autumn cleaning [haiku]

yellow leaves
on discarded chair -
autumn cleaning.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

more notes coming soon.

i have been tweeting a lot lately, and not keeping my online notebooks as up to date as i would like. [my paper notebooks doing just fine] on the other hand, there are a number of ongoing notes, everything from photography to my carefully considered strong atheism, to software engineering (or lack thereof) not to mention bits of poetry that need to be finished and posted. i hope to get back to my blog late august. at least that is the best laid plan...

craigslist: ken-rockwell-obssessed husband

someone found this in craigslist. very funny. [ken rockwell. i do read some of his reviews, but rarely buy only on his recommendation. sometimes he is way over the top, and sloppy.]

    Ken Rockwell-Obsessed Husband (North York)
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [...]

    One gently-used caucasian male. 36 years-old. Slightly defective.
    Remembers the names of Ken Rockwell's kids but not our own. Constantly
    buying high-end photo gear then selling it on craigslist the second
    Canon or Nikon releases something new. Complains endlessly about
    lowballers, tire-kickers and pixel peepers. Sold car to buy a Leica body
    and now wants to mortage house to buy lenses, all at Ken Rockwell's
    insistence. Maybe you can reprogram him. I have no time because I have
    to cart our kids around on the TTC and work two jobs while while he
    fiddles with film and DSLR to achieve super-saturated highlights.

    Reasonable offers accepted: Food, clothing, 1992 Subaru Justy. Offers of
    photo equipment will promptly be deleted! Lowball kickers are welcome! A
    swift one in the nuts will do him some good.

       * Location: North York
       * it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other
         commercial interests

    PostingID: 1239135682

paypal scam via craigslist

Subject: mint lowepro computrekker plus AW - $175 (toronto)
From: annemary
Date: May 21, 2009 12:28:08 PM EDT

Thanks for the post...I am really interested in buying this item but I am not in state for now I'm in Germany for a conference meeting...Am buying this item for my company agent located west africa....I will add $100.00 USD for the shipping cost...Making $275.00 USD... I will make the payment through my PayPal account cos is very secure and easy to receive money.....Kindly send me your PayPal email so that i can send the payment... Hope i will read from u again here soon..

this is a blatant scam of course. i did not ask for $100 for shipping, because i am not planning to ship it. the paypal payment is not very secure; credit card payments can be reversed. see paypal chargeback faq.

reflection [haiku]

wet tulips -
looking in a drop
for reflection.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

frozen [haiku]

spring thaw -
in a rushing stream
frozen heart.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]
sometimes, what froze during the dark, cold days of winter cannot be thawed.

birch and starling [haiku]

dying birch -
one starling on a branch
now two.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

recent notes, tweets and quotes

eren says [and clearly he has been watching too much kids tv and superhero cartoons]

let's face it... in the future, world may be ruled by birdbrains...

overheard in a bday party:

what manners? this is maple pie!

tweet #2858933749: we should be able to tweet straight into wikipedia so that some gems of our tweet-ergo-sum [or maybe sum-ergo-tweet] can be preserved....

"land of the goodebump and the white knuckle" no, not wallstreet... not the average north american bedroom... just mazda's imaginary world.

anonymous on ruby/rails:

it sucks mightily!

toronto star frontpage reads: "politicians chase naked truth" [leaving aside the comic mental image, which two words don't go together?]

I think I overheard someone say "we require spontaneity" ... uhh.

we arm ourselves with ideologies. -- wendy kaminer

thought of the day: familiarity invites carelessness. (familiarity breeds things too but i think this is more important)

flustered dad [me] in need of a paper towel: please bring me a ... a... child: what? an elephant?

adobe "air" ... hmm one thing to learn from car companies: choosing less dumb names.

I wonder what CNN would be like tweeting. repeating the same sniplets of "news" endlessly. or change the word order to keep it "fresh".

situation room: wow it is as dull as I remember it from the bush days. evidently, an increase in the IQ of the administration has had no positive effect on CNN talkies.

need some grounding... phew the C compiler still works! ran out to find a bookstore... where is russell? ooo... house and philosophy!

retweeting redux:. if you like tom u probably will like geoff. here Is a 15-day trial subscription...

thought of the day: if a choice is too easy, it probably isn't real. [some hard choices are not real either.]

correct math considered harmful: you are the 9,672,535,834th visitor to see this lucky banner. congratulations, you won!

plato in tech age: commentators should be required to spend a year hacking and living in the technology they want to comment on...

i wish there was an icon or some onomatopoeia that would accurately reflect a deep sigh, tightened lips, and exasperation. siiighooghummm?

shirky's coverage of linux, from what I have skimmed, is depressingly unoriginal. sigh I will have to read here comes everybody" more fully...

wow the kid can actually explain how fast lucky luke has to be to draw his revolver faster than his shadow!

have picma micron 05mm with archival ink, will travel...

thought of the day

if history repeats, by definition we did not learn from it, and each iteration costs more. [oz/0309]

recent notes, quotes and tweets

AIG... is the sound of brain matter squished underfoot...

when there is nothing to do, it's a waste of electricity to keep the mind running. -- Andre Kukla [mental traps]

I would like originality and repeat scores on my tweets. maybe numbering, indexing and concordance as well. (pat. pend)

grrrr bad enough we had to live with stupid watered-down "sci-fi" for years. now syfy? is that the sound u get when ectoplasmic goo drips?

quoth graydon hoare:

facebook users are insane. it's a web page. full of people's vague mutterings and crude party photos. get a grip.

new journalism: i wish it would be called something else, like journalism-the-next-generation (jtng)...

thought of the day: sun bleaches anything it touches, including thoughts.

so cool to find a quote i had noted from a broderick essay come back to me via my email sig line someone responded to four (!) years later:

bloat is the enemy of promise. sadly, like super-sized servings of greasy junk food, bloat sells. -- damien broderick

deleted ambiance app from my iphone. latest edition requires signup/login for sounds to put you to sleep and you have to pay for the priviledge. just what I need: another login in yet another opportunistic web service. not sure if sleeping is the expected result or the existing condition.

what would world be like without omelettes?

facebook vs twitter: re-structuring vs structuring... closed to open vs open to well... open. perennial battle of world-building. alas, twitter has a foundation made of balsa wood, bale wire and duct tape, so we'll see how easy it is to build a structure on.

thought for the morning... heraclitus was wrong: u can bathe in the same river twice. you just have to swim damned fast to catch it again.

thought of the day: when all else fails, pay attention!

nothing like an old-fashioned shave: meditation under cold steel.

readings on photography for early spring, part one

portraiture... one of the finest books on portraiture is now out of print, alas. i have studied every image in it countless times since 2000... just great portraits with short notes on the process of making the images, composition, positioning the sitter etc.

jane bown, faces

closeup... this one is a photographer scientist's exploration of extraordinary things around her, from microscopic to larger. just amazing and eye-opening work, with short, sometimes lyrical introductions to out-of-this world [yet of this world] images.

felice frankel and george whitesides, on the surface of things: images of the extraordinary in science

light... for a long time i searched for a really good book on photographing lighting that covered everything, from product to portrait. this book happens to be an indispensable reference. a lot of text, a lot of technical detail, but i think well worth the effort if one is interested in best uses of light.

fil hunter, steven biver, paul fuqua, light - science & magic: an introduction to photographic lighting

composition and design ... this one is one of the better books on the topic. covers everything from gestalt perception, dynamic tension, to graphic and photographic design elements to process. i especially like the case studies, various images made and their issues, leading to the one image that has all the right ingredients.

michael freeman, the photographer's eye: composition and design for better digital photos

law of indecision

i recently discovered this:

oz's law of indecision: when enough indecision accumulates, it collapses into a dwarf decision.

[march 2009]

recently noted quotes

must... have... sushi! - eren yigit [age 10]

ufs must die. -- casper dik

will true love conquer all? not in my show! -- joker

when in doubt, eat broccoli -- liz pearson and mairlyn smith [ultimate foods]

the wonderful thing about science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your eyes. -- xkcd [what about the brain?]

recently deleted iphone apps

two pieces of "free" ad-supported software deleted from my iphone: movies (flixter), and i.tv. thank you for playing. currently undecided on the movies replacement, not an important app. i.tv was quite easy to replace: napkin studio's what's on is a [says so from the start] ad-free tv guide. it has a somewhat strange initial setup sequence, but once configured, quite nice and smooth. thanks guys.

all i want

first noted quote of the new year... john shaw, from the intro to his photoshop cs3 ebook [review]:

All I want to do is make a good image. I don’t want to make a composite picture by taking a tree from one photo, a wolf from another, those humpback whales from a third, and putting all these parts into a shot of the Grand Canyon.

perl

As I progressed through the project -- as my shell surpassed 1,000 lines and made its way towards 10,000 -- I was learning of a painful truth about Perl that many others had discovered before me: that it is an undesigned dung heap of a language entirely inappropriate for software in-the-large. -- bryan cantrill

[on a related note, see perl as voodoo. thanks ivo.]

storm [haiku]

snow storm -
unblinking, she holds
my gaze.

[oz/2008. all rights reserved.]

idiotic comment of the month

mr harper, on his potential departure from power:

the opposition is attempting to impose this deal without your say, without your consent, and without your vote.

those of us who have lived in countries that produce minority and coalition governments with great regularity should either find a nearby wall to relieve the strain on our heads, or laugh uproariously in disbelief. it is not clear what part of the recent election results mr harper does not understand: his minority part, the opposition having received the majority of the votes, or that coalitions can and should be formed when a governing party is too arrogant and/or too stupid to do its job properly.

toronto sun and canadian democracy

today's toronto sun headline screams: no! no! no! this must not be allowed to happen. [those who studied media are excused for thinking that this is a headline from a newspaper in chilean dictatorship years, and the newspaper is el mercurio] toronto sun should stuff it. this is exactly what is allowed to happen in canadian democracy, where majority of canadians have elected people who can and should use their position to bring change when needed, including a re-structure of governance. goodbye to mister harper, whose arrogance and weak¹ intellect is the cause of unnecessary turmoil. to quote david mamet [bambi vs godzilla]

the unfortunate and inevitable concomitant of "bring it on" is "how do you like it now?"

¹an intellect which has ideology as its primary source of nourishment is weak by definition.

today's dropped iphone app: WeatherEye

nice looking app. in its info page, in all caps, it claims it is FREE. nowhere in its info page does it mention that it is ad-supported. nowhere does it mention that it will want to know your sex and birthdate for better ad placement. yet another bit of cybercrud that wasted my bandwidth, and is now deleted from my iphone.

my eyeballs are very expensive. ask permission before trying to capture them, or go to hell.