Cafe Bucky

I own ThereAndThen .org, .net, and .com.

I am thinking of taking my writings on ThereThen addresses, and
moving them to one of my other domains.

So if someone is interested in purchasing all 3 ThereAndThen
domains, they should contact me (dls in the domain name of
daniel, with a dot org on the end)

To the six legged invaders downstairs:

Your time of play in and around my kitchen sink is fast nearing the end. I have cleaned the counters thoroughly, but still you persist in all combinations of Group Arthropod Kama Sutra amongst my innocent dishes.

I have followed your trail to the outside, past the veranda and out towards the driveway. As I would expect from you invertebrates, the trail mysteriously vanishes. This is probably a good indication that you were sent from the Underworld, but it’s likelier still that you just have a “really cool tunnel system”. You’re not paying rent, and I would have thought that wiping out 100’s of your ants and uncles (ha ha, a little human humour) would have been hint enough for you to high tail it to somewhere more suitable (the Petaluma City Hall comes to mind).

But nooo, apparently news doesn’t travel well through all of those feelers crowding out your sense of self-preservation. Look, there isn’t food lying around, leave!

I am giving you until 8 am to clear out of my kitchen. Should you persist in mocking my efforts (holding 4 legs to your little noses while making obscene gyrations), you will feel the wrath of Raid! Do not think, my little roaming exoskeletal squatters, that I won’t cut loose with massive amounts of aerosol hell upon thee!

And stay out of my coffee grinder.

Sincerely,

The Master Of The House.

Wow, such a compliment! A couple of photos of mine have started cropping up as background screens on some blogs.

Gosh, I’m flattered! No, really, I am. I mean, I’m happy to be an innovative photographer. My teacher Art Rogers, once called my work “ethereal”. It’s a thrill to see total strangers using my work, because they think it’s cool or whatever. thank you!

However, it’s just me paying the bandwidth bill.

So, photo frenzied fans, please do me a favor:

* give me a photo credit if you use my work
* make your own copy so that you’re not hitting my server
* remember, I own the copyright on all of my words, images, movies, and hiccups. You can’t use my photos in any non-personal context without my permission.

And this reminds me that I should mention two things:

* I will launch my own Photo Site, SnapSmith.com, sometime in October or November. There will be some easy method to order prints.
* I am writing a photo db, FlexiPhoto, and, among other things, it makes the process of embedding photos in an arbitrary web page (with control of scaling and quality) very easy. I’ll have to think about how to limit access to full-sized originals :-) (and permissions in general)
* oh, and if you are interested in getting zoom blur shots of something in Manhattan, I’d very likely be up for the gig. There’s more to my life than programming, raising a daughter, doodling on my Strat, and keeping up with F1 and Soccer :-)

So, on the one hand, I’m asking for credit. On the other, I’m writing something that makes it even easier to grab photos. That part echoes the infamous X11 credo: “mechanism, not policy”.

A question I’ve heard a few times is “is there a way to let people see a photo on a computer, but not grab a copy?” The answer is a resounding “no!”. Once the pixels are on the screen, that’s it. They’re up for grabs. About the only thing I can do is slap watermarks on anything I want to charge for.. or lower the quality to the point where “you get the idea, but getting the original will cost in some way”.

So in a nutshell, recall the bit from the book Neuromancer where The Finn winces, and says “observe the protocol” :-)

Just wrote an entry about embedding photos in arbitrary web pages

You know, like:

scale 10, quality 10…

or:

scale 5, quality 90…

Announcing a blog focused on the development of FlexiPhoto:

http://www.flexiphoto.com/blog

This is another piece of the puzzle towards getting that project going: a focused spot to make annoucements, solicit feedback, and so on.

Wow, Canon is really raising the bar with the EOS-1Ds Mark II. 16.7 megapixels for a 35mm-sized SLR! That’s an image size of 4992×3328.

Gosh. Drool. And it’s 1:1 with film. None of this silly “multiply your focal length by 1.5″ stuff. An 18mm lens is an 18mm lens.

I was wondering how closely this compares with film, in terms of resolution. There are a couple of decent pages on this:

* ClarkVision: Film versus Digital
* How Many Mesagpixels Does My Digital Camera Need?

I still love my Nikon D1, and my wife’s D1x. We’ve been thinking about jumping to Canon down the road, and this just adds to the thought. I like the fact that Canon lenses are better suited for motorsports photography (faster autofocus, no pun intended)

(invariably, someone who’s happy with a little digicam will wonder why I would lust after something so big and clunky. Print size. My wife can print some beautiful stuff off of her Epson 2200 at 11″x14″. I also like my comparitively smaller Nikon 950, and my Holga)

brief definition: FlexiPhoto is a web-based photo database.

There’s a preview version of the FlexiPhoto source up on the site!

I’ll make it more obvious soon. More docs are on the way. Ask me if you want to get the version that’s there now. The key word would be “downloads” :-)

The goal this weekend was just to put a stake in the ground; to just get to the point where I felt like I had settled on a license, that I had something functional, and that I knew I’d gotten the ball rolling.

So that’s a big relief! It’s good to get something non-trivial out there.

I saw the Ramones at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco in 1980 or 81, during the “End Of The Century” tour. They were unlike any band I knew at that time. And they played with so much energy and passion! Sure, I’d seen the Dead Kennedys and others in the punk scheme of things (at venues such as Mabuhay Gardens, and The Fillmore), but something about the Warfield (which is a grand old theatre) turned it up a notch.

Johnny and Dee Dee managed to play with their guitars at their knees, legs splayed, heads bobbing along at insanely high metronome. The front three were planted up there on stage; posed in a certain defiance, focusing the room on them. They had “it”.

Goodbye Johnny. From the opening chords of Blitzkreig Bop, you gave us a lot of joy. Now my daughter is a second-generation Ramones lover.

Sorry to see you go, go, go, go goodbye.