I’m back, but very busy. I’ll write some tonight, hopefully. In the meantime, here are some pictures to look at.
I’ve been pretty manic the last few days; getting ready for a week-long business trip while finishing up a bunch of freelance work and taking a class on underwater photography has blurred my week one day into the next. Tonight Jen and I have a meal at our favorite restaurant and then I board a plane at 10am tomorrow morning. I’ll be back here around the 14th or so with a ton of photography and some good stories to tell.
(Yes, I’m bringing the laptop, and yes, I have a wireless card in it, but no, I don’t think there’s connectivity on Bimini.)
There is a fantastic article on the state of the OSX Finder at Ars Technica today; John Siracusa takes Apple to task for the bastardization of the original Finder into its current incarnation (which he argues is not even a finder at all, making good the point that the Finder is the computer.) He outlines a number of good points about the way things work, why they do not follow the original model (and break most of the fundamental principles of the Interface Guidelines) and offers suggestions as to how they could be better. For anyone who works with interfaces and UX models, this is good juicy readin’.
Also via Slashdot, an article about a photographer who was fired from the LA Times for digitally altering a photo which ran on the front page. This isn’t the first time, but it raises serious questions about ethics and the art and science of journalism.
I have been very busy in the last couple of days, but there’s a new slideshow up in the pictures section of the abandoned river house in Ellicott City.
There is a new blog up on the subject of computer games; it’s run by the good folks at Corante, whose newsfeed I subscribed to daily until the backlog got hopelessly past twenty days. But what I did read was very thorough and insightful. Andrew Phelps notes here that the online community in Everquest was estimated to be the 77th richest world economy by a Cal State professor who guaged the numbers on current Ebay auctions. Those are some pretty powerful numbers when you stop to think about them. It’s fascinating to see people begin to look at gaming in a different light (myself included.) The issue of trust in a virtual community is fascinating. What happens when there’s rampant cheating on a particular server or throughout a certain game? Easy—people stop playing it. Therefore it becomes mandatory for the creators to either prevent this, or make it so cheating is hard, expensive, or unfeasible.
Music of the day: the ParaDynamic Roadhouse streaming feed on iTunes. (Warning: the webpage is sucktastic, but the feed is great. Look for it under the “Blues” category.)