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Before the salt in evaporating sea water turns white, it goes through stages of color that range from jade green to brick red, with variations of orange, yellow and other colors. From above the salt ponds around San Francisco Bay look like giant panes of stained glass. The shot above is from my latest set, shot on approach to SFO last week.
Wow: Regis McKenna’s Wikipedia entry is one short paragraph. Geoffrey Moore’s is barely more than a stub. We’re talking here about two of the greatest marketing minds in human history. I’m not joking. Amazing.
Neither has a picture, either. I just checked my own 31,000-shot gallery, and didn’t find either one. I did find the great Phil Moore, however. Like I said at that link, one of my heroes.
Painted Cave. Lava Falls Trail. Uinkaret Volcanic Field. Nat Friedman. Denver International Airport. Sarah Lacy. Rainsford Island. Dorney Lake. David Boies. A peak above a glacier. Rim of the World Highway. Elena Kagan. Diablo Canyon Power Plant. Lake Havasu. Berneray, North Uist. Spectacle Island. San Gorgonio Mountain. River Nith. Paul Trevithick. Dumont Dunes. Tunitas Creek. Steve Gillmor. Boreray, North Uist. Guido van Rossum. Nunavut Shadows. Bristol Dry Lake. Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station.
All shots I’ve taken. All put in Wikimedia Commons, and (in nearly all cases above) in Wikipedia, by persons other than myself.
All I did was post them on Flickr, label and tag them well, so they could be found and used, via the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
That’s just some of them, by the way. Lots more where they came from. One hundred and five, so far.
Above is the best (or the widest) shot I could get of Lake Manicouagan, which is the largest visible impact crater on Earth. Only three (or maybe four) are larger and none are visible.
The Manicouagan impact event happened about 214 million years ago, give or take. That was 14 million years before the end of the Triassic, which was first of the three “dinosaur ages” of the Mesozoic, an era that came to an end with the Chicxulub impact. Coming that far in advance the Manicouagan event may not have been to blame for a mass extinction, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant.
There are better photos in the series, but it was a hazy day and the one above does the best job of showing the crater’s edges.
I’ve been wanting to see (and shoot) Manicouagan for many years, but routes and weather had never obliged before. This time they did, which was cool.
The shot above, made on Sunday out the window of a plane on approach to Las Vegas, comes three and a half years after this shot, which I took from the ground at Hoover Dam. Here’s a whole set of the fly-by. Not much of the dam shows. The Colorado River gorge is easier to see.
Two things stand out for me in this scene. One is the remarkable engineering involved in building the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, better known as the Hoover Dam Bypass. The other is that, from altitude — far more than from the ground — you can see the volcanic nature and origin of the rock supporting both the bridge and hte dam. I’ve been looking around for source docs online that detail the provenance of this rock, which needs to be of a competence sufficient to anchor one of the world’s biggest dams, while also supporting a bridge over a gorge. As I recall from the visit, it’s rhyolite. But, not sure. Looks like it. Maybe Arizona Geology can fill us in.
Above is a picture of the Station Fire, taken from the plane I was riding from Santa Barbara to Denver on Monday afternoon. I believe the water body at the bottom is the San Gabriel Reservoir. It lies in the midst of the San Gabriel Mountains, most of which are in the Angeles National Forest, much of which got burned up in the last two weeks.
I didn’t see this scene myself, since I was seated on the left side of the plane, with a view of the Mojave desert. But I knew the fire was there, below the right side of the plane, which had a perfect view of the burn area. So I handed my camera over to people sitting on the right side, and they made the shots.
The fire has been burning itself out in the back country, which it was doing on Monday when that shot was taken. Current stats: 160,357 acres, 71% contained, 3,647 personnel, containment expected on Tuesday September 15th, 2009, at approximately 6:00 PM. (Yes, they’re that precise.)
Why do mature redwood trees have trunks that rise two hundred feet before branches commence, live for centuries and have bark that’s a foot thick? Because they are adapted to fire.
Why does the silver-green chaparral that covers California’s hills and mountains burn so easily? Because it’s supposed to.
Why, other than its color, is the California Poppy such an appropriate flower for the Golden State? Because it is adapted to both fire and earthquakes. Says Wikipedia, “It grows well in disturbed areas and often recolonizes after fires”.
Of course, so do we. That’s why it’s not weird to find humans colonizing hillsides and other “disturbed areas” of California. Case in point: I am writing this in a house sited on an former landslide, not far from the perimeters of two wildfires that claimed hundreds of other houses in the past few months.
Every spot on Earth is temporary, but California is a special example. As permanence goes, California is a house of cards.
For example, take a look at some of the animations here, prepared by geologists at UCSB. Watch as a sheet of crust the size of a continent gets shoved under the western edge of North America. Debris that piled up in the trench where that happened is what we now call the Bay Area. Submerged crust that melted, rose and hardened under North America — and was just recently exposed — we now call the Sierras. Take a look at the last 20 million years of Southern California history. It’s a wreck that’s still going on. One section of that wreck is a bend along the boundary between plates of crust. Mountains pile up along that bend, like snow in front of a plow. The biggest of these ranges we call the San Gabriels. Those are on fire right now. Add up all the Southern California wildfires over the last twenty years and you’ll get a territory exceeding that of several smaller states.
My point is perspective. The human one is so brief that it can hardly take in the full scope of What’s Going On, or what our lives contribute to it. In a geological context, what we contribute are carbon and fossils. We do that by dying. Other planets have geologies as well, but none have marble, limestone, coal or oil. Those are all produced by dead plants and animals. It would be hard to make heat on Mars because — as far as we know — there is no dead stuff to burn.
Humans love to make structures and produce heat, which means we have an unusually strong appetite for dead stuff. Even cement and steel require dead stuff in their making.
If you fly a lot, as I do, you start to notice black lines on the landscape. These are coal trains that move like ant trails from mines in the West to power plants all over the country. The largest of these mines are in Wyoming, more than 50% of which has coal to burn. This coal consists of dead stuff that has been buried for dozens of millions of years, and took at least as long to form. In Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee says the largest power plant in Georgia, Plant Sherer, “burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year—two thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of Wyoming.”
Nothing wrong with that, of course, unless you’re not human.
From any scope wider than our own, we are a pestilential species. Since the human diaspora began spreading out of Africa only a few thousand generations ago, we have chewed our way through land and species at a rate without equal in the history of the Earth, which began 4.567 billion years ago, or more than a third of the way back to the start of the Universe. We are distinguished by our intelligence, our powers of speech and expression, our ability to use tools and to build things, our ability to learn and teach, and our diversity (no two of us, even twins, are exactly alike). There are 6.781 billion of us now. Few of us will live more than a hundred years, and fewer still will have more than a few decades to contribute more than carbon to the world.
Among the many recent developments in civilization, two stand out. One is a widespread realization that the effects of human activity on the planet are non-trivial. The other is a growing ability to connect with each other and communicate over any distance at very little cost. What will we do with this knowledge, and the ability to share it? Will we follow the model of civilizations that waste the places where they live? Or will we prove to be creatures who can change their nature and stop doing that?
The former is the way to bet. The latter is the way to go.
Bonus read: John McPhee’s The Control of Nature. A third of it is called “Los Angeles vs. The San Gabriel Mountains.” While it is mostly about “debris flows” — slow motion landslides — that happen during winter rains, the important part for today’s discussion involves a primary condition for those flows: mountain slopes denuded of vegetation by fires. This means you can count on many mudslides this coming winter.
When I read that an impact had been spotted on Jupiter, I figured it was somewhere other than the equator, which would be a bulls-eye. Even Shoemaker-Levy, a huge comet broken into a string of pieces, slammed like a series of machine gun bullets into Jupiter near its south pole.
But this one was bigger. See above. And read the story. That black hole in the side of Jupiter is nearly as big as our whole planet. [Woops, not quite. DFR points out in a comment below that the black spot is certainly a moon shadow. Jupiter has four big ones, they do make shadows like that, they are all on the planet’s equator, they’re all a good deal smaller than the Earth (being moons), and I should have known better. Anyway…
And nobody saw it coming.
One good thing is that Jupiter is kind of a crap sweeper, gliding around the inside edge of the outer solar system with a nice big gravitational field, sucking up debris that might otherwise clobber one of your inner planets, such as ours.
By the way, that bright point of light in the eastern sky these evenings is Jupiter. The smaller points of light on either side of it and close by are its moons. The clear-eyed can make them out on a dark night. And they’re quite obvious through good telescopes.
Oh, by the way, there’s a total solar eclipse happening right now in Asia. The NASA server with cool info seems to be hosed. So do some other sites I’ve checked (not that my connection is good right now… we’re back to high latencies again). But Shadow & Substance is on the scene and covering it live. Lots of fun stuff there.
I remember talking to Nick Givotovsky the first time at an early Internet Identity Workshop, when he pulled me aside to share some ideas, and immediately stripped my gears. The guy was as smart as they come, and articulate to an extreme equaled by few. I had to stop him every few sentences to get him to dumb it down a bit, or at least to let me catch up. Many conversations followed, in many settings. Every encounter with Nick was engaging and mind-sharpening.
We became friends — or as close as people get when they’re mutually engaged in a number of projects, and enjoy each other’s company, as well as each other’s minds and hearts. I called him “Nicky G.”
Best I can recall, Nick came to nearly every IIW, plus workshops on VRM, networking and much more. He always contributed, always brought a warm smile and good sense of humor. He was serious, but didn’t take himself too seriously. A rare combination. Also notable was Nick’s mode of engagement. He was always original, often challenging, but never hostile or obstructive. And his mind was always open, always curious, always ready to step up and participate.
As I recall, the last I saw Nick was at the IIW this past May. He left a bit early to get back to his farm in Cornwall, Connecticut. I remember him talking about this old tractor he had, and how much he enjoyed operating it. He died this last Friday after falling off (what I assume is) that tractor. More of the story is here and here. (I share those links there for the record, but they are not pleasant reading.)
Nick’s last post on one of the many lists in which he participated told the story of his older brother’s death. “I think he did it astonishingly ‘right’, if such a thing can be said of dying,” Nick wrote.
Alas, Nick died wrong. And way too young. He was just 44. He leaves his wife and two kids. Plus many shocked and saddened friends.
Hard to tell from the looks of these, but they’re columns in front of the Park Plaza Hotel in London. The rest of my London shots from last week are here.
On the same flight that started with The Cities in darkness and ended with Chicago at sunrise, my flight glided over Madison, Wisconsin, which I shot in the dawn’s early light. The shot above leads to the whole series. I need to go back and correct the botched tags on many of them. Meanwhile, locals can fill me in on what I got right and wrong.
One of these years I’d like to actually visit Madison, on the ground. Meanwhile, this will have to do.
Just posted this series of shots taken while flying into Chicago at dawn in early April
We are severely into Pano. It’s an amazing free (woops, $2.99) app for the iPhone that lets you take panoramic shots — first by helping you line up one shot after another, and second by stitching them together remarkably well. The above is the first of two shot at Harvard’s Old Yard. I made small mistakes on both, but so what. They’re a load of fun, and not bad, considering.
Where most of my earlier shots in this series were of fire detection and spread across time, the one above (and in the larger linked shot, on Flickr) is of “fire radiative power”. If you look at the whole set, you can get an idea of both intensity and spread across time. Again, these are from MODIS, which is an instrument system on satellites passing more than 700km overhead. Still, it finds stuff, and dates it. That’s why this next shot is very encouraging:
It will sure spread some more, but we can see the end coming. Here’s the whole photo set.
And here’s the latest update on exactly what burned (addresses and all) from Matt Kettmann (Contact), Sam Kornell , Chris Meagher (Contact), Ben Preston (Contact), Ethan Stewart (Contact) of the Independent.
They also issue a caution:
The bad news is that the fire still threatens parts of Goleta to the west, the Painted Cave community to the north, and, to the east, parts of Santa Barbara and Montecito, where the evacuation order was just extended once again.
Those Indy folks did — and are still doing — an outstanding job, deserving of whatever rewards are coming their way. Great work by everybody else reporting on the fire as well. Kudos all around.
And great work, of course, by the firefighters. They saved the city. If you’ve ever seen a fire this big and threatening (for example, Oakland, which I did see, and which took out more than 3500 homes), you know how hard it is to stop. Around 80 homes were lost in this one. It could have been many more. If Cheltenham, or the Riviera, had gone up, and the sundowner winds kept blowing, it’s not hard to imagine losing the whole city, since the rain of flaming debris would have caused a true firestorm. From the same Indy report:
“The firefighters must have sat in every single backyard and held it off. The fire reached literally the backyards of every single one of them, but I didn’t see a single house burned up there.”
The mountains won’t be as pretty for a couple of years. But the city will also be safer. That’s the upside. 2:54pm Pacific
Here is a great map that shows all three fires in the last year, as well as good information about the ongoing Jesusita Fire.
(Scroll to the bottom for my latest. Not the latest, just mine.)
The shot above looks west from the eastern flank of the Jesusita fire, above Montecito. The overlays are MODIS (the dots and squares) and GEOMAC (the red line). I think the GEOMAC data is older, but I’m not sure. Both were downloaded at about 4:42am, Pacific time. The newest detections are red and the oldest are yellow. They are from instruments on satellites and may or may not indicate major fire activity. One during the Tea Fire suggested that the fire had spread far down into the Riviera district and toward town. When I checked the spot, it turned out to have been a fire in part of a small isolated oak tree. No fire had spread to or from there.
Still, the data do show changes in the fire’s approximate perimeter over time. Step through this photoset and you can see how the fire has gone over the past few days.
Sean Trek has a way of seeing MODIS with radiative power.
It looks to me now like the next challenge, after saving lives and homes, is keeping the fire from burning for many more days or weeks across the back country. The trick here is to let the fire take nature’s course while also keeping it away from civilization. It is a significant fact that California’s state tree (the Coast Redwood) and state flower (the California Poppy) are both adapted to fire. One might also make the case that the latter is adapted to earthquakes.
I don’t doubt that if any of the three most recent fires — Gap, Tea and Jesusita — had hit fifty years ago, much of Santa Barbara would have been cremated by this morning. Since we are among more than 30,000 current evacuees, that might have included our house too. Firefighting and team coordination have vastly improved just since the 1990 Painted Cave Fire, when more than 600 homes were lost. Experience from that fire led to many of the improvements that saved homes this past week. (For a history of Santa Barbara’s wildfires, go to Santa Barbara Outdoors, and read the remarkable series that starts here. It covers the eight fires between 1955 and 1990.)
Life everywhere is a losing game with death. We just hope that the substantive things we do and build will outlive us. In much of California, the chance that our homes will outlive us is smaller than most other places. Some homes lost in the Tea Fire had replaced homes on the same property that had burned in 1964 Coyote Fire and again in the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Among disasters that might befall homes in California, only earthquakes are more certain to occur, and in more places. Hence the higher insurance costs.
But still the graces of living here are exceptionally high. Mild, sunny weather. Clean air. Beautiful mountains and beaches. Wonderful people. Excellent university. So we do.
And every day we should thank the heroic work required of the firefighters who keep the worst of nature at bay. Posted 5:38am, Pacfic.
Meanwhile, I’m glad to see the subtitle in Gretchen Miller’s report in the Independent, Fires Burn In Canyon Near Painted Cave: Favorable Weather Conditions Keep Fire Under Control. From around 10pm last night. 6:20am
The LA Times has a story on the fire, dated 10:28pm last night.
Last night on KCLU before going to sleep I heard that the Gane House at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden was destroyed. This confirms it. 6:28am
A news conference is scheduled for 8am. Just heard that on KNX, which has done an excellent job covering the fire.
Okay, the press conference just ended. KCLU, KNX and KTYD (and, presumably, some or all of its four sister stations) all carried it. KCLU bailed before it was over. So did KNX, though they stuck it out a bit longer. Only KTYD stayed until the end. (Bravo for them.)
The news that matters is that the fire is “contained” along the northern border of Santa Barbara. Thus spake SB Fire Chief Andrew DeMizio (who always starts by spelling his name). He was glad to see “that black line” on the new Incident map. Contained does not mean put out. He had another word for that, but I forget what it was.
The language is interesting. A fire is an “indicent”. Police, fire, Red Cross and other personnel are “assets”. Lifting an evacuation order is “repopulation”. My kid just said, “I thought ‘repopulation’ was what you got after the first population has died”.
Inexcusable, if true: No questions about locations still apparently threatened. (Could be that somebody asked and I didn’t hear it.) Specifically, the only two communities up in the Santa Ynez Mountains, overlooking the city: Painted Cave and Flores Flat. I gathered from the Indy story mentioned above that Painted Cave was okay. But the only way I knew that Flores Flat survived was from a little human interest feature that KNX has been running over and over again: comments by a woman who gave advice about what to take and what to leave behind. She said she had resigned herself to losing her home in Flores Flat, but was surprised to find it had survived. Frankly, I’m amazed that Flores Flat is okay. I’ll bet the firefighters gave special attention to that one. Maybe one of the places where the DC-10 laid down some of its 12000+ gallons of fire retardant was between Flores Flat and the fire.
Flores Flat is far up Gibraltar Road, between Gibraltar Peak (where many of Santa Barbara’s FM stations radiate from, including KCLU and KTYD) and the site farther up the mountain face where hang gliders and paragliders launch toward the city when the winds are right. From the looks of the map and overlays above, the fire movement was eastward away from Gibraltar, and up and over the crest of the ridge near Montecito Peak to the east and LaCumbre Peak to the west.
The Tea Fire surely created a fire break as well. It burned much of Gibraltar road, and up the face of Gibraltar Peak, where it roasted the antennas of KCLU and many of the other stations there. KTYD and its AM sister KTMS are located a few hundred feet above and behind there, so they survived. To the west of there are some of the main power lines that supply the city. As I recall those lines are draped quite high, and I suppose survived the fire as it approached Gibraltar road this time. Other high power lines coming into the Goleta side of town were hurt in the Gap Fire last summer, knocking out power for much of the city at the time.
The weather is much better now. Cooler, and moist, with marine layer fog moving in off the Pacific Ocean to the south. Vari0us officials cautioned that this could change, and in fact it probably will. Typical late Spring and Summer weather is early morning fog, burning off as the day goes on. Whether hot “sundowner” winds return is still an open question, but various weather sources suggest that won’t happen. On the other hand, if the fire gets into Paradise Valley on the north side of the ridge, the story might be different. The climate there tends to be much hotter and dryer than on the Santa Barbara side of the mountains. 8:50am
We have friends in Worchester who were going to Santa Barbara to see Katy Perry’s last show, in her home town. That last link is from Noozhawk, which I’ve neglected to follow more closely. The reason is that Santa Barbara is being repopulated with a raft of new and improved media sources growing like a ring of redwood sprouts where a mighty tree has fallen. That tree is the Santa Barbara News-Press, a once fine newspaper that was (and remains) in a much better position to survive than papers in other cities that are owned by stressed public companies or private individuals with shallower pockets. The story of the News-Press’s meltdown is not yet the stuff of legend, only because it’s still going on. Kind of like a fallen tree with a few intact roots, staying alive, but barely. For more on that, just look up Wendy McCaw on Google. Or read Craig Smith. It’s his main beat. A sample:
A major fire in town didn’t stop the Santa Barbara News-Press from doing business as usual. In this case, “business as usual,” meant laying people off.
This time, the unlucky employee was Jued Martinez. He was a digital image technician for the paper, the “go-to-guy for Photoshop issues,” as he put it, working in the camera (pre-press) department for many 15 years.
He announced his own layoff via Twitter around 1:40 Thursday afternoon by saying, “Wow! I’m available for Design work now. Just got laid off from the SBNP. Feel a little better now, not worrying about it.”
To witness how retro and self-destructive the News-Press is, go to their Jesusita Fire Coverage page. Click on a story. Say, this one. You get one sentence. Then you’re told to long in. Subscribers only. Hell, even when we were subscribers, we couldn’t get in there. I’m sure it all disappears or scrolls behind a paywall after a few days in any case. Gone like snow on the water.
Except as a source of fodder about itself, the News-Press plays a self-minimized role in the local news ecology. For getting news on the fire, that includes:
With the radio stations, I mean their streams, not their sites.
I’ll add others later (including stream addresses). Gotta go. Here’s a photo pool in the meantime. 9:33am
And here’s one last photo, courtesy of the only commenter so far on this post:
Thanks, nathan. 10:19am
They’re “repopulating” at last. The worst is over. 10:48am
Minotaur rocket trail from 2005 launch
Glaring Rocket Launch Could Surprise East Coast Residents Tuesday Evening reads the headline of a post by Joe Rao at Space.com. In it he points to a video I taped in 2005 with my kid of a similar launch on the west coast. You can watch it here.
The launch will take place on Wallops Island, Virginia, but should become visible up to hundreds of miles away as the rocket arcs upward into space. Look for the launch starting at 8pm Tuesday. If the view is clear, you’re in for a treat.
Click on the image above (or here) for some still shots from the same launch.
It all started here. With Platform A: the first of thirty-some oil platforms built in the 1960s off the coast of Southern California. To anybody looking seaward from Santa Barbara, the platforms are nearly as much a fixture of the horizon as the Channel Islands beyond. The three closest, Platforms A, B and C, are just several miles out.
On January 28, 1969, Platform A had a blow-out. As much as 100,000 barrels of oil rose to the surface and spread. Had the oil been carried away from shore, the event might have been small news. But instead it gunked up the coast, ruining Santa Barbara’s harbor for a time, and treating the world to the first of many iconic visuals: tar-covered sea birds.
Long story short, Earth Day followed.
Some pictures from the time.
First, a big thanks to all the folks at Yahoo who ran down and helped fix the problem behind the post below. Turns out I had two IDs, one for Yahoo and one for Flickr, and that the two were never joined, or merged, or whatever it is. They still aren’t, but it’s cool. The only one I care about (at least at this point) is the Flickr one. I still don’t understand what went wrong, exactly, but at least now I know for sure what the logins and passwords are, for both accounts.
So I just celebrated by uploading some shots of the Channel Islands, which I took two days ago, en route from LAX to SFO. I have a huge backlog of shots to upload, but I’m too busy these days to keep up. But this is a nice batch, and labeling and tagging everything didn’t take too long.
On Wednesday I somehow signed out of my Yahoo account on Flickr. When I tried to sign back on, my login/password failed. So I went through Yahoo’s authentication process to recover those, and it sent them to me by email.
Still didn’t work.
Then I went for help here, and got thanked by a page that said “one of our knowledgeable and well trained Sign-in & Registration agents” would get back to me within 24 hours. At 2:42 this afternoon I received this:
Subject: Auto Confirmation – Your Yahoo! Account Verification support request was received …
From: Yahoo! Account Services <my-login-help@cc.yahoo-inc.com>
Reply-To: Yahoo! Account Services <my-login-help@cc.yahoo-inc.com>Hello,
This is an automated message regarding your recent request for Yahoo!
Account Verification Customer Care support. Your message was received,
and you will hear back from us within the next 24 hours with an answer.Thank you for reaching out to us. We look forward to helping you!
Sincerely,
Yahoo! Customer Care
**Please do not respond to this message as no one will receive it.
I look forward to being helped too.
FWIW, I have had a Pro account that since Flickr was a start-up in Vancouver. I have 28,000 pictures on Flickr so far. I’d like to put up more.
Now, of course, we’re entering the weekend. Still, I’d like some real help here. If any of ya’ll know one of those “knowledgeable and well trained Sign-in & Registration agents” — or just anybody who can help, please send them my way. Thanks.
I’m bummed that I’m drinking a beer on the deck here in Santa Barbara while Dave is in Cambridge. Would have enjoyed having coffee with him this morning. So instead I’ll raise a glass in his general direction, and post a bunch of loose notes here.
Sez Dave, Doc Searls likes to say that markets are conversations, but people are conversations too. Right. And markets are people, which is our point in this Cluetrain chapter. They are not marketing. The market in marketing is a verb. A synonym for sell, basically. (See definitions 13 to 16 here.)
Which is why I think “conversational marketing” is oxymoronic. Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit, for example, came to my attention by way of a fellow Cluetrain author who attached a promotional email from Federated, adding “yep, looks like our work here is done! Off to find some good stout clothesline and a high enough limb.” Among the speakers is Comcast’s “Director of Digital Care.” Feeling cared for, Comcast customers?
Okay, that was unfair. The director in question is Frank Eliason, who has a fine blog and is running at about 16,000 followed and followers as @comcastcares on Twitter. I’m one of those thousands (on the following side, anyway).
Anyway, here’s just one paragraph from the CM Summit pitch:
CM Summit will provide key insights from some of the world’s largest brand advertisers and the web’s most successful social media properties. Don’t miss this opportunity to look under the hood of conversational marketing and find out what’s driving innovation and success for the publishers, marketers, and consumers who occupy the social Web.
Gag me with a shovel.
Gag Steven Hodson too. He says The wrong people are promoting Social Media. Specifically,
We are increasingly be told that Social Media is about being able to open lines of conversations with corporations and governments. It is supposed to be the new way for us to interact with those in more powerful positions than us. We are increasingly being marketed to about the benefits of being connected to brands – be it personal or corporate ones.
As a result people are beginning to think that social media is nothing more than a round table with corporations, marketers and public relation people deciding on what the conversation is all about. Once more we are finding ourselves being talked to even though it is carefully couched in terms of openness and transparency.
Yep. Later Steven adds,
We have only begun to taste the incredible freedom and personal power that comes with being a part of a social media world. It is this taste that companies fear because it removes them from the top down position. It brings them onto a level playing field where even the poorest person in the world can have an effect.
Social media doesn’t belong to the marketers, the public relation flacks or the corporations so desperately trying to take ownership. It belongs to the people. For the first time the media truly is made up of people for the people.
It is us who should be out there promoting Social Media – not the Facebooks, not the MySpaces, not the Twitter and especially not the marketers and corporations. The sooner we realize that the sooner we can take back our social media from the grasp of those who would bastardize it to their own means.
I’m with him in every respect other than love for the term “social media.” That’s because most people equate “social media” with Facebook, MySpace and all the other conversation containment silos.
Let’s go back to fundamentals. For that I’ll defer first to Larry Josephson, my favorite personality in the history of radio, who naturally isn’t working there any more. Larry once told me, “Radio is personal. That’s my philosophy.” The road radio traveled to hell (where its commercial corner has rotting for the last thirty years or so) was paved with jive like Federated is talking in that pitch. It’s all sell-side shit, and about as conversational as a billboard.
The Net is personal too. So is the Web. Also email, SMS, IM and the rest of it.
And before all of those, so was the telephone. Nothing could be more conversational than that. Back in the 80s, Reese Jones told me that the phone — a tech communications mode that is senior in the extreme, was both the original and the ultimate platform. And now there are close to a billion app downloads for the iPhone. One of the iPhone’s 25 thousand apps is the Public Radio Tuner, which is now passing 1.6 million downloads. That app, plus WundeRadio, have turned my iPhone into my radio. Together they get many more stations than would ever fit in a dial.
Reese’s point: conversation is personal. It’s one-with-one, not one-to-many. It may be social in the sense that talking with another person is a social act. But it’s not a group thing. Orignally a brain researcher, Reese pointed out that none of us are capable of listening to more than one other person at a time.
In other words, talking may be social, but listening is personal.
Talk “social” and the silos show up. That’s what “social media” are. The good stuff Steven wants us to save, and advocate, are inherently personal qualities of the Net and the Web.
By the way, without Reese schooling me about phones and conversations, I doubt I would have come up with the “markets are conversations” line.
Speaking of which, in Brian Solis’ The Conversation Index, he says this:
Communities support each other. Citizens actively help others make decisions, offer suggestions and referrals, proactively share negative experiences, and repeatedly ask question – with or without our participation.
Doc Searls calls this Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). Others refer to it as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But, as we are quickly learning, “management” and “relationships” are as distant from each other as their intentions. Perhaps it’s better stated as Community Relations or better yet, Public Relations.
Well, VRM is not CRM. Nor is it public relations. It is nothing that the seller does. VRM is something the customer has. It comes from the customer. There will be, in the VRM world, both individuals and user-driven and customer-driven services, which I call fourth parties. More about those distinctions here.
Other stuff…
Mike Arrington’s post about The Cenralized Me and Data Portability is all about VRM, though he doesn’t mention it.
Great interview with Richard Rodriguez, one of my favorite writers and thinkers. Richard’s book Brown foreshadowed Obama’s presidency. This is outstanding, too.
Umair Hague is in high dungeon about The Geithnerconomy, which Umair considers a coup.
Long as we’re down on Obama, Tim Jones of the EFF says In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s. That’s on top of Jennifer Granick’s post about a proposed federal take-over of the Net. More centralization and concentration of power, anyway.
Not sure whether or not I’m creeped out by this new biz model for journals and Twitter.
To answer the question “How come you’re not posting your usual giant piles of photos on Flickr?” the answer is that I stupidly somehow signed off Flickr and can’t sign back on, because I have no idea what the hell my ID or password are. (Actually I do, but they don’t work.) I have appealed to Yahoo for help here, and its automatum has thanked me for that. They may not want to thank me for what I’ll say if “one of our knowledgeable and well trained Sign-in & Registration agents” doesn’t get back to me within the promised 24 hours. That’s by tomorrow afternoon. FWIW, I’ve always been vexed by Yahoo’s ID system. Not that it’s much different than anybody else’s but … somehow it has always been a bit of a problem.
The Failure of #amazonfail, by Clay Shirky, is a good read too. What he calls “conservation of outrage” (that is, “finding rationales for continuing to feel aggrieved, should the initial rationale disappeared”) is exactly why I am always slow to get worked about stuff that get crowds excited. In fact, VRM is in part a way not to get outraged at vendors, but rather to engage them constructively. (But we don’t have those ways yet, so go ahead and get outraged anyway.)
Here’s a nice rationale for PayChoice. (Which needs a different name, by the way.)
Okay, beer done. Later, folks. I’m heading in.
Stephen Lewis has an excellent post from Istanbul on the occasion of President Obama’s visit to Turkey, which was completed this morning.
Steve explains, “Yes, that’s Garanti with an ‘i’ and not a double-’e', as in Garanti Bank, one of the largest banks in Turkey. For the last two months Garanti Bank has mounted these advertisements on billboards throughout Istanbul — with text offering low interest loans set below an image looking convincingly like Barak Obama and printed in a very Islamic green. Actually, the face is that of a local actor and Obama look-alike. The choice of an Obama-like image for the ads might imply a guarantee of stability in a time of instability and a recognition of vox populi rather than the very real and desperate need of the US economy for low-interest capital.”
More of Steve’s thoughtful postings at his alterblog, Hak Pak Sak.
Flying from Boston to Minneapolis by way of Chicago today. The second leg is through the middle of this:
Shouldn’t be much to see out the window.
But I’m looking forward to talking tomorrow morning at MinneWebCon. The title is The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power. I gave a shorter talk by the same title to a small group at the Berkman Center a couple weeks back. The video and audio are here. This one will be for Web development folks rather than the somewhat academic folks that come to Berkman lunches. Should be fun.
I also expect to be hanging Monday night with other folks interested in seeing Carolina beat Michigan State in the NCAA championship game. 
Got these shots of St. Louis and the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers while flying to Austin by way of Chicago two Fridays ago. You can see the Gateway Arch, right of center, Busch Stadium, the Edward Jones Dome, the City Museum, and lots of barge traffic on the river.
I actually didn’t see much of St. Louis. My window seat didn’t have well-placed windows, and I couldn’t see downward in any case. But my little Canon Powershot 850 could look for me. So I held it against one of the windows, angled it downward, and shot away, checking from time to time on the back of the camera to see if my shots were accurate. Didn’t do too poorly, considering.
What I want is a small camera like this one that can shoot RAW without taking forever to do it. (As was the case with my old and much missed Nikon Coolpix 5700, which also featured a flip-out viewer, making shots like this much easier.) The PS 850 has no RAW mode, and its processing is rather thick with artifacts. Still, fun to use.
Flying out of SFO yesterday morning, I had a great seat for shooting: on the left side of the plane, away from the sun, facing The City on departure. I got several hundred shots crossing the country, more of which will go up on Flickr over time. Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded a set of San Francisco alone. Here ya go.
Between flights in and out of O’Hare last Saturday, I caught this formation of geese flying overhead. Before Flight 1549, this wouldn’t have worried me.
Last week I got some nice aerial photos of Atlanta and its surroundings, shooting from a restaurant rather than a plane. Most of the ones in the set above were taken from the revolving Sun Dial restaurant atop the 73-story Westin Peachtree hotel where I stayed. Some were taken from my room on the 54th floor. Above are the Bank of America and Sun Trust buildings, both called “Plazas” — as is the Westin Peachtree, atop which I took this shot.
Here are some shots of a storm as well, shot from a suite on the 67th floor. One sample:
On the left is 191 Peachtree. On the right is the Georgia Pacific building. While there I marveled at the storm coverage on TV. I might put up some of that later.
There was a tornado warning in the midst of all that. This mattered to our hotel, because one last March hit the hotel directly and took out many windows — though no occupants.
It’s not like this in Atlanta, but it was like this in Boston a few days ago. So, another photo set of ice on storm windows.
Not long ago as geology goes — nine, ten, twelve millennia — one of the world’s largest lakes covered most of Minnesota, plus much of North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and a corner of South Dakota. It’s called Lake Agassiz, named after the scientist Louis Agassiz, who figured out the Ice Age (continental glaciation, basically), and whose statue dropped head-first into the concrete in the 1906 earthquake.
Evidence of the late lake s not obvious unless you look in winter, from altitude. I did that while flying west the week before last. Here’s the photo set I shot. Those lines you see in the farmland are old shorelines of the lake. Since it was a glacial lake — a large puddle left by the effect of global warming on the ice cap — these lines I suppose also qualify as glacial moraine. Anyway, interesting shit. To me, at least.
By the way, the straight lines in the shot above are wind breaks made of trees or hedges. (Not sure.). The larger square or rectangular dark areas are woodlots. The setting is a spot almost exactly where South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota meet. I believe it is in South Dakota.
By the way, what remains of Lake Agassiz is Lake Winnepeg, Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes, and a larger number scattered around three provices of Canada.
Check out David Bergman’s 1,474-Megapixel GigaPan picture of the 2 gigaperson presidential inauguration last Tuesday. You can all but look in the noses of the people there.
What impresses me most is how many cameras with extremely long lenses were there. Yow. Canon and Nikon were cleaning up.
My aerial photo of Giants Stadium, aka The Meadowlands, where both the Giants and the Jets play, made WikiNews Shorts today.
When it got down near zero (Fahrenheit) a few days ago, the ice formations on the windows were too delicate and interesting to resist shooting. Click on the shot above for a look through the whole series.
Afterposts on USA1549 (more popularly, just 1549)…
Bio of the pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger, aka “Sully”, the captain of flight USA1549 yesterday afternoon. Via TheSmokingGun.
Charles Bremer, pilot and editor for the London Times, on the flight. Includes interesting background, such as why Airbuses can float “in the unlikely event of a water landing”. Expect Boeing planes to be fitted retrofitted soon with the same feature. Hat tip to Andrew Leyden for that one. (Note: This comment says I have my facts wrong here, and offers corrective details. Interesting stuff. Go read it.)
Airbus 320 fact sheet. Includes interesting safety record info.
Nice series of photos and a graphic from one commenter on this FlightAware discussion page.
Stephen Lewis was wise to turn down the opportunity to participate in a Ponzi scheme in a time and place where the downside of failure was absolute. The lesson:
| Fast-forward a decade to 2005, Bulgaria is about to enter the European Union and bank and insurance moguls whose memories are the only remaining links to the identities of initial depositors and investors are being shot wholesale in gangland-style slayings. On a wintry Sunday, I join a friend for an early morning hike part-way around the base of Vitosha mountain, just outside of Sofia. At the town of Bistritsa we leave the hiking path in search of a restaurant serving tripe soup and grappa (shkembe chorba and rakiya to afficionados). As we enter Bistritsa we pass a neighborhood of immense homes worthy of present day Las Vegas or 1970s American television soap operas about the scandalous lives of California rich. On the gated entrance way of every third or fourth such mansion are posted Necrologs — paper fliers announcing or commemorating the deaths — of the home’s owner. Most of the deceased seem relatively young and few likely to have died from natural causes. My hiking companion, a retired journalist explains … some of the deceased are businessmen, some are gangland heavies and “narco-millionaires,” and others are “credit-millionaires” i.e people who had borrowed large sums of money from banks on behalf of others and made fortunes on commissions for doing so. |
This is one in a series of thoughtful posts that combine Steve’s wide travels and deep cultural understands with his photography. While some are timely, all are timeless. Samples here, here, here and here.
Since I’m an aviation freak, I’m also a weather freak. I remember committing to getting my first color TV, back in the mid-70s, because I wanted to see color radar, which at that time was carried by only one TV station we could get from Chapel Hill: WFMY/Channel 2 in Greensboro. These days TV stations get their radar from elsewhere, and have mothballed their old radar facilities. (Here’s one mothballed TV radar tower, at the WLNE/Channel 6 transmitter, which is istself doomed to get mothballed after the nationwide February 17 switchover to digital TV — marking the end of TV’s Mainframe Era.)
Online I’ve been a devoted watcher of both Weather.com and Weather Underground. Both those last two links go to local (Cambridge, MA) maps. They’re good, but they don’t quite match Intellicast, source of the map above. Play around witht the pan & zoom, the animation and the rest of it. It’s a nice distraction from weather as ugly as we’re getting right now here: sleet and then rain atop enough snow to cancel school today,.
I love this video.
So I’m here in the Bolt Bus from Boston to New York. There’s wi-fi on board, and power outlets in the backs of most seats. But the wi-fi is slow, so I’m on a Sprint EvDO card. Getting about 1Mb down and .6Mb up. Not bad.
Anyway, I’ve recently uploaded a pile of photo sets to Flickr, where my inventory of photos is now approaching 26,000. Here is a list of just a few sets, mostly shot from airplanes and other moving vehicles:
Wow. It’s snowing now. Hard. We’re still in Connecticut, approaching the Westchester border. The Weather.com map is quite colorful:
Hm. Not taking. Guess I need a separate post for it.
On departure from Zürich to Paris yesterday the ground was shrowded in gloom and haze, but above it the sky was clear and crystalline. I sat purposely on the left side of the plane to get a view, even though I knew I’d be photographing the scene against the sun, which would be low in the early afternoon on a day approaching the Winter Solstice. Worse, the window looked like it had been cleaned with fine-grit sandpaper. Still, I got some nice shots with my old Tamron zoom and the Canon Rebel Xti (borrowed from the excellent and generous Rebecca Tabasky, a colleage at the Berkman Center).
I’m guessing the plane was about a hundred miles from the shot above. Closer for some of the early ones, and much farther for some of the later ones, some of which feature Mont Blanc, the only peak I could easily identify. I’m hoping some of the rest of you can fill in the blanks.
Got some nice shots of San Francisco and Marin on Sunday, as we flew off to Chicago on the first leg of the trip home from Thanksgiving in California. Actually, my kid shot most of them, since he had the window seat. Shot some other stuff too, which I’ll put up later.
Mount Tamalpias (better known as Mt. Tam) looms in the background, and Mt. Beacon in front of it.
Looks like the evacuation notices have been lifted. And The Map (which is very well done) now has two pages showing the status in the area, including (near as I can tell) all 211 burned structures, nearly all of them homes.
My shots of the aftermath are here.
Hard to believe I’m in Boston now, and about to be in Zurich, then Amsterdam. See some of ya’ll there.
Before:
After:
I just put up a gallery of shots I took as the sun was going down today, and the evacuation barricades were lifted — at least from some of the Tea Fire burn area.
The aerial shot above is from the excellent Live Search Maps. If you want to look around, the top shot is in this view here.
Most of my shots were after the sun went down, so they’re not the best. But they reveal some of what went on at the western edge of the fire perimeter.
Most of the houses north of Sheffield Reservoir (which is now buried beneath a park) were spared. But many along Gibraltar, El Cielito and West Mountain Road (such as the one above, a beautiful house with a view across a pool and Parma Park) were burned. It wrenched my heart to see residents visiting some of these homes. They weren’t all “mansions”, as the out-of-town media called them. Many were not even especially upscale. But most were beautiful, and all were in a beautiful setting. And they were homes. They contained the lives of their residents. Lives that will have to start over in many ways.
We know people who lost homes here. Our hearts go out to them.
One thing that amazed me was how good a job the firefighters did protecting many homes in this area. One official said it would have been reasonable to expect to lose 500 or more homes in a fire like this one.
I head back to the place our kid calls “alt.home” or “shift_home” in Boston tomorrow. Meanwhile I am appreciating every minute I’m here.
Meanwhile, here’s a thankful shout-out to the firefighters who did their best to save what they could. Which happens to be the rest of Santa Barbara.
Bonus pic: Here’s exactly the same area, after the Sycamore Canyon fire in 1977.
[Later...] I’m on a pit stop at the Starbucks Coffee & Reggae Disco in King City, where the music is so loud that people go outside to talk on their cell phones. Just did that myself.
It was weird to hit SCAN on the rental car radio and have it stop at 87.7, where KSBY/Channel 6 in San Luis Obispo was running a live press conference on the Tea Fire from Santa Barbara. I stayed with it until the signal gave out around San Ardo. Meanwhile, here’s what I picked up that matters: Homes were lost on the folowing roads:
They said 210 structures were lost. More than 5000 homes were evacuated across a large area outside the fire perimeter, ours among them.
Only residents with government-issued IDs will be let into the main burn areas: Mountain Road, Conejo, Coyote, a few others.
Okay, hitting the road again. Next stop, SFO. Then BOS and back to work.
[Later...] I’m at SFO now. No time to say more than to look at this map, this City 2.0 summary, and these images and headlines.
Oh, and look at this. It’s the same scene after the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Some home sites have burned three times: In the 1964 Coyote Fire, the Sycamore Fire, and now the Tea Fire.
These are a few among the many salt ponds that ring the south end of San Francisco Bay. Once considered and agricultural innovation and an economic boom, the practice of “reclaiming” wild wetlands for industrial purposes is now considered ecologically awful by environmentalists, especially here on the West Coast of the U.S., which has precious few wetlands in any case. Many environmentalists have been working to get Cargill to close the ponds and return the Bay to its more natural state. Cargill hasn’t budged. In fact, <a href=”http://www.cargill.com/sf_bay/saltpond_ecosystem.htm”>Cargill has its own views</a> on the matter, plus some interesting facts about the ponds themselves.
It’s worth pointing out that the Bay is actually one of the youngest features on the California landscape, having flooded within only in the last couple thousand years, as sea levels rose. (Global warming has been happening, in fact, since the last ice age.)
I took this shot two days ago on approach to San Francisco on a flight from Boston. Here’s a set of all the photos I’ve taken of salt ponds, both here and in the desert. And here is the whole set of shots I took from coast to coast. Most were at the ends of the flight, since the sky was undercast most of the way.
New Hampshire has a Brookline, too. It’s just north of the Massachusetts border, and it’s this pretty little New England town, complete with a covered bridge and a lighthouse.
The former was born in 2001 and carries foot and bike traffic, and the latter has less modern provenance, judging from its look. And it is obviously ornamental, sitting at the corner Potanipo Pond, at what I gather is the source of the Nissitissit River.
Interesting to compare two photo sets, taken one day away from exactly one year apart. Here’s my series of the site from 2007, and here’s the one from 2008. Except for the footbridge the subjects were a bit different, but one thing stands out: the colors were better this year.
Fall in New England is a visual cliché of the first order, and exactly as advertised. Only better this weekend, because it’s been unseasonably warm, as well as clear and perfectly gorgeous, complete with full moons each night.
We’ve been out at a church retreat at Otter Lake, New Hampshire. And it’s been a healthy break for me, coming as I am off one of the worst colds in a long time. The fever broke yesterday morning, and the cough ended last night. It was the first night in a week when I actually slept the whole night and it was blissful.
Meanwhile, I’ve loved walking along the lake and in the woods. The loud colors at a distance usually turn out to be comprised of leaves with blisters, chewed-out edges and other signs of wear & tear. What I love about the forest here is that it’s mostly evergreen with deciduous trim. You can see one felicitous effect of that in the shot above, where pine needles hang like ornaments from the stems of maple leaves.
I’m pretty sure the shot above is of a sugar maple, though it might be a Norway. Maybe one of ya’ll can help here.
Anyway, we’re home again tomorrow and back to work.
Oh, by the way, all the shots in this series were taken with a little pocket camera rather than my big (and somewhat broken) SLR. Still, does the job.
From the air there’s a strange kind of vast sameness to the Grand Canyon. It’s a carved up layercake of variously colored rock that’s less dramatic viewed from above than from its edges or its insides. There’s one anomaly, however, that stands out for me every time I see it: the Uinkaret Volcanic Field, which flows over the edge of the canyon and cascades down to the Colorado, looking like tar poured over a birthday cake. The most dramatic corner of the field is called Lava Falls, atop which sits Vulcan’s Throne. That’s what we have in the shot above.
It was taken on September 18, on my way from Boston to Las Vegas by way of Los Angeles. I’ve shot the scene before. The whole collection is here. The larger Grand Canyon set from this trip is here. It’s pretty freaking dramatic too, actually. Someday when I have time I’ll identify some of the features there. Meanwhile if any of the rest of ya’ll feel like doing the same, please do.
By the way, one of my earlier shots is featured in Wikipedia’s Uinkaret Volcanic Field article.
In September I took two flights across the country that featured lots of clear views of the sights below. I think I took 700+ pictures on each of them.
I’ve been posting them to Flickr in slow motion, trying to minimize the labors involved in tagging and captioning them. It helps that many of these sights I’ve seen before, so I could just copy and paste from one shot to another.
This set is of Comb Ridge, in southeastern Utah. Other sets I put together, all in Utah and Arizona, are of Goosenecks, Lake Powell and Navajo Mountain.
Funny thing, when I went to look up Navajo Mountain on Wikipedia, I saw that one of the pictures there bore a strong resemblance to one of my own because that’s exactly what it is.
Just a pause in the midst to express appreciation for Weather Underground’s storm-tracking services, and handy pile of Good Stuff, such as the WunderMap. Their site is far less crapped up with junk than Weather.com.
Right now we’re getting a late summerlike storm, complete with thunder. Thanks to the map’s animation and storm tracking features, I can see exactly what’s happening, and educate my judgements about whether to walk to the bus or the train — and when.
Anyway, dig it.
… to McCarran International Airport, for providing free wi-fi.
And dig the speed:
Nice.
Guess I can upload some photos while I’m busy with actual work here (at 4:49am).
Canon has unveiled the 5D Mark II SLR. Whoa: 21.1 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor; ISO range from 100-6400, and expandable to 25600 (that is, shooting under appoximately no light); 1080p HD video shooting with live view on the back (3″ across), HDMI and USB connectivity…
Also welcome: a sensor-cleaning system (my 30D is constantly plagued with sensor dust).
$2700 or so.
No price yet from Amazon, but you can pre-order it.
Sitting and shooting at U.S. v. Microsoft, 10 Years Later, at Austin Hall in Harvard Law School. Extremely interesting, and free as well. If you’re nearby, stop by.
I shot more than 500 pictures out the pitted and blistered windows of the United Airbus 320 I took from Chicago to Orange County, day before yesterday. The shot above is one of them. It’s part of this series here, all of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah.
What I’m hoping is that somebody somewhere has troubled to identify all the rock strata on display here. If not, I’ll do it eventually. Meanwhile, I’ll at least tell you that the lightest color rock — the spine of the “reef” that stands out most in the larger feature known locally as the Waterpocket Fold — is Navajo Sandstone. Read more about it at that last link.
(Note: this post was made mistakenly as a page, and didn’t go up at first. Now it’s here. Thanks to commenters for the help.)
I’ve flown over these coal mines in New Mexico and Arizona many times, but never checked to see what was up with them. Or down. Or choose your direction.
Turns out the one above, a giant W in the Arizona landscape, is the Black Mesa Mine, and it has been mothballed since 2005 when the destination of its coal (via an unusual route), the Mojave power plant, was shut down. The Kayenta Mine is still running, as are the other mines I saw off to the east around the Four Corners areas.
I’m flying back to Boston today. Weather looks bad for shooting over the West. It’ll be dark over the rest of the trip anyway, though sometimes I get some good city shots at night.
Flying out here on the 19th, I sat on the sunny side of the plane, which never makes for good shooting, but I still got some decent shots of Gloucester Bay, Mt. Blanca in Colorado’s Sagre de Cristo range, Great Sand Dunes National Park, center-fed farms (such as the one above) in the San Luis Valley, the San Juan River running through a hogback, Shiprock, the painted desert, the Black Mesa Mine, the Kayenta Mine, the Grand Canyon, salt evaporators, Mt. San Jacinto, Mt. San Gorgonio, mountains of coastal southern California and Los Angeles freeways. Some are good. Enjoy.
I grew up in New Jersey, which I think of as “New England without the universities”. There are many places in New Jersey with beauty equal to, say, New Hampshire’s. But New Jersey never had the same ethos of preservation, the same not-quite-a-mythology that explains why Norman Rockwell and his sentiments fit New England like a shoe while to the rest of the country they remain a maudlin approximation of bygone times elsewhere.
I transferred my state citizenship from New Jersey to North Carolina in early 1974, when I left our small rented house on Route 94 in Yellow Frame, out in Sussex County, the beautiful northernmost county of the state. Back then Sussex County had more cows than people, and featured fall colors and pastoral scenes worthy of calendars and post cards. Best of all it shared the Delaware River with Pennsylvania. The shores of the river were settled first by the Lenni Lenape Indians and later by the Dutch, descendents of which continued to farm the islands and lowlands alongside the river, right up to the point in the 1970s when the United States government, with help from both states, condemned the land, including perfectly good towns such as Dingman’s Ferry, and let it all fall to ruin while fighting and failing to build the unnecessary Tocks Island Dam Project. It was, and remains, a disgrace.
Can you imagine the feds, or Vermont and New Hampshire, doing the same to the Connecticut River? Of course not. We’re talking about New England here.
The difference was brought home to me this past weekend when we picked up The Kid from camp in Vermont and took our time heading back to Boston. We visited Middlebury, Waterbury (including the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream headquarters), the Rock of Ages Quarry near Barre, and various towns along the Connecticut River before having some okay Thai food in Keene. New England is truly a beautiful region, even with almost no available hotel rooms.
Much of that was recorded photographically. Here’s the set. Here’s the slide show.
Nice to know New England is there. Less nice to know that much of the same beauty has long since been paved or otherwise profaned in other states. (Of course, I also realize that much has been lost in New England as well. Just less of it than elsewhere.)
The shot above is of the Congregational Church in Middlebury, Vermont. I shot a series of photos of the church, most with white and grey clouds boiling up in the sky beyond. I wasn’t sure which was best (which is why I kept them all), but I am sure that several are better than the one the church uses for its own website.
I also did some experimental shooting with this brick building in downtown Middlebury, which is about as nice a little college town as you’re gonna find anywhere. The best of those shots, by the way, were taken not with my Canon 30D SLR, but with a little Canon Powershot SD850is. Partly that’s because the little camera likes to yield more vibrant colors than the big one; and partly it’s because the big one wasn’t fixed right and read the light wrong.
Anyway, I’m back out in California, where I am now a citizen, even though most of the next year will be spent back at the Berkman Center in Cambridge.
Several weeks ago, while we were walking around Mystic Seaport, in the mist of shooting these pictures, I dropped my camera, a Canon 30D — a workhorse that has served ably for more than two years. Afterwards it seemed to work fine mechanically, but it could no longer read light properly. For whatever reason, it overexposed shots by two stops or more. (All the shots I took with it after that were in manual mode using guesswork about light, trial and error.)
So I took it in to a camera repair shop near Boston, and they sent it to Canon. On Friday (yesterday) I got it back. It was an almost entirely new camera. New back, new top, new electronics. I didn’t have time to test it out before hitting the road for the weekend in Vermont and New Hampshire, but I didn’t expect any problems.
I was wrong. The problem wasn’t fixed. It still reads light wrong and overexposes by two or more stops. How could they replace so much of the camera and not fix the one thing that was wrong with it? Amazing.
I suppose I should bring the camera back on Monday and repeat the process, but I really want to have it in California this next week, and on the trip that follows that one. In fact, the first day I’ll be able to pick it up is September 12.
Right now I’m hoping that Samy’s in Santa Barbara (where I bought it) will be able to send it into Canon and expedite a fast turn-around on a fix.
Meanwhile I’m wondering if I should just go ahead and get a soon-to-be-discontinued Canon 5D, which is getting down around $1000 now. It’s a great camera, much better than the 30D. And use the 30D as a second camera. But… I dunno. Probably not, mostly because I’d also have to invest in all those good lenses that will make the 5D sing. Right now I have only one really good lens for the 30D. The other two are cheapies: a Tamron 18-200 (sharp, but not fast, and with fuzziness at the long end and barrel distortion at the wide) and a Canon f1.8 you can still get for just $80 or so. They do a good job for the money, but they’re not real good lenses.
I’m a pretty good photographer. Not great, but pretty good, on the whole. And I feel like a pretty good musician using an almost good instrument. The 5D is a good instrument. Not the best, but close enough. To get a 5D and the “glass” that would do it justice… say, three primes (fixed length lenses) and a zoom would cost several thousand dollars. That’s out of my range, at least until my get-rich boat comes in.
I’m sure it will. And for that to happen, I need to focus on other work.
I listen to a lot of WBUR in my car. ‘BUR is Boston’s main NPR station, and where I’m I do most of my public radio listening. While weather isn’t the main thing on ‘BUR, it’s a frequent thing, and what makes me feel at home when I listen. Lately the report has been what we’ve heard most of this summer: more rain. Flash flood watch, even.
Still, as I looked around here, it’s sunny and clear and perfect in the same way that Boston weather this summer has been sucky. That’s because I’m listening in Santa Barbara. At home I use our Sonos system, and in the car I use the Tuner app on my new iPhone. Tuner costs money and is missing some pieces (just like the iPhone), but it’s a great way to listen to radio.
I got an iTrip AutoPilot to go with it. The design is good, but its FM signal is way too weak. Not sure if I’ll take it back, but I’ve abandoned it while jacking the iPhone into one of those fake tape cassettes on a wire, which I shove into the car’s cassette player. (The car is a ‘95 Infiniti.) ‘BUR is easy on the cell system because its stream is just 24kbps. I’ve also done a lot of listening to faster streams, all the way up to 128kbps, and I gotta say those work pretty well too, over the 3G system. My fave at the top rate is Radio Paradise, which is just an awesome music station.
The main result for me is a new set of prelminary conclusions about the final stage of radio.
1) Live still matters. I have lots of stored music and podcasts on my iPhone. They’re great to have, but there’s no substitute. Stored and live are not the same. Both have their virtues, and now both can be maximized.
2) Human still matters. When I listen to WBUR in the morning, I expect to hear Bob Oakes, even if what he’s saying could be said by anybody.
3) The primary medium for radio, as with every other form of digital communication, is now the Net. Over-the-air (OTA) will still matter for a long time, but it will be become secondary rather than primary.
4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we make that happen, the better.
5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.
6) iPhones and other MIDs (mobile internet devices) will become bags of tools for doing all kinds of highly personal and engaged stuff. Today I’m in Toronto blue-sky-ing at PlanetEye (I’m on their board), thinking about all this. Long ago Larry Josephson told me “Radio is personal. That’s it.” But when all you had were transmitters and non-interactive receivers, there was a limit to how personal it could be. Not any more.
I’ll add more, but I gotta go.
In May of last year I flew from London to Los Angeles and shot a lot of pictures out the window. While still ascending toward the sky over Scotland and beyond I shot a city I later discovered was Manchester.
Since then the photo has acquired 21notes by 3 different people. Go through the 49 shots at that last link and find many more notes from more people than I can count. Amazing. I love that kind of help.
Speaking of which, many shots like this also serve duty in Wikipedia. I just discovered where they live.
We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms this summer in Boston. On Sunday we followed the last ones out of town, veering west after departing from Logan, while the clouds puffed off to the east. The dawn weather was dreary at ground level, but quite pretty, as clouds go, from altitude. So here’s a set of pictures I shot on the way out of town.
Most of the rest of the trip was cloudy, wasting a perfectly okay window with no obstructions. But I still got nearly 200 shots. I’ll be putting the rest of those up soon.
A few dozen million years ago, in the Eocene — not far back, as geology goes — a large lake covered much of what’s now western Colorado and eastern Utah. A lot of organic muck fell to the bottom, and now that muck is oil. Problem is, it’s locked in shale, and extracting it is no bargain… yet.
If and when it ever gets to be a bargain, look to see some of The West’s prettiest landscape ripped up.
Edge-on, the old lake bed presents itself as the Book Cliffs*, which overlook I-70 for a hundred miles. I took some shots of the region when we drove past them last year. And one of those shots now illustrates this post by Brandon Keim in his Wired blog.
[* My geography and my geology were corrected below in the comments by Ron Schott, a genuine geologist. Brandon Keim wrote about oil shales using my photo. There are oil shales, but not in these Book Cliffs deposits, which are older. The oil shales are in strata above the ones exposed here. Apologies for the errors.]
What we’re presented with here is a set of costs that can only be rationalized in terms that regard the extraction of all the world’s oil as an economic necessity — and nothing else.
I hear arguments for mining oil from places like this and a few memorable lines from the Doors’ “When the music’s over” come to mind:
What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
Stuck her with knives in the
Side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and
Dragged her down.
Great song, by the way. Also the one that foreshadowed the demise of Tony Soprano on the penultimate episode of Tony’s show.
Is there foreshadowing here too?
I’m in Mystic Seaport with family, looking at boats and learning history. It’s a great place that I remember well, even though I’m pretty sure the last time I came here was in the 5th grade, which would have been a little more than 50 years ago. Most of the antique boats currently on display here are younger than that. Perspective.
Anyway, earlier today I dropped my main camera, a Canon EOS 30D, and it no longer takes accurate light readings. It works, but I have to use another camera to read light, or guess at exposures and use trial-and-error. So I need to send it in for repairs. Any recommendations on that? The unit is long since out of warranty.
By the way, the shot above was taken not with the 30D, but with a little PowerShot SD 850IS, through one lens of my polarized sunglasses. The lens of the camera is small enough to do that. Other shots in that same series were taken with the 30D, but lacked the polarizing filter. They are much sharper and less grainy, but also less colorful.
I should be adding many more before the weekend is out, even with the 30D limping along.
I shot some Puffins the other day, from an old lobster boat piloted by my cousin George, who is a local on Maine’s Muscongus Bay. We skirted just past the surf surrounding Eastern Egg Rock, from which puffins disappeared in the 1800s after settlers ate all their eggs. The birds have been re-established there with great help from Project Puffin and the Audubon Society. There was a nice story in the Boston Globe yesterday about puffin restoration at the small, rocky island. I was there a few days earlier, and I’ve got the pictures. Fun combo.
Puffins are smallish birds with large colorful bills. Except when they’re laying eggs or fresh from hatching between hard rocks, they spend their whole lives on the open sea. The Globe story mentions one bird that’s 35 years old. That’s a long time on Earth for a sea creature that lives mostly on or above the surface.
Anyway, travel. I do a lot of it, along with plenty of photography. For those and related reasons I am on the board of PlanetEye, a new company that just launched on the Web. Check ‘em out. Give’m feedback, too. They have a link for it, and I know they listen.
J. Dana Hrubes has been reporting on his work and life at the North and South Pole for the last few years, but I just discovered his site this morning via the 12 July Aurora Gallery at SpaceWeather.com.
Here’s his report on 2007-2008. Here is the June page, with some amazing pictures of the aurora australis in the midst of stars. Plus this paragraph:
| June is the month when we celebrate the midwinter solstice. It means that we have lived through 3 months without the sun and there are 3 months until sunrise on September 21st. As for me, I get sad when the sun starts to rise because it means that the magic of walking miles each day to work and back under the beautiful skies of the South Pole will be over. But for now, we still have plenty of darkness left and the two coldest months are just beginning, July and August. I hope to beat my record low of -110.7 F (almost -80 C) which was in early August, 2005. I personally would like to experience -118 F and break the all time record since records at the Pole began in 1957. That also happens to be the temperature that carbon dioxide freezes at this altitude (over 10,000 ft equivalent). By the way, these are actual static temperatures, not any of that wind chill nonsense. Even at temperatures below -100 F, we still hike out to the telescope every day. I haven’t missed one day at South Pole Telescope since I got here on December 8, 2007. |
His weather widget says it’s -89°F right now, or -65°C. Still, good to be there, if only vicariously.
Today is the 100th birthday of my father, Allen H. Searls. He only lived about 71 of those years, but they were all good ones, and I miss him still.
I’m writing this from Portland, Maine, on our way up to his sister Grace’s place near Booth Bay, where the family will gather to reminisce and otherwise enjoy the world we all occupy for too short a time.
Here is a photo gallery of shots from Pop’s life, including some amazing ones from his job working as a cable rigger on the George Washington Bridge — a structure that went up, almost literally, in his front yard. (A few decades later, when the lower deck of the bridge went in, the house he grew up in was demolished to make room for more roadwork.)
I’ll be adding more to this collection over the next few days as we scan and upload more shots from this collection and Grace’s as well.
Since I lack a car here, I haven’t gotten out much, and not at all to any place that gave me a vantage on the fire. Until today, that is, when we went to Goleta and I had a chance to pause on Hollister Street by the airport where the Forest Service runs P3 Orion air tankers up to the fire sites to dump bright fire retardant on the landscape. (It’s not bad, by the way. Essentially, it’s fertilizer.) Here’s the photo set. (Also added more maps to this photo set.)
Tag: sbgapfire.
Click on the shot above to see the sunset I witnessed on Upper State Street in Santa Barbara last evening. I had gone to Radio Shack for supplies, and paid cash in a dark store, since the power was out. Stopped on the way back, stepped out of the car and shot this series.
Tag: sbgapfire.
Ray Ford has an excellent report on the fire in the Independent. A sample:
Rather than forcing the fire downhill into the ranch lands where it could be dealt with by the forces that were massing along Cathedral Oaks, the flames followed lateral channels east and west along saddles formed by erosion of softer rock materials, turning what was a half mile wide fire into one with a three-to-four mile wide. By 8pm, in the Ellwood area, rancher Ken Doty, his son, and son-in-law were busy spending the night building dozer lines to protect his property from the advancing flames.
On the other end, at the top of the Fairview area, neighbors were out in the street, dumb-struck by the huge flames they could see on the hills immediately above them. The questions were mounting.
Here is Ray’s photo gallery. Also excellent. And as scary as the text.
It is significant that Painted Cave is now under mandatory evacuation orders. If the fire jumps 154 and moves into the Painted Cave area, then winds blow down toward the city from the ridge, that would be extra bad.
[Later...] 9am. Looks like the wind is blowing the fire to the west now. Except for the firefighters, it looks like this will be a nice 4th in Santa Barbara.
Tag: sbgapfire.
Click on the above to dig one of the best photosets I’ve shot in a while. I was driving to a Radio Shack to pick up a volt-ohm meter, so we could monitor the browning out of electrical service, when I saw the sun setting through the smoke from the fire, and knew instantly that I could get a good angle on that through the Mission in silhouette. So I turned the corner, and sure enough. Got it.
Any blogger or news service that wants to use any of those shots should feel free to grab any of them. Give me photo credit if you like, but it’s not necessary. Just here to help.
(tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire)
Inciweb’s latest on the Gap Fire (tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire) is 10 hours old, it says (as of 12:17am Thursday morning). Most of KEYT’s 11pm newscast was devoted to the fire. Currently they’re reporting 1200 acres burned, 5% containment. The winds are not Santa Ana grade, but do come down from the NNW, flowing SSE over the Santa Ynez mountains (where the fire burns, above Santa Barbara and Goleta), directly toward town (and also in to the path of areas already burned by backfires, one hopes). KEYT also reported 10-13mph winds, with possible gusts up to 35. But the reporter on site said winds below, where houses are threatened, were calm.
Meanwhile ash is falling and the smell of smoke is strong. It’s stuffy, but we have all our windows shut here.
We also had a power outage. KEYT reported that nearly all of Santa Barbara and Goleta were knocked out by smoke affecting the main power lines into town, which come over the mountains from the North. (The other main power lines come over the mountains near Gibraltar Peak.) We came back on, but around 70,000 homes are still without power. The County of Santa Barbara has more on the front page of its website (that last link), but no direct link to any single report.
I’ll put up some pictures shortly, taken from our neighborhood close to the center of Santa Barbara itself, about 10 miles by air from the fire center. [Later: It wasn't easy, since the Net's speed has been way down... no doubt Cox is affected by this... but I got at least one picture up: the one above.]
Tuning around the radio dial, I only hear fire news right now on KCSB/91.9 from UCSB, alternating between English and Spanish. The station’s many Web streams are here.
More from The Independent (also on its fire page), Noozhawk, Edhat…
Here is a very deep history of wildfires around Santa Barbara. Scary and important. And here is my post about them, from the last time a fire threatened. I also had some ideas last year about public radio filling the hole left by departed news and “full service” commercial stations (all of which are gone from Santa Barbara). It was on my old blog here, but seems to be gone right now.
[Later...] The Net from Cox, our cable Internet provider, is down. The borrowed Sprint EvDO card, however, works perfectly. I even managed to upload the rest of my fire smoke photo set to Flickr.
The trip across the country on Friday yielded very little photography, at least for me: a set just 26 shots long. Our 3-person family had row 12 on the left side of a United 757-200. That’s one of the rows with a blank wall where a window might otherwise be. Our only window was usable only if we reclined the seat, and then it was pitted and dusty, and on the sunny side of the plane as well, which makes for terrible aerial photography. (Here is a shot that focuses on the window itself. Amazing we got anything through that.) Also we were on the leading edge of the wing, with the left engine intruding into much of the view of the land below. On top of all that, it was pretty hazy and/or undercast from coast to coast. The main exception was our flight path southwest across the Wind River Range of Western Wyoming, which features more than 40 named peaks in excess of 13,000 feet. Many of those are in the shot above, along with Willow and Boulder lakes on the far side of the mountains. I am sure Gannett Peak, highest in Wyoming, is near the center of the shot, which also takes in the Continental Divide
The Kid shot nearly all the pictures, by the way. He had that seat.
I’m not a car nut — I could never afford to be, lacking both the money and the time — but I do enjoy and appreciate them as works of arts, science, culture and plain necessity. So, about a month ago the kid and I joined Britt Blaser at the Concours d’Elegance in Newport Harbor, looking at an amazing collection of antique cars and motorcycles, all restored or preserved to a level of perfection you hardly find in new cars off the production line.
We also got to hang with new friends from Iconic Motors, who are making a very hot little sports car designed and made entirely in the U.S., mostly by small manufacturers of obsessively perfected goods. Took a lot of pictures of both, which you’ll find by following the links under the photos.
Something about 3/4 of the way into this here. From MoMo last week in Amsterdam.
Here are my still shots from the show. Also from Maarten’s barbeque the night before. I’ll have more Amsterdam shots up when I’m done dealing with life & stuff.
[Later...] Here they are.
You fly enough and they bump you up to Business Class whether you want it or not. That’s how United Airlines works, and for most passengers that’s not a bad thing. In my case I often don’t want it because it means giving up a window seat I’ve carefully chosen back in what we used to call Coach.
But that’s what happened last Wednesday, when I flew from Amsterdam to Chicago. I got bumped to an aisle seat in the Business Section. Worse, nearly everybody with a window seat closed their shades. For viewing we might as well have been in the cargo hold.
The “air show” system that displays flight progress on a map was also down, although a couple times I was able to tell where I was with my GPS, which (amazingly) was able to pick up the 4+ satellites required to to quadrangulate our location 38,000 feet over the Earth.
So I knew when we got to Greenland — my favorite place to shoot from on high . I asked my seatmate, who had the window, if she’d mind if I took some pictures of the land below. She said okay, we opened her shade, and that’s how I got these shots here.
The conditions were less than ideal. It’s never good to shoot out the sunny side of a plane in any case, because the direct light illuminates all the scratches, debris depositions and other imperfections in the windows, which are optically awful to begin with. This window was average or worse in those respects, and on this day Greenland was also hazy, with lots of clouds amidst the mountains. Still, I got some decent shots — enough, at least, to slake my thirst for geographic and geological spectacle and knowledge-building.
I took more shots a bit later, after we crossed the white expanse of Greenland’s middle (at just above the 63rd parallel, which is just 3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle), but need to work instead. Meanwhile, if any Flickr freaks want to help me name some of the mountains, glaciers and other features I shot in that series (or any of the others), please do. I found a few details on Google Earth and filled them in.
The caption for the above reads,
The water body is a glacial bay called Norrivig. Behind it is an island in the midst of which is “Azimuthbjerg” lat=63.4333333, lon=-41.6666667. Here is NotSoGreen on the same area, which also points to this Jason Sloan photo on Flickr. This is all in the Tunu or East Greenland, one of four large Greenland counties, or administrative districts. East Greenland is known natively as Ostgrönland. The glacier or gletcher emptying into Norrivig Bay is Thrym. The mouintain beyond is Hvidbjørn Bjerg, at
N 63° 31′ 0” W 41° 49′ 0”, or 63.51667 / -41.81667, with GeoNameId : 3423410.
Hope that helps the curious find out more.
If you’re interested in Greenland — and I would highly recommend it, because it’s not only beautiful but melting — check out NotSoGreen. Wonderful service.
It was a clear morning yesterday when I flew out of Boston, and almost identical when I landed in San Francisco. For oddball reasons of season and perspective, many of the sights on the outbound looked like the coast of Mexico or Brazil. In fact the above is Plum Island and its inlet on the North Shore near Ipswich.
Anyway, a fun set. Many more coming. See the slide show version here.
My grandmother, who was born in 1882 and died in 1990, came from sturdy Irish and German stock. It’s a combination that yields what I like to call “very organized party people”. She lived longer than her sisters, but not by a huge sum. The other three all lived into their 80s and 90s.
Grandma was the third of four daughters whose parents were Henry Roman Englert and Catherine Trainor. Catherine died in her thirties, so I assume that when this picture was taken, the girls were without a mother — although grandma often spoke fondly of her Aunt Mag, Catherine’s sister. I still remember lessons handed down from Aunt Mag. Such as, “You’ve got it in your hand. Put it away.”
Catherine Trainor Englert was the daughter of Thomas Trainor and (as I recall) Catherine McLaughlin. Thomas emigrated from Ireland in 1825 at age 15 and worked as an indentured servant to Catherine McLaughlin’s dad in Boston, learning the carriage trade. After marrying Catherine he moved to New York, living at a farm in Harlem while running a successful carriage business on Lower Broadway, where the World Trade Center later stood and fell. The Trainors had two daughters and at least two sons. As I recall one of them fought in the Civil War and died of injuries not long after the war was over. As the family story goes, the son arrived home on Christmas in a box.
Henry Englert was the son of Christian Englert and Jacobina Rung, who emigrated from the Alsace region of Germany in the mid 1800s. Henry was the head of the Steel & Copper Plate Engraver’s Union in New York City. The family’s home was at 742 E. 142nd Street in the Bronx. Grandma described the site as a paradise for the girls growing up.
Grandma was third of the four girls. Fourth was Florence, with whom Grandma stayed closest all their lives. Grandma Married George Washington Searls and had three children. The middle of those was my father. His older sister was Ethel and his younger was Grace. Florence married John Jackson “Jack” Dwyer, and had three children: William, Catherine and Jack Junior. William died at 19, a tragedy that was still fresh many decades later when I was growing up. Catherine married Donald Burns and had two sons, Martin and Kevin. Jack Junior had many kids with his wife Ruth. This all added up to more cousins and second cousins than I can count.
From the late 1940s into the early 1960s, our extended family maintained three adjacent properties on the edge of the New Jersey pine barrens. In one, called “Bayberry” lived Grandma and Aunt Ethel — Grandma’s oldest daughter and my father’s older sister. Ethel was a successful businesswoman, running a Newark office of the Prudential Insurance company. As I recall she held the highest position of any woman in the company, which says a lot about glass ceilings in those days. In another lived Aunt Florence and Uncle Jack. In the third lived us. We were summer inhabitants, while Grandma and Aunt Florence became year round somewhere in the middle of the Fifties.
This post, written in summer of 2003, gives a good sense of what a wonderful place and time that was. I still remember vividly Aunt Florence and Uncle Jack’s 50th wedding anniverary, on June 8, 1960. (The photo series from that day begins here.) Now even the kids pictured in that post and those pictures are getting old. All but a few from our parents generation passed on years ago. Notable exceptions have been my aunt Grace and Catherine Burns, the mid-born among Florence and Jack’s three kids, and the third Catherine in four generations.
Grace will be 96 next month, and is doing fine living up in Maine. Yesterday, however, came news that Catherine had passed on Sunday. She was 94.
While I haven’t seen Catherine in many years, I’ve kept up a warm correspondence with her son Martin (pictured with the cat in that last link — a cat that he recalls scratching him while we were posing for Uncle Jack, who set up a large view camera on a sawhorse).
Catherine did an amazing job over several decades studying the genealogy of her family’s roots, and adjacent ones (such as the Searls) as well. Nearly all the photos in this collection are from her archives. Her studies informed many of the notes in the captions as well.
I’ll try to make it up to Portsmouth this evening for the visitation announced in Catherine’s obituary. Meanwhile, it is moving to look back through her early life in this series here. It shows how the children and adults we were and become stay alive in us, and in our loved ones.
Love is life. To give it is to live it, and vice versa. I thank Aunt Catherine for giving us so much for so long.
Click on the above for a nice series of shots I took while flying out of Chicago in the evening, looking east toward the skyline with the sun behind me in the west. Early on is a nice series of the Bensenville Yard, one of the most impressive, and busy, rail yards in the world.
Shot this series of pictures, mostly of islands in Boston Harbor, while ascending to the skies out of Logan on Sunday, en route to San Francisco. The one above is Rainsford Island. (And my shot is a lot prettier than the one at that last link, on Wikipedia. They can use it if they like.)
Like many islands and hills in the Boston area, Rainsford is a drumlin or two. Given its shape, I’d call it Fish Island.
Got a lot more pictures from that trip, but they’ll have to wait. Meanwhile, here’s a slide show from the last cross-country trip.
Andy Carvin & NPR crew get kicked out of a public place for taking pictures with a weird (but way cool) camera.
I’ve now passed 20,000 shots on Flickr. When doing that few things please me more than finding out that one of them now illustrates its subject on Wikipedia. (Where I remain a stub, by the way. I don’t mind. Wikipedia entries about living folks are too often wrong.)
Here’s another. I know there are more, but not how to find them.
But that’s not the point, which is that the primary source of media now is each other. We’re rebuilding everything back up from Layer Zero. That’s us.
In Linux Journal: Is Linux now a slave to corporate masters? I think it’s a serious question, though the comments there so far have not yielded a serious answer. I’m kinda surprised by that, but maybe it’s still early.
Speaking of Serious Stuff, Stephen Lewis visits The Infrastructure of Repression, and vice versa, at HakPakSak. A sample:
| To enforce the ban and prevent mass protests, the Turkish government bussed an army of police to Istanbul from throughout the country, stationing dozens of riot geared policemen at every street and alleyway leading to Taksim and to Istiqlal Caddesi, the main pedestrian artery that feeds into the square. Policemen carried truncheons, shields, automatic weapons, gas masks, and tear gas cannisters. Larger arteries were blocked by tank-mounted water cannons manned by police… |
| The quickness and effectiveness of this shutdown of the infrastructure of urban movement of one of the world’s largest cities was alarmingly effective. By knowing exactly where the pressure points of urban movement are and how to pinch them, the government and police succeeded in isolating neighborhoods from neighborhoods, halting the movement of people, and putting a pulsing, hyper-alive city into a state of near sleep. Even the communications infrastructure of the present age — internet and mobile voice and sms — could not compensate for the atmosphere of isolation and the breakdown of information flows and of the ability to exercise the basic rights of citizenship that ensued when the infrastructure and freedom of physical movement, the most elementary components of cities and civilizations, were frozen. |
While matters are far more peaceful here, infrastructure matters no less. Hence Comparing hard and soft infrastructure, another recent post in Linux Journal. This one vets what I’ve learned on photo explorations of infrastructure in Boston, Cambridge and the Minuteman Bike Trail. Try looking at them in slideshow mode. Click the “i” for information, and you’ll see the captions that go with each.
And here’s a Cinco de Mayo link roundup at the ProjectVRM blog.
Here’s the link, and here’s the text:
Additionally, we have awarded two special prizes for the initiatives we considered groundbreaking. The VRM project lead by Doc Searls is from our point of view a very innovative approach to bring the concept of user-centric identity to customer management. During the VRM Unconference 2008 this topic has been intensively discussed for the first time in Europe. The second special prize goes to open source projects Higgins and Bandit, which we consider the most important open source initiatives in the field of Identity Management.
And here’s Bart Stevens’ blog post with photographic proof as well.
Big thanks to Joerg, Martin and all the folks at Kuppinger Cole for hosting VRM 2008 and for welcoming all the participants from the VRM crew to EIC2008.
We have many more events coming up. In addition to regularly (and irregularly) scheduled ones in the U.K and elsewhere in Europe (need to get everything on the wiki), we have the VRM sessions at the next IIW, plus the first VRMW (VRM Workshop, unless we come up with a better name for it) at Harvard on 9-10 July. Mark your calendars.
Shots from the I Can Haz Case Study? session at ROFLCON. The show continues today. I’ll be there.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking to ROFL, check out (some of) the many videos linked to by Ethan Zuckerman here.
To get (and stay) in shape, I’ve been spending more time off-grid. Less blogging and twittering, more time communing with nature. Some of that time I’m not indulging my curiousities. Or at least I’m resisting them. No electronics, for example. It was on one of those walks that I became curious about the story of infrastructure, past and present. What were these metal plates doing in the ground? Why were they there? Why were there so many of them? What were their different purposes? Which ones were remnants of services or companies no longer in existence? Which ones had found new uses? Why do so many carry the signatures of companies and utilities long dead?
I started on the Minuteman Bikeway, which passes close to our home not far from Harvard, where I’m headquartered these days. With a minimal slope, it’s perfect for active but low-stress strolling or biking. And it connects a lot of interesting historic sites. At one end is the Alewife “T” stop on the Red Line subway. At the other is something in Belmont I haven’t reached yet, because I usually go only as far as Lexington. Most of the stretch runs through Arlington, which combines the former villages of West Cambridge and Menotony. This is roughly the path along which the British soldiers retreated from Lexington on April 19, 1775, losing men (mostly boys, actually) and killing colonials of many ages. Thus started the Revolutionary War.
The Middlesex Central Railroad was born in 1846 and died in 1982. Part of it was better known as the Lexington and West Cambridge Railroad. It began as a vein of commerce, carrying goods from mills and ponds along its path. The Earth was colder in the early days of the railroad, and the winters were longer. Ice cut from Spy Pond was shipped all over the world from docks in Boston. This past winter the pond was thick enough to support skating for about three days.
But I’ve become more interested in the infrastructure story. So, over the last couple weeks, as Spring breaks out along the trail, I’ve been shooting pictures, mostly of stuff on the ground, before it gets haired over with vegetation, in faith that patterns will start making sense to me. I’ve also shot a lot around Cambridge, Boston and other places, but haven’t put those up yet. Right now I’m adding descriptions to the photos in this set here.
This is part of a long-term project, methinks. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in following the same threads, tell me in the comments below.
Clicking on the picture above will take you on a slideshow tour of the Grand Canyon, shot from the right side of an LAX-bound 757 that departed from Boston. I have no idea what movie was showing at the time; though I do know I refused, as I usually do, to close my windowshade to reduce ambient light on the ancient crappy ceiling-mounted TV screens. The scene outside upstaged the movie in any case, as it has been doing for the last several million years, as the Kaibab Plateau has pushed its dome upward and the Colorado has stayed roughly where it had been since the many millions of years before that, when it wandered lazily across a flat plain.
As ranking canyons go, the Grand Canyon is almost too grand. It’s freaking huge. From the air I find it far more dramatic to peer down into its narrower regions, such as the one above, which is early in the Colorado’s course through the canyon. The series follows the canyon from east to west, from not far below Glen Canyon dam and the Vermillion Cliffs area to Vulcan’s Throne and Lava Falls, where relatively recent flows have slopped their blackness down across the canyon’s iconic layer-cake strata.
What is most amazing to me about this corner of The West is that it was obviously placid through so many time stretches across the last almost two billion years. The West is painted with the colors of long periods of relative quiet, as sands and silts and gravel and cobbles were deposited by braided rivers and transgressing seas.
All of the Grand Canyon’s strata were laid down before the age of dinosaurs. Younger layers such as those comprising the Vermillion Cliffs to the East, the Grand Staircase upstream in the Glenn Canyon area, in Canyonlands, Arches, and most of Utah’s most colorful layer-cake displays — Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Cedar Breaks, San Rafael Reef and Swell — are comprised of younger rock eroded off the top of the Kaibab Plateau.
Some of the shots were taken with my Canon 30d, and others with my tiny PowerShot 850. which does a better job of shooting straight down through the window. Its smaller lens distorts less through the plane’s multiple layers of bad glass and plastic windows. And the display on the back lets me shoot without looking through an eyepiece. It’s not perfect, but not bad, either.
I still miss my Nikon Coolpix 5700, which took lots of great pictures out plane windows, and was frankly much better at that job than the Canon, mostly because the Coolpix’ objective lens was smaller (again, better for looking at angles through the terrible optics of plane windows), and partly because the camera’s flip-out viewer allowed me to hold the camera to the window at angles I could not put my face, but where I could still see and frame the view.
When I couldn’t sleep last night, I uploaded another pile of pix shot out the window during a flight last month from Boston to Los Angeles. This segment runs from the Mineral Hill Mine in Arizona to Slide Peak in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles.
The picture above is of the the mine at Mineral Park, Arizona. Once home to a settlement of 700 people, it’s now a ghost town.
What intrigued me, even from 30 miles away, was the “happy face” look of the mine, produced by the small ponds in the mine’s depths.
Here’s a slide show compiled from shots from a left side window (6A) of a United 737 flying from Dulles to Logan. Featured are Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey’s refinery districts, New York and BostonProvidence. Even from half a dozen miles up and more than that away, you can see the bright lights of Yankee Stadium and Camden Yards, where the Yankees and Orioles were playing that evening. Also the Verazano-Narrows and George Washington bridges, along with many others draped across the black waters below.
Got some nice pictures of the Cornwall Coast, while still ascending out of Heathrow en route to Washington and Boston.
The shot above is of Padstow Bay, with Trebetherick and the Polzeaths on the right, above Padstow and Daymer Bays. (The latter is the lower, or southern, one.)
Interesting to see how the surf hits the Polzeaths at full force. Some pretty big waves there. You can also see the corduroy surface of the ocean, as the waves advance from a swell coming in from the west.
Often as I fly over eastern Canada, I’ve somehow always missed Newfoundland. It has always been nighttime, or clouded under, or too far from the plane’s route. Well, not this last time. When I flew from London to Boston via Washington (LHR-IAD-BOS) on the first day of March, I could see on the plane’s map that we were headed straight over the southeastern corner Newfoundland — the Avalon Peninsula, where St. John’s lies next to the easternmost point on mainland North America. Then, as we approached, the plane veered slightly left, toward the south, and we missed St. John’s by fifty miles or more. But it was a clear day, so I got a few shots of St. John’s anyway, and then much better shots as we flew just south of the southern capes.
I got some nice shots of Trepassy Bay, Biscay Bay and St. Mary’s bay, all on the “Irish Loop” of Highway 10. The towns along and near the loop — Portugal Cove South, Trepassy, St. Shotts — are fishing villages more akin to settlements. So far I’ve found surprisingly little about them on the Web, most of which I’ve put into links in captions under some of the pictures. Maybe some of ya’ll can fill me in.
Yesterday we went to visit the De Cordova Museum in Concord Lincoln, where we were looking forward to seeing the museum’s iconic pink pig sculpture along with other exhibits in the museum and its Sculpture Park.
Rounding a curve on the road through the park heading into the museum, we were shocked and saddened to see that a tree from the center of a nearby grove had fallen squarely across the pig, smashing it right in the middle. No expert could have dropped the tree more squarely. It was amazing that, given 360 possible compass degrees that the tree might have fallen, it picked exactly this one.
Later we learned that the tree had fallen just that morning, no doubt because its rooting had been weakened by gound saturated with rain over the past few days.
Then this morning I was surprised to find no mention of the news in blog or the Boston Globe. So I just started uploading a bunch of pictures taken with my pocket camera. The lighting wasn’t good, but there are plenty of shots for anybody to use, should they like, up here at Flickr. If you’re a journalist of any kind, feel free to take and use them.
More about the pig. It is a work of Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks. Its title is Trojan Piggybank, and it is on loan from the artists. From the writeup two links back:
Originally exhibited in the 2004 Navy Pier Walk: The Chicago International Sculpture Exhibition, Trojan Piggybank comes to DeCordova Museum’s Sculpture Park with a playful warning from its collaborative team of artists, Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades, who caution, “Sometimes things are not what they appear to be.”
From a distance, the large pink wood piggybank appears friendly. A closer look reveals military camouflage colors painted around the snout, suggesting a recent wallow in filth, while imparting an additional and foreboding meaning. The artists intend this familiar military pattern to represent the greed associated with our ever-expanding military industrial complex. This visual stratagem is furthered by grates protecting Trojan Piggybank’s eyes, and a hatch door on the underbelly hinting at hidden invaders inside. A large silver coin waits at the ready in the piggybank’s slot. As Simpson and Georgiades observe, “The pleasures of consumer culture are accompanied by less desirable social consequences. When we impose one way of life onto another, the bad goes along with the good. The playful piggybank has a hidden agenda.”
No wonder our first thought was that the tree across the pig was itself a sculpture, or an improvisation on the original.
Well, in a way it was, no?
I just discovered that Google Earth is also useful for astronomy. You go under View and click on Switch to Sky. Suddenly your screen is a planetarium. It’s not quite the equal yet of KStars, Starry Night or Carinasoft’s Voyager (the three programs I know best), but it’s not bad for a start, and with call-outs that integrate well with the Web.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, I’m wondering if there’s an easy one-click way to copy lat/lon from an x/y location on the Earth. Or to copy the geotag.
Another question… Is there an easy way to make Google Earth display the names of mountains and rivers? Seems the only way is by angling down with the tilt slider (the horizontal one above the compass tool), to an elevation barely above that of the mountain — and then using your mouse, keyboard, or that joysticky whatever-that-is in the middle of the compass, to fly like a plane toward the mountain’s crest, hoping that at some point the name of the mountain will appear in blue above it. Any of you geo-hackers know a better way? Hope there is one.
And one more… Is there a way to use normal, non-3D fonts?
Oh, and these questions don’t just apply to Google Earth.
My main purpose is to geotag pictures I put up here. No way to label them all, since there are around 18,000 of them. But I’d like to label a few, at least. Easily.
That’s a shot of the Lava Falls section of the Grand Canyon. It’s one of my favorite scenes: of lava from the Uinkaret Lava Field slopping down into the canyon over the north rim. Atop Lava Falls itself is Vulcan’s Throne, a volcanic vent about 73,000 years old.
This may seem old, but the lava is among the newest features of the Grand Canyon. The Kaibab Limestone over which the lava flowed was laid down in early Permian time, around 290 million years ago. All the rocks below are older, on down to the Vishnu group at the bottom of the canyon, around 1.7 billion years ancient.
That set is one of many that came out of my most recent trip out west by plane. I’m in London now, and still getting them up.
Getting this one up quickly from my seat in a London-bound 777 before taking off. It’s a set of shots heading westbound from Comb Ridge to Monument Valley in southern Utah during the trip west I’m ending now. The shot above is of Red Lake, a dry lake in the midst of an only slightly less rutilant desert south of Comb Ridge, the town of Bluff, and the San Juan River. The colorful parts of Utah are among my favorite places on Earth. Even though I haven’t been to most of them.
Someday I’d love to take a rafting trip down the San Juan River, through Goosenecks, which are also featured in this series.
The whole trip is here — a long series of shots running from Boston to Los Angeles. I don’t have all of them up yet. All my connections have been too slow. Maybe I’ll finish them in London. We’ll see. In any case, it was the clearest view I’ve had coast-to-coast in many trips.
The Grand Canyon series is pretty good too.
The interesting thing to me about the footprints above, aside from their nature as photography fodder, is that they resemble the layout of the two intersecting paths at Winthrop Park, where I took the shot.
You can see the paths on Google Maps if you look for the intersection of JFK and Mt. Auburn in downtown Cambridge — one block south of Harvard Square (which isn’t), or you can hope that clicking on the “Link to this page” link for the park itself will work; but for some reason Google Maps (on this laptop, at least, in two different browsers) shows you the park while it’s loading, then jumps to another part of Cambridge. It’s 2:33am, however, and I’m not going to try to debug whatever I might be doing to cause that.
In any case, the pidgeon prints drew a map of the park paths.
The park is also Wintrop Square. Unlike most squares in Boston, it actually has corners that are right angles. It was the city’s original marketplace, and therefore dates, as does the city, from 1630. It was called Newtowne then. It became Cambridge eight years later.
The link behind that picture leads to a small set of shots I took with my new little inexpensive Canon pocket camera (with a name like a license plate, so I don’t remember it). Takes some getting used to, but I like it.
One of the pleasant discoveries I’ve made since moving (at least temporarily) Back East (as we, or they, say in California), is that I enjoy the winter. Nothing is prettier than New England under a fresh snow. That’s what I was trying to shoot there.
What I missed was taking some shots the day before the snows came, when the ponds were both frozen and clear. I bought some skates and went out on one of the local ponds with The Kid, who with a total of hours on skates was far better than his old man, who hadn’t been on the things in at least three decades — and hadn’t skated on a pond or a lake since his teens. So we’re talking, like, 45 years ago, give or take.
Now it’s warmed up and about all that’s left of the snow is gray glaciers of former slush along the sides of roads. Still, it’s pretty to me.
This weekend we’ll go skiing with friends up in Vermont. My first time skiing there. Looking forward to that, here at midnight in Toronto (at the moment).
There’s this great haze effect you sometimes get in the mountains of Southern California in the evening. It’s not smog, though sometimes that’s involved. It’s just enough moisture in the air, nicely layered, to give you these amazing silhouettes that look like Japanese paintings. Or something.
And that’s what I saw whille driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles last Thursday evening, right after CES, when I passed through some low mountains between Barstow and Victorville on I-15. Google Earth is woefully deficient in the mountain-naming department, so I’m not sure what these are. The near ones are close to the road. The far ones are probably in the San Gabriel Mountains, which frame the Los Angeles basin on the north, and the Mojave Desert on the south. At this point I’m on the Mojave side, facing southwest. In any case, I got some nice shots in the set behind the picture above.
And here’s the same effect, in the San Gabriels, shot from an inbound plane.
Picturing CES, continued is my latest post at Linux Journal. It leads to a long report in the form of captions to over two hundred pictures (though far from all) shot at the show.
Las Vegas is a crazy place. Picturing CES shows some of that. There’s more to come.
Just noticed I have 394 potos tagged lasvegas here and another 77 here.
That was the sunrise on New Year’s Day here in Santa Barbara. Here’s the sunset from the same day:
Both were harbingers of sorts. As I write this we’re having the worst rain of the new year. Huge storm happening.
We’ve been under snow in Boston for all of December; but in our case we missed the white Christmas there, opting instead to visit family and grandbaby in Baltimore, where it was a bit cold but not snowy. Christmas evening, however, we made up for that by hanging in Denver, waiting for a plane to Boise, where things were white again, and getting whiter.
The next morning, after a fabulous breakfast I wrote about on site, we hopped in the rented Subaru Forrester and headed toward Sun Valley. The roads were slick and the accidents were many, so I didn’t do any shooting until we were heading into Shoshone, and taking the Sawtooth Scenic Byway (Idaho 75) north into Sun Valley. That’s where this gallery came from, including the shot above, which was made by The Kid out a side window. Not bad.
We had fresh snow every day in Sun Valley, and even more up at Galena where I did the first cross-country skiing in my life. Beautiful place, with the best lodge food I’ve ever had. Amazingly good, especially considering the remote infrastructure-free location.
Anyway, things stayed white all the way until we were over California airspace yesterday. More pix of those after I get some sleep.
As a photographer with nearly 18,000 shots on Flickr (and hundreds of thousands on hard drives), Dave Winer’s FlickrFan looks like a killer thing. I’m especially interested in turning our idle flatscreen “TV”s into useful ways to display the work photographers and services (such as the AP) that I like. When I get home to Santa Barbara later this week, I’ll give it a whirl.
Meanwhile, I think we’re going to see TV undermined absolutely by “content” of the users’ own choosing. TV itself isn’t even TV any more. It’s just one way among many for people to display pictures and video that could come from anywhere, produced and distributed by anybody, including (and especially) the user himself or herself.
When the TV ceases to be a TV, and can be whatever you want, wherever you want — yet still remains that attention-grabbing thing that a screen tends to be — all kinds of interesting things can happen.
I think we’re not only seeing the end of TV, but the beginning of a new life for digital photography.
My sister Jan put up a nice photo series of our Aunt Grace Apgar, flying with our cousin Mark Crissman. Grace is 95 and doesn’t look or act a day over… hell, pick a number. Make it a low one.
Her mom lived to 107, and Grace is in better shape at 95 than Grandma was at the same age.
Hoping here that some of those long-lasting genes got distributed in my old bones too.
Speaking of ice and snow, that picture above is one in a series of shots I took out the window of the galley in the 777 yesterday as it passed into Canadian airspace after hours crossing nothing but the vast we North Atlantic. This is the Labrador coastof the province now known as Newfoundland and Labrador. The patterns made by the icy water flowing past small islands along the coast was beautiful and fascinating. Look here and here to see the larger scope, and how some play between moving seas and moving winds creates these broad flow patterns that almost appear to have been made by a rake or a broom.
The shot above is one in a series shot last night walking from our hotel to the Louvre. It was cold and rainy, but Paris itself more than compensated for the discomforts, because Paris in the rain looks better than most cities in the sun. Such a great place. I forgot how much I missed coming here, which I used to do quite a bit, back in the mid-90s. A few bits of French even came back to me.
Anyway, I found a good connection here at LesWeb3 (where the wi-fi is otherwise bad), so I’ve been uploading shots. Here’s the whole series, which will keep growing.
My Flickr DNA reveals that I have 383 photo sets among 17,437 photos, and just just one favorite photograph by anybody else, which is embarrasing.
(Thanks to Mike Warot for the pointer.)
So I was flying from Boston to Atlanta by way of Chicago, heading south across Illinois roughly on a vector that took me along Interstate 57. I had enjoyed getting looks at varioius intersections and landmarks (Chicagoland Speedway, Argonne National Laboratory) west of Chicago, the Canal Corridor (with the Illinois and Michigan Canal) and the Illinois River on either side of Joliet, the Kankakee River, and then the countryside along the way to Champaign-Urbana, when I spotted a fire on the main street of a town along the way.
I had meant to do the detective work of figuring out which town it was, and to get some photos to the local paper, but got caught up in work.
Then this morning I decided I needed to nail this one down, and sure enough, the town was Paxton, and the fire was in its historic Magestic Theater. Here’s the story from the News-Gazette. Here’s the “before” picture of Downtown Paxton, from Wikipedia. I believe the Magestic Theater is there on the left. Not sure, though.
In response to my piece in Linux Journal yesterday, Antonio Rodriguez, proprietor of Tabblo, has come up with an excellent workaround for photographers dealing with the asymmetry of today’s Net and the problem of uploading over and over again to multiple photo sites:
I’d like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn’t Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc’s VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.
You listening lazy web?
Better yet, are you listening, carriers?
All the last-mile companies — Comcast, Cox, AT&T, RCN, Time-Warner, Verizon and the rest — are continuing to make all their money on “triple play” and other monopoly rents. They can do better than that. The Net may be a World of Ends in an ideal sense, but in reality there are physical-world issues that put proximal services at a real advantage. Same goes for proximal real estate.
The carriers have already let Akamai school them once. I suppose you could throw in Amazon’s Web Services (notably EC2 and S3, which provide big back-end compute and storage, cheap) as well. Companies such as Digisense leverage Amazon’s S3 back end to provide workarounds of carrier last-mile slow-upstream asymmetries. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted Digisense.) Rather than being a problem to be worked around, the carriers could become the solution. Or at least support solutions provided by more agile companies that could serve as partners or customers.
There are enormous benefits to carrier incumbency that go beyond extending decades-old cable TV and century-old telephone company business models. There are countless potential service businesses that can be either created or supported by the carriers, and their suppliers as well. (That’s you, Cisco.) Antonio just described one of them.
Here at my apartment near Boston I’m lucky to have a choice of three different carriers: Comcast, RCN and Verizon. I use Verizon because it provides 20Mb downstream and 5Mb upstream — much higher speeds, especially on upstream, than either of its rivals — and comes pretty damn close to delivering exactly that:
The HDTV we get is also pretty good, though the user interface and choice of set-top boxes fall far short of what we’ve experienced for years in Santa Barbara with Dish Network. (Still, they’re new at this. I’m willing to cut them some slack.)
Anyway, we pay a little over $100/month for TV, phone and Net as a “triple play”. Of that, the Net is about half the total. But what if we want more, such as an IP address or two, so se can set up our own Web servers? Well, we need to get Verizon FiOS for business for that. There the lowest price is about $100, for a two-year commitment for “Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps”. That’s twice the cost for much lower speeds, both ways, than I get now. The closest business offer to what I have now is “Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps”, and that’s $389.99/month for one year and $404.99/month for two years.
This kind of pricing prevents far more business than it supports. It’s the old telco mentality at work: the one that says, “Businesses can afford to pay more, so we’ll charge more”.
Verizon and its competitors need to start seeing their primary advantages in three places: 1) existing customer relationships; 2) proximity to customers of buildable and rentable service-platform real estate; and 3) providing the connectivity that allows business to grow around #1 and #2.
So consider this a friendly and construcive shout-out to CZ and others at Verizon, from the other side of the carrier/customer fence. You guys are making some good moves, technically. Now let’s see you make a few that support the Web’s and the Net’s business and social ecosystems, and not just those of Hollywood and Ma Bell’s ghost.
Over in Linux Journal: Let’s keep photography and mapping mashable. A sample:
Now, in an ideal world — that is, one where the Net is truly symmetrical, peer-to-peer and end-to-end — I would rather do the federating myself, from my own photo archive, with my own APIs. That way I could federate selected photos to Flickr, Tabblo, Panoramio and whomever else I please. In fact, that would probably make things easier for everybody. But that’s a VRM (vendor relationship management) grace we don’t enjoy yet. In the absence of that, we need more open APIs between services such as these, so customers’ photos can be shared at the vendor-to-vendor level.
To get the context, ya need to read the whole thing. But you get the idea.
The shot above, of Kettle Point on Lake Huron, is one of many in a series taken in a line running from Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario, across Michigan looking north toward Saginaw (and its Bay), Grand Rapids, various towns on the Grand River, and then the shore of Lake Michigan, all while flying from Boston to Chicago on the way to Atlanta last week.
The woods near Kettle Point, and up the coast into Pinery Park, comprise the largest oak savanna in North America, left unspoiled because the sandy land beneath was bad for farming. The lines running through them are the remains of old shorlines. I won’t say “ancient”, because they aren’t. They’re markers of the rising land and shrinking size of the lake, which is actually a puddle left by the melting glacier that comprised an ice cap that recently came south as far as Long Island and Cape Cod, which were both built along its southern boundary of dirt and rock the glacier had carried there. In fact all the Great Lakes, and nearly every Lake in Canada, is but a dozen thousand years old, at its most elderly edge (this one here).
Kinda puts global warming in perspective. You could stand at any one of those lines at any time in the past 12,000 years, and speak of global warming as a progressive fact.
By the way, fall colors stand out in many of these pictures, if you look closely for them.
Put up a tabblo of Greenland in blue light at sunset. Another take on this series here.
Behold Fridgewatcher.com.
I just uploaded some more shots from last week’s flight over Greenland, en route from London to Denver. The last series, of peaks drowning in ice, was shot with the sun below the horizon, behind clouds, or both. Couldn’t tell from my side of the plane. As we flew straight west, however, the sun began to come up again, just peeking over the horizon and illuminating the peaks of mountains above deep fjords bottomed by glaciers, all moving toward the Davis Strait on the west side of the island. The result highlighted the deep blue of dusk in the valleys.
Eastern Greenland blows my mind every time I fly over it. This last trip was no exception. Imagine Alps, Rockies, Himilayas, buried up to their nostrils in snow and ice across an expanse of Saharan dimensions, all of it moving, less an ice cap than a great spreading mound of blue and white, all of it heavy as magma, hard as stone, abrading away at the mountains, leaving horns and scarps protruding above the whiteness. At its edges icebergs calve off constantly and in great profusion, suggesting a bovine maternal quality to the great mound itself.
Anyway, it’s past the equinox and gaining on the winter solstice, so the sun was quite low when we flew over Greenland en route to Denver from London last week. Still, the subject was still there. Amazing sight.
Just got into Chicago, and now I’m sitting in seat 4F, at the window, camera at my side, while the rest of the passengeriat boards the 737.
Beautiful view of Toronto, Hamilton, Southern Ontario, Lake Huron and Central Michigan after clearing the clouds in Central New York. Got some pix I’ll put up later.
Can’t get to my point, Have to turn this off. durn.
Okay, we’re en route to Atlanta, and permission has just been granted to use laptops and other “approved electronic devices”. These do not include “all electronic devices including two way radios using cellular wi-fi technology”. The technical among you will know that the last phrase was not written by a technical expert.
Anyway, my point, two paragraphs up, was that these prohibitions, while serious in one way, are silly in others. I’d bet that most of the open laptops on this plane have wi-fi on by default, putting out whatever little signal that involves. I have my wi-fi turned off, which spares the battery in any case.
More to my point about silliness, for the first time ever I was told by a flight attendant to turn off my camera, presumably because it is an “electronic device”. I can only assume, because I didn’t ask. Her pissy and reproachful tone made it clear that asking questions would not be helpful. So I complied. Meanwhile we crossed the north shore of Chicago, with brilliant fall colors and many scenes I would like to have shot, but alas. Not big as deals go, but still annoying. The risk to the aircraft caused by my shooting pictures out the window is exactly zero. The benefits to the airline exceed that, though perhaps not by much.
I’ll check when I get to the hotel, but I’ll bet that about half of the 17,000 or so pictures I’ve put up on Flickr were shot out of plane windows. (Later… 4303 are labeled “aerial”.) A lot are blah, but more than a few are pretty darn good. Including many shot on approach or take-off.
And now I’m in Atlanta, at Apachecon, working.
Many flights aren’t in the air. They’re on the ground. Such as mine, UA7157 from IAD to BOS. It was supposed to depart at 2:35pm. It’s 4:30 now. The plane was delayed out of Philadelphia, and is on the ground now at IAD (Dulles, Washington DC). We’ll board shortly.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at flight trackers. Flyte.com can’t find the flight at all. Flightstats says it leaves at 4:09. So does FlightAware. Here’s an announcement…
Turns out 7157 has a new plane with 15 fewer seats….
It’s now 5:30. I’m still at IAD, only now on flight 822, which was due to leave at 5:15. I volunteered for it, and got a free round trip voucher for doing that. I still have a window seat, but in 12F on a 757, which has no window, but rather a large blank space from which the rushing sound of the plane’s ventillation system roars.
Anyway, we’re not going. Soon as I sat down in the plane, they announced that a bolt was loose in a wheel, and we would be delayed at least 45 minutes, or perhaps an hour.
The Verizon cell signal is too poor in here to do the fancy flashy stuff that most or all the flight tracking sites use, so fuggit. I’ll try to sleep.
[Later...] Got in at 7:10. The fix didn’t take that long, and I netted a free round trip for the trouble. Coulda been worse. Now to bed for real.
Here’s what I saw when I looked out my Denver hotel window this morning. That’s venus and the moon, in a conjunction, high in the eastern sky. If you live on the West Coast and it’s clear, you can see the same thing right now (5:20am), and into the morning light.
Same for folks in Hawaii and the Pacific.
The configuration will change by the time dawn reaches Australia and eastern Asia, but will still be impressive, methinks.
An interesting exercise: with the moon so close to Venus, you have a guidepost to finding Venus in braod daylight, just by looking for it to the north of the moon.
By the way, sorry the shot’s a bit smeared. It was a five-second hand-held exercize and the best I could do with no time to spare.
Had a great time watching the fireworks show at Battersea Park last night. Guy Fawkes Day isn’t until Monday, but this was a perfect night for it: not cold, not rainy. Which is the most you should ask of London in November. I stood there in a long sleeve shirt, carrying two layers of unnecessary additional outwerwear over my arm along with the camera.
The shot above, and all the others showing the flamethrowing display (orange lines pointing upward from the bottom of the photo) were all made without me looking through the viewfinder. I held the camera over my head, and the crowd in front of me, pointed in the general direction of the fireworks.
The show was well-coordinated with music, and involved some of the most unusual and inventive pyrotechnics that I’ve yet seen: fireworks that flew in tight ringlets once they achieved altitude, others that produced trails that looked like waterfalls, draped across the sky… Very nice.
Went there with friends old and new, and enjoyed it tremendously. My one regret was missing the last tube out of Sloane Square. Finding an unoccupied taxi proved difficult for more than an hour, during which I failed to grok the “night bus” system as well. But I did find a taxi eventually, and chalked it up to another learning adventure in London.
Enjoyed last night’s Bloggerdinnerbostonoct07. I brought my camera, but only took one picture, which isn’t even worth posting. That’s because it was too crowded for the lens I was using, at the places where I was standing; and also because the conversation was more important anyway.
It was interesting to come to an East Coast gathering where I knew maybe one in twenty people. (Though more than that knew me.) In the Bay Area, the ratio is usually reversed. Anyway, met a bunch of great new folks.
Boston to Earth: lots happening here.
Much more from Jeremiah, who turned me on to the event, and who points to all the pix tagged bloggerdinnerbostonoct07 too.
I’m at my Aunt Grace’s new place way back in the woods on a Maine coastal peninsula, feeling way cool that I have successfully guessed the WEP key on her wi-fi station, and am now connected to the Net via her rooftop satellite connection. Meaning that all these bits travel a 25,000 mile round trip to get where they’re going. Not a big deal anymore, I know, but I still think it’s cool that it works at all.
We went hiking in the woods this afternoon, looking mostly at fall colors above and soft mosses below. But somewhere in there we found an old mica mine, with some of the most amazing rocks I’ve ever seen.
It’s fun to visit with so many New Jersey relatives that have moved to rural New England. I feel like I’m in Monmouth County in a parallel universe.
Might have pictures later. Not sure. Too much else going on.
Got a few shots of downtown Toronto earlier this week while I was there on a whirlwind in-and-out trip. It was unseasonably warm, and foggy as well. Many of the shots at the link above were taken as the fog burned off.
The camera wasn’t my usual Canon SLR. Instead it was my wife’s little Olympus SP-350, a camera we both hate. It takes decent pictures and has a few other virtues, but it also kills batteries at about the same rate as older cameras killed rolls of film. And rechargeables don’t last for crap in it either. Yes, I’ve updated the firmware. The latest made a *little* difference, but not much. Anyway, if you ever have a chance to get one, avoid it.
On the trip over here to London last Sunday evening, I shot a set of 24 photos over about a minute and a half while our United 777 ascended through a layer of cirrus clouds at around 25,000 feet, give or take. The sunlight passing through the clouds, which at this altitude were comprised of ice crystals, produced a form of rainbow called a “sundog“. These can also be seen from the ground, but obviously the better angle is on the level at the clouds’ own altitude, with the rising or setting sun at a low angle. Normally I toss most of the shots I take, but in this series every one was a keeper.
I managed to irk pretty much everybody with my post Citizen journal breaks a heroic story. Shelley Powers and David Kearns both took issue with the “citizen journalism” concept. Shelley said it doesn’t work, and David pleaded “for the demise of that horrible ‘citizen journalist’ meme”. Liz Straus, who pointed me to the story in the first place, said “Aw Doc, why the focus on citizen journalism and not the focus — as David point’s out — on the oral history that’s been happening since time began?” More than one comment gave David Armano a hard time for apparently preferring to report via Twitter and blog, rather than through mainstream news media. David himself weighed in with good answers to his critics, and added, “This isn’t real journalism and I don’t think anyone would claim it to be (I wouldn’t). It just demonstrates that the average person can tell a story from there perspective. I was there, I saw what I saw and told that story. That’s all.”
But is it?
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, Linus’s Law says. But we have to do better than just de-bugging posts like David Armano’s and mine. The mainstream media never had enough eyeballs, or time, to do a job that was even close to ideal. And now, as advertising money and eyeballs both flood over the banks of mainstream media and out through the surrounding jungle of blogs, twitters, cell calls, text messages and countless other outlets for information, we clearly need to think afresh about re-institutionalizing the means by which we get trustworthy news to each other, and how we then debug and interpret it along the way.
We’ve not only hardly started to build the new (or renewed) institutions we require; we barely have a common understanding for what we’re doing in the meantime. “Citizen journalism” sounds right to some, “horrible” to others. Blogs are journals in the literal sense, but few carry the same breed of responsibility long ferried by major newspapers and magazines. (Although fate may put bloggers in that position from time to time.) While we debate whether or not new media authors practice “real journalism”, the need to report What’s Going On not only persists, but has more means than ever.
This is why I’ve lamented the dying not only of local newspapers, but of full-service local radio in most smaller U.S. cities, and the failure thus far of everybody (bloggers, public radio, you name it) to fill the void. Old acts are failing and new acts are not fully together.
Earlier this year Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica put together five basic Principles of Citizen Journalism (accuracy, thoroughness, transparency, fairness, independence) that should refresh veteran journalists while educating rookie ones. We also need new institutions where these kinds of principles can be practiced. And new practices where these principles can be institutionalized.
If you’re looking for a good cross-section of possibilities here, check out JLab and the Knight-Batten awards, which are given to worthy efforts in constructive journalistic directions.
While all these are good, the larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.
This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.
Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of “impressions” to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.
The holy grail for advertisers isn’t advertising at all, because it’s not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it’s the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It’s also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers — on customers’ terms and not just on vendors’ alone. This is VRM: Vendor Relationship Management. It not only relieves many sellers of the need to advertise — or to advertise heavily — but also allows CRM (Customer Relatinship Management) to actually relate, and not just to capture and control.
As VRM grows, advertising will shrink to the the perimeters defined by “no other way”. It’s hard to say how large those perimeters will be, or how much journalism will continue to thrive inside of them; but the sum will likely be less than advertising supports today.
The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this. Today I have fellowships at two major universities, plus consulting and speaking work, all of which I enjoy because of blogging. The money involved far exceeds what I might have made from advertising on my blogs. (For what it’s worth, I have never made a dime of advertising money by blogging, nor have I sought any.)
On the with effects side — money made with journalism, rather than because of it — perhaps the new institutions of journalism will become more accountable as journalism’s consumers pay its producers directly. I don’t know how we’ll get to that, but it will necessarily involve VRM, and I would love to help build it.
One sure thing: a primary building material for the future institutions of journalism will be the work of amateurs sort, the best of which will honor that adjective’s original meaning: one who loves a subject, but does not require payment for obsessing constructively about it. Again, the old system does not go away, but grows to include both the old and the new.
Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.
About an hour into Southern Illinois after watching St. Louis’ Gateway Arch recede from our rear-view mirrors, we were met along Interstate 70 by an even more surreal giant totem: a white cross, rising oddly out of a field next to the highway and behind a bunch of industrial buildings. So we shot a bunch of pictures of it and kept on trucking. Later I looked up giant cross 70 illinois and found Effingham, Illinois – Giant Cross, at RoadsideAmerica.com:
In case a nearly 200-foot cross isn’t surreal enough for you, this site is enhanced by ten rock-shaped (as in “Rock of Ages”, natch) speakers next to the stone tablets for each Commandment, blasting out what sounds like the stuttering instrumental break from Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days.” Press a button by each station and hear a bit of wisdom appropriate to the given Commandment. [Aqua Larva, 10/28/2006]
Now I’m sorry we didn’t stop.
(By the way, I’m posting this from the passenger seat of our car, heading toward Cleveland just past Columbus in Ohio on Interstate 71. Gotta hand it to Verizon: EvDO actually works here. It’s the first stretch on the whole trip where the connection has stayed up.)
For someone as old as I am, it’s hard to keep Kansas City (the fist song ever written by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, recorded by everybody but made a hit) by Wilbert Harrison out of one’s mind. With my Kansas City Baby and a bottle of Kansas. Citywine.
Taking a plane, a train and walking are all listed as options by the writers (and Harrison) for traveling to Kansas City. We did it by a black 2000 Passat Wagon, loaded to the gills.
The wagon passed 120,000 miles just nine shy of Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque. I’d last been to Arthur Bryant’s in 1987, or whenever it was that Duke lost to Kansas in the NCAA semifinals in the Kemper Arena there. My business partner David Hodskins, a devoted Duke fan (he actually went there, and was at the time an Iron Duke), had won a flight for two to the finals by winning a trivia contest or something on the old M Dung morning show on KFOG in San Francisco. I was his date. We flew there, rented a car, picked up our friend Jon Parker (also a rabid Dukie) dumped our stuff in our hotel, then sought out the one thing we wanted most, other than to see Duke win: a pile of Arthur Bryant’s Meats, on Brooklyn Avenue.
The menu on the wall was written in those red and black letters you insert into a kind of coarse corduroy. One memorable entry bragged about the restaurant’s “legiondary sauce”. The choice was between a sandwich and a plate, as I recall. Large black men behind the counter sliced giant hunks of hot beef fresh from a huge brick oven, threw a pile of it on a metal tray, and ladled sauce over the top. If you got a sandwich, they did the same thing, with the pile between slices of white bread that quickly became soaked in juices. It was some of the best food I’ve ever had.
This time, however, we were in a hurry, so we went to the restaurant’s new location out at a vast big box shopping center just north of the immense Kansas Raceway. It was about three in the afternoon and cicadas loud enough to cause hearing damage were buzzing from little trees growing fresh out of the landscaping. There were almost no other customers. Our choice choice on the current menu was between ribs, sausage, pork and beef, so we got a half pound of each, plus some beans and cole slaw. They were all excellent. But the meats were cold, the sauce came from squeeze bottles on the tables, and the atmosphere was pure theme-bar nostalgia with little of the the original restaurant’s soul. Still, it was the best food we’ve had on this trip, and worth the stop.
The day began in Colby, Kansas, which it turns out Dave had visited a few years earlier. I found it notable for the conscientious Starbucks just up the road from our cheap motel. My wife and I like our cappuccinos strong, and consider it a steep challenge to get the average starbucks not to make a cappuccino (or anything other than a straight espresso) that isn’t mostly milk. Generally, ordering a “double short cappucino” or a “double short dry cappuccino” yields an approximation of the ideal. (Background here.) In this case, the barrista said “I think one of these might be a bit heavy. See what you think.” I did, and it was close to perfect, but a tiny bit milk-heavy. She made it again, and nailed it. Gotta love that.
Colby was also familiar on more obscure grounds. I remember passing through there on a family trip in July 1963, long before Interstate 70 bypassed the town (and everything, pretty much). We were on Highway 24 headed west toward Colorado Springs. A tower with KXXX on the transmitter shack caught my attention. Turns out the station is still there (here’s the topo), on 790AM. No website (well, there is one, but predictably it’s for a porn site), but a big signal that covers much of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado with the “5000-watt voice of agriculture”, or something like that, by day. At night the station is 24 watts and covers downtown Colby.
Anyway, except for stopping to eat meat, we made it all the way across Kansas and nearly all of Missouri. Just under 600 miles. The next day (today as I write this) is for having fun in St. Louis. I’m missing it, since I’m sick with some kind of intestinal business, probably exacerbated by sitting on my ass for days at a time. Anyway, Day 5 is when my wife and kid explore museums and see the sunset from the Arch while I try to get well and catch up on work here at the hotel. That’s what I’m almost doing right now.
First we got up at 3-something AM and drove back into Arches National Park, roughly to the site where Thelma & Louise stuffed the cop in the trunk. There, in darkness, we watched the eclipsed moon sink slowly behind rock spires barely visible in silhouette. It was there that I shot the photo above, acting as a human tripod. Incredibly, it came out. I had no idea until now, abut 20 hours later, in Colby, Kansas.
We went back just before sunrise, crashed in the motel, and didn’t get up and out of town until way late in the morning. Then we drove pretty much non-stop until we were well into Kansas.
I’m uploading photos, in very slow motion. Motel wi-fi is generally bad, whether it’s free or not. (In my growing experience.)
We almost went to Cedar Breaks, but it was raining heavily up there — and all around that part of Utah — when we left Cedar City this morning. So we went up 15 to 50 and headed down to 70, where we took in the Castle Country, San Rafael Swell and San Rafael Reef before arriving at Moab in late afternoon, just in time to take in some nice (though very intermittent) lighting on the most amazing rock formations in the world.
Check here for pix. They’re uploading now on the dial-up speed wi-fi here at the hotel.
I’m hitting the sack, hoping to catch the solar eclipse at 4am or so.
I was sure Hurricane Dean wiped out these places here. All in the Playa Del Carmen area. But apparently not.
[Later...]
Turns out I was right in the first place and this setting (and everything around it) in the coastal town of Majahual is gone:
The three pictures behind the three links in the first sentence above were all shot by my sister Jan and myself while on a shore excursion from the last Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, in October 2005. In the first comment to this post (and in comments to the picture above), she reminded me that we were in Costa Maya, not Playa Del Carmen. And that Costa Maya got clobbered by Dean, with Majahual right in the storm’s bull’s eye. Here’s a Cruise Ship Report:
Carved from the jungle along the Yucatan coast only six years ago, Costa Maya in that short time has become of the most visited ports in the Western Caribbean, with cruise ships carrying a half million passengers calling there last year…
But Cesar Lizarraga, director of sales and marketing for Costa Maya, said about half the port’s infrastructure — including the cruise ship pier, which was able to accommodate three ships — was damaged by the mammoth storm.
“An early estimate indicates the port will remain closed for six to eight months,” Lizarraga said. Others suggested a mid-2008 timeline might be more realistic.
While the faux Mayan shopping and entertainment complex at the foot of the cruise ship pier suffered heavy damage, the adjacent town of Majahual — where dive and souvenir shops and open-air restaurants lined the picturesque beach — has largely been destroyed.
All our pictures there were of Majahual, not the faux shopping center. The cruise ships avoid telling you about Majahual, but we found out anyway and went there, where we had some of the best fresh cooked fish, ever, at the El Faro restaurant, right on the beach. I can’t imagine it, or anything in that town, which has an elevation of about 3 feet above high tide, and couldn’t be closer to the water.
Here’s the El Faro:
Gone now, for sure.
The hurricane hit land near Majahual on the Quintana Roo coast of the Yucatán Peninsula at 08:30 UTC (03:30 EDT) on August 21, 2007. Wind gusts of 200 mph (320 km/h) were reported. The state’s tourist cities of Cancún and Cozumel were spared the worst of the storm, but it wreaked havoc in state capital Chetumal, some 65 km south of landfall.[106][105] However, communication with the Mayan communities near the landfall location has been difficult, and little details are available from there.
Dan Askin of CruiseCritic reports:
What we do know is this: The latest from Costa Maya is that more than 50 percent of the pier has been destroyed by Dean. Rebuilding will required a multi-million dollar investment, and it will be a minimum of six months before cruise ships will return to the port. We’ll know more about the fate of the area as residents, business owners and government crews return today to assess the damage.
And now, courtesy of Julie Minter, we have more details — this time on the nearby fishing village of Majahual. Just a five minutes cab ride from the pier at Costa Maya, the little town has become a popular destination for lunching, beach bumming and souvenir shopping. In her first-hand account of Hurricane Dean’s impact on the areas outside of the actual Costa Maya resort, Minter tells Cruise Critic that the overall scene is quite grim.
“From the new light house all down the town of Mahahual, it is no longer Mahahual, everything is gone!” Many of the local businesses, she tells us, including restaurants, souvenir shops and dive shops are gone, with only a few buildings spared. Minter notes that “busted glass, water and wind damage is seen all over … houses are left in pretty bad shape. It is a shame that not everyone knew or got to visit this beautiful well kept secret that we knew as ‘our private paradise,’ our little island.”
Cruise lines have not yet released information on itinerary changes, but it’s clear that Costa Maya will have to be replaced for the near future.
In the meantime, Minter’s Blue Ocean Safari Dive Center plans to issue refunds to folks who pre-booked shore outings. “Blue Ocean Safari will be closed until further notice – but we will issue refunds once we know that the damage is.”
On Cruise Critic’s Costa Maya forum, some members are trying to contribute to relief efforts; some have even suggested that one way to show support would be to not apply for refunds from cancelled excursions. (Please note Cruise Critic’s rules regarding donations: According to community manager Laura Sterling, “Only links to legitmate relief efforts are allowed.”) Visit the Costa Maya board for more information.
Although Dean swept over Yucatan as a rare Category 5 hurricane, which is capable of causing catastrophic damage, the storm’s top winds were relatively narrow and appeared to hit just one town: the cruise ship port of Majahual.
The few people who had not evacuated Majahual fled ahead of the storm. Dean demolished hundreds of houses, crumpled steel girders, splintered wooden structures and washed away parts of concrete dock that transformed what once was a sleepy fishing village into a top cruise ship destination.
And there are many more photos here. Found via this CruiseCritic thread.
Here are photos and a thread recalling Majahual as it was.
One of my biggest rarely-fulfilled fantasies is visiting amazing places I’ve seen from the sky. Starting this Saturday we may do some of that. Or maybe not. Depends on how much we hurry on our road trip from Santa Barbara, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we plan on living for the next year.
(No, we’re not moving there. We are committed Santa Barbarians, and we just moved into our new house here a few months ago. But in order to make the most of my Berkman fellowship, and to step on the gas for ProjectVRM, I need to be there. It should also help my Linux Journal work to be in the company of many talented geeks as well.)
Anyway, as it happened my last flight back from Boston vectored south, across Tulsa, and followed Interstate 40 through the Texas panhandle, across Albequerque, the Painted Desert of Arizona and the volcano-dotted deserts of Southern California on the way into Los Angeles.
I shot a lot of that from the air, as you can see in the photosets behind the pictures in this post. If we take I-40 it’ll be interesting to see how some of the same places look from the ground.
Anyway, in the meantime I’m spending most of my time packing and trying not to drop too many balls on the floor. So expect continued light blogging.
I haven’t posted much on the Zaca Fire since I got back. One reason is that — for the moment, at least — civilization seems less threatened, even as the wilderness behind us burns away. The other is that I have a lot to say about it, and work with other locals to do on it, that I’m just not ready for, since neglected deadlines for other real-world obligations loom.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching. In fact, we don’t have much choice.
Yesterday, for example, was an orange day. All day long the sun was filtered though clouds of ash from the fire. I took a few pictures, naturally. The set is at the link here and behind the picture above.
And if you want to follow progress with the fire on the Live Web, check out the Zaca Fire news river that David Sifry put together in the midst of other pressing matters. “Be of service” has always been his motto. Came through here, too.
One disappointment of my Canon 30D camera is that the colors, while almost clinically accurate, are not as rich as they were on my old Nikon Coolpix 5700. The Coolpix is now a five-year-old model, with only 5 megapixels and no switchable lenses or anything. Yet it took some outstanding shots. The one above was taken at SBA, the Santa Barbara Airport, through a chain link fence. Shots in that series are still among my faves.
A reader writes,
I just did a search on Flickr for “Doc” and got “Would you like to try a search for photos about bashful, dopey, grumpy, happy or sleepy instead?”
I failed to reproduce the effect, but still, it’s funny. Not that it matters, but I was “Sleepy” in junior high school. With good cause. Except for Bashful, I’ve been all the dwarves.
Two casual photos I’ve taken of Baltimore have made their way into the Schmap guide for the city.
One of the things I like best about digital photography is seeing results and learning from them immediately. In shots like the one above, for example, I could see that the time exposure actually worked, even from an airplane flying at hundreds of miles an hour. I not only see what I got right away, but I know exactly what settings produced the exposure, and I don’t have to waste a roll of film and a pile of prints to see the result.
Shots like these also fool the photo processing systems too. Those systems often think night shots like these are underexposed and compensate by overexposing them in the printing process. To get the shot above to work with film, I’d probably need to bring the negative back in with specific instructions to enlarge it properly.
It’s also interesting for me to see, often months after I’ve posted them, which pictures people remark upon or call favorites. The one above, for example, I shot on June 6 of last year. Since then it has been called a favorite by five different people, all at different times, including once a few hours ago, which is how it returned to my attention.
The shots of mine that others call favorites are often not my own favorites. Yet the fact that others have “favorited” these is interesting and rewarding to me. It’s also taught me not to edit too heavily. Better to throw a pile of stuff up there than to post only those shots I consider most worthy.
Also, how people relate to photographs differs from one online photo service to another. For example, Tabblo (born in Cambridge, MA) supplements Flickr pefectly as a place to assemble photos into montages or “tabblos” that can, if you like, be printed in a variety of forms. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted Tabblo in the past.) Thanks to mashable web services, I can flow my Flickr sets into tabblos. It’s interesting to me that this tabblo has had 14 comments (two by me, in response to others), including two favorites (not by me), out of just 90 views. Meanwhile the original photo set on Flickr has had 2 comments out of 244 views. For the Tabblo set that’s more than 10x the rate of commenting on way less than half of the viewing of the same set on Flickr.
What would be my own favorites, among either photos or sets or tabblos? I’ll post a few here over the coming days or weeks, to see if any of the rest of ya’ll agree.
The power went off when the storm came through yesterday afternoon (see the post below). I heard it happen first when I was driving through Baltimore, watching the storm gather, listening to WEAA/88.9 on the radio. Faint hints of lightning blinked in the sky. On one of the brighter blinks, the station’s audio went out. The signal was still there, broadcasting silence; but the audio was gone. A few minutes later, back at the house, I was working on my laptop when the lights blinked a couple of times then went dark … and stayed that way until 5:30 this morning. Of course the air conditioning went out too. So did the fridge, and the washer, and everything else. The baby (my new first grandchild) was oblivious to the discomfort of the adults, still dealing with a hot day and night — and also a wet one, as waves of rain came and went. Over 4000 Marylandians were without power from BGE, which said it would be back up at 5:30, then 9:30, then 11:00. All of which were wrong, it turned out.
Anyway, I’m at a coffee shop this morning, where the wi-fi is free but slow. I did manage to upload some pix of the Grand Canyon, however, shot a few weeks ago from the same flight from LHR to LAX on which I toured southern Greenland. A sample:
Closer to home, firefighters have held the southern flank of the Zaca Fire. Although they’ve got a lot of fighting left to do, it looks like Santa Barbara is safer than it looked a day or two ago.
I’m in Baltimore for about a week, enjoying good times with family. And with the city. In spite of all the publicity by Poe, Mencken, Levinson, Waters, and a pile of fine sports teams, Baltimore remains one of the most overlooked cities in the world — a singular center of shipping, education, industry, medicine, science, history, government, art, sports fanaticism and other signs of advanced civilization. All those virtues make for fun exploration, too. Which I’ve done every time I’ve come here.
Of course, I’ve shot pictures. Click on the one above (from Fort McHenry) for all 244 shots I’ve tagged “Baltimore”. In addition to photosets here, here and here, it includes shots from the sky — such as this one, taken at night from high overhead on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston.
