The Replacements

Shared a cigarette for breakfastShared an airplane ride for lunch Sitting in between a ghost And a walking bowl of punch Can you play a little hunch?

Predicting a delay on landing Well I predict we'll have a drink Lost my money on the first hand Got burned on a big fat king

And your ears are gonna ring And your eyes just wanna close Nothing changes I suppose

It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no

We'll wait away the raindrops Look out boy, you'll catch cold Serving boy can chain nothing That ain't anchored to his throne But at least he's going home

Sitting like a backwoods junkie Caught down in a servant trust Look at the funny monkey Putting silver in his cup

And your silver turns to rust And your secondhand clothes Trust no one I suppose

It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no

Shared a cigarette for breakfast Shared a pack of lies for lunch Credit card almighty Bringing in the next little bunch

And you owe me on a hunch And your eyes just wanna close And nothing changes I suppose

It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no It's too late to turn back, here we go Portland, oh no

good read

The Dumbing Of America - washingtonpost.com

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Retoucher in the New yorker

The World of Fashion: Pixel Perfect: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

Busy busy busy

Been real busy here. Did a shoot for Fuze Organics, another one for Guitar Hero for the DS which I can't post till June, a smattering of band photos and the retouching has been off the hook. Lots of Olympic retouching coming in as well. Can't post those for a looong time though.

Add in the fact that we are moving soon and I am not getting any form of that thing called sleep.

Which makes me tired and neglect the blogs. Many sorry's!

This is handy

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Compress a file or folder via drag and drop to Dock

nspired by this hint about the Screen Sharing application in /System » Library » CoreServices, I found another small but very nice application there.

Drag Archive Utility to your Dock (or toolbar or sidebar). Now, you can drag a folder onto the application, the result of which will be a compressed archive in the same location. If you don't like the default .cpgz format but prefer ZIP, or want to have another destination for all archives, just open the utility and change its Preferences.

Fyi

For those not in the know, Clinton served on Wal-Mart’s board for six years prior to her husband’s run for the presidency. She recently received $5,000 from Wal-Mart. I’ve raised the Wal-Mart relationship repeatedly in my current race against Clinton and it causes deep unease among voters. I believe it speaks to the incumbent’s close ties to abusive corporate power: her large corporate financial contributions, her support for so-called “free trade” (which is simply trade to benefit corporations) and her unwillingness to confront corporate power that denies every American, among other things, universal health insurance. So, I had to chuckle when I read that Clinton, having never said a bad word about the company in the past, recently said that Wal-Mart should pay more for its workers’ health benefits. And, to boot, she returned the $5,000 she had received from the company. But, when asked what she did about the company’s benefits for workers when she served on the board, she replied, “Well, you know, I, that was a long time ago ... have to remember…”

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t promote an image of being an intelligent woman who has a pile of facts at her fingertips but, at the same time, you suffer a sudden bout of amnesia when asked to answer for your record. And it would be an inconvenient record to defend.

In 1992, Wal-Mart was simply smaller than it is today. But it was still huge, with $43.9 billion in net sales, 1,714 stores and 371,000 employees. Even in 1992, Wal-Mart was already the world’s largest retailer.

And the board Hillary Clinton sat on was rabidly anti-union, was exploiting sweatshop labor around the world, discriminating against women workers, forcing workers to labor off the clock and destroying communities that did not want them. This should not be a shock: Clinton was a partner in the Rose law firm, one of the most active anti-union law firms in the country.

So, the question still remains: what did Hillary Clinton do—or, not do—when she served on the board of Wal-Mart? Maybe, if her memory was refreshed, she could tell us how she protested the company’s relentless union-busting, expressed feminist outrage at the widespread discrimination against women and was horrified that the mushrooming wealth of the Wal-Mart family was made possible on the backs of slave labor around the world.

Thanks Steve

Fun.

Tracked Shots on Equatorial Mountings

One axis of this mount, called the "polar axis" aligns parallel to the Earth's axis and a motor and gear turn the scope around this axis at the exact same rate that the Earth turns so that an object in the sky stays stationary in the telescope.

This type of mounting allows the telescope and camera to track or exactly follow the sky as the stars appear to move across the sky as the Earth turns underneath them.

An equatorial mounting that is correctly polar aligned can track on the stars to allow exposures of many minutes. A camera with a normal lens can be mounted "piggyback" on top of the telescope and wide angle, normal, and short telephoto focal length shots taken while the mounting tracks the stars.

Worked Over and Overworked

6449 Comments, mostly neg about debates.


ABC News: Clinton, Obama Find 'Brotherly Love' at Philly Debate

This was the most disgusting display of journalism I've ever seen. Charlie and George are puppets. William Ayers, flag pins and "Bitter? Give me a #### break. Those are media driven issues and NOT what people who are struggling with high gas prices are concerned about. I almost paid four dollars for regular unleaded gas at at discount station. But the high price of gas was a throw away question at the end of TWO HOURS! Has anybody at ABC been to a grocery store lately? Are the houses or condos in their neighborhood empty or up for sale b/c of the mortgage crisisI guess not, because they insulted both candidates with the tabloid questions in the first 50 minutes of this charade that was called a debate. This is why I get my news elsewhere, b/c ABC can't be trusted to deal with the truth. Poor Peter Jennings, he didn't work as hard as he did for you to turn this into tabloid TV. And if you want to do Hannity's bidding for him, then go to FOX News.

Subprime was just the beginning. Wait until California's prime borrowers start handing their keys to the bank.


Why the next mortgage crisis may be worse. - By Mark Gimein - Slate Magazine

Just two banks, Washington Mutual and Countrywide, wrote more than $300 billion worth of option ARMs in the three years from 2005 to 2007, concentrated in California. Others—IndyMac, Golden West (the creator of the option ARM, and now a part of Wachovia)—wrote many billions more. The really amazing thing is that the meltdown in California is already happening and virtually none of these loans have yet reset.

* In San Bernardino, a house bought for $310,000 in 2005 is now being offered by the bank for $199,900. * A 2,000-square-foot ranch house in Rancho Santa Margarita is down from $775,000 to $565,000. * A starter home in Sacramento, sold for $215,000 in 2004, is now down to $129,900.

These are not sale prices. They are asking prices. Don't doubt that they are negotiable.

Yeah

"Nostalgia is the new friendship" That Nathan guy again.

PXL-2000


PXL-2000 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oddly, simulating the PXL's simple hybrid design turns out to be quite difficult. Indeed, getting the cassette deck distortion just right has proven to be an extremely complex problem. One can, however, get close to the PXL's oddly ethereal quality by putting a video sequence through a number of different processing steps. These must be carried out in this order or the effect will be quite different. * Reduce the saturation to 0. The PXL2000 is a monochrome camera. * Reduce the frame rate to 15 frames per second. Deinterlace the video; the PXL does not interlace. * Reduce the resolution to 120 pixels by 90 pixels. * Apply a Gaussian blur function with a radius of about one and a half pixels. This mimics the lowpass filter. * Sharpen the image slightly (about 30%). * Clamp the black point to about 5% and the white point to about 95%. * Compress the dynamic range of the entire image by about 1.2 to 1. * Posterize to 90 steps * Add a lag effect; this should add a small proportion of the three previous frames to each frame, giving slight trails and motion artifacting * Add whichever video modulator simulation effect you prefer, plus some scanlines (since PXL is not interlaced) * Clamp the white and black points again * Apply a second Gaussian blur with the same radius * Add a black border around the image to push the edges of the image into the title safe area. (The image area is exactly 75% of a full 720 x 540 NTSC frame, or 540 x 405.)

The result of this process should resemble PXL2000 video.

Thanks Nathan!

Azureus and a Base Station FYI


First Thoughts: AirPort Extreme Base Station - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

RE: torrenting and ports, if you have Azureus, you don't have to manually forward ports anymore with the new router. Goto Azureus Preferences > Plugins > UPnP > NAT-PMP and enable it.

On the new Extreme, goto Internet > NAT and Enable NAT Port-Mapping Protocol

Now everytime you open Azureus, it should be able to open the appropriate ports on the Extreme as needed.