Natural Beauty
Ever since I can remember, I always thought my mom looked more beautiful on a day to day basis than when she dressed up for a special event. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the hairdo she would pick or something else. I just feel a stronger connection to the “real” person rather than a made-up idealization.
This view of the world has always extended to my photography. Sure, I took posed pictures, but by-and-large my favorite shots were those candid shots of my friends and family members. Yes, they always complained that they didn’t look their best, but what they didn’t know is that to me, they looked infinitely better than when they stood their with their fake smiles. In fact, you could always hear people afterwards saying, “so and so is obviously faking their smile.” Of course! There’s nothing to naturally smile about when there’s a camera pointed at you. The best smiles are the ones caused by the things we smile about: our children, friends, and family. This has inpsired my latest portrait trend, consisting mostly of candid portraits. I love this work more than almost any other work I’ve done recently with my photography. The only work I love more is the work where I push myself to my creative limits - whether that involves a creative composition or being creative in Photoshop (or, less frequently, in The GIMP).
Die Web 2.0!
In the “Technically Speaking” article of October 2006’s IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Paul McFedries speaks of a new term surfacing to counter the whole “Web 2.0” crap that’s going around. Web 2.0 always smacked of marketing to me - a way to get investors to put money into some kind of upgrade to the Internet. “Oh, we’re doing TWO-POINT-OH stuff here, none of that Web 1.0 stuff.” Of course, as my readers know, the whole point behind Web 2.0 is the blog/AJAX/flickr/etc interface where the users create and modify each others’ content. McFedries reports a few good Geeks who have responded by rebranding “Web 2.0” as “chmod 777 web”. All of my Linux/Unix readers will get this instantly and start cracking up. For the rest of you, this is the way, in *nix, where you say that a file or folder can now be read, modified, and executed by the owner of the file, everyone in his group, and everyone else. Basically, you’ve just made it into a Windows-style file.
Fedora Core 6 Release Date Slips....
I noticed today that, as usual, the Fedora Core release date has slipped. This is a good thing as there are some bugs remaining to be fixed. However, it is annoying for me. I want the new toy! Here’s the explanation:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-October/msg00000.html
Spine of Jellyfish?
So, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, despite our warnings. It is now time to see if our threats have some backbone to them. Kim has continuously defied the world and has been rebuffed each time. Does he give a darn? No, because all we do is threaten sanctions over and over and threaten with talks. Despots do not respond to talks they respond to violence. We need to either sabotage their country and cause as peaceful a revolution as possible, or we need to attack. Although I hate war, we went into war in Iraq because they supposedly had nukes. Kim not only has nukes, but he is a nut and will probably sell nukes to his good friends in Iran. The world needs to stop being so pusillanimous.
Rediscovery
When I first started posting pictures to flickr, I thought I had to post photographic art or pictures taken with the purpose of display such as:
and
But recently, as I’ve seen the work of other famous and important photographers, I’ve come to realize that some of the other shots I’ve been taking can also be great photographs. So I’ve been trawling through my archives to look for photos I could share with my fans and friends on flickr. Some of these pictures are even 5 years old already! In fact, searching for these new gems has taken me down memory lane and allowed me to relive some of my favorite memories. These are the reasons why we photograph. It’s not just a process for creating art, but it’s also a process for documenting the world around us and our own lives. Especially precious to me has been the rediscovery of some of my photos of my grandmother Aida who has almost been gone two years. That’s why you’ve seen a lot of my older work on here recently as well as on flickr. Here are some more of my newly rediscovered favorites.
Blogroll Adapted!
I have now adapted my blogroll code for YOU! That’s right! Now YOU can put in the URLs of blogs you want to keep track of and my program will put it all on one page for you! No more wandering from site to site! Just visit the link on the right or this one right here!
http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/YourBlogRoll.html
I will soon be adding in a cookie feature so that you can save your favorite sites instead of entering them each time!
