MacOSX 10.5 added some bling, possibly to “catch up” with Vista. The transparent menu bar sucks. Completely. Please, someone at Apple, fix this.
I’ve got my desktop picture set to cycle through some of my photographs. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, but occasionally, one comes up that causes my menu bar to look like this:
Seriously.
Yes, transparency is cool. It’s great to show off the power of the UI renderer, etc… But not at the sake of readability.
Walking across campus this morning, I passed a couple dozen students with laptops open, sucking the wifi network. I wasn’t trying to snoop, but I noticed that well over half of them had browsers open to Facebook. It struck me that they are spending much of their time pumping content and data into a proprietary commercial venture. And they’re fine with it. I’m pretty sure they’re capable of understanding what it means to provide so much information about themselves - what they like, who they know, what they’re doing, the music they listen to, the books they read, their vocabulary, things they’re selling/buying, etc…
I’ve been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I’ve actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.
Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren’t indexed by Google, and they’re essentially part of a private conversation.
I want to preface this post by saying that I realize that it will sound like pretentious self-important aren’t-I-great writing. That’s not what I intended, but it’s difficult to write about this without throwing caution to the wind. Although I shoot a fair number of photographs, and at least partially identify myself as a photographer, I have had absolutely no formal training. I have no “expertise” on the subject, aside from that which has been self-taught, and experience gathered from shooting something like 50,000 photographs over the years. People have been asking me to provide some pointers on how to improve their photography, resulting in this blog post. OK. That’s out of the way…
I just tried to navigate around in my Time Machine backup, only to find that it was woefully out of date. I’d set it to automatically back everything up, and had assumed that it would, you know, automatically back things up.
It hadn’t been doing it.
Since December 5, 2007.
Over a month ago.
And I’d assumed that I had a reliable hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backup.
I just got my signed travel request approval to cover my pilgrimage to Lotusland for NothernVoice 2008. I mean, I was already planning on going, even if I had to stick the trip on my Visa card, but it’s nice to know I can go with blessings :-) The moose is loose!
As I’ve said a few times, this is my one must-attend event. If this is all I get to do in 2008, the year would still be a success. The biggest draw for me is being able to hang out with a bunch of people whom I both respect and admire, and let myself get pulled out of my normal comfort zone to kick out the jams for what isn’t a purely educational, nor a purely technology conference. I’ve blogged before about why I’m looking forward to NV08, and why previousNorthernVoiceconferences have been so meaningful for me.
I just completed my “2007/365” project, where I took at least one photograph per day for the entire year. I didn’t realize going in just how hard it would be, but it forced me to see things differently and I did learn to be a bit more proficient with the technical aspects of photography.
Taking a cue from Dean Shareski, I’ve put together some of my favorite photographs taken in 2007. I maintain a “Photos I Like Most” set on my Flickr account, where I keep 100 photographs that I personally like. As I add a new one, I have to drop an older one. So, I just selected the photos from that set that were taken in 2007. This isn’t a “year in review” or “my top 10 photos” - just some of the photos I took this year that I personally like. They’re listed in reverse chronological order, with newest at the top and oldest at the bottom. Kinda bloggish that way…
This post is another in what feels like an endless series of love letters to Aperture. I’ve been using Aperture exclusively for a year now. At first, I was in way over my head. A complete amateur, lost in a professional tool. Now, I’m a complete amateur, able to salvage photographs pretty effectively in a professional tool. I’ve dabbled with iPhoto recently (using it to manage the photos from my son’s Fisher Price camera, because sending a 5 year old into Aperture felt like overkill) and I’m positive I could never go back. I’ve imbibed deeply of the Aperture Kool-Aid. It’s entirely possible that other apps (Lightroom?) could do what Aperture does, but Aperture works so amazingly well that I won’t bother to check out the other apps for awhile.
Jim posted about Yahoo! Shortcuts, and while the WordPress plugin sounds cool (it claims to scan a blog post and automagically find links to blog posts, flickr photos, and other sources of info), I’m not sure how well it’ll translate into real life. It looks like it scans the blog entry as you’re writing it, and when done it’ll run some code to insert stuff into the post before publishing.
Long ago, I made a decision to publish everything that I do under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license (CC:By). With all of the licenses available, and all of the clauses listed as part of Creative Commons, why did I choose not to invoke them?
I don’t publish things online for fame, nor fortune. I started doing this primarily as an outboard, searchable brain. Over time, the network effects kicked in, and I’ve kept doing it for the additional reasons of sharing thoughts, experiences, and information with the rest of the class. The conversations that take place across the various bits of the social web have become far more important to me than simply publishing content. In order to honour the spirit of the network, attribution for use of content is required - a simple hyperlink - which then teaches Google, Technorati, and the rest of The Machine about the semantic connection between pages (and people).
This post is intended to counteract the funk that I was feeling (and generated) when I made my previous post. Things aren’t quite as dire as I made them out to be. Yes, there is much room for improvement, both locally and globally, but this is statistically the best time in the history of humanity, so far. And the trends show that things are getting better, overall. See Hans Rosling’s excellent TED presentation, where he backs this up with some powerful statistical animations (and even sword swallowing).
This post is in response to 
