Haiku for May 31

nor'westerly winds
gusts howling at fifty k
thirty-first of may

Easy Rider Down

Dennis Hopper
May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010

Actor, Artist, Director, Painter, Poet, Photographer, Sculptor,
Father, Grand-Father, Human Being

"It's not who you boys are or what you look like,
it's what you represent that scares these people."
George Hanson quote from the movie Easy Rider

Struggled to find words for this, and put off posting it as I thought about it. I'm a fan of his art and his movies. Easy Rider is in my Top Ten Favourite Films of all time. It was a film that changed me. Whether that was a change for the better is debatable, but it helped shape who I am. Don't bother to post a comment if you haven't seen it. If your excuse for not seeing it, is a preconceived notion of 'biker movie', shame on you. Even if you can't get into the plot, it is still some of the best wide open vista road footage ever, and one of the top 3 counter-culture films of all time.

Rest In Peace Billy

Birthday Haiku

The b'day today... and I'm off on my annual pilgrimage




two birthdays today
silence substitutes for song
remembering yours


whoooops... totally forgot to post this after I wrote it

The first 'long weekend of summer'

It's 9AM. Saturday morning on the first 'long weekend of summer'.

My goal this weekend is to get on the motorcycle. It's all ready to go, and has been for well over a month.

If I can get some more yardwork done.

A sheep in wolf's clothing

With the underpinnings of privacy of social media sites on the internet, there is a groundswell of opposition to who exactly owns your data. The fine print in the legalese of the privacy statements of sites like Facebook and mySpace is precocious... and removing your data, from their 'service' is, at best, a painstaking ordeal.

Some have gone so far as to launch a QuitFacebookDay, although saying it and doing it are two wildly different undertakings.

Not exactly what you thought you were signing up for.

One such 'new' social media site is Diaspora*.

diaspora /dī-ˈas-p(ə-)rə, dē-/
origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”
1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

In many ways open source works. And diaspora* is showing some of the 'theory' behind how they plan to make it work. They have a plan. They raised money by using Kickstarter, which itself, is a very cool concept, and I encourage you to check out the site. There's been some interesting projects funded by using it. The project is not overfunded, but they have certainly exceeded their initial expectations of $10,000 by June 1, 2010.

As of today have raised $175,894.03.

1759% funded with 12 days to go.

So as the 'who owns your info' debate crawls along, will an upstart protect your rights. The problem will be with the creators. At some point it will become big enough, to be a takeover target. That's the reality of it. Is it another great idea that will be bought out, and then data mined to provide more targeted advertising.

Only time will tell.

Eric Schmidt's anarchy quote

'the internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.'

Eric Schmidt
April 2, 1997

Eric Schmidt is now the CEO of Google.

Shaman or sage?

braincase: blockages and blurts

Monday morning... pre 7AM. Coffee, the sound of the wind howling outside. Feels more like fall than spring. Ms. Slippers (aka the cat) has gone out for her morning reconnaissance mission. I'm not sure I have anything to write about, other than hockey, and my bad mood.

I am tired. Drained. A talk with the lawyer on Thursday, put me in a bad mood, that is only now beginning to subside. More money and still no result. I'm not sure I'm getting good counsel for my money. All I know is that, it's expensive, and I'm no further ahead than I was before.

The braincase switches to the abstract. My friend Damons' dad was a lawyer, he passed away a few years ago. Mike Cooke was a great lawyer... and crappy business man. The kind of lawyer that would give you 110% in court and took clients on a 'pay what you can' basis. It's times like these, when a loss is felt so deeply, that it seems fresh.

In 9 days I'll be making my annual pilgrimage to the cemetery. Sadly. To wish my friend Mike Dixon a happy birthday. Mike was the best man at my wedding. We had the same birthday, he was exactly a year younger than me. After he got married, he sort of fell off the face of the earth. Saw him maybe a handful of times over 20 years. That's what happens when you marry up socially. You get a new 'class' of friends... her friends. Sadly, that usually means you are forced to abandon your friends. The friends that knew you best. A tragic end to a life and a friendship. The choices he made, still effect me to this day. For the past 4 years, I reflect on my failings as a friend.

I can't seem to move passed it.

Reckless Restless

Having trouble getting jump started today. Coffee isn't helping at all. Reflective, somber and sense memory overloaded.

Now that I've gone to all the trouble of digging out this gear, I'm surprised by how much camera gear is in my possession. It's sad because it should be used, that's what it was built for.

Every piece of gear, has it's own history. Whether it started with me, or has ended with me. I have a great old, circa late 1920's box camera.


A Kodak Rainbow Hawkeye No.2. Red. Uses 120 film, it's still available. On a good day it's worth maybe $35. And yet it's still usable for what it was designed for, taking photographs. Solid mechanical design, nothing fancy or complex, but it works... 90 years on.

Wait and see if there are any first versions of an iPhone 90 years from now. Things are disposable now. It helps fuel consumerism, if you make product with a finite lifecycle.

Braincase Query
Do we ever truly own something, or are we merely caretakers of it?

Kijiji's Late 'n' Lowballin' Douchebags

The Kijiji sale fell through. Wanker.

I think I'll take it over to the eBay place, and see what they think they can get for it. They have some darkroom stuff on eBay now, so it may work as cross promotion, save on shipping sales. Their commission is kind of steep at 30% of the final price, but I've emailed them to see about selling it anyway. They take all the photos, post it all, answer all the retarded questions, so maybe it is worth 30%.

Now that I've dug all this stuff out, it's in the way, as opposed to stuck in unlabeled boxes, and sort of out of the way. So it's going somewhere, goddamnit, first of the week.

I'd list it on Kijiji, but I don't want to hang about, waiting on the no-shows and lowballing douche bags, like today. I know you wanted $300, but I just got one that used to belong to Sherman Hines for $30. BTW, Sherman Hines has owned every bit of photo gear made. Ever. And if you buy a used piece of photo gear in Nova Scotia, the guy selling it to you will swear on his dead mother's grave that it used to belong to Hines. FYI, I was shitting in this outhouse when Sherman Hines took this photo. I left the light on when I was done, just to piss him off. So now you can say you met me too.

I don't think Kijiji is worth the grief... or my time, n'est pas. Waste of half a day, thanx for nothing a$$h*le.

Got a Kijiji story? Leave a comment!

Can I built it myself?

Braincase Quest:

To make the 'new' blog a bit more visually appealing for you, the reader, and me, the designer.

First, I couldn't find a 'stock template' that I liked. So I settled on Rounders... me and 25% of the blogspot squatters.

The goal is to lay it out using the 'golden canon of page construction' based on Jan Tschichold's book, The Form of the Book.

It's an exquisite piece of design, and math. Web designers are just now starting to adopt traditional 'print' design aesthetics into their web work. A rudimentary search for this kind of coding has turned up... well a lot of false starts. The math isn't all that complex, but the coding could possibly end up being a horrorshow.

All I can do is try, and like gardening, it will be a work in progress.

p.s.
Sitting here, iTunes has decided today shuffle feature should be a weird mix of aggressive alt grunge and late 70's 'new wave'. Make no mistake. iTunes has an agenda.

Old School v. Tech Cool

Tuesday, garbage day. 7:30 AM

A better nights' sleep, but I still don't feel rested. And, again this morning, my stomach is upset. Most of that's caused from the looming ethical issue surrounding yesterday's post, in particular the second paragraph. At least that's what I'm telling myself. It started around the same time, and the more research I did, the worse it got.

So, Tuesday, bloody, Tuesday. The list of things I should have well underway, has grown by one item.

There is a 'new-ish' photography club is town, they have an ad on Kijiji looking for darkroom equipment. Not the run of the mill amateur gear, medium and large format. In a previous career, not only did I work as a freelance photographer, but also, as a darkroom technician. Black and white photography is a passion of mine, and around the age of 13 I was smitten with it. Hook, line and sinker, I was lured to it. Later it became a career. Yes, there was a period in my life, when I got paid to do what I loved. It was always just enough to pay the bills and eat, but it was 1000 percent better than any McJob I had ever worked at.

There's lots of gear packed away... somewhere. Most of it was going to get binned, so I took the decent stuff home when the 'digital revolution' started. I found most of it a good home, and the rest became mine. So I need to make a list for the guy in charge of acquisitions. So he can pop 'round see if they want to buy any of it.

Hopefully they have a need or use for most, or all of it, because that's what it was built for, to be used. Not hoarded away gathering dust. This stuff takes up a lot of room, I could use the space and the money. I won't sell it all though, I'd still like to keep enough to have a working darkroom, should I ever wish to return to the dark arts.

I'll be keeping cameras, aka the retirement fund, in the hopes that it will eventually pay off, and that my small collection, will be worth something.

Does anyone even 'print' photos or is it a post thing now. I have negatives, a tangible archival hard copy, from which to make reproductions, until my estate gets them and my rights of copyright for fifty (50) years after my death.

Braincase query: In an age of digital photography, and the pre-planned or built-in obsolescence of technology (e.g. hard drives, memory cards, etc.), will there be a generation of kids that have giant gaps in their photo history? Sorry honey but the photos from when you were 5 to 9 were 'lost' in the hard drive failure of 2007.

Print v. Post

Lazy Monday morning, not super warm... but at least it's not raining, and the wind has calmed a bit. I should do yard work today, now that I have fallen behind. At a minimum, I should try to get some fresh air.

The last couple of weeks, have been spent researching copyright law, and sitting within arms length of a landline, waiting for industry people to call me back. For obvious reasons, none of the details can be posted on the internet, until there is some sort of resolution. It is causing me to lose sleep. And my appetite. The moral and ethical scope of protecting my work is expensive. Not just financially, but mentally. If it goes unchallenged, someone 'gets away' with something. But if I pursue it, I'll ruin somebody's career and livelihood.

dreaded post #1

The dreaded first post.

Every blog starts at post #1... and then either dies a slow horrible lonely death, or is updated occasionally/whenever you think about it, or becomes a thought provoking tour de force.

The litmus test of whether anything I have to say (or type, as it were) is important, relevant, sane, or useful, is up to you.

Unlike the Marines, I have left a blog behind. It served it's purpose and then was promptly abandoned by me. Like digital trash. 0110001010000111100100100111101001010101010 littering at least one server somewhere. Litter sucks...