The gear does not make the artist.

So a lot of photo buffs on the interwebs are linking to thisEssay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age. And I can't help but kinda laugh at it. There is a tendency in photography for people to define there work by the gear they use to make it and I just think that is a cop out. I do exactly what he does digitally and I have shot with hand held 4x5 pressboxes over my head with strobes to get action. This romantic association with gear is something that just seems like a lack of vision on the part of the artist. If you want to shoot slowly and take your time, shoot slowly and take your time. Don't let your gear frame your art. The gear is there to serve you not the other way around.

River Ride

sellwood-river-park Here is a Pano I tool on the ride the other day with the Canon G9. I really enjoy the look of that bridge coming out of the trees. Then the fishermen and sunbathers just add that summer touch.

Die you slugish bastards!

Jane's Delicious Garden - Snails and Slugs

Slugs and snails love eating fleshy, green plants – and especially young fleshy, green plants. This is why they make a beeline for our vegetable garden. But did you know there is something slugs and sails like even more than green plants? Beer!

Oh, they shall be made to pay for going after my spinach. The slugs, they shall suffer.

Morning Pics

Now I have wet slippers Really been enjoying my mornings in the garden here. Here is a pic of some of the veggies I planted the other day.

Been thinking about killing the original pixelrust photo page as it is almost redundant now. I really like the new wordpress engine running this part better then that one, but I like the single image post as well. It's just clean and simple. So screw it, I'll keep both running simply because it amuses me.

This here pic was taken with my trusty Canon G9. The macro on that thing is fun as all get out. I have a fancy idea of doing a trypdich of these three images (two links there, fyi.). But I have not laid them all out yet. I like these as a sun flare series though.

(I can hear that little voice in my ear going, "Decorative art! BAH!" and I have stabbed it with a rusty swingline stapler.)

Not Paradise by the dashboard lights

Disable Dashboard | Utilities | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld

There may be other reasons you’d rather not have Dashboard available. For instance, if you run a lab of Macs in a school, you may not want the students wasting all their work time on the Asteroids video game widget or watching the (I am not making this up) Goblet of Fire movie release date countdown Widget. If you’d like to disable Dashboard, for either RAM usage or other reasons, here’s how to do it. It requires a trip to the Terminal, in /Applications/Utilities, but it’s not too hard to do.

How to kill the Dashboard once and for all!

Quotes

"“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do" - Mark Twain

"Daddy, what does regret mean? Well son, the funny thing about regret is, It's better to regret something you have done, Than to regret something you haven't done."

- Butthole Surfers

Coffee and Poetry

In the vain of, "Do Something Different, Start Today" I figured maybe I'll do something I have not done for many years here and post some poetry. I used to do it all the time in the way back archives. What is something that is possibly particular to me is that I cannot write shit at the computer. I need a good sitting spot some coffee and the outdoors to write anything decent. So when I get sucked up into computer land I fail to write anything at all. But anyhow, Here is a coffee time ditty I wrote this morning:

big fluffy fast moving clouds shoot past the breaks in the trees the newly planted garden glistens with fresh water all deep earth black with hopeful green hands reaching up to the clouds like so much cotton candy

In praise of booooze.

' I drink, therefore I can', Prospect Magazine issue 158 May 2009 - Printer Friendly Article

The Colorado study tested the DNA of moderate-to-heavy drinking students to determine whether they had the G-variant gene. They were divided into two groups accordingly, before having alcohol injected directly into the bloodstream (to eliminate differences in absorption rate). Those with the G-variant produced a slightly different version of what is known as the mu-opioid protein, which elicits a stronger response in the brain. As a result they reported stronger feelings of happiness and elation after their shot of alcohol. This initial euphoria is usually followed by a longer state of relaxation, lasting several hours. For those with the G-variant, this period aids the creative process. Perhaps the odd additional tipple might be needed to keep the fire burning, although too much further consumption douses the flames prematurely, inducing lethargy.

The effect of alcohol on this group is not the same as an opiate. The euphoria is much less pronounced than, say, heroin, while alcohol still exerts depressive effects. A drink too many and the soporific effect predominates, overwhelming the endorphins and sending even the G-variant drinker to sleep. This may be why Francis Bacon, by his own admission, worked well after a few drinks, but not when drunk.

The creative effect of alcohol, then, seems to involve a delicate counterpoint between stimulation and relaxation. Unlike some side-effects of drink, such as its tendency to make some people morose or violent, this endorphin release is positive and pleasant to behold. People with this gene variant also seem more prone to alcoholism, perhaps engaging in an increasingly vain pursuit of the highs they used to experience after the first drink or two.

There once was a saying uttered among my friends in younger days, "There ain't nothing I do I can't do better drunk."

Now the saying is more along the lines of, "I need a nap."

The moral? Don't get old. Great link though....

That's funny that Japanese word "dorobo" means Thief.

So my friend Manabu informs me that: "That's funny that Japanese word "dorobo" means Thief . And Drobo for a Japanese person sounds exactly that."

Which I find to be high comedy and appropriate all at the same time.

So I outputted the Drobo's own diagnostic information to email to them to get some feedback as to what is happening and they ENCRYPTED the diagnostic. That's some shady business practices there.

I suggest you think long and hard about having all your data saved in a proprietary format that only Drobo can access. And now I see that diagnostic info is encrypted as well. Why?

Let them roam

Stop worrying about your children! | Salon Life

May 4, 2009 | Over the past year, syndicated columnist Lenore Skenazy, 49, has become something of a heretic. She's an American mother of two boys, now 11 and 13, who dares to suggest that today's kids aren't growing up in constant state of near peril.

Amid the cacophony of terrifying Amber Alerts and safety tips for every holiday, Skenazy is a chipper alternative, arguing that raising children in the United States now isn't more dangerous than it was when today's generation of parents were young. And back then, it was reasonably safe, too. So why does shooing the kids outside and telling them to have fun and be home by dark seem irresponsible to so many middle-class parents today?

I grew up wandering outside non stop.

Drobo, uh oh.

Are you familiar with Drobo? That link gos right to the support page because you are going to need it if you own one. Google "Drobo won't mount, but shows up in Dashboard". Basically, it disconnects and then won't remount but I can see it in the Dashboard app. I can even get it to blink it's lights at me and see it in Disk Utility app. But it won't mount come hell or high water. To fix it I shut down the computer, unplug the firewire cable from the Drobo, wait for it to go to standby mode (one light), then unplug the Drobo power cord. Wait 20 seconds or so and plug the cord back in to power it up. Meanwhile I boot up the compter and launch Dashboard. Once the Drobo is done booting I plug the Firewire cable back in and have 60% chance it will show up. Repeat if it does not. Not exactly fun.

This time after doing this I get some Dashboard red lights saying it's going to take 100 hours to rebuild and data protection is in progress. The tech support person blames the new WD Caviar Green drives. Saying any of them could be bad. So by their logic you are adding more possibilities for failure by having more hard drives in a RAID? Really? Is that not the opposite reason for running a RAID?

I also found out that Drobo uses a proprietary RAID system. So if it does crash, you can't get your data back witout another Drobo bay to plug them into. Not cool. Time to go back to a bank of mirrored hard drives as a back up. One fails I can pull it and still have data. I have been using eSATA Drive Enclosures by Mac Gurus for about 5 years now and have never had a hiccup. Been using Drobo since Sept 08 and have had to call tech support 3-4 times and now I have a serious system crash on my hands that I can't do anything about for 100 hours till it gets done with it's rebuild.

This Drobo does not inspire confidence. If a car keeps breaking down you are not gonna take it cross country on a road trip. The Drobo keeps breaking down, I don't trust it with long term storage needs.

And to people who say RAID is not backup, yeah I know, but it's part of my redundancy here and I use it as my library in Lightroom and iView Media. So shush. The idea of having to rebuild those libraries over the weekend while finding another back up solution to phase out the Drobo is not fun.