Never Say Devil

It’s probably nothing like desperation, actually. I’ll try and explain. There’s this little voice inside my head. It doesn’t tell me to hurt people, if that’s what you’re thinking, no. It’s more like a compulsion. I always thought it was something external to myself, a being from a higher plane, guardian angel, or something like that, giving me clues about what would make my life happier, and, to use the words of Radiohead, more productive.

I had this thought the other day, however: Maybe the little voice inside my head, really is inside my head. Most of us have two brain hemispheres (condolences to those who don’t), both having different functions but through the high bandwidth connection between the two halves, both function as one whole. But, I think sometimes, my more artistic half comes to the conclusion that I need an intervention, and starts leading me away from my mainly left-brain, logical endeavours.

I find my mind wandering, thinking about photography or writing novels (an unrequited—as in I’d love to, but never get to, dream of mine), or drawing pictures of eyeballs, as I often do. Wandering away from whatever programming or problem solving task I’m currently working on. I think I engage in so many logical tasks that the right-brain becomes completely underused, and probably sits there for hours and hours wondering what the hell is going on, until it manages to get a message over to the left-brain that is strong enough to shatter its concentration and flood it with delightful compositions including lovely velvet couches and pale women who look like they might have one foot in the grave, or other decidedly Burtonesque things designed to completely derail logic, and send it careening off the bridge into a ravine.

So, the right-brain wins often, sending me on photography trips, out to meet new people, on its never ending quest for inspiration. And, the left-brain is left to wonder what all the fuss is about. What’s the big pattern underlying all this, it asks. It’s all just a bunch of random things. Pure acts of artistic desperation. Leftie, we’ll call him, can really be clueless sometimes.

This man has to be my favourite local artist. His photographs really scream about the glamour of bygone eras, and there is always a sense of longing there. He does the majority of his work on film, and does not believe in photoshop as a compositing tool. Here is a mosaic of his work.

He has started a website and I will be trying to make a website design suitable for showcasing him there.

Friendships take a lot of time to build, and for me, friendships with other women are always strange at the best of times. The following mosaic (you’ll need Microsoft Silverlight installed to be able to see it) is composed of all of the photographs produced by my friend Kara Yerex in her short lifetime on Flickr. Believe it or not, all of the images were lost in a computer crash, and so, only low resolution versions of these exist. It’s so sad! So, here’s my little homage to the lost data, and at the same time an homage to a good friend and wonderful artist.

The content for this post was generated from images found at Kara’s Flickr Stream, with the mosaic generator Andrea Mosaic, and Deep Zoom Composer which is part of the Microsoft Expression set of tools. It takes a whole lot of time and CPU horsepower to make one of these. The resulting application and data can be quite large, so I store this on the Silverlight Streaming web site which has 10GB of space just waiting for me to consume it.

It’s hard to float a boat designed by monkeys out of swiss cheese.

“Meaty Karate Bat”, a flickr image by thorinside.

Sometimes, the most perfect flash sites come along. Go to The Hero Factory and create your alter ego. Make sure to read the absolutely excellent titles that are generated when you do so! Oh my goodness, what a hoot!

Well, it’s another year already. The last one went by so fast, but it was quite the action-packed year, that’s for sure. I brought my family with me to France, which was the biggest highlight for me last year. What an amazing trip! I suspect this year will be less travel oriented, and with much more going on close to home. I dearly want to expand my photographic interests, and begin to really build up my portfolio there. I’ve met some really amazing people and I’ll continue to work for free and meet as many people as possible who want to do creative photography work.

So, let the new year begin! I hope everyone who reads this has a great 2009!

So, it’s finally happened. From my part of the world, Flickr has dropped off the map. From what I can tell, there’s some sort of DNS issue, and many of the flickr.com subdomains cannot be resolved by me, or my friend Jack starting last night and continuing all of today. I feel a little like someone has stolen my puppy.

I hope that it gets resolved quickly, or we’re going to have to call this Black Tuesday… or I guess more appropriately, White Box Tuesday, since all you can see on Flickr today is white boxes with nothing in them.

Here’s a little geek prayer: May the Internets be kind to Yahoo, and may the system administrators be swift. We pray for Flickr, and hope she comes back online soon.

UPDATE: My little geek prayer was answered. The 48 hour DNS propagation period seems to have passed, and Flickr is now ticking as fast as usual. Praise be to the Internets.

“Waking Dream”, a flickr image by thorinside.

I haven’t blogged in ages. Really, who has the time? Today I got a text message from Rachel, whom I’ve only just met (and not in person) on Facebook, and I decided to take her to this little place that I know of, with nobody living in it. We livened up the place with strobes for a while, and I came home with a few photos to process.

Things to remember for next time: Always make sure the camera is focusing on something. Always make sure the camera is not on manual focus unless I mean it. But otherwise, it was a great time. Thanks Rachel!

It is easy to assume that software you don’t understand is fundamentally broken.

For every thread, a race condition exists.