Tim's Reflection Connection

Flickr

Tim Tyson — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:37:53 +0000

I’ve been a Flickr fan for years. I’ve had a pro account for several years.

Yes, admittedly, Flickr had become a bit stale. But lately they have been heating up, a lot!

Their new Flickr iOS app rocks! Love it! While it hasn’t reached a point to be a replacement for my favorite iPhone camera app, KitCam, it still rocks. I use Flickr now far more socially than ever before!

Today, they rolled out their new Flickr web design and account plans.

My God!

Awesome work!

Not only are they now offering everyone a free TERABYTE of disk space (holy cow!), they have pumped up the site to epic proportions!

I mentioned that I’ve been a paying member for some time now. Well, heck, with a free terabyte, I could easily fit all of my little photos. (I only have uploaded just over 10,000. The new plan easily will accommodate 250,000 average sized camera phone photos.)

And Flickr did the decent thing: sent us all an email. Tim, would you like to cancel your pro membership and go free?

As everyone knows, I hate ads and chose to keep my pro account. But the fact that they chose to do the decent thing and made the offer impresses me! A lot!

So, my photography will be getting even more social as time goes on.

Thanks Flickr!

Yahoo: Awesome job lately!

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More Corporate @#$% @HomeDepot

Tim Tyson — Mon, 20 May 2013 21:35:04 +0000

So, you call Home Depot and schedule a date for them to come in a measure for a new carpet install. They take all of your address and payment information. You instantly get an email confirmation before hanging up.

You make clear to them that you may need to change the date because you are coordinating this with another person, on the other side of the country, that will let them in to do the measuring. “No problem.” you are told. “Just call us back in advance to reschedule if this date will not work.”

I call the handyman. The date will not work.

I call Home Depot to reschedule. They can’t reschedule until the payment is processed. It will not be processed until after the date they are scheduled to measure.

Setting this up has already taken about a dozen phone calls. One number to get the “correct” number. One number to schedule, another to reschedule, another number to purchase an appliance….

What the hell?!

I buy something in the store and its drafted out of my checking account before I get home with it!

Beta Breakers

Tim Tyson — Sun, 19 May 2013 03:11:44 +0000

Photo by davidyuweb on Flickr

Every time I hear the name, I think of people that test beta software and try to break it.

But the name has nothing to do with that. In fact, the name really is: Bay to Breakers: the famous, annual, 30,000 people race that starts on the bay side of San Francisco and ends Oceanside, at the ocean “breakers.” Apparently it’s a huge event. Race details can be found here. The race was held yesterday (Sunday).

Today I learned that it’s also a very festive event. Large numbers of people run in costume and in the nude. Yes, you read that correctly. A few months back the city passed a law making hanging out nude in San Francisco illegal. Apparently a city council member became offended when a nude customer at a local restaurant refused to sit on a newspaper. So, the city, against great protests might I add, banned public nudity unless it was “appropriate.”

I had no idea going naked in the city wasn’t already against the law to begin with, but this is San Francisco! So, since there is a large number of people who like to run naked, the new law banning public nudity in the city specifically allows, by name even, running naked during the Bay to Breakers run.

So, if you’re bored, you can Google “Bay to Breakers nudity” and click on the images link to see pictures of all these naked people running. Warning: a good number of them are something less than attractive.

I wouldn’t mind shooting pictures of the crazy costumes, but I tend to not enjoy being in extremely large crowds of people! I hear it’s an amazing event!

While you will never catch me running naked, I think it’s hysterical and even cool (I’m sure quite literally!) that people actually do that here. Only in San Francisco!

What a place to live!

Bay to Breakers through the years (sfgate.com)
Bay to Breakers Was Everything it Promised to Be (Slideshow) (blogs.sfweekly.com)
Bay To Breakers Runners Take To The Streets Of San Francisco (sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com)

Gettin’ My Groove On…

Tim Tyson — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:00:24 +0000

All we need is a disco ball in this video: a time lapse of the sunset in Sausalito as seen from the front yard.

The closest cloud interested me. I had high hopes, expecting great and swirly things from it.

About 20 minutes into the time lapse shoot, I noticed that the clouds to the west, by Mount Tamalpais, looked awesome and were just going to get more amazing as the sun went down. But I was already invested in my little cloud that fizzled, and I couldn’t figure out how to shoot the mountain without getting the neighbor’s ghastly shiny roof vent thing that sticks up 4 feet into the air. :(

You will notice the bank of clouds extending from the right and going behind Angel Island—that’s fog that has rolled past the Golden Gate bridge and into the bay. I love how it roils about. Ahhh…. What a place to live. So very lucky!

When It Happens…

Tim Tyson — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:36:42 +0000

A Badly Sunburned Tim!

It happens really quickly!

I was “camped out” atop Hawk Hill, determined I was going to shoot a time lapse of the fog burning off the Golden Gate Bridge, the bay, and the city. The whole area was completely socked in with dense, fast moving fog. Torrents of fog were moving in over my head and down on top of me (as you can see in the time lapse), from the Pacific Ocean.

It just couldn’t last all morning!

Well, it came and went and then came back again. Then… suddenly… It cleared.

All morning I had been cold in the fog and blasting wind and had no idea that in the few hours I sat on top of the hill, I was getting a terrible sunburn!

Ouch!

Now my skin is peeling!

So, about 3.5 hours compressed into 60 seconds. Enjoy!

Awareness: “This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace

Tim Tyson — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:05:00 +0000

Brilliant, as he was.

…This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

…The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race”–the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

…None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

… It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

The entire speech is even better and can be found at this link (Part One) and this link (Part Two).

A text file of the entire speech is included at this link.

Other interesting DFW links: Slate.com, YouTube videos, OpenCulture.com.

Another Geek Moment

Tim Tyson — Thu, 09 May 2013 01:06:15 +0000

My apologies. I can never set up this code correctly to properly link the audio and the slideshow. The code below does just that and is included here on my “memory in the sky” for my future reference.

Below is the code when embedding a SlideShowPro (Slide Show Pro, SSP) slideshow into a post. This code accomplishes:

Audio is off on initial load
Slideshow does not automatically start playing
Audio play behavior is linked to the slideshow play behavior (starting/stopping the slideshow starts/stops the audio).
Audio loops if the slideshow plays longer than the audio file duration
The slideshow controls and information are hidden until the user mouses over the slideshow.
The width/height are the same aspect ratio as my 5Dmk2 photos with additional space for navigation

The order of the code flashvars seems to be relevant, and the line numbers are not used.

     attributes: {
          id: "[As provided by SSP admin panel]",
          width: 580,
          height: 386
      },
      mobile: {
          auto: false,
          poster: "vignette"
      },
      params: {
          bgcolor: "#000000",
          allowfullscreen: true
      },
      flashvars: {
          xmlFilePath: "[As provided by SSP admin panel]",
          audioAutoStart: "Off",
          displayMode: "Manual",
          audioPause:"On",
          audioLoop: "On",
          panZoom: "Off",
          mediaPlayerAppearance: "Hidden",
          navAppearance: "Visible on Rollover"
      }

We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast. Had this been an actual slideshow, you would be seeing pictures now. You are not.

New Era in Software: Rental

Tim Tyson — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:25:04 +0000

And I hate it!

Adobe’s software is stunning stuff, no doubt about it: Photoshop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, to name a few of the industry standards.

Over the past few years, Adobe’s software has become prohibitively expensive for the common man, easily costing well over a thousand dollars for a software bundle.

But, at least you owned it and could use it until it was no longer compatible if you upgraded your computer system.

That’s all history now.

In just a few weeks, you will not be able to buy Adobe software. (In fact, I don’t see it for sale on their site now.) You will only be permitted to rent it.

Adobe is touting the great advantage of their “creative cloud”: instant updates. Well, they could just as easily have chosen to provide instant updates to their existing software product line. But they didn’t do that. Instead, instant updates is supposed to be an irresistible enticement to make people bite the software rental bullet.

Unlike previous software license arrangements, after the purchase, you don’t own the software to continue using it.

With software rental, if you stop paying your rent, you’re evicted: the software stops working.

$50 a month to rent their software. It’s a very big bite to swallow unless you’re a business.

As far as I am concerned, the only real advantage to their creative cloud (as they call it) is the ability to enhance collaboration. That’s it.

Frankly, I hope their efforts to rent software fail. It costs too much money. It creates and extends dependency.

Software rental offers no graceful way to stop upgrading as prices go up and up and up. You are totally dependent at that point. You can’t do without paying their rent. They have you.

And they know that.

Hello, Matrix.

I can’t live without you, and my dependency started with Adobe in 2013.

Are we going to allow this business model to succeed? We have a choice to make, and it will greatly impact our future world!

Adobe kills packaged software (smh.com.au)
Adobe Will No Longer Sell Software On The Mac: You’ll Have To Rent Photoshop Instead (cultofmac.com)
Adobe Just Radically Overhauled Its Business Model And Won’t Sell New Software Any More (ADBE) (businessinsider.com)
What Photoshop’s Move to the Cloud Actually Means for You (lifehacker.com)

Vacuuming Our Cat

Tim Tyson — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:06:43 +0000

Conrad the Kat, also known as “Beast” and “Animaux Sauvage,” is a total fur factory. He generates more fur than any critter alive. He sheds everywhere. Enormous fur bunnies lie in his wake as he saunters around his lair. I’ve given up the idea of having fur-free dark clothes.

A colleague told me she vacuums here cat and that her cat loves it. I was desperate; so, I tried it.

To my surprise, Conrad actually loves being vacuumed! Betty was right!

Periodically I plop him up on the bed and vacuum as much hair out of him as possible.

Conrad has always been a very personable cat, very atypical for cats. And, again, unlike most cats, he loves his friend the vacuum cleaner, as you can see in this short video of him being vacuumed.

Orwellian Doublespeak

Tim Tyson — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:01:12 +0000

OK, let’s carefully look at this quotation from CNN’s website today, with a critical eye focused a bit more precisely on reality and not Orwellian doublespeak:

After Jason Collins came out as gay, ESPN’s Chris Broussard said the NBA player was living in “open rebellion to God” — sparking a backlash against the sportswriter. That’s proof, some Christians say, that changing attitudes are turning evangelicals into a “hated minority.”

Source: CNN*, May 5, 2013

This statement is very carefully crafted Orwellian doublespeak: that artful craft of deferring to the indefensible, selectively reshaping facts into something they are not because the truth doesn’t suit one’s indefensible agenda, manipulating how people perceive reality.

Let’s look at the facts: the use of one’s professional platform (in this case as a sportscaster) to broadcast one’s personal religious beliefs is neither professional conduct nor acceptable conduct. Chris Broussard is simply and appropriately being called out for his lack of professionalism. A backlash was warranted.

“Some Christians say…” should more factually read: “Changing attitudes are making more transparent the hateful intolerance a religious minority have been attempting to force on the public space, a minority that refuses to accept that anyone should be allowed to live in any way outside of how that minority chooses or prefers to interpret the Bible.”

Let’s be clear: this loud and vocal religious minority does not have the right to force others to live by their religious beliefs. Their attempts to do so have failed. They have squarely lost this clash of ideas in the public space and need to accept this reality as they become less and less relevant to the 21st century. Their lifestyle choice has been rejected.

Religious extremists are free to live their narrowly defined religious beliefs as long as they are not hurting other people. This unsolicited comment by Chris Broussard was nothing less than hurtful and bigoted. “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

I stand against their efforts to force others to live by their beliefs. Their beliefs need to be able to attract a following based on the merits of their faith practice. Without doubt, their faith practice has done just the opposite: brought upon themselves the disapproval bad ideas deserve. My personal advice to them: Rather than crying fowl, offer better ideas.

Ralph got it right over 100 years ago!

Lidewij Edelkoort nicely summarized the psychological space people are choosing to define for themselves today:

Freedom from rules, worship of nature, fascination with the past and a devotion to beauty are certainly the focal points of the romantic movement, and can be seen once again building up in society, along with the belief that imagination is superior to reason and intuition superior to organization.”

*Which, IMHO vacillates between being the Crime News Network and the Christian News Network

Just Not Right…

Tim Tyson — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:16:15 +0000

So Bloomberg published the pay ratio between the CEO and average salaried worker for top, publicly traded US companies.

Something is just not right when the CEO makes almost 1,800 times more money than the average company worker. I think workers, all workers, deserve a level of pay based on their contribution to the company, but no matter how you slice it, this list represents unbalanced greed disguised in many ways. The pay of CEOs has increased 1,000% since the 1950s. Average worker compensation, well… no where near so much. At all?

Here is a link to the full list.

Click to enlarge

Bloomberg publishes CEO-to-employee-pay chart (boingboing.net)

Art and Craftsmanship

Tim Tyson — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:30:05 +0000

Click to enlarge to see more detail

I vividly remember, as a very young child, my father pulling into a gas station. I recall exactly where it was. Nothing exists there now. In fact, it’s been paved over and is now a major road intersection. But then, it was a gas station with dirt parking, no pavement, anywhere.

It was hot. (Florida generally is.) The car windows were down as this was before we had a car with air conditioning.

In the shade of the building, off to the left side (and the left side of our car) was a man sitting on a very short, three-legged stool hand painting a sign. I was so fascinated I sat on my legs on the car’s seat so I could see better! He was painting with a brush on a blank sign canvas. His letters were perfect. No tracing. All freehand. Fancy, ornate, angled letters.

I suppose my fascination with artistic expression was born on this day. This man, this graphic artist, saw something in his mind, in his imagination, and was bringing it into existence, into reality so I could experience it too.

He did this with brushes and a palate of paints.

Regional artists created localized looks and visual “personalities” associated with where their work was typically seen. How times have changed. Today, the “look” of signage is “homogenized.” Fonts and presentation media are rather standardized across the world. Digitized. A dreadful sameness permeates our visual lives. Well, it does the same in our sound space as well—with samples and repeated patches. Creative genius is vastly marginalized and at significant cost.

Welcome John Mayer‘s vision of cover art for his album, Born and Raised. Sony Music/Columbia Records, New York, commissioned an amazing traditional glass art and sign craftsman, David A. Smith, to design and create the album cover art. David, who lives and works in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom, creates stunning masterpieces. I have always been enchanted by glass artistry (gilding, etching, stained glass, etc.), but David takes this to the top of the master level.

Check out this video of the process. The level of skill and craftsmanship is fantastic! You can almost smell the paints, stains, dust, etc. How many people in our world still have this skill?! I hope this art form enjoys a huge resurgence. Magnificent.

I See a Whale…

Tim Tyson — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:30:51 +0000

Point Bonita Lighthouse in the Distance

Sunday was volunteer day at the Point Bonita Lighthouse.

As always: stunning day!

I counted, for certain, 7 different whales, perhaps as many as 12.

They were very active, coming to the surface often.

They were also very close to the lighthouse.

One was particularly huge! In fact, it was the largest whale I’ve ever seen.

Another was a calf.

They were heading north.

One of the volunteers asked a little boy if he had seen the whales. I thought the young child was going to explode with excitement as he began jumping up and down, flopping his hands, completely unable to speak at first.

Another gorgeous day in the headlands.

Interesting Conversations

Tim Tyson — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:58:28 +0000

Live as I was shooting…

This morning (written on Tuesday, April 23, 2013) I was up early to shoot a sunrise timelapse of the Golden Gate Bridge from Horseshoe Cove.

You meet really interesting people in the early hours of the morning when you’re shooting solo, and this morning was no exception.

Bamboo

I’m not sure if that’s how he spells his name, but that’s how it is pronounced. He’s a young, friendly fellow who walked up and started asking questions about what I was doing. He was knowledgable about photography, asking informed questions.

He loves the outdoors and this gorgeous area. We probably talked for about 30 minutes. He refurbishes wooden boats at one of the area marinas.

Sasha

Sasha, visiting for a conference, feels like she has a lifelong bond to this area. She especially feels a magnetic attraction to the bridge, the reason she came here to eat her breakfast.

Incredibly fit, she spent Sunday paddling about 14 miles around the bay and talked about the challenges that poses with the currents. (I can only imagine, as I will certainly never know from experience!)

From San Diego, Sasha is a marine mammal veterinarian, specifically assigned to take care of the navy’s (and homeland defense–god, I hate that name!) dolphins and seals. I didn’t know the navy even “kept” such creatures. She explained how they are used very effectively to monitor the waters for explosives and objects that are “out of place,” like swimmers, small submersibles, etc.

Again, every time I shoot these I learn something. One of the big challenges with this timelapse was the birds flying in and out of the frame at high speed. I was shooting with a relatively long shot interval (5 seconds) which created a lot of jitter with the birds. Therefore, I had to remove the ones that were in flight in the foreground. I had no idea how many birds fly by!

Going from dark to sunrise is challenging enough and requires a longer shot interval to accommodate for the longer exposure time (b/w 3 and 4 seconds) in the darker portion of the time-lapse at the beginning. I’m not really sure what the solution is for this issue, but the shot interval was just too short, especially once the sun came up.

At any rate, here is the time-lapse.

Fog Timelapse in Fierce Wind

Tim Tyson — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:26:29 +0000

Area seen in the timelapse (click to enlarge)

I was in Sausalito when I saw what the fog was doing; so, I rushed home and grabbed my camera equipment.

The location was fiercely windy, and the wind chill was extremely cold. Even though I was wearing a heavy shirt, wind-proof vest, and winter coat with a hood, I was freezing!

I was also concerned that the tripod wouldn’t remain still, even with my heavy camera equipment backpack hanging from the center pole hook underneath. In fact, the wind was so strong I had to keep my knee against the heavy backpack to keep it from swinging in the wind and causing the tripod to move. I think I was only moderately successful!

The wind direction caused the wind to continuously “catch” the lens hood facing the more interesting part of the scene. Everything was as low and as tight as possible. (For example: the center pole was all the way down, and the tripod legs were set low to the ground.) I even held the tripod, pushing down; otherwise, it may well have blown over! Not fun when done for an hour and a half.

Two notes to self: In the future,

Use the heavy video tripod. Even my really stable, large RRS tripod wasn’t able to stand up to this wind.
Keep velcro ties in the camera bag to tie down the intervalometer and camera strap.
Use a 1 second shot interval. In the bright sun, even though the fog doesn’t appear to be roiling around at great speed, it is! Not only will this help with jitter, it will also help reduce flicker from such extreme and sudden changes in brightness caused by the moving, and at time dense, thick fog.
Bring gloves!

I shot this time lapse on the rim along the bay by Fort Baker. I was facing the 101 just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can’t see the 101 traffic as it is heavily shadowed by the fog in the setting sun.

The fog was literally pouring in over the ridge. It seemed to hit warmer air that lifted it up above where I was. It then seemed to dissipate quickly after passing over, never making into the bay from this angle. The fog did, however, come through the Golden Gate Bridge and into the bay just south of where I was standing.

Brilliant! Churnalism versus Journalism

Tim Tyson — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:11:04 +0000

I’ve noticed for some time now that so much of what I read online and in my RSS aggregator feels like press releases. I’ve even got in the habit of asking myself, “Who is paying for me to read this ‘news’ story?!”

Well, the good folks at the Sunlight Foundation (I’ve blogged about them before!) have a browser plugin and a URL that will find out this information! I love it!

Select the page (or copy the text and paste it into their URL) and they will search known sources of press releases and other resources and present for your side-by-side comparison the results. Check out the video demonstration.

An attack on “churnalism” posing as journalism!

Check it out! Awesomeness!

(I wish they offered a browser plugin for Safari! In the meantime, I’ll just use the URL!)

Churnalism, a tool for journalist accountability, detects “PR submarines” (theatlantic.com)
Churnalism: discover when the “news” you’re reading is a press-release (boingboing.net)
“Churnalism” tracker catches journalists copying press releases, Wikipedia (arstechnica.com)
Churnalism.com exposes an ugly PR and media truth (stuartbruce.biz)

I Find this Deeply Moving

Tim Tyson — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:43:44 +0000

Louie Schwartzberg

I am always pondering, at some level, what motivates us to do and say the things we do. Today I stumbled upon this treasure. This short video of a TED presentation by Louie Schwartzberg is a “must see!” The pause and the reflection it brings are transformative.

Beauty and seduction are nature’s tools for survival because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens our hearts and makes us feel we are part of nature and we’re not separate from it. When we see ourselves in nature it also connects us to every one of us because it’s clear that it’s all connected and one.”

—Louie Schwartzberg (from his brief presentation)

Here is a brief quotation (Brother David Steindl-Rast) from a portion of the brilliant video within a video that begins around 3:09.

You think this is just another day in your life.

It’s not just another day—it’s the one day that is given to you today.

It’s given to you.

It’s a gift.

It’s the only gift that you have right now. And the only appropriate response…

is gratefulness.

If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great grift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.

…

Brother David Steindl-Rast

…open your heart to all of these blessings, and let them flow through you that everyone who you will meet on this day will be blessed by you: just by your eyes,

by your smile,

by your touch,

just by your presence.

Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you.

And then, …

it will really be a good day.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (Text and reader)

Tim's Reflection Connection

Flickr

More Corporate @#$% @HomeDepot

Beta Breakers

Related articles

Gettin’ My Groove On…

When It Happens…

Awareness: “This Is Water” by David Foster Wallace

Another Geek Moment

New Era in Software: Rental

Related articles

Vacuuming Our Cat

Orwellian Doublespeak

Just Not Right…

Related articles

Art and Craftsmanship

I See a Whale…

Interesting Conversations

Bamboo

Sasha

Fog Timelapse in Fierce Wind

Brilliant! Churnalism versus Journalism

Related articles

I Find this Deeply Moving