X-mas Eve 2004

It's X-mas Eve and the weathers cooled just nicely, if it stays this way it'll be nice tommorrow. Last night we foolishly ventured out to the shops, Oh my Fucking God! Highpoint a local complex was open 24 hours and by crickey folks were taking advantage of it! I took my camera along as usual. Damn battery ran out got a couple of good shots though, too lazy to post 'em here, so i'll just link to 'em over at flicker.

• Our steps under mixed lighting handeld so well by digital
• Hangin' out the car window, minimal indeed.
• Blur galore dunno where from though?

Yes indeed the light was awesome, and when I get around to it I will add them to their own Nikon Gallery over in my site.

But back to the crowds! I don't ever remember shooping this close to X-mas being that bad! It was six deep in both directions and sometimes the same in some of the shops, maybe this arvo I'll pop out to the local shops (on foot) and see wazzup?

As we now currently have broadband at home I'm listening to SomaFM and boy do they play some irreverant stuff, it's actually their special holiday mix. I just wish they'd up their rotation a little I have been listening nonstop during waking hours since Monday, and I've had to switch off once coz it got to repetitive.

Preparations for tomorrow begin in earnest now, I'm boiling the spuds for the potato salad, making the sangria mix and generally tidying up.

Hot weather & flickr

Today is our first 100 degree day in the old money so to speak, 38 degrees Celcius, was the forecast and I suspect it's hotter than that right now. Gets a bit hot in the small room out the back I call home this time of year, but as we are in a weatherboard house and there are lots of doors and windows that face all 4 points of the compass we are lucky when the change finally does come through.

So here we are 3 days into it and what have I spent 60% of my time doing? hangin' out at flickr. Have joined several groups. The squared circle (two entries already, A day in the life of, missed the lastet deadline, so we'll see how I go with the next one. Machinery - 4 entries two from my exisiting account and 2 from a shoot in the shed using a portable flash. Trippy Pix and Minimalism. getting real busy in there now, what the hell am I too do when I start back at work? Stil want to add some updates to my own site, particularly the Nikon Gallery. Ah time! When is there ever enough?

On a slightly different note, I got my first 4 books back from the binders on Monday, and to say I'm stoked is putting it mildly. Four A5 sized 16 page boooks with 12 images and text a delight o hold and to handle, can't wait to give 'em out one Christmas Eve. Itchin' now to start and make some more!

Santa IS Evil!

The links just keep on comin'

Don't be scared of Santa?

Pre-Christmas Musings?

As Christmas draws nearer someone over on the Creepy Christmas group at Flickr found an article about the increased likelihood of death around the "silly season" Well I'm gunna trump that with a table that *almost* proves the increased chance of an assault around Christmas. It's taken from a report I downloaded written for a Sydney Hospital. it's entitled -
'Investigation of the Incidence and Analysis of Cases of Alleged Violence Reporting to St Vincent's Hospital', by Marjorie Cuthbert, Frances Lovejoy, Gordian Fulde. See table below, from page 5 of the document.

Presentations of alleged assaults (Admissions in brackets)

25 December - January	176	(55)
February	113	(33)
March	169	(35)
April	147	(36)
May	118	(30)
June	131	(44)
Total	1038	(199)
Surveyed	512	(60%)	Completed forms

Don't get me wrong. I love a good feast with family on X-mas day. However my definition of what constitutes a family has changed over the years. Let's assume that a family by definition is a good family, a good family implies that it functions as a unit. Well I argue that there are no functional families at all, only degrees of dysfunctional families. As was driven home to me YET AGAIN at a recent birthday party for my wife's niece, I recently posted a comment on it allbeit a short one, and of course now I can't find it.

Pause and Effect

Currently reading a book that examines interactivity and narrative, "Pause and Effect". Having only read couple of sections at this stage I'm more than impressed with the ideas that are coming across - so far stay tuned for more about this book.

Photography Articles from about.com

I love my little news reader aplication. NetNewsWire. I can gather so much information so quickly using it, here's a couple of articles on about.com that I think are interesting.

Workflow: Filing and Finding.
The third of a short series on how to manage working with digital images, Workflow: Filing and Finding takes a look at issues such as storing of digital images, choice of storage media, finding your digital files, using suitable file...

Andreas Gursky: Does Size Matter?
Currently one of the biggest names in art photography, Andreas Gursky is also making some of the largest prints, and fetching the largest prices in the auction rooms.

At least I'm being seen!

Want to see my most viewed images at Flickr, go ahead?

As the year draws to an end.

Well this is it. Work has finished for the year, I now have to start knuckling down and getting ready for 2005, which I think is going to be even bigger than 2004 in many ways. I've started shooting images for my interactive idea/piece and am getting ready to write out lessons and notes for my students too. Several deliveries from Amazon are here too ready to be read, 'Pause & Effect, the art of interactive narrative', by Mark Meadows, and 'Experience Design' by Nathan Shedroff, are just two of the many books I hope to read over the next 6 weeks. Of course I am also pretty obsessive about flickr too. Having made a conscious decision to shoot at a lower than 8 x 10 print size this means I can upload straight form the camera with no manipulation photoshop if I so choose. The flip side being that I won't be able to ever print anything larger than about 4 x 6 inches. Which I happen to think is a perfect size for the books I have always wanted to make and will produce my first prototypes this year.

DARK DAY FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

From Alternet.org

"In1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy the Reagan-Bush administration's protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s," Robert Parry of Consortium News writes. Webb paid a high price for his "Dark Alliance" stories written for the San Jose Mercury News. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues and demoted by his paper, causing him to quit. Despite CIA internal investigations that later validated much of Webb's reporting, his career never recovered, and on Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide. "Unintentionally,Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s," Parry writes. "Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the CIA's confession from the American people."

SOURCE: Alternet, December 14, 2004

Popular Culture?

Well, phone camera postings on Flickr are up even further, 28,600 as of this writing!

Speaks volumes I think?

Ghandi quote

"You may never know what results come
from your actions
but if you do nothing
there will be no result "

Voodoo Art?

X-mas function produces Art?

Normally chicken entrails are used here but I thought these arrangements of bones may send out some messages or clues to the eaters personalities?

Flickr Groups

Flickr has groups.

Groups are thematic collections of photos by often disparate people.

My favourite is Creepy Christmas where I have made two contributions.

Viewed 42 times so far!

My most popular digital photograph so far on flickr? No photoshop manipulations at all, it's all in camera

So you think HR departments are run by humans? Check this out. It's from an e-mail I received from a freind who got it from a HR firm for a job app recently.

"Thank you for your application for the above position. This letter is to inform you that you have successfully progressed to the Second Stage in the recruitment process for Careers At XXXX. You have been placed in an actively managed database that is reviewed on an ongoing basis and as roles become available. The Program is structured so that there is no "Official Intake", rather it is a continuous, ongoing employment process. "

So sweat away to your hearts content on that next job application. Just don't lose any sleep on it's appearance, as I doubt anyone looks at it anyway till it's down to the last 10 or 20 perhaps? I always been furious, that these things demand word documents, and could never really understand why? Now I know. It seems that the file is sucked in by a computer and the data in it is extracted and added/compiled into a database. This database then cross references you and and the job at hand. If all is honky dory you move along in the process.

So I guess that the answer to getting an interview is, to put the right kind of words into the CV application. Forget about how it looks. Of course this means nowt if your going for a job at a small business. Generally the boss there hires and fires in person.

Documentary on Islamic Terrorism

Want another perspective on Islamic terrorism, sick of Fox Media's stranglehold on the information coming out of this whole conflict? Try the Australian Broadcasting Commision's site 4 Corners then.

Sadly even our cable connection chokes on this, so if you can put up with it do so.

4WD death machines?

It's the nut behind the steering wheel really. For all those 4WD drivers out there in Suburbia, a message.

Drop shadow text effects using CSS

For the handful of you who use a real browser like Safari, you might notice that I have added a little drop shadow effect to the text in the header of each page of my website, this effect is only viewable in Safari as it's a CSS 3 spec. Thanks to the new forum from WestCiv for this heads up. WestCiv make a neat liitle app that writes CSS in a WYSIWYG environment, it sped up my learning of CSS dramatically.

Brunch in the Western suburbs of Melbourne

Internet Publishing reaches new high?

Or should that be a new low?

We hit our favourite coffee shop this morning for brunch, then had a bit of a browse around the shops, join us on that brief tour. Now here I sit at home an hour so later, and the images are online and organised.

Some look like they may need a little tweaking in photoshop but otherwise I'm happy

Learn how to be a Virtual Tour Photographer

Just found this on Virtual Tour photography, and have of course downloaded the pdf file. Seems pretty funny.Chris Bachelder's Lessons In Virtual Tour Photography, is the name of the book, the site seems to be a book review kind of thing.

The opening paragraph of the sales blurb reads...

The wealthy photographer Ansel Adams once wrote, "A good photograph is knowing where to stand." How simple, how true—and how difficult! Even though Adams's heart failed him well before the whirling magic of virtual-tour technology was introduced to our world, his mysterious words ring true. In the high-tech, "fast-paced," paperless freelance international real-estate-photography industry of today, those eight words still cut. Because a good virtual tour—just like a good photograph of a boulder, or a pinecone—is knowing where to stand. And in Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography, available now, for the first time, as an e-book, you will learn where to stand, and how to know where. But that's not all you will learn! Picture this: You, conversant in the three types of display apartments........