Shocked that in 2019 not only are there businesses that don’t have their own domain name but are still using @hotmail.com for email.

Backlash on Gruber re: Stallman comments

Just read this on Daring Fireball where John is describing some emails he received about his comments on Richard Stallman in a recent episode of The Talk Show:

I know your shows are meant to be funny and ad-lib’d to a degree but resorting to a random character attack is not something I want to listen to.

I know you don’t like e-mail but I really feel strongly about keeping this kind of garbage off the air. Nerd/geek culture is about acceptance not snobbishness and if your show claims to be for nerds, I don’t think it has place for this low-brow bullying.

Almost had to do a double-take when I read that. First of all, Stallman is a disgusting pig with a terrible history of mistreatment of women. He’s fucking fair game on the “random character attack” in my book.

As to nerd/geek culture being about “acceptance, not snobbishness”…when? Certainly not since I can remember. Nerds/geeks can be some of the absolute worst when it comes to that stuff. Wow.

Better late than never! Never thought these Morning Glory blooms would ever come and almost pulled down the plant because it’s so late in the season!

Austin Mann says serious photographers should get an 11 Pro because the increase in cost is worth it. Of course he only seems to really do anything with his around Sept. The rest of the time he’s using real cameras 😉

Fun with Dell computer recovery

Last night reminded me why I really prefer Mac. Trying to get the XPS13 laptop (model 9350 for those that are reading this that might have come here looking for clues) ready for sale and of course a factory reset can’t be straightforward. Dell has options for just this scenario but once I ran the factory reset the first time I wasn’t able to do it again because the recovery partitions, which were still on the drive, were no longer available because the boot loader was changed. Not sure why a recovery tool would do that but it must have because it ran once.

I needed to run it again however because instead of just shutting the machine off where the configuration of Windows starts I went thru the whole process. After a lot of messing around trying to get the bootloader configured again ( still have access to the settings on the image of the machine I made in Parallels) I finally just downloaded their cloud-based repair tool to redownload Windows and do a new install. That process ran overnight and I turned the machine off at the point I should have early last night. What remains to be seen today is are the recovery partitions available.

For those who might be interested the tools at boyans.net, especially Visual BCD Editor in my case, can be a life saver. If you ever dual-booted a Dell laptop with Windows and Ubuntu and want to get back to “normal” his other repair tool is excellent.

Why do I photograph?

This question, via Om Malik’s excellent blog, is an interesting one that I haven’t asked myself. So why do I photograph? I love the process of trying to see things differently and a camera helps focus (no pun intended) that process. Whether its a different angle or crop, or different light, I always enjoy the challenge in trying to see things in the world differently.

As stated in other posts here I am also an iPhone photo app fanatic. I love playing with VSCO and Hipstamatic and the endless possibilities they bring to photography. Sometimes the tools are useful to make things look more like what your eye saw (top) vs. what the camera produced (bottom). Thanks Lightroom!

More often than not it’s to bring a sense of something else to the photo, a vintage look, a fantasy aspect, or maybe a sense of motion that wasn’t there in the first place. Whatever it is I love doing it and its the thing about my iPhone that brings me the most joy.

The building I work in is on the grounds of what was the Glenview Naval Air Station. When they turned it into commercial and residential use they created a park, Gallery Park, with a lake. This is an overlook on the lake. Edited with Hipstamatic Jane lens, Irom 2000 film, and Apollo flash.

The Jane lens adds a vignette around the outer edge of the photo it’s operating on and boosts the brightness in the middle, that’s its signature effect in my opinion (I’m sure it does more with the colors but in my mind those are the main things). Irom 2000 is borderless and warms up the photo a bit. The big surprise in the combo for me in this picture was the Apollo flash. Not only did it up the contrast in the photo but it really boosted the greens. I’m not sure if this was intentional or a bug but it worked wonders on this picture.