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Ribbit.

Ok. I am an idiot.

Basically... long story short... I fucked up the gallery at 13th Stone and had to batch re-add all the photos. This apparently fux0r'd the titles of the images, so none of the shots have the title visible. It's no that big of a deal except that I keep track of what is what by title. I'll see if I can figure out how to add them without botching the whole damn thing again. Shit. Another side effect of my fuck-up was the vote counters being deleted and thus reset. On a lighter note however, peops can add comments now to the photos.

Anyhoo, they are back up should you ever chose to view them.

Thanks for the link Jason... very cool idea. As is this.

I feel like I'm getting sick. EL is feeling sick. I'd rather us be sick together than sequentially. When I was in nuclear prototype in New York, my boss had like 4 or 5 kids and between his wife, him, and the children, someone was always sick... always. Some strain of virus or whatnot would just cycle through the family continually. They could probably get bankrolled by a pharmaceutical company to be a test bed for new medicines. Of course, have an immune system that could keep you alive in that family would probably also make you a shoe-in for a job with the CDC... you could handle ebola without protective gear while eating a sandwich without harm. There has been a hint of winter in the morning hours over the last few days. It's nothing more than a whispered promise on autumn's breath that cooler times are ahead if we can just stick out the heat a bit longer. The single thing that I miss the most of living upstate New York is the air. It is also the defining factor in my love of Colorado and more recently Minnesota. Almost all my lung's life, they've been pumping the thick, heavy, often polluted, moisture laden air of coastal towns and oceanic atmosphere. The crisp, clean air that wraps the Adirondacks in a cool blanket this time of year lives strong in my memory. I miss it. In Houston, for those who haven't had the pleasure of living here or Los Angeles, we have air that you can almost taste. It tastes kinda like dirty dishwater looks like it would taste. It's discolored and thick. It sticks to you like a film. Everyone's necessity to drive doesn't help our air quality much. This morning, like most mornings, the interstate was a parking lot... even the HOV lane was start and stop. I try to ride the bus as much as possible, but they are miserable polluters as well. I guess a little something is better than nothing. I long for Friday. I cling to each day like a rung on a ladder... pulling myself one day at a time toward that little resting point between flights of stairs. It's sick. I go through each day at work just hoping that I don't have to interact with my boss on any level whatsoever. I go to work each day hoping today might be the day things change for the better. Today could be the day, couldn't it? It's sick. I've decided to start shooting in RAW all the time no matter what... I've said that before and then switched back to JPEG due to flash file system constraints. I need more flash. That has to be the answer. At any rate, if I'm ever to be serious about printing my photography someday, I should shoot RAW and work only in lossless, drive-space-hungry format. We'll see if I can stick to it or not. Coffee time.

Sleepy. Very Sleepy.

A few pages of new ones at 13th Stone. Please take a moment to check 'em out and leave some feedback.

I found out today that a friend of mine at work submitted his resignation this morning. How good that must have felt.

Today's Engines was pretty cool:

"Today, let us accentuate the negative. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

William Henry Fox Talbot was born into a very upper crust British family in 1800. His mother was an artist and art collector who made sure he had a fine education. When he was only 32, Talbot became a Member of Parliament. He was also bent toward art, and horribly frustrated that he didn't have the manual talent for it.

Talbot eventually equipped himself with a camera obscura that cast traceable images on a piece of paper. But, even with that assistance, he complained, "the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold."

That was 1833. During the next year, he did some work in mathematics, and then turned back to the problem of capturing images. He experimented with paper that he'd washed in table salt and treated with silver nitrate, so it would darken under sunlight.

He made images by putting objects on the paper under the bright sun. At first, he could view them only under dim candles. Then he solved the problem of fixing the image so it could be seen in daylight. After another year, he'd improved sensitivity until he could expose pictures by admitting light into his cameras.

These images, however, were all negative ones. Light appeared as dark, and dark as light. But Talbot kept revising and improving his chemical processes until, in 1841, he was finally able to created multiple positive pictures from one of his negatives. At that point, modern photography, as we know it, was born.

Three others were simultaneously working on photography: Joseph Niépce and Louis Daguerre in and Louis Daguerre in France, and John Herschel in England. Niépce was first to capture an image. Daguerre improved upon Niépce's ideas and had a working process before Talbot did.

Talbot and Herschel were friends who compared notes as they worked. But Talbot was unique in creating negatives from which one could get multiple prints. His system came to dominate photography until we had Polaroid, and then digital, cameras.

And Talbot's rich legacy of images catches me off guard. You see, one of Talbot's favorite subjects was his home in Lacock, England. It'd been a thirteenth-century abbey that passed into private hands during the anti-Catholic reign of Henry VIII. Lacock Abbey, and the town around it, make up a living remnant of history. Now they're a favorite location for period TV and movies.

That abbey home has also turned up where you might not expect it -- like the James Bond movie Moonraker. Maybe its most apt use was in the first Harry Potter movie. I go back to a book of Talbot photos and find one of a witch's broom in a medieval doorway, along with views of the same gothic towers that surround Hogwarts Academy.

The dark side of Harry Potter raised some eyebrows. But, what is life without that dark side? Talbot put that fact in special focus when he created modern film photography -- when he showed us reality only after first catching it in its negative form."

John Lienhard is awesome. Local radio just wouldn't be the same without his 0735 and 1555 contributions.

Simplicity. I had been thinking a lot about what's important in my life, how my goals have changed, and where I'd like to see EL and I be in the future. The bottom line is basically happiness, but I think simplicity is key. There is a certain web of complexity surrounding every aspect of my life today... high profile job in an extremely large corporation, mortgages plural on more than one property, credit cards, automobiles, etc. It's all this "stuff" that ties adults in contemporary America to jobs they may or may not enjoy and a routine that they may or may not dictate. The peanut gallery may be full of naysayers, but I believe that everyone has the ability through choices to shed this stereotypical lifestyle that fits people into our class based society and live free... maybe not fiscally free, but free of heart. That is where I want to be in a few years. Free. There is a lot of pressure associated with the responsibility of being a good provider for your home and maintaining a quality of material life that provides safety and comfort for your loved ones, but that's not really the junk I'm talking about. I talking about state of mind. Simplifying just makes the path from here to there easier to see, but it isn't necessarily a requirement to get there. I just know I want to find my way there fast. I lot of people think money leads to happiness. I think money leads to comfort, but not much else. People without money have problems, true, but people with money just have more expensive problems. I someone where to give you ten million dollars - no strings attached - how would you use it? I'd be curious to see the results of that kind of case study. There was a large chunk of time in my life where the me would have bought and played and squandered, but now I would use it for the long haul. Set it up to trickle enough subsidy to my pay to life a modest lifestyle doing exactly what I want to do. Interesting thoughts. I'm crazy tired this morning. I believe it to be psychological. I'm sure that if I were going anywhere but the office, I'd feel differently. Maybe a few gallons of coffee will help? Speaking of, I heard some blurb on the radio about a proposed coffee tax. I didn't get the details, but I think it's an ingenious idea that I absolutely hate. Just say no.

EL and I just finished watching Animatrix... very cool. Today was another lazy day. Tomorrow will probably prove to be another typical Monday. Yeppers.

Sleepy. Need coffee. I did a huge house cleaning over at Photo.net. I am really unhappy with my photography these days and so I deleted about 50 or 60 shots from the archives. It's difficult to believe how fast this weekend has flown by. I'm in serious need of sustenance, so this will again be short. I hope everyone savors the day.

Great day off... why can't they all be this good?

Eclair says to go vote!

Game night at the house tonight. I was picking up clippings in the yard and found a dead dragon. I have no idea how he died, but given the weather is crappy out, I used him to test the new flash. I am looking forward to getting some handheld f/32 shots in the field.

Rest in peace poor fella... you and Mr. Cash both...

I'm surprised the poor bloke is only sueing for $5 million.