog away in obscurity for the most part. As we were playing with the Wordpress stats plug-in we noticed the chart above. Whoa! We musta done something really bad in week 13 (March 22 – 28).
Or did we? We wrote about Harley Davidsons and Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Outliers among other topics. You’d have though those would be of interest to someone. I’ll have to do some server-log sifting, but the answer could be something technical – like a change in the software or my configuration. At this point, I don’t know.
Similarly, I stepped on the scale yesterday, and found myself some 4 lbs. lighter. True, I have been watching the diet since we returned from France, though, amazingly I didn’t gain weight somehow during a month of bread, cheese and wine (among other culinary delights). I was thrilled, but less so this morning, when my old weight returned. Software glitch in the digital scale? Bio-bug in the body? Again, more information needed.
Anyway, we began to think about other discontinuities: the famous, and fascinating, chaotic behavior of population growth equations in which populations oscillate chaotically when the growth rate reaches certain ‘magic’ values. We wonder how this might apply to our viewership stats: we seemed to be growing nicely when the big crash occurred. Could there be a ‘hit recession’ underway?
Scott, Lilly and I walked over to Allied Arts this morning for Ansel Adams Day, an event that featured many more docents than examples of the young Adams’ work while he was Allied Arts’ ‘photographer of record’ in the 1930s. We wound up mostly walking around the very pretty grounds and snapping pictures.
Nor were we alone: a guy with an ancient Rolleicord (a great camera) on a tripod was shooting the hedge maze and a woman and her assistant were shooting portraits of four little girls.
On the walk back I began thinking about my plans to finally get the Gulker Photo Archive completely up and running, with access to 80,000 plus digital photos and scans, plus our new pursuits – prints and books of photos from the archive. A show of work by Portola Valley photographer Alan McGee inspired me to get moving…
Sign of the economic times? For some years now, we have been lusting for the Cadillac of Weber charcoal-fired grills (though, technically, I believe it’s classed as a ’smoker’), known as The Performer. Some years back, when a previous Weber (the kind that sits on 3 spindly legs) had gone to its end (in part because of slack maintenance on my part), I merely replaced it with the same $89 model.
I found myself regretting that I hadn’t popped for the sturdier high-end model, with its convenient side table, shelf, charcoal bin and propane coal-starter. I found myself with all the pieces – grill, charcoal sack, charcoal chimney, utensils, food et al. and no real place to put them (except the patio table and benches and surrounding terrain).
This year, the Williams Sonoma catalog arrived, featuring a glorious color photo of the Weber I wished I’d purchased. I left the catalog out, turned to the proper page, and eventually the spouse began making approving noises, given our two-year-old patio remodel and the fact that the current Weber had also fallen into disrepair.
Wishing to be wise, and thrifty, I went to a local discount chain (Orchard Supply Hardware), thinking to beat pricey Williams Sonoma’s tariff. Sure enough, I located the model, but was disappointed to see that it was being offered for exactly the same price. I hovered long enough on the aisle considering alternatives (including the old $89 standby) that a salesperson approached me.
Said salesperson was wearing a tie, and was, thus, presumably on some managerial rung of the OSH hierarchy, and he wasted no time exercising his executive powers: “10% off if you buy today.” I hesitated long enough, that he then offered “another 10% off if you apply for an OSH account – only takes a minute!”
We were approaching $70 in savings here, and truth be known, the Williams Sonoma listing was ‘catalog only,’ meaning there was a $100 ‘flat’ shipping charge (good for New Yorkers, but hard to swallow for one who lives 2 miles from a WS store), so I was looking, really, at $170 savings at this point.
Emboldened, I pushed a little: “What about assembly?” Free, guaranteed within 72 hours. That clinched it. The credit application really did take a minute (they basically swiped my Visa card and said ‘OK’). I used my savings to buy a new light fixture for the front porch, a big sack of Lazarri mesquite charcoal, a small propane tank (for the Weber’s starter) and some sandpaper and cherry stain. And I still had bucks left over… but I resisted their big Craftsman tool sale…