Woa, ten years.

Like they say, even the longest trip is just one step after another.

This blog has gone for over ten years now.
(It started Sep 4, 2005.)

And I did not notice at all, and thus forgot the tenniversary. I might have celebrated it somehow, like with a silly contest like "find the old post with pictures of three characters from Phineas And Ferb, and win a real scale model of P&F's spaceship. [Shipping/handling: $3,500] [Contest void on Planet Earth.]" But alas, it's a bit late for that.

OK, I give

OK, I have changed the colors to a simple black text on a light grey background. This should work for all.
[I refuse to use a white background on aesthetic reasons. Like blue-jeans, it's simple so omnipresent that it crosses both borders of Boring and enters, almost, "irritating". Maybe that's just me. I haven't worn blue jeans (I have no other problems with other colors of jeans) for 40 years and I've never designed a site with a white background. Also a light grey background is more readable, for me and I think studies show it too.]

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Btw, I agree that the wide margins are silly. But my HTML knowledge is limited, and I can't find the setting in the template which determines this...

Half makeup, half woman

I'm never trusting women's looks again.
At least women have the advantage that what they see is what they get. OK, when it gets to personality, that's a whole different matter!

The new layout

I had used the old layout for close to a full decade!
So I suddenly decided to get another one. You like it?

How do you organize things?

I've arrived at a point where I have acquired so many things, that it makes it hard to find a thing if it's been a while since I used it.

If I make a system with many boxes, that takes up too much space, and I probably can't remember what I filed a thing under anyway.

Too few though, I end up like my "gadget shelf", which is now so crowded that it's just luck if I find anything, and to drag it all out and be systematical would take an hour.

Any good tips?

Breakfast Club Dancing; Molly Ringwald

Breakfast Club is having a rennaissance.
For me personally, the dance scene is the heart of the movie.
Note especially Molly dancing on the stair. Seriously, how do women move like that?! It just seems they are constructed a different way.

Oberon Design

A few years ago, I bought an Oberon iPad cover in thick leather, embossed with a beautiful design based on an old drawing. It is stunning, though with the downside that it is hardly lightweight.
Since then they clearly expanded a lot, despite making leather and metal designs are quite resource-demanding. I find their designs, now both in leather and metal, to be gorgeous, and if I need another lifetime and it's female, I know at least one place to get my jewelry.
OberonDesign.com --- Page of sample designs

It seems van Gogh's Starry Night is becoming iconic. It was

Also used in the excellent CGI movie Home.

Wildlife Comedy contest winners

These winners of a "Wildlife Comedy" contest are wonderful.

Brilliance is always opposed

Yoshihisa Maitani was probably the most brilliant and visionary camera designer we had had. He invented the compact Olympus Pen camera and the SLR version the Pen-F (with a big system of lenses and accessories), and he invented the Olympus OM-1, which brought about a wave of other manufacturers finally seeing that an SLR camera needs not be able to double as a mace.

Here is a speech he made where he talks about what he had to go through to get his visions engineered and produced. It is funny, and fascinating both from an engineering and social perspective. After he had produced two cameras which shattered sales records like glass, his ideas were still actively resisted in the company!

[Alternative link, though the article is split up in many pages.]

There are some rrrrealy bright people out there

A town has rejected solar panels for some, er, unusual reasons.
Here is a part of it:

Bobby Mann said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms.

“You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out.”

He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.

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Was not worth the wait... (Miley Cyrus nude)

(Sorry, this is the style all the way through.)

I'll bet many many of Miley Cyrus' fans have been wishing for a nude shoot of her. Well, now it is here.
But don't get too excited; it is not all that great. In fact I would say it's just about as boring as it could be.
This photographer, Terry something, gets the chance to photograph one of the world's most famous young singers in the the nude (what a chance!)... and what are his preparations? They were:
1: Saying 'Take off your clothes.'
2: Saying 'Stand in front of this plain white background.'
3: Putting a flash gun directly on the camera, guaranteeing the most flat and boring light we could get.

There were a couple of attempts to be "provocative" with a black dildo and such, but other than that, clearly neither he nor Miley thought this event to be worth going for any interesting, pleasant, or exciting expressions, poses, or compositions.

Of all the 120 photographers I dealt with when running my nude sites, I don't recall any of them ever sending me a submission which was this lazy and boring. And most of them could have done this job way, way better.
I think things like this gives nude photography a bad name, as if it needed it.

[If you're still interested, here they are.]

Get relaxed on grammar

If you are writing, and ever have doubts about grammer*, don't miss this lecture. It's even funny.





I think I may continue to spell it "grammer" just to make a point...

To me, "grammar" obviously comes from "grammatics", but then got to be used instead of the correct word, and the original forgotten. Surely a cosmic joke that this happened to the name of the field of protecting proper use of words!  :-)