Month: January 2006

Are black holes Firewire or USB 2.0?

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 23, 2006

What’s spooky about cleaning out closets, and I mean really cleaning out closets, is all the stuff you have that has absolutely no value.

For instance, I have about 100 zip drive disks. I’ve long gotten rid of the drives, as well as the computers that take floppies.

Then there are these power cords for what, I have no idea because all the devices I can find have their cords.

I figure I have 2437 parallel printer cords, and 193 miles of cable wire. These go nicely with the 87 kilometers of ethernet line.

What is this? What is this? I haven’t a clue what it is. It’s black and plastic, that’s all I know.

Why does one woman need 13 maps of California?

I have instruction manuals for microwaves I got rid of 8 years ago. And I still have Microsoft CDs from 2000. If I owned an orchard, I could hang them from trees to scare away deer and birds. Since my roommate has declined to play Cubical War, I might as well toss them.

One can have too many pens.

I have several hundred slides of lava lamps.

Burningbird

The Escapes

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 21, 2006

I can see I need to improve my use of escapes with quotes in some of my semantic web technology, though the effect can sometimes be a bit humorous.

I’m about to publish a series of posts on photography, but before I do I have a question: has my site been as slow for you to access as it has been for me? I’m thinking this is a by-product of the Blonde Joke hits, but it could be my new DSL connection and only I’m having problems accessing pages.

Internet

The great escapes

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 21, 2006

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I can see I need to improve my use of escapes with quotes in some of my semantic web technology, though the effect can sometimes be a bit humorous.

Photography

Photography Pheeds

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 21, 2006

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I won’t be purchasing iLife 6 anytime soon, but I gather it does have a nice feature in that you can subscribe to a Flickr photo feed with the tool. Unlike regular feed readers, with iPhoto, you can create a slideshow of the images–rather nice, really.

A friend has subscribed to my Flickr feed, and hopefully I’ll have some interesting photos for him to look at–bald eagles if I can ever manage to get any pictures. Still, I don’t expect to be posting as many photos to Flickr in the next few months. I want to experiment around with creating my own photo applications using the wide variety of Ruby-on-Rails, PHP, JavaScript and other libraries on my development server. I also want to start being a bit more discriminating about what I publish online. Quality, not quantity.

In addition, I want to start separating out the social aspect of photography that comes with photos being on a Flickr site. I want the photography to be seen as photography, not an invitation to have communal chat. I think the community can be fun, and I’ve met terrific folks at Flickr. But I also think it can impact on how you view your photography over time; or at least, I’ve found it so.

I still think Flickr is the cat’s jammies, and plan on continuing to use the service–just not as frequently, or for the same purpose as I’ve used the site in the past (as storage for my online photos).

Photography

End of a Photo era

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 21, 2006

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My first camera was the newly released Nikon 8008, though I used Nikon cameras previously when I worked for a photographer. I liked the 8008 so much that I ended buying two bodies: one to hold B & W film; one for color.

Now I use a digital Nikon, the D70, and hope to, someday, move up the line to something like the D2X. Until then, though, my D70 does a wonderful job, and I love the camera.

I was ambivalent when I heard the news that Nikon is discontinuing most of its film line in addition to all of its manual lens–only providing support for the F6 and FM10 and whatever lenses these cameras need. This does signal a major shift in the camera industry, and for the first time I wonder how much longer film cameras will exist. More, I wonder how much longer film makers will continue to create film.