Was saving this for tomorrow. However, I noticed a photo of me taking this photo posted today. So I posted mine too.

I enjoyed exploring this house and environs.

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Like a Post-Apocalytic Movie

Originally uploaded by Ezra S F

Yesterday I met with some other Flickrites to check out the Bostwick Cotton Gin Festival. There were easily a couple thousand people there, which is impressive for a town of 354.

(The photos I’ve posted so far at writing this post are just of Bostwick. Estimate I’ll end up posting another dozen before I’m done.)

We didn’t stay for the parade, but instead ventured over to the Nolan House (Evan’s awesome photo of the house). There were some donkeys and mules next to an old store. Then we stopped at Rutledge, a fertilizer factory in Newborn, and Mansfield. It was a fun, productive day.

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Well… Maybe….

I’m not even sure this blog is about me. Probably it is not about you. Instead, it making a generalization. You know, those statements which are based on false reductionist approaches and assume some random event represents the key to solving everything.

Anyway.

Stop taking things personally.

Unless derogatory language is used to directly describe you (specifically named or tonal inflection used on a noun which can only refer to you), something is not a personal attack.

Your operating system of choice… is… not… you. Unless you were the creator, in which case you do have the right to think of yourself as the operating system. Ironically, the creators seem to be the only sane ones.

The science fiction serials or soap operas you watch… are… not… you.

The software of the human brain seeks to identify when others have wronged us in some way. This justifies violence or at least harsh words. Except, this software was designed for interactions thousands of years ago when we operated in small tribal groups where we knew the people with which we daily interacted. Someone who wronged us would be someone who knew where we slept. Not a faceless entity anywhere on the globe. We have laws because the software is incapable of handling the modern social dilemmas of one-off interactions.

So stop acting like Cro-Magnons.

Start acting like you have compassion. Because through such acting, your software will start actually having compassion.

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I was walking around familiar places in my home town with a woman I know from there and her niece. Every where we went, sites looked way prettier than they appear now.

In every commercial area between the road and parking lots were 10 feet tall berms with decorative trees along the top and azalea bushes at the base. Every parking lot had its own holding pond for the water the lots displace.

Buildings were multi-story and huddled together in bunches. Even the corner gas station I visited most days after school was now just the first floor with the Walgreens down the road now occupying the second floor and the offices catercorner on the third through fifth floors. Every building was somewhere between light and dark brown.

Signs were no bigger than 4′ x 2′. None of these huge monstrosities one can see from miles down the road.

Philosophically, I would not portray myself as politically green. The environment falls pretty low when ranked against things I consider politically important. (Not even in the top 5 or 10.)

Also, I am lazy. Don’t make me have to exert disciplined behavior to effect change. Just change it in small steps towards what it should be. I’ll notice, but the small steps ensure I’ll be upset for maybe 24 hours and over the course of a few weeks will no longer care.

Hopefully the politics are not invading my sleep?

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Originally uploaded by Ezra F

Took this yesterday. Dunno why I didn’t think to take this previously.

Check out the large version.

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However, this was a horrible way to get traffic to this blog.

1. All of the text and images go into Fb Notes. Nevermind the terms of service. People looking at my blog posts think I wrote it in Facebook. Unless they are observant enough to see “View Original Post” links in tiny text, they have no idea about the blog which was originally the point. When I cross post stuff to multiple blogs I make it obvious the other places it exists.
2. Embedded videos get stripped from Fb Notes. Lately, I have been posting embedded TED Talks videos here. So I have to think about how to change my posts to accommodate Facebook.

So, I discovered some friends who are also photographers on Facebook use an app called NetworkedBlogs. (They are Flip!Photography, Invisible Green Photography, and Stylized Portraiture.) Once configured, this app will post to my and friends’ (on my behalf) Facebook Walls a link to my wall. The format of the posts look similar to when a link is posted, such as a thumbnail.

The setup is also fairly easy. Enter the location, description, category, and email for your blog. Prove it is yours whether by having others verify it belongs to you or placing code on the site. Finally, go to “Feed Settings” link and click “Auto-publish to personal profile”.

I am hopeful this solves my problem. If so, then I have another blog to setup. (Someone asked to buy that domain. I guess I asked too much for it?)

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Reality bites. Hard.

(See Taryn Simon photographs secret sites on the TED site)

TED About this talk: Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.

Also: Taryn on Charlie Rose, Discomfort Zone (Telegraph)

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Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.

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An “Andy Bush” (I think that was the name) asked in a phone poll:

Do you think 3rd world dictatorships and Hillary Clinton should determine US gun rights?

Apparently I was supposed to forget their own VP Wayne LaPierre in a recorded message (portrayed as live) described the United Nations as a bunch of 3rd world dictators. LaPierre has for years claimed the UN deliberations about buying the illicit arms in African war torn areas somehow means taking American firearms but omitted anything about Africa from his message. Shame on me for being well read to know the background information so as to not be completely swayed by the spin. In the recorded message he also described the United States Congress as willing to hand our country over to the dictators. (Whatever that means.)

This message and question are deliberately framed the so the only possible answer is “No.” At the time I could not see this question as possibly being shown in any publication as anyone would dismiss the question as so completely skewed the results are meaningless.

Such an attempt to manipulate me annoyed me, so I answered “Yes” just to waste as much of their time as they did mine. Andy Bush sounded confused when he asked me if I said “Yes”. He asked if I wanted to change my mind.

Next time ask me a legitimate question to get an real answer.

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Elizabeth posted this well done Youtube video.

Animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry. Starts about halfway through the original work at the appearence of Halley’s Comet and concludes at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

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1. No purse to carry more sstuff. I have big fingers, so I need stuff with big buttons. Things like iPhones are maddening to use because I cannot seem to hit the buttons correctly. Things with lots of big buttons tend to be big which makes them a pain to carry.
   
   
2. Never underestimate my ability to break toys. Only the most resilient of electronic toys survive me. It isn’t uncommon for my laptops, phones, or cameras to experience 5 foot falls. Everything I carry with me ends up with marks from the abuse even books. Paper can take the abuse. I have no faith e-book readers could maintain their screens from being around me.
3. Computers tend to tempt me to fail at multi-tasking. When I shut down my computer to go home, I typically have at the minimum a dozen windows. (Even the client I use to connect to my servers usually can fill that dozen.) Reading on a computer rarely will result in more than a page of reading every 10 minutes. Because blog posts are usually pretty short, distractions have less chance to interfere with reading them.
4. Books are common enough people accept them as normal. Cool toys attract attention. I’d expect an expensive phone or e-reader or laptop to attract the kind of attention which results in theft. Books are cheap few would care to go to the effort.
5. Phone are becoming more like computers. What I don’t want is a phone (or another device) which I treat like my computer, aka failing at multi-tasking. Just today I squared 1024 on paper instead of using the calculator on my phone. Having access to the Internet through my phone could be bad for keeping me on task.
6. Why faux paper when you could use paper? The e-book readers market how much their technology looks like paper. Paper looks, feels, smells, and tastes like paper.
   
7. Spending money on a device to get to read seems counter-intuitive. The devices should be subsidized by the content. But that would mean Amazon $10 books would cost more like $20.

Typically I don’t change until I have a problem with what I am using. Books don’t cause me problems. So I am happy to continue to read books for the foreseeable future.

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Behind the Scenes Originally uploaded by Ezra F

Yesterday was the second Athens, GA Strobist meeting. Like the first meeting, it was fun and informative. I really ought to invest in my own setup to practice outside these meets.

Maybe it is time to start selling my work so I can afford more gear.

Missing about 4 people. Photographers sites: 1) Erik (Onelight), 2) David, 3) Sherri (Onelight), 4) Wes, 5) Sara, 6) Steven, 7) Tim

I’m excited to see their photos.

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She pointed out students are the most affected by and most important constituent for any decisions we make. Yet the student point of view is almost never considered. Capturing what is good for students might mean installing all the possibilities where students and faculty could compare. It might mean surveys, however, I think self-reporting provides so much erroneous data we could do without it.

My job’s focus is more toward what is the most efficient, least problematic system for me to start/stop, install, upgrade, and review logs. I am still mulling what job position we have who would focus on ensuring whatever we do will provide for the best student experience. Guess really that should be all of us.

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Apparently women sniffed teeshirts worn 2 days by males. Women preferred the shirts belonging to genetically dissimilar men. These are the good men because they ensure better MHCs in offspring. Unfortunately, the women on oral contraceptives preferred genetically similar men. Yeah. The latter women would prefer their brother, son, or father (all sharing 1/2 her genes) to any other men. The feared scenario is women marry men satisfying their preference for genetically similar men and in preparing to have children suddenly find their husbands revolting.

Our mothers were on to something when told us to always smell nice. Preventing women on birth control from smelling who we really keeps us from getting judged down inappropriately. Well, really the game we play is not letting the other side have too much information.

P.S. The same study almost found significance to single women preferring genetically similar men. That really would make news.

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Looks like in the Atlanta area sinkholes are starting to happen.

I wonder why news agencies are not warning people to expect these might happen? Maybe the ground under Atlanta doesn’t have as many caverns compared to Albany so the danger is not as great? Hopefully it won’t take several of these for people catch on to the possibility.

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Upgraded to the Tarski 2.5 theme. Previously I was using the Tarski 2.4.

One of the reasons I like Tarski is the opportunity for a custom header image.  Something I can use of my own. However, like the moo.com cards, finding a photo whose crop to this narrow 720×180 window isn’t so easy. At the moment I am using the train photo. Through the weekend I might try new photos.

Original Tarski Custom Header

Consideration one from my train photo.

Consideration two from my Queen Anne’s lace photo.

Consideration three from my mushroom photo.

Consideration three from my phlox photo.

Leave a comment if you see something you like.

Splash

I’m thinking of putting the above photo into the splash page as well.

The tacky Facebook profile widget got tackier. So now I have a Flickr widget for a slide show of my Most Interesting 60 photos. So, ya’ll visit the set of the strobist shoot to increase the Interestingness of your favorites into the top 10.

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Course Instructor can produce a report of the raw tracking data. However, access to the role falls under the Administration tab so people running the system need to make a user specifically to enroll themselves at the course level to get the reports. (Annoying.)

Instead the administrators for my campuses pass up to my level of support requests to generate reports. For providing these I have SQL to produce a report. This example is for users who clicked on a specific file. Anything in bold is what the SQL composer will need to alter.

set lines 200 pages 9999
col user format a20
col action format a32
col pagename format a80

clear breaks computes
break on User skip 1
compute count of Action on User

select tp.user_name "User",ta.name "Action",
      to_char(tua.event_time,'MM/DD/RR HH24:MI:SS') "Time",
      NVL(tpg.name,'--') "PageName"
  from trk_person tp, trk_action ta, trk_user_action tua,
      trk_page tpg, learning_context lc
  where tp.id = tua.trk_person_id
    and ta.id = tua.trk_action_id
    and tua.trk_page_id = tpg.id (+)
    and tua.trk_learning_context_id = lc.id
    and lc.id = 1234567890
    and tpg.name like '%filename.doc%'
  order by tp.user_name,tua.event_time
/

Output

• User aka tp.user_name – This is the student’s account.
• Action aka ta.name – This is an artifact of the original script. You might drop it as meaningless from this report.
• Time aka tua.event_time – Day and time the action took place.
• PageName aka tpg.name – Confirmation of the file name. Keep if using like in a select on this.

Considerations

I use the learning context id (lc.id aka learning_context.id) because in my multi-institution environment, the same name of a section could be used in many places. This id ensures I data from multiple sections.

The tricky part is identifying the file name. HTML files generally will show up as the name of in the title tag (hope the instructor never updates it). Office documents generally will show as the file name. Here are a couple approaches to determining how to use tpg.name (aka trk_page.name).

1. Look at the file in the user interface.
2. Run the report without limiting results to any tpg.name. Identify out of the results the name you wish to search and use: tpg.name = ‘page name‘

Most tracked actions do have a page name. However, some actions do not. This SQL is designed to print a “–” in those cases.

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They had an amazing freedom which was they didn’t have to make any money on it. The Internet had no business plan, no CEO, no firm responsible singly for building it. Instead it is folks getting together to do something for fun rather than because they were told to or expecting to make money off of it.

The examples certainly seem compelling. However, I fail to see the connection between the architecture of TCP/IP and human small acts of kindness. Instead some examples make the Internet and Wikipedia sound a single step from oblivion. Maybe I am not a pessimist?

The second video, Is the Internet what Orwell feared?, discusses the failure of social media to break down dictatorships. Connectivity * Devices != Democracy. Instead of censoring the bloggers and commenters, give the bloggers the opportunity to see the cleaned up issue. The issue gets dropped because there is no longer a story. The moral is transparency can look nice but not actually result in actual change. Wait… The same thing happens in democracies. Hmmmmm.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

Evgeny Morozov: Is the Internet what Orwell feared?

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From what I gather strobist is about shifting camera flash from near the camera lens off to the side. Similar to golden hour sunlight, the light is more dramatic when not coming from near the camera. Also, camera flashes throw harsh light so soften the light by having it reflect off surfaces or go through translucent material.

Interest built about having a strobist meetup to shoot together and help each other. Steven Skelton, Tim, and Megan arranged a meetup last Saturday (group photo set). I was the only photographer walking into this totally cold without having at least read or watched any tutorials. So the quality of these pictures could better be a testament to the efficient teaching by Steven and Megan. At least it didn’t seem nearly as difficult as I expected.

This would also be the first photoshoot where I consistently used Manual rather than Shutter Priority.

This was also the first time I worked with models. (top right: Renee, right: Leann) The one wedding I shot taught me I really do have to direct people to get what I want while listening to get a feel for what they want. Megan sensed my hesitancy and worked through some ideas with the first few pictures then let me to go work on my own ideas. Models are people too. As a card carrying introvert, dealing with people normally exhausts me. This not so much.

This was a fun experience. I know I have things on which to work:

• Putting together my own strobist setup.
• Compose more carefully.
• Find dramatic locations.
• Become more social to approach people to photograph.

The mechanics of photography are also entertaining. Call me a geek, but that there are so many values to track in photography fascinates me. Plus there are tons of toys. I’m not really a builder, so I probably will not be crafting custom flash grids or softboxes.

I knew I enjoyed watching the antics photographers go through to get the right shot. The antics a good model will go through to be in the right shot adds a whole new dimensions for me. For example, pictured right is Clinton easily a dozen feet off the ground so Megan can take a dramatic shot.

For about a year I’ve really slacked off using my camera. The wedding, photowalk meetups, and now strobist meetups put me back in the mode of thinking about what I should do next. That is a great thing.

P.S. Normal is about 100 views of my photos a day. Since I posted the photos Sunday, traffic has been 250+ views a day.

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B&N suckered me into buying the book My Stroke of Insight by setting up a table for interesting topics. Smart because I nearly dropped a couple hundred dollars that day. Anyway, I gave it as gift to Mom. Family conversations and book gifts about random miscellaneous topics is why I blabber so much about random miscellaneous information. No, I had not read it before I gifted it. So… Now I am reading it. I do like the book.

Alexis told me she knows someone else who is reading it. She has exams so I recommended she at least watch this video. I figure the invitation should be more global.

I’m kind of hoping to have a stroke now.

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