Microsoft

They still don't get it.

'He (Steve Ballmer) said a big part of the future of computing is in determining users' intent. For example, he said it's simple to ask his assistant to get him ready to visit Charlotte. But on a computer, it involves opening up his calendar, visiting several Web sites, printing out tickets, and so on. The two will become more similar, Ballmer said.

When you type the word “Chicago” into a search engine, it will be able to determine whether you meant the city, the band or the musical based on your Internet history.'

First, Microsoft has never in their history known what people actually want, let alone delivered it. Second, basing predictions of what I will want in the future on what I have wanted in the past is simply stupid. I am a human. I make mistakes. I change my mind. I learn. I develop new tastes. I am alive and dynamic, and therefore really not very predictable at all when it comes to desire. It is only slightly easier to predict behavior, but even that is not terribly reliable even for the professionals. There is a reason why stock brokers make a point of telling you over and over again that past performance is no indication of what will happen in the future. Peoples' desires change with the wind. In addition, by extension, everything which is based on people (bands, musicals, and even cities and countries) also changes and evolves.

What Ballmer is asserting here is based on the view that humans are mechanistic, static, and base....the standard view of humanity that M$ has held for years. It is simply flat out wrong, and they cling to it like it is the reason they have been so successful. They are the most misguided and clueless bunch of twits around.

Who knew???

Goats...best models ever. Who'd have thought that?

Ugh...

Well, that was a waste of 2 days.

Yesterday morning I upgraded Firefox to version 3.5. It was a disaster. First, it was not compatible with about half my addons. Second, there was some problem which appeared to indicate that the installation had corrupted my profile, which turned out not to be the case. Every time I started 3.5 up it would open a second little window, which was blank...empty. If I closed that window FF would crash in such a way that it was unable to render a report or give an error log. Sometimes the little window would not appear until I minimized the main window. In an effort to diagnose the problem I went into safe mode, which did alleviate the problem. Naturally, the next step was to uninstall all the addons and create a clean profile, which I did. Even with a clean profile and no addons, FF3.5 was slow and the little window was there. Still, it was useable. And even in that condition it is worlds better than IE.

Then I went to post a comment on Scott's website. Like on this one, you have to type in a "captcha" (that string of letters to verify you are human). Except for whatever reason FF3.5 was not allowing the captcha image to load, nor was it allowing the audio version to be played.

So I just got done uninstalling 3.5 and going back to 3.0.11, which I never had a lick of trouble with.

In looking at 3.5 it seems to me that it is going down the road which lead to IE's downfall as "the" browser everyone uses. Namely, it is getting really bloated. It doesn't make any sense either, because the whole idea of addons and plugins is that it allows you to keep the browser itself very lean and fast. Understandably some security is still going to have to be addressed in the browser itself, but it should not have to take a front seat to functionality if the browser code itself remains unencumbered with a ton of complexity. I think FF is trying to be too much to too many people, and should cut it out, leaving personalization entirely to the addon and plugin community.

Anyway, I am now back to normal. Heh...

On being right

Yesterday the heavy equipment entered Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Hmmm...I wonder what they could be building. And why. There will be a memorial there on Friday, so we will see how many people show up just for that. Just in the last 5 days alone there have been 2.3 million legally purchased downloads of single MJ songs and half a million MJ albums sold in retail stores. To put that into perspective, Thriller sold 104 million copies total.

One thing I was wrong about...people actually did start gathering at his boyhood home in Gary, though it appears that it won't be a long-term thing. It's the smell, you know.

So early indications are that I am going to be correct about this whole money spending thing. I'll keep you posted as long as I care enough about it to do so.

****UPDATE****
Memorial is now scheduled to be held at the Staples Center (capacity 19,000) and they are hanging big screen monitors on the outside for the people who are unable to get in. Apparently Neverland would never have been big enough. All of a sudden I feel like singing "We Are The World". It is nice that the State of California is writing IOU's for tax refund checks, forcing the people who were expecting to buy food with those checks to find other means, while the late "Mr. Feed the Starving Kids in Africa" gets a royal send-off. Arnie better be taxing the hell out of this little shindig, that's for sure. I wonder how much admission will be? $20? $50? In any case, add it all to the total amount getting spent by the general public on this. (19,000 seats at $50 per works out to just under a cool million, btw.)

The other issue with Neverland is that CA won't let MJ be buried there. Apparently they have weird laws about burying bodies in CA which preclude you from planting anyone anwhere except an official cemetery or mausoleum. So it looks like Forest Lawn is going to be it, though a year from now they are going to have to rename it Trampled Lawn. That is going to be a very busy place for awhile. I am sure they will still make Neverland a Graceland attraction though. It would be stupid not to, really.

Finally, I did the math on the music sales in the last 5 days and it works out to be roughly 15 million dollars spent by the huddled, economically hard up masses. Are you keeping track of all this? That number alone is approaching the annual budget of an entire public school system in a decent sized city, and people are spending it on music that we have all already heard for years.

My Michael Jackson Post

This just has to be done. I have never really talked about how I feel about Michael Jackson before, and now that he is dead I feel that the time is right.

In a nutshell, he has never been any more of an issue for me than any other person on the planet. I hold little, if any, appreciation for pop music, and thought what he called "entertainment" was never anything more than flash. So I saw him primarily in the same light as someone he had obviously studied, P.T. Barnum. To put it in Michigan terms, he was all gravy and no meat. To me, the whole Michael Jackson carnival sideshow was just never worth bothering over because I knew it was all smoke and mirrors anyway.

Part of the issue is that I really dislike pop music. To the point that whenever I read the term "pop" I automatically in my head pronounce it as "poop". (Try reading any of the articles about Michael Jackson that way. I defy you not to laugh out loud.) The whole genre is geared toward appeal to the masses, "pop" being short for "popular". This, from a musical perspective, is to me, akin to prostitution. Yes, I think pop is the pornography of music. It is formulaic, artificial, base, and strives not just to maintain the lowest common denominator, but to continually exceed it in order to one thing: maximize sales. All the art gets stripped away and replaced with flash and shlock. That is why the primary demographic for pop music is not adults, and not males, but rather teenage and preteenage girls. They are gullible and like flashy things. The result for the music however, is that it is no longer artistic, but merely crafted. Stamped out of a mill, or more accurately nowadays out of a software program. It is not music, as far as I am concerned, it is just strings of notes. Much like strings of cheap plastic shiny beads at Mardi Gras.

--Hey, I'll trade you this nearly worthless plastic crap for your dignity, what do you say?
--Oooh, shiny! Okay!

I can't blame Jackson for this, he didn't start it. His way was paved by Elvis and the Beatles, the pioneers of poop. (Sorry, it is habit.) And none of this is to say that these people were not talented. Elvis had a really great voice. Michael Jackson was a great dancer. John Lennon was a very talented lyricist. And for be it from me to chastise someone else for the decisions they make in life. If poop is what they wanted to do, who am I to judge that? So you won't hear me say anything negative about these people, or their career choices. But you won't hear me say anything positive about it either. I look at it as if Rembrandt would have done graffiti instead of oil painting. He would have been undoubtedly good at it, but....

So I don't hold any of these guys in any higher regard than I hold circus geeks and carnies. As far as Michael Jackson being the "King of Poop", it was Liz Taylor who coined that term and we all know about her extensive musical background, so it must be true. Oh wait, she is an actress. Never mind. But wait, that is what I said poop is really all about, isn't it? Acting? It isn't about the music at all, it is about presenting the flash. So perhaps that is why her bestowing the title was so readily accepted. Maybe Liz Taylor knows more about poop than it first appears. In that light, I suppose it is true that he has taken poop to a level that no one else had, or has since. If that means you are the King of Poop, then I guess he deserves the throne. But a throne over something as inane and vacuous as poop doesn't really mean much to me. It is just more flash. Neverland indeed.

Here's a little nugget for you to take into consideration now. We are arguably in the worst economic times since the Great Depression. But watch over the next month to see just how much money people are going to spend because Michael Jackson is dead. They will flock in the hundreds of thousands to Neverland (Not to his birthplace, because nobody is going to flock to Gary, IN.) just as they did to Graceland. There, they will pay what in all likelihood will be well over $100 a head to go through and view a memorial of some sort. They will buy millions of copies CDs that they already own, as well as the inevitable repackaged box-sets and unreleased recordings. T-shirts. Posters. Hundreds of millions of dollars are about to be spent by the public sector. My question for you to mull over while you observe this happening is: How bad off can America really be economically if poop culture has that kind of expendable cash? I will revisit this in a month or so.

Well there you have it, the reason behind my relative disinterest in Michael Jackson, Elvis, and the Beatles and my total abhorrance of pop music. There is one thing that I would be interested in seeing though: This has all the makings of one of the weirdest damn estate sales in history.

Elvis sighting

Went on a bike run this weekend. For future reference, anytime you see something like this at the campsite across from you, you know you are in for a helluva weekend.














Points of note: The gentleman on the left has been in the Navy for seven years and has never once set foot on a ship or boat of any sort. How does that happen? (I checked, and his name was not McHale.) The soldier just to the right of Big E (that is actually a guy in a suit, btw) is the only one whose name I remember (mostly)...Hutch. He is off to Korea soon, where he will try desperately not to spill any beer. Fine men, all of them, and if are representative of the sort of person defending our country then we are in good hands. The soldier on the right is actually a skyscraper dressed in a uniform. Seriously, the guy was like 6' 7".

I discovered in talking with them that color guard duties (the reason they were there) are invariably dull and non-events. People by and large don't even speak to them. So they were very happy to spend a day being treated by thousands of people as the celebrities they are. No you will not wait in line for beer. No you will not walk anywhere, you will be issued chauffered golf carts. Yes, you will be smothered with biker chicks who want to show you their chests. Yes, you will personally be sincerely thanked for your service and have your hand shaken by each and every person who comes within 15 feet of you. Yes, we will take pictures of you posing with Gold Elvis and put them on the internet. No, we won't put up the other pictures. :)

Other notable things from the weekend: We got 20 miles off course on the run somehow (Mickey). The weather was kind to us, as 50 miles south of where we were they got 9 inches of rain in 24 hours. We got hard rain in the middle of Friday night and then sunny skies all weekend.

Misc.

Added two new photos to my gallery at photo.net yesterday. People shots this time. Two of my nephew's kids. (The individual shots are linked below.) People is an area that I have been neglecting, not purposefully but I just don't enjoy taking pictures of people as much as I enjoy taking pictures of other things. I do enjoy it, as I think people bring a unique quality to photos that you just can't get with other subjects. We identify with people in a way that we don't identify with other things, after all.

And skin is so hard to light well. Human skin oil is both fantastic and frustrating when it comes to its refractive and reflective properties in light. You really have to pay attention to all your light sources and angles. Outdoors in natural light (where I like to be) it can be like playing pool and trying to make eight bankshots at one time on one table. A lot of people have a natural gift for it, and can simply eyeball where to be and how to walk into a perfect setup. My sister is like that. She takes wonderful portraits. A lot of people just takes thousands of pictures at all different settings and angles and then pick out the keepers. (It is the paparazzi method. I call it photographic assault and battery. It is appropriate in some situations, but I tend not to want to use it for people or animals as having your picture taken is uncomfortable for some, and at the very least a distraction. In any case, knowledge of your craft is replaced by brute force, which I think takes away from the "art" aspect of it. Maybe not in the finished work, but certainly in the creative process.) Then there are the people who live in areas where the sun is always the same, day after day, and so they have the luxury of having predictability with lighting. Here in Michigan, everyday is different and I have to finagle every setup until I am happy. Or get lucky. Either way, that means having patient subjects. Kids tend not to stay in one place very long, so I was very happy with the picture of the girl in the swing. That one was mostly set up before she even got there, as I identified the spot as being an ideal setup ahead of time. Still, right after this shot she was off and running again.

The infant is her new brother, who was asleep on my sister's shoulder. Again, this shot was in natural outdoor light. It was much more difficult than the other one, as they were under a canopy, and he was almost directly backlit. Most people make too much out of being backlit. It is only a problem if you can't get enough light onto the subject. In this case, because my sister's face was right there I was able to use it as a reflector to bounce the light back onto the baby's face. It just required a small angle adjustment on my part. I did have to hold her hair out of the way, so this was a one-handed shot. Apart from that though, it was an easy one. The great thing about infants is that they don't run. And it doesn't matter what they do, even if it is sleeping, everyone thinks it is the most precious thing they have ever seen.

Off on a bike run this weekend, looks like possible tornadoes tonight too. In a tornado, a motorcycle is considered shrapnel. I will be camping with thousands of them. Don't worry, I'll take a camera. And stay upwind of as many bikes as possible.

I was on a bike last time a tornado came through here, oddly enough. Fortunately I got to a friend's house before it got too bad. The bonus about this area is that when a tornado forms as it comes off Lake Michigan, it has to go up over the old dunes. Much of the area we are in here is part of a large valley system on the opposite side of those dunes, so that tornado touchdowns are actually relatively rare until you get a little farther east. We do get straightline winds though, which are essentially horizontal tornadoes. Think "streetsweeper" on a huge scale. Hopefully this weekend will not be like that. At all. I should get lots of opportunities for people pics though.

Oh, faithful readers...

I have to apologize once again for neglecting the blog...well, I don't have to, but I should. Oh to heck with it, I have already told you a hundred times I really don't care. Still, with so much going on I should at least post somethign to show you that I have not just been sitting around with my thumb in my nose. So here...one of this week's additions to the wallpaper file.
















Any idea how hard it is to get a shot of this? This particular little scene was taken at a distance of about 100 yards. Very makeable shot at high noon with a 12-gauge, but a bit more dicey at dusk with a 300mm lens. Add into that mix that I didn't have time to grab a tripod, so I had to be as steady-handed as I could after running for the camera and getting into position. (On the positive side, I am apparently not as old and shaky as I feel some days.) Then there is the whole part where you have to get them to pose decently and hold still.

These two have been going through the same clearing fairly frequently since the little one was born, but never in optimal light and always when I am right in the middle of doing something else. Half credit goes to my daughter for keeping her eyes open and alerting me when they show up. I am still hopeful that one of these days I will get lucky and bump into the fawn alone out in the woods, as when they are away from their moms they tend to sit pretty still and allow you to get fairly close before bolting. But I probably won't get to give that a whirl until Thursday.

In other news, great photographer and loyal blog reader K has found a publisher and will be coming out with a book of selected photos from his LA project this fall. Check his blog for details. I am so geeked for him!

And friend and frequent photographer of kids, Scott, took a hysterical picture of his nephew this week. It is funny how we photographers can be so insensitive to how tired our subjects can get of us sticking our lenses in their faces all the time. Well, the ways they try to get us to understand that can be funny anyway. So for you Scott, here is proof that you are not the only one whose subjects are...well, let's just say "less than gracious".