Canon Employees Are Forbidden to Sit Down

Canon Employees Are Forbidden to Sit Down, Walk at Normal Pace, article.
(Notice how the comma used instead of the word "or" saves precious pixels which then can be used gainfully elsewhere on the Internet. Brilliant.)
In the hallway, if an employee walks slower than 5 meters every 3.6 seconds, an alarm and flashing lights are set off, [...] there's a sign on the floor in said hallways that reads, "Let's rush: If we don't, the company and world will perish."

That's the most braindead leadership thinking I've heard of. If it were a Dilbert strip, it'd be one of the less realistic ones.

Fashion 360, Powered by Nikon

Fashion 360, Powered by Nikon, article.
"The Fashion 360, Powered by Nikon is an intricate technical rig of fifty D700 cameras timed at different intervals to capture celebrities on the red carpet from an innovative visual “surround sound” perspective. In collaboration with production company Big Freeze, the Fashion 360, Powered by Nikon will allow viewers at home to experience a 360-degree view of their favourite celebrities."

I don't know about you, but I'm so excited I probably can't sleep tonight. How often, in the many thousands of hours I've sat breathlessly captured by the thrills and imagination of the catwalk, have I not thought: "if only I could see this from all 360 degrees!"
Well, now it's possible. Mankind will never suffer from paucity of a high culture diet again.

Vincent movie

"What is the use of a beautiful body, animals have it too... perhaps even more than men... but... the soul, as it lives in the people, that's what animals never have. Is not life given us to become richer in spirit?" - Vincent van Gogh


---
I'm watching "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh", a film with some of Gogh's letters read by John Hurt. It's excellent.

Vincent is seen as the archetypical "tortured artist", with some justification. But I think it is much more important that his art came from Love of Life, and like he said himself, from Serenity. He never felt sorry for himself, he took the hardships of life as simply the price one paid to reach Higher. And he saw the Light, Love, and Joy behind it all, and that is what he painted.

Art or comics

More Buttercup Festival.

I've had a few "is it thises or thates?" recently, here's another: is this comics or is it fine art? I'm leaning towards the latter. Comic strips should ideally have more immediate communication and accessibility, but as fine art it's wonderful.

I sympathize, I've tended towards the same whenever I've attempted any kind of comic in the past. For a person who loves pictures and abstraction it's hard to compromise with that just so people can "understand". :-)

shoes

Sometimes I wonder how the frig I end up on some of the spam mailing lists out there... ? I mean, ladies' shoes? There are not many things I'm less likely to be interested in.


Reminds me: are all women masochists? Why do they walk around in those torture instruments?

The Fall of the Old Camera industry

The Rise of Digital imaging and the Fall of the Old Camera industry, article.
As cameras become more digital gadgets than optical instruments, it is going all to hell for many traditional camera manufacturers.

In Munich, Germany, the former Agfa building was demolished in February 2008.

A Pen for the 21st?

It seems the upcoming compact Olympus system camera will resemble the classic Pen. I'm excited. I've been wishing for years for a compact, fast, high-quality digital camera. A street photographer's camera. I so hope they get it right.
But if they don't, maybe Panasonic will, or somebody else. It's bound to happen, or so I choose to believe.

Batteries

OK, so sometimes I'm an idiot. I hope it never happens to you, it's very embarrassing.

I've bitched about trying to make a bluetooth remote control work, and blaming the technology.
But now there's new evidence that none of all the batteries I tried in it were entirely fresh, and when it got totally fresh batteries, voila, it works fine.
My bad.
Maybe the moral is, don't save half-used batteries.

More steampunk

This one can be won. It seems to me that this one, like the Wall-E I showed recently, have gone so far that the fact that they are PC cases is incidental to the fact that they are sculptures. An afterthought, like the burger in a Happy Meal.
And the artist in me sort of thinks: why not just make sculptures?
Well, I guess it's sorta kool that they also work, even though most bits on them perform no function.

New ad

I've renewed the only ad I use for Domai, on The Online Photographer. So today I took the opportunity to update the graphic too. I suck as a designer, so by pure luck I hit on something which not only looks good, I think, but also matched the color scheme on the site.
It's the one saying "joyful nudes" here, a little down the left side of the page.

Presuming

I keep learning again and again, apparently to little effect, that one should not assume what others know about. I was just asked "what does LOL mean?", because I had used it as only answer to a point in an email.
The point being that I was asked by a man who has used the Internet daily for fifteen years.
And he is intelligent and very successful, and speaks English well. Apparently he just never before has seen it used in a context where he felt compelled to query about the meaning.

Married to...

From the comic Buttercup Festival.

This might explain a few things about mystics like me.