Relax. This isn’t a navel-gazing retrospective. It’s an effort at editing my photo library.
I took some time last night to go through the photos I shot in 2010, to find ones that were good. I do this long after taking them, to distance from the emotional connection - it’s easy to think a photo’s good if it’s of family member etc… if you like the content or moment. But I try to go through on a second (and third, and fourth) pass to find ones that are good on their own. I started doing this delayed review after watching an interview with Gary Winogrand, where he mentioned that he doesn’t even develop film for at least a year after he shoots it, to separate himself from the emotion of the moment.
5 hours worth of mouse activity on my computer at work, while putting the finishing touches on my MSc thesis research proposal, ethics application, and supporting documents. Dark spots are where the mouse stopped moving (the big blob must be where I was doing a bunch of typing or something). Lines are where the mouse moved. Light circles are clicks.
I’ve been trying to find ways to reduce the amount of information about me that’s tracked every time I do anything online. I don’t like that every piece of activity is tracked, analyzed, and sold. I’ve said over and over, that if any government or agency had proposed tracking this much data on every citizen, there would be an uproar. But we just shrug it off when it’s done by the big online properties.
a series of composite images, produced from my 2010/365photos daily photo project. Each month was composited separately, and then a composite for the entire year was produced from the monthlies.
wherein I likely get added to a few more watch lists… the article is specifically about corruption of the political process in the US, but since we are tied so closely to them, much applies here as well.
on the shift in power from democracy to corporations:
> The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.
I took each photograph in my 2010/365photos set, and combined them using ImageMagick’s `convert *.jpg -average output.png` command to produce an image representing the average of all photographs. This is how a typical moment in 2010 looked:
stupid russian spambots are hammering this blog from multiple IP addresses, and getting through Akismet like a sieve. So, instead of trying to combat the mouthbreathing cretins using l337 script kiddie tools to pump their crap into the comments section of my blog, I’m disabling comments (again) until Akismet stops sucking.
Evan and I watched Gojira (1954) last night (thanks, Netflix!). We had fun reading the subtitles, and watching Gojira do his thing. A fun movie, with some surprisingly deep cultural subtext (the society of post-atomic Japan, a scientist conflicted over his creation of a doomsday weapon…).
But… There was a scene in a fishing village on the Island of Oda Island, where an elderly man was describing the rituals they used long ago to ward of Gojira. Human sacrifice. Ritual dances.
This is a long, rambling, incomplete blog post that’s been rattling around in my head for a week. I decided to try to just put something in writing to see if I could make it less unclear. Caveat emptor.
If people are to manage their own content, forming their digital identities, they need a way to host software and content that doesn’t require obscure and detailed technical knowledge.
Us early adopters are not normal. We’ve been so close to technologies, for so long, that we forget what it’s like to be new to the stuff. Or not to live and breathe tech every day. Most people are not like us. They don’t know what HTTP is. It’s just some silly letters before the address of a website. They don’t know what DNS is. They don’t know what FTP is. They don’t know what SSH is. Or MySQL. Or PHP. Or Perl. etc…
>The basic idea is this: an Unhosted app lives on a web server and contains only source code. That source code is executed on a user’s computer and encrypts and stores data on another server. That data never passes through the app server. Therefore, the app provider doesn’t have a monopoly on your data. And since that data is encrypted, it can’t be exploited by the data host either (or at least, it probably can’t). > >The data can be hosted anywhere. “It could be in your house, it could be at your ISP or it could be at your university or workplace,” says de Jong.
Evan and I watched Gojira (1954) last night (thanks, Netflix!). We had fun reading the subtitles, and watching Gojira do his thing. A fun movie, with some surprisingly deep cultural subtext (the society of post-atomic Japan, a scientist conflicted over his creation of a doomsday weapon…).