So this was what, just before xmas? Severin came to town, and so we had to meet up for drinks. There was some confusion, followed by some stumbling, but luckily sophie was there to keep shit together. These would have been in color, but I somehow got the camera in JPEG mode, which means these have a weird blurry look to them when zoomed all the way in, as if the details were painted. Oh well. Which reminds me, I still haven’t done any work on a RAW converter to use with DarkTable. The list of projects keeps growing, and the time to work on them is somewhere between not much and nil. I need to prioritize, I suppose. Maybe after the move.
Posted on 2014-02-07T07:10:43Z GMT
Startup central may be SOMA, but the finantial District is seeing a huge boom of its own. There’s a group of folks from work that almost always go for salads at an undisclosed location in that area (nobody wants to advertise). I’m not a salad eater by any stretch, but I do like the walk, and the light of all the giant glass building is nice. There’s something to these photos, a complexity, that I really like. They have a lot going on. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about subject. Specifically, what my subject is. What do I want to be looking at. It seems a lot of the most interesting things are already covered, in depth, by geniuses, sometimes many times over, in the face of change. I’m not sure where I was going with this paragraph. You can stop reading now. (ed. note: obviously the last picture wasn’t taken at lunch; it just fit with the building thing I had going, and happened to be next, chronologically)
Posted on 2014-02-06T06:25:40Z GMT
Last December at work had a visit from a really great teacher, “Sandi Metz”:http://www.sandimetz.com/. We spent the week mostly workshopping about object oriented design. I gotta say I learned a ton. It’s like there’s a whole different world of how to program that I was only dimly aware of. Patterns and antipatterns, refactoring to expose complexity (sorry Jacob, for thinking you were crazy when you showed me this before), and even one “miracle of programming”:https://github.com/skmetz/socialchorus-dec-2013/tree/miracle. Do you ever look at a problem, and you have solutions for it, but none of them are very good, and you suspect that there’s something even better just over the horizon? It’s the same as that feeling when you can’t quite remember the word you’re thinking of. Now, imagine someone came along and showed you how to go over that horizon, and, really, it was just a little hill in your way in the first place. That’s what Sandy did for us, in a nutshell. Some of the good advice, which I will attempt to summarize: 1) Do the simplest thing possible. 2) Take small steps. 3) Trust your feelings in areas you have experience; that’s your preverbal brain telling you something’s up. I really can’t say enough nice things about the whole workshop, so here are a couple photos I took on a coffee run.
Posted on 2014-02-05T15:15:28Z GMT
I just realized I know two Ronans. One is in Oklahoma, and is distinguished from the one I know in California by being a) a toddler, and b) a girl. The one here is a 30 year old Irishman. Try not to get mixed up. We started at a tiny pizza place called Slicers. It was packed, just from our party. Place was tiny, and at the point we numbered about 15. Really, really good pizza though, and beers. Before too long, we moved down the road to this Tiki bar, where everything got both blurry and darker, if you catch my drift. No, It was literally dark in there, lit only by candles, and feeble, tiny bulbs on the wall. Last night, I nearly had a panic attack when my RAID stopped working. It was appearently one of those little blips that shuts the whole thing down entirely. A half an hour of troubleshooting and a reboot later and it was fine. For that half hour, I was thinking, fuck this, I’m going back to film. Film doesn’t have these problems. But with film, I simply couldn’t have shot in this light, at all. Reciprocity breakdown would have dragged these shots dow a couple stops below whatever ISO film I’d be using, and there’d be nothing in the shadows. 1/4 of a second at f/1.2, at least. So, I realized this, and then started looking at cameras again.
Posted on 2014-02-04T14:35:23Z GMT
That’s all I was doing. I had my camera out, and I was walking. There was a dude in the street, and it looke like he had been hit by a car, but he was talking. Ambulance was on its way. So I took two photos, and finished walking home.
Posted on 2014-01-30T05:24:55Z GMT
