When Alan was in town, we played some music (made some noise) and streamed it to DS106 Radio, where DrGarcia recorded some of it. She later rebroadcast it, where Bryan recorded a copy and then jammed along with us. Very cool stuff. It's extremely rough (well, at least my part), but so much fun.

#ds106radio Campfire with @cogdog @dlnorman & @bryanjack by Bryanjack

We spent a few days last week camping at White Lake, in BC. The campground had a couple of docks that we were able to use, and they made pretty good spots for hanging out, swimming, and fishing.

Dock life is pretty good, at least to this land-locked prairie boy...

I'm dabbling with a [contact form plugin](http://blog.hunk.com.mx/magic-contact/) (again). There should be a fancy schmancy "Feedback" sliding tab on the left side of the site now. I might want to spend some time tweaking how it's set up. Not entirely happy with the default text etc... This post is really just a way to clear the static file cache without blowing it all away, so it shows up on the front page...

From [Neil Strauss' article in the WSJ](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576415940086842866.html?mod=e2fb):

> Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Nothing groundbreaking, but a really nice description of how the networked and shared access to all information ever captured is shaping our individual memory and information retrieval strategies.

Or something. I don’t have the attention span to actually read the article. Or the short article summarizing the article. Or, really, to write a proper blog post about the short article summarizing the article.

I know I think of memory first as query structures. I’d be hooped if teh googel went down.

I was sitting on the deck after getting home, cooling down from the bike ride, and was struck by the awesome fast-moving whispy clouds overhead. Had an idea to try to shoot the motion, and shot 15 minutes of video with my phone. I then recorded a few minutes of atmospheric guitar noise, and spent far too long convincing iMovie to do something with the video, and then even longer convincing my internet connection to upload it to YouTube. Anyway, here it is…

The story of the [monkeys that snapped photographs of themselves](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2011051/Black-macaque-takes-self-portrait-Monkey-borrows-photographers-camera.html) made the rounds last week. A photographer's gear was borrowed by a band of monkeys, and they managed to squeeze off a few photos of themselves. Some of the photos are actually very interesting.

**Photograph on left copyright 2011, an unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia. Photograph on right copyright 2011, another unnamed macaque somewhere in Indonesia.**

I took this photo of Evan during the 2007 Calgary Stampede. We were in the kid's section of the midway rides, and he was soaking in all of the excitement. He was almost 5 years old, so the sounds and lights and motion and energy had overstimulated him pretty strongly. Shortly after this, he hopped onto a dragon rollercoaster, and rode it until he nearly fell over. It was a good day.

I've decided to disable comments on my blog again.

I don't care that the comment threads often wound up in left field talking about meta-meta-meta-social criticism. Having comments open invites that kind of thing to happen - it's leaving an open mic plugged into the PA system, and inviting anyone to take it. That's essentially the whole point of having open comments, to see where things go after hitting "Publish."

Duncan Davidson, a photographer I've admired for years (he's one of the guys behind the dailyshoot project), wrote up a fantastic description of the recent Kind of Bloop/Blue photograph copyright brouhaha. A photographer, Jay Maisel, takes an iconic photograph of Miles Davis. It's an amazing photograph. It's used for the cover of Davis' Kind of Blue album. Wonderful stuff.

[caption id="attachment_4951" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="Pixel-art image by Andy Baio. Photograph by Jay Maisel."][/caption]

Fast forward a few decades. Musician and artist Andy Baio releases an album of chiptune music, and creates some cover artwork inspired by Maisel's photograph. He doesn't directly use the photograph, and doesn't simply manipulate the photograph. He essentially creates a new pixel-based drawing based on the photograph. It's a completely new work, painstakingly created in a different medium, inspired by the original. Maisel basically threatens to sue the bejeezus out of Baio, but he's willing to settle for a comparatively mild ass-raping. Maisel's a majillionaire photographer, with resources to burn on law-talking-guys. Baio's just a guy making stuff for fun.

This is one of those photos that looks extremely dramatic, but has a boring and mundane backstory. I was doing housework - probably laundry or something equally exciting and glamorous - when I looked out of our bedroom window and saw these clouds. The sun was just about to set (nearly 9pm on a mid-July evening), causing some severe and dramatic lighting, and the storm cell was boiling up over downtown into higher altitude winds. I ran, grabbed my handy XT, slapped on the el cheapo 300mm lens and started messing around to see what I could capture. And then a plane moved into the frame. It was far away from the storm cloud, but the lighting and long focal length made it look like a narrow escape. Often, people think this photo was taken from the air, and that I was shooting down on the cloud. I wasn't so lucky.

I'm working on a couple of projects that will involved formalized "stakeholder engagement" processes, so I'm reading up on some of the resources from that field. First up is the United Nations handbook: [The Stakeholder Engagement Manual](http://www.accountability.org/about-us/publications/the-stakeholder.html), by the [United Nations Division of Technology, Industry and Economics](http://www.unep.org/dtie/).

It's describing an engagement process based on the goals of inclusiveness and sustainability, rather than corporate risk management. That approach could come in handy in lots of places.