Well, not my windows actually, just someone else’s that I saw this morning.

The Song of the Day is of course “Cars Hiss By My Window” from the 1971 Doors album “L.A. Woman”.

I already used this song in “1281 – Cars Hiss By My Window“. Hear it on YouTube.

The last time that I used this title was in summer 2010, and that time it was laundry hanging from Italian windows.

This time it’s a bike that I saw yesterday, and even if you don’t like this image, for instance because you think that selective color really got old ages ago, it still touches an interesting question: Does this image infringe upon someone’s copyright? I saw it, I took it, I processed it, but how can I know???

Sick? Oh yes.

The Song of the Day is “Hanging Around“, originally from the 1977 Stranglers album “Rattus Norvegicus”. Hear it on YouTube.

I took and processed these two images on Wednesday, but I didn’t manage to write the actual blog post. Yesterday was not better, thus here I am, two days late, writing from the train to Carinthia.

At the moment I’m pretty occupied with a new project. Our company will move to another part of Vienna, pretty much across from where I live now, and thus I’ll move as well. I’ve already found an apartment in a house that’s being built right now and that will be ready in about a year, just when I need it. From there it will be only a five minute slow walk to work. Contrast that with 50 minutes on two underground lines, and that twice a day. Adds up to a lot of life time

Now I have to decide about options, colors, tiles, floors, where I want to have electric outlets,etc, and all that greatly depends upon how I’m going to furniture the apartment. I have some pieces that I want to take with me, but of course things like a kitchen have to be custom-built. Thus I’ve spent almost a week now creating a 3D model with Google Sketchup, trying to get feeling for the size of the rooms and how I’ll be using them.

The Song of the Day is “All Down The Line” from the 1972 Rolling Stones album “Exile On Main Street”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is where the LX5 meets its physical limits. ISO 320 is not much, but this image was fairly pushed in the shadows and it shows.

The image was taken in 16:9 aspect ratio and after processing I had already uploaded it, but somehow it felt unbalanced and didn’t satisfy me. I reconsidered, cropped heavily from the bottom, and as an extreme panoramic it suddenly works. In a way

The Song of the Day is “Can’t Wait” from Bob Dylan’s 1997 album “Time Out Of Mind”. Hear it on YouTube.

I really enjoy using the Panasonic LX5 again. It’s an incredibly light camera, a camera with very refined ergonomics, fine picture quality (well, probably not this image, but this was taken at ISO 400 in low light, and then: who needs fine detail with such a graphic subject?), and it’s simply a pleasure to use. For instance there is nothing better than a hardware slider on the lens for switching between aspect ratios.

Do I like it better than the E-P2? From an ergonomics point of view certainly. Of course the E-P2 has a much bigger sensor and works better in low light, it has more shallow DOF and all that, but it can’t replace the LX5 as my low weight camera. Will I buy an LX6? Sure, if it’s a similar evolution as the LX5 is from the LX3.

The Song of the Day is “How High The Moon” from the 1985 Manhattan Transfer album “Bop Doo-Wopp”. See a live performance on YouTube.

My time was extremely limited today. I spent countless hours with Google Sketchup, and when I realized that time was running short, I grabbed the LX5 and took the car, venturing into the unknown parts of Villach.

By all means, this image is stretching the dynamic range of the LX5, and yes, there is some noise coming up in the shadows, but then, this is, among other techniques, a composite of two versions from the same RAW, two EV apart, thus I was surprised by how well it turned out. And, by the way, did I say this camera is light

The Song of the Day is the Cream classic “Traintime” from “Wheels Of Fire”. Enjoy it on YouTube.

No no, no prison, just a shopping mall, although …

All while I worked with the E-P2 and my Nikon lenses, the LX5 stayed on a shelf in Villach. Saturday I took it for a ride and, guess what, it’s still a great camera.

The Song of the Day, purely by color, is “Walls Of Red Wing” by Bob Dylan. Hear it on YouTube.

I’ve been in Carinthia one day earlier today, because I had to bring the car to a car repair shop.

The appointment was for 8:00, thus I started out early and also made some images. The Image of the Day with its perfect alignment of moon and the mountain Mittagskogel was one of them.

I used ISO 640 and by accident I kept ISO at that for the whole day. That’s the kind of stupidity that you end up with when a camera does not have reasonably intelligent auto ISO

Oh, by the way, you may remember that I wished Nikon would implement auto ISO in a way that takes focal length into account. Good news: wish granted. Bad news: so far only on the D4

The Song of the Day is “Fingernail Moon” from Annie Lennox’ 2007 album “Songs Of Mass Destruction”. Hear it on YouTube.

I like Kirk Tuck. I admit I only discovered his blog when The Online Photographer reported about his resolution to give up blogging. Thankfully Kirk reconsidered, and since then I follow his blog. He is a powerfully eloquent writer and the sheer amount of text that he produces is intimidating. Nevertheless I read his posts, all his posts, and all but a very few from start to finish. I do it because Kirk is not only knowledgeable, he is also amusing.

And he can be rude. You know, that hobsonesque type of rudeness, that I-know-who-I-am-and-I-say-what-I-say type of in-your-face rudeness. I like that. It’s great to know where someone stands and it’s great to hear honest opinion voiced in an honest way. Very frequently I agree, sometimes I don’t, and this time I don’t agree at all. Kirk mourns Kodak and SOPA/PIPA.

Kirk has blogged a lot (not only) recently about the challenges that digital technology poses to traditional businesses, and as a professional photographer and writer he is exactly where the impact is felt these days. In his world, the “Internet Giants” like Google and Amazon exploit free or cheap content and mix it with their advertising. He sees the artist as being exploited, used in a pseudo-darwinian struggle that can’t be won, devalued and meaningless for the giant content exploiters, washed away and replaced by the next wave of desperate contenders.

And all this may be right. In a way. It’s only that destroying the Internet won’t help. And destroying the Internet is, what SOPA/PIPA are all about.

It may not be meant that way. It may only be a helpless attempt by incompetent, short-sighted politicians, financed by a fat industry that greatly overestimates its value.

I like good Hollywood movies. Probably not as much as I like what Ingmar Bergmann, Federico Fellini, Carlos Saura or Francois Truffaut have made, but I’ll strongly defend “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” as one of the best movies ever made. Still, the Internet is changing our world towards freedom, in a way that was never before possible, in a way that science fiction failed to predict, and I don’t want to give up all that for the greater good of Hollywood.

The Internet is a communication infrastructure and the greatest collection of knowledge that humanity ever had. Sure, Encyclopedia Britannica (or Brockhaus around here) is of a higher standard than Wikipedia (much higher indeed, and to see those refined encyclopedias of the past wither away is aggrieving), but Encyclopedia Britannica is a niche product for a very small, wealthy elite. Today I have complete mirrors of all the texts of Wikipedia on my smart phone, ready to be used in situations when I am not even connected. You know, there are Internet cafés in the third world. And people there are able to partake in that wealth, and they are able to contribute, and they do. There is much more to the Internet than “piracy”. There is social change, there is knowledge spreading, there is political power, enormous agility, and the whole world is rapidly changing.

Kirk portraits Google as the big, soulless juggernaut that tries to change the Internet into a TV-like structure, with “free” content produced by exploited authors, intermixed with advertising, the only revenue-generating content at all in this network.

It’s provocative and it’s plain wrong. Sure, Google doesn’t do what it does for the love of us, but that’s not the point. Google is a giant enabler. Google empowers ordinary people like me and you. Google makes it possible for me to write a blog post about something that I care about, and actually make other people who care find it.

There was a time when the Internet was not known to lawyers and businessmen, but even at that time people produced content and liked to see that content shared. The Internet was about communication and sharing of knowledge – and it worked. No business involved, no money paid. All that still exists. It is a layer on top of the plain infrastructure, a community completely isolated from the Internet’s commercial uses.

Let’s admit it, the Internet costs a lot of money and someone has to pay the bill. Even if you dislike the ulterior motives of those companies that provide the infrastructure, in the end it’s great that it is there, because the Internet is of course the exact opposite of a TV-like broadcast medium, regardless of how much revenue Google generates through advertising. The Internet has a commercial backbone, but the valuable part are the constantly re-forming neural connections of this planet-sized brain.

For the first time in human history we have a means of immediate and global exchange, and this is not about media piracy at all. Yes, piracy exists, no doubt, but it is just one small phenomenon in that broiling sea of ideas, exchange and democratic communication.

SOPA/PIPA are laws meant to observe, control and oppress. The sad reality is, that in order to reach their goals, our society would have to mutate into the worst kind of tyranny. And even then they wouldn’t succeed, because there are always ways around for those who are really determined.

SOPA/PIPA would erect The Great Firewall of the United States of America, only that the US define cyberspace as their home turf. You read this post on manessinger.com, the blog of an Austrian author who happens to publish in English language and who uses a domain registered in the US, publishing content hosted on servers located in the US. I don’t feel like I should be under US jurisdiction though. Should I? Should the US government have the right to shut down my blog whenever they feel like it, without due process? Well, they also think they have the right to kill whoever they want, so probably I shouldn’t complain

SOPA/PIPA are dangerous because they propose technical solutions that are not only unfit to reach their goals, but that also have severe side effects. Take for instance the idea of DNS manipulation. Not only is it easy to circumvent, it is also undermining the efforts towards a trustable, cryptographically secured DNS that will be essential for combating cyber-crime. You can either have DNS manipulation (by governments, criminals and criminal governments) or you can have secure DNS, not both. It’s a fact completely obvious to every computer scientist, but the politicians still hope for the perpetuum mobile.

The Internet is a complicated clockwork with some flaws, but is completely absurd to expect that technically incompetent lawyers and politicians could fix anything. To the contrary. The proposed measures are technically dangerous, ineffective towards their proposed goals, and they are perfectly adequate as the foundation of a totalitarian tyranny. We don’t want that, we don’t need that, we must never agree to that.

SOPA/PIPA are not made for Kirk Tuck. They are made for Warner and Sony and Disney. So, what’s the solution for the big players in the content industry? I don’t have any. They will have to adapt. I know, being able to sell us the same content on ever new media, vinyl, tapes, CDs and DVDs over and again, that’s what made them fat and greedy, but I don’t need their content. I consume it once in a while, I pay for it, I gladly pay twice if it’s that good (happened a lot with music, happens now with some books), but if I have to choose between a corporate “Internet”, sold by corrupt politicians, and the friendly and helpful society that I have lived in for 20 years now, I say good riddance to the content industry.

Go and invent your own infrastructure. Nobody asked you to try to make money on the Internet, nobody asked you to “go digital”. Don’t whine when it doesn’t turn out as in your arrogance you thought it would. Leave us alone. Go die somewhere where your foul pestilence does no harm.

And Kirk? I wish he would think about what he wishes for. And reconsider. He’s just too good and influential to be on the wrong side. If he ever got what he asked for, I guess he wouldn’t like it anyway.

The Song of the Day is “Tears Of Rage” from “Music From Big Pink”. Or “The Basement Tapes”. Depends on how you like your Band, pure or not. Hear it on YouTube.

Gordon had tracked down that robot for weeks and now he had him cornered. Things were not so easy though. Maybe he should have called out for reinforcements first, but now it was too late. He had to face this metallic monster all alone …

Well, I’m reading Asimov, no doubt, and although the robot in my little fantasy is probably going to violate First Law, it is not so uncommon. Think of it: They didn’t send robots into Fukushima, as everybody had expected, but on the other hand, military ponders the use of robots for securing borders. First Law is not in fashion these days.

The Song of the Day is “The Great Suburban Showdown” from Billy Joel’s 1974 album “Streetlife Serenade”. Hear it on YouTube.