01.29.07

Rain

Posted in Photography at 12:00 am by thomas

I finally got around to get a film developed that had been stuck in one of my cameras for a few weeks. It was a pleasant surprise to find the pictures below among a random collection of shots I took during December on my way home after work.

I remember that it was an icy cold night and it was raining hard with nasty gusts of wind around the street corners. I had to hold the umbrella while shooting with the SLR one-handed. To make matters worse, it was a relatively slow film, so I’m really surprised how well the pictures turned out.

Shot with a Nikon N80 on Kodak Gold 200

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01.18.07

Making Things

Posted in Modern Life at 12:14 am by thomas

I’m originally an electronics guy from since before computers as a hobby were even an option. I fondly remember the days of building small transistor radios from scratch, etching my own circuit boards and soldering the hell out of all the components.

I also had several of the amazing Philips electronic kit sets that made experimentation with electronic components ridiculously easy.

So I remember electronics as a hobby from way before even BBS came around, when all the schematics you could find where in books and magazines. If you didn’t actually know somebody else in person who can use a soldering iron, you were on your own. And parts were hard to come by. You had to order them through the mail or take the train to the next reasonably big city where they had stores full of components.

Once home computers came around I slowly moved away from pure electronics and software became my main interest.

So it was strange now to surf around a bit and see how amazing the projects are that one can attempt nowadays. The Electronics Forum is full of cool, complex projects that are possible thanks to the marriage of modern electronics and the web.

There are also fantastic magazines and blogs like MAKE that open the world of electronic tinkering to a new generation of people who have never even considered that they could make something like a MP3 player by themselves.

And then there are the kings of the makers, like Ben Heckendorn who redesigns the world of video game consoles around him.

All of this makes me feel like I should start making things again…

01.06.07

The Mouse as Hater

Posted in Rants at 2:43 am by thomas

The web is abuzz with the latest outrage from ABC/Disney. There is a hate-filled talk radio station here in San Francisco called KSFO, owned by ABC Radio, and a local blogger got ticked off enough by their programming to go and do something about their hate speech.

The blogger – Spocko – posted MP3s of some of the nasty stuff that KSFO broadcasts and then wrote to the sponsors and advertisers on these programs with links to the audio files. It worked. Several large advertisers are going to remove their sponsorship from KSFO and this got the lawyers at Disney busy.

Disney forced Spocko’s blog offline by dropping a DMCA request on his hosting provider. It seems that these corporations are too big and stupid to learn their lessons: Attacking a blogger is like sticking your hand into a hornets nest.

Now Disney can try to deal with posts like this one on hundreds of blogs all around the world. Good luck, you morons.

And here’s what all of this is about:

Articles with quotes from the broadcasts and statements by Spocko:

ABC/Disney Endorses Hate Speech

Disney Threatens Media Critic

Spocko vs. The Rat

…and here are links to the MP3s:

Online Blogintegrity

If you listed to even only a few of these, you will understand. This stuff is fascist hate speech of the worst possible kind. No honest company should be associated with vile, nasty crap like that.

Personally, I will finally sell all my Disney stock. We bought Pixar shares back in the day because we really liked what that company stood for. But now that these shares have been converted to Disney stock, I can make a timely statement about what I think of ABC/Disney by selling off the shares of a bunch of fascist enablers.

01.04.07

Video Games of Lore

Posted in Games, Modern Life at 11:10 pm by thomas

Here’s a history of video game consoles in pictures. It’s almost scary how many childhood memories were surfacing while I scrolled through this parade of now-ancient consoles. Ahh… to be young and having time to waste…

You Are (Still) Part of It

Posted in Good Stuff, Japan at 1:41 am by thomas

Markuz has posted a commented compilation of his amazing art project on the Momentarium site.

I am amazed at the amount of work and creativity Markuz has invested in this project and this compilation shows touching moments where he interacts with everyday people who have been pulled out of their shell and who put their busy lives on hold for a few minutes to become a part of this project.

Chinese Operas

Posted in Good Stuff, Media at 1:20 am by thomas

I wrote about the Quiet American’s One-Minute Vacations before in one of my early blog posts, but I have a reason to write about it again:

A few months ago I recorded a minute’s worth of two Chinese operas that were performed in neighboring buildings in San Francisco’s Chinatown and I thought it might be of good enough quality for the Quiet American. And as it turns out, it has been listed for November 27, 2006. Listen to it here.

I’m honored to be part of such an illustrious list of one-minute vacations…

Big Machines

Posted in Modern Life at 1:03 am by thomas

Just stumbled over this picture on the CERN website. In Science Fiction movies you always see those huge machines that dwarf all the humans in or around them, and this picture of the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN shows a real-world machine that is as close to Science Fiction as we get nowadays…