My view of the world

I’ve been doing some light remodeling and discovered this in a jewelry box that had belonged to my sister.

To me it’s just another piece of junk jewelry that was probably purchased the late 60’s, in Arizona, either in Baghdad or Prescott.

To my neighbor it represents an “unfair stereotype.” –He’s a good ol’ boy from someplace in Oklahoma, so this is definitely not something I expected to hear.

His wife on the other hand, wanted it for one of the kids who likes Chihuahuas. (I’ll just take the dog off the chain and give that to her.)

If the silly thing had been a copy of the Mountain Dew label that featured a Hillbilly moonshiner shooting at a revenuer, I certainly wouldn’t have seen it as racist.

The world of political correctness is weird.

I found this on the Daily Telegraph’s Wacky World Week.

A man holds a box of Pakistan-made (Super Osama Bin Laden, Kulfa Balls) milk and coconut flavour hard candies bought at a bazaar in Kandahar city June 10, 2009. REUTERS

I found this through stumble.

The photo site Fishup has crashed.

The page is in Russian and is an apology for the stoppage of the photo-service.

This is a rough translation of part of it:

“Respected users!
We bring to you our apologies for prolonged outage of easy to work Fishup and “information vacuum”, in which you arrived lately.”

They go on to say that the site is down do to “a technical malfunction of its equipment.”

Saying “a critical situation has led to the failure of the primary and backup storage, which in turn led to the loss of the fitness for work of the system as a whole.

“Due to the large volume of work to restore Fishup, it will tentatively begin to function next week. While this will occur without prior uploaded photos, they will appear on Fishup, as the recovery continues. The process of recovery is quite long and unfortunately, there is a chance that not everyone will be recovered. We will have more precise information on Saturday, after we complete the current phase of recovery.”

In other words a major photo site went Chernobyl on them, they have no idea how much if any data they’ll be able to recover, and they’ve given up sleep while they try to glue the shiny bits back together.

I don’t envy them their task, but I bet they maintain an off-site backup in the future.

I think that even in an era when our cameras contain more powerful computers than the ones that used to run the space program filters still have a place.

You can correct an amazing range of problems with software like Photoshop. But I feel that the closer the photo is to the way you want the final image to be the less risk there is that you will over-process it.

I sometimes come back to an image that I’ve tweaked in Photoshop until it looked just the way I wanted it to and find it’s been processed to the point that I go back to the original and start over.

A friend posted this on Las Vegas Vegas.

He’s using a Nikon D200 and auto white balance.

This is what happens when you throw it into Photoshop and apply an 85 photo filter at about 45%

It still needed to be shot through a haze filter, but to my eye it looks much better.

If you prefer to do all your processing on the computer you should try this tutorial on removing a blue haze in Photoshop.

This morning I was heading up the road at about 45mph, when I noticed a white car coming up through traffic at something approaching light-speed.

As the car passed I glanced at it and didn’t see any whiskey bumps so I figured the driver was probably sober. Then I noticed the woman fluffing her hair and checking herself in the mirror.

She was forced to stop and I saw her put both hands behind her neck to fix her clothing or maybe a necklace and leave them there as she accelerated away from the light.

When she found an opening she darted across the other two lanes of traffic, all the while checking herself in the mirror, and disappeared onto the freeway.

I got on the freeway and almost immediately came up on two small trucks, side by side, in the left and center lanes doing about 50 or 55. –One of the trucks looked like it had never gone that fast before and was now struggling to make it to the nearest junkyard.

So I moved into the right lane only to have a big rig come up an on-ramp and force his way in front of me, blowing smoke as he tried to get up to 65mph.

I spotted a full sized pickup coming up though traffic at a pretty fair clip. He sailed up behind the junker in the center lane and was still sitting no more than 4 or 5 feet off their bumper a mile or so later when I turned off.

Just as the big rig gained enough speed so it looked like we were going to pass the two slow pokes, a kid in a little white Scion pulled up in the center lane, stood on his brakes and proceeded to cut me off. (His radio was so loud that even with my windows up and the a/c on I could hear his music clearly.)

Then when I was less than half a block from work the person in front of me stopped dead in the middle of an intersection and looked around like he was somebody’s forward scout searching for landmarks. –I fully expected him to get out and spread a map on the roof of his car.

As I parked, a homeless guy that had been in the night before came up to me and asked when we opened. I told him it would be about 15 minutes. He replied “Oh, ok. 5 minutes?” I smiled and repeated the “15 minutes.” He walked away saying “Great, I’ll see you in 5 minutes.”

–You’ve got to love living in the big city.–

This is an office, storeroom and photography studio.

To keep things in perspective, that’s a 24″ light tent and those are 10″ reflectors.

I’ve also got a sparkler on a light stand and tripod that aren’t in the picture but this setup is as simple as I could make it and still get the job done.

–Being the less than graceful type, the trick is to get my size 14 feet where I need them without tripping over the light stands, tripod, power cords or bumping the tent and knocking over something fragile.

I decided I needed a little more light so I bought a couple of 105 watt EiKO fluorescents.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to set them up. –They need a longer base to fit my Smith Victor reflectors.

Did you know, that here in the US, if your boss issues you a company cellphone you owe taxes on a portion of the usage?

I certainly didn’t. Until I read an article in the Washington Post that said the IRS was trying to simplify the way this tax is figured.

It seems that back in the Eighties, when cellphones were a considered an expensive luxury and kind of silly for anyone not running a business, Congress passed a law requiring the value of employer-issued cellphones to be included in workers’ gross income, unless an employee kept detailed records showing the phone was used only for work.

Now, with the vast numbers of cellphones in use, the IRS is trying to figure out how to collect the most money from it. —I mean….. how to most fairly assess the portion of the phone bill that should be taxed.

The law was intended to keep employees from using employee-issued cellphones for personal calls and then writing them off as a work-related tax deduction. But the paperwork requirements make it almost impossible for the average person to keep track of their usage.

The IRS has presented three options to simplify the documentation for employers:

One is to deem 75 percent of work cellphone use as related to work and the remaining 25 percent for personal use. Employees would be taxed on the value of the personal minutes.

Under a second option, employees would provide proof that they have a personal cellphone to use during work hours.

A third would let employers use a statistical sampling to determine the average workers’ use of the cellphones for personal calls.

At first glance I can see that no matter which method is chosen, handling the volume of paperwork generated by this law is going to cost more than any taxes they manage to collect.

The folks in congress have tried to get this law thrown out. The last time around the bill passed the house but failed in the senate.

This year it’s being tried again. –The only thing we have to worry about is how much unrelated crap will get folded-in, when all the bill should do repeal a rather insignificant law.

I’m a gadget freak so whenever I come across a site like Edmund Scientific’s it takes me at least 20 minutes to get back to what I was doing.

These are some things that caught my eye a few minutes ago:

First we have a usb refrigerator to keep your drinks cold. –I hope it works better than the usb coaster that supposed to do the same job.

You say you put a lock on your bedroom door but your mom got a copy of the key. Now you can solve that little problem. Just install a Biometric doorknob. –Then if she wants to go snooping through your underwear drawer without your permission she’ll have to chop off one of your fingers.

Do you long for the good old days when you had to blow out the candle before you went to sleep? Well now there’s a light switch that allows you to blow out the lights by blowing into a little square on the switch. —Ok, if you’re close enough to blow in the thing you’re close enough to flip the switch, so so I don’t know why you would want one either.

Don’t look at me like that. I never said they were practical.

For a while now I’ve been posting some of my photos on Flickr and I highly recommend it.

While I’m not much of a photographer, every so often someone wants to see something I’ve photographed. –By putting the photos on Flickr I no longer have to sort through several directories on several backup devices, edit the shots and then print or email them. And while I haven’t posted all my photos by a long shot, I’ve posted enough of my latest so I can send my friends to Flickr and if they want something I haven’t already posted this makes it look like I’m trying and will eventually get the rest up. –This of course is pure B.S. I’m not about to scan and post several thousand slides, prints and digital images -most of them bad- but it seems to keep people happy and out from under foot.

What surprises me are the shots people have shown an interest in. The Edgewater poker room seems to be viewed with the most consistency. This is an incredibly small room that I shot early in the morning while it was empty. –It’s probably just because of the word “poker” in the title.

All I know is for sure is that there seems to be some kind of a rule that says if I think it’s really interesting nobody else even looks at it.

So far I haven’t joined any groups so on an average day, I’ll get a handful of referrers from this site with an occasional hit from Flickr. But yesterday, instead of my usual 10 – 14 views (and then only on those days I post new photos) I got 54, all from Flickr?? I don’t know how or why they found me, but with a few million users there’s bound to be the occasional anomaly.

Who knows, maybe I’ll become famous….