Today I was at a client site attempting to troubleshoot what could generously be called the worst piece of commercial software I’ve ever looked at. It turned out that I couldn’t do anything to solve the problem, but what made the trip worthwhile was the location: a bombed-out looking collection of stone and brick buildings, decidedly 19th century architecture, surrounded by fields of junk and a mountain of steaming mulch. Many of the structures looked fascinating and practically begged for further exploration, but discretion won out over curiosity and I elected to shoot from a distance (mostly).
My Google-fu reveals the origins of this strange wasteland: it is the remnants of Daniels, MD, a mill town dating back to the 1840s, which was laid waste by Hurricane Agnes in 1972. The cupola in the photo above is the bell tower of the St. Albans church, now bricked up to prevent vandalism.
For train nuts, this is a tour of the old B&O Main line, which cuts right through the heart of what used to be Daniels. This site is notable for the excellent aerial photo of the mill in 1956.
“You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re gonna be sued. I…I mean…It is..These people are responsible for shareholders. They’re private companies.”
—President George W. Bush, January 28, 2008, talking about the warrantless wiretapping program and the “Protect America Act”.
What is it about that statement that makes my blood pressure spike? Again, when did my rights as an American citizen suddenly vaporize? Whatever happened to my Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure?
I don’t give a shit about the telco companies. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they get sued six ways to Sunday by every one of their customers. They chose to aid the government with this program (except for Quest), they have cadres of expensive lawyers who tell them what to do, and they can sink or swim on their own. It’s obvious Bush doesn’t care about being responsible for us, the citizens of his country, by the letter of the Constitution, which requires that a warrant be supported by probable cause and sworn to by someone who is accountable for it. We as citizens should be outraged by this invasion of our privacy, but we’re not.
The argument “I don’t care if they listen, because I’m not doing anything wrong,” is weak and ignorant. We have laws that state clearly what the President is allowed to do in the interest of national security; in this case it’s the 1978 FISA act, which never required a court order in the first place. This administration felt it needed to expand the scope of its powers beyond any type of oversight or accountability, which immediately makes me suspicious of its motives.
When a government oversteps the written laws, the erosion of those laws is the inevitable result. Grabbing for unlimited power is human nature, and our laws are there to keep that impulse in check. This administration has repeatedly asserted that it is not accountable to Congress for its actions, many of which make a mockery of its claim to defend “freedom”.
I feel less and less like I want to participate in this society if I feel like I’m living in a police state, governed by vague threats of fear and panic. My President should be accountable to his shareholders too, but nobody seems to give a shit about what this administration does.
Update 3.7.08: See this article for more information on abuses of power.
The only things we bought last week at the DC Big Flea were very, very small. Jen stopped at a vendor who had vast plastic trays of postcards arranged on a table, categorized by location, and her eagle eye found the county my parents live in almost immediately. She picked up a small sheaf of cards and two immediately caught her attention: the church across the street from my parents’ house, and a shot of Main street in their town.
Lousy camerphone image, sorry
The helpful vendor dated them for us sometime between 1901 and 1908, when they were known as “souvenir cards”. At that time the USPS still prohibited private companies from calling them post cards, and the sender could only include a short message on the front side. In 1908 the prohibition was struck down, and anyone could publish post cards with the familiar divided back.
These two were printed in Germany, a sign of their quality, and have the location printed in script on the front (I’ve removed it to protect the innocent). At the time, it cost one US Cent to mail.
I would give anything to go back in time to turn the camera about 120° to the left for a shot of my folks’ house.
In old historical plane news, The Swamp Ghost, a B-17E sitting in a marsh in Papua New Guinea since 1942, is in the middle of a legal dispute between the PNG government and the American businessman who claims the salvage rights. In the 1960’s, the U.S. Government relinquished all rights to any crashed or abandoned military equipment, excluding underwater wrecks, placing this airframe into a curious limbo. Other wrecks have been “salvaged” from PNG and restored to flying status, but for some reason the removal of this particular B-17 got people upset.
I’ve seen pictures of this plane before in its original location, but wasn’t aware it’s been moved—it’s sitting on a dock, disassembled, awaiting the resolution of the legal dispute. From what I can tell, PNG isn’t letting it leave, and most likely it will stay there (unless they ship it to the states for a restoration, which I doubt they have money for).
In any case, stay tuned for more airplane pictures this weekend…details to come.
There’s a certain scent in the air today. It’s something I associate with the age of ten or eleven, when I lived in a big house in the Connecticut woods and spent most of my time outside exploring. At the time I had a fascination with hunting, the army, the woods, and survival in the elements, so I built forts and bunkers and tree stands with my buddies, who shared the same interests I did (and who also lived on multi-acre plots of land like us.)
We’d stay out in the woods until the sun got low and filtered through the low-hanging leaves, and the temperature would drop, bringing out a particular earthy fragrance from the forest floor: The rich, loamy smell of leaves, heated and cooled, mixed with rich, moist earth, and a touch of fresh-cut grass, signalling the shortening days and cooler nights of fall just around the corner. It usually meant we were wearing jackets and jeans instead of shorts, school was back in session (so we were ducking schoolwork as long as we could) and we stayed out of the wetlands so we wouldn’t freeze as the sun went down.
Around the time dusk fell and we smelled woodsmoke through the trees, which meant that parents were home and settling in for the evening, we’d gather up our gear and say our goodbyes, then scatter our separate ways on well-worn paths through the forest. Days like this make me think of that brief, magical time of my life when afternoons lasted forever, Intellivision was my religion, Duran Duran were the biggest thing on the radio, my three best friends lived within walking distance, and the world was ours to explore.
Yesterday I had the lucky fortune to wander around a Baltimore landmark I’ve always wondered about but never been inside: The Crown Cork & Seal factory on the city’s east side. I was searching for a vendor to drop off a package, and it took me some careful moseying around the property to find them.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to explore or shoot photos, but certain parts of the sprawling complex have a Children of Men/Full Metal Jacket-type feel to them: ancient brick buildings, soaring courtyards filled with years of debris and trash, along with the odd shopping cart or plastic storage bin.
After being shuttered in 1956 when management moved the company headquarters to Philadelphia, the 15-acre site lay empty (as far as I can tell; information online is sketchy at best) until recently. Now it looks like the property has been split up into separate rentable buildings under the care of a management company.
At some point, I’d love to go back and spend a day shooting everything I saw.
Bush Aide: Military Could Go Into Pakistan.
So, let me break this down a little here. Our president, whose approval numbers are in the dumper, but who still controls the Senate, has a plan to make America love him again: He’s thinking about going into Pakistan to get Bin Laden because Musharraf hasn’t done so.
I can’t think of a more misguided foreign policy that that, other than, perhaps, just nuking Russia for the hell of it. Pakistan is already a pretty shaky ally, and Musharraf by all accounts is walking a thin line between secular progress and another Islamic state. (Remember, Pakistan and India have been lobbing ‘test nukes’ at each other for ten years, and Pakistan is also pretty cozy with China.) What our government still hasn’t grasped is the fact that things aren’t black and white like they insist on believing—and why their policy in Iraq has gone so badly. A thousand years of tribal, ethnic, and religious quarrels between hundreds of separate groups is not going to miraculously work itself out after the tanks enter town and everyone gets a Hershey bar.
The simple idea that the leadership of this country is even considering entering another country and destabilizing the government there—can anybody say Cambodia?—makes me shudder. I hope to god the commanding generals find their balls and talk some sense into the cowboys in the White House.
Also, why isn’t this the top headline in today’s news? Seriously, in about 30-point type?
I got an email a few days ago from a friend who recommended me for a teaching job at a local college. I don’t have a lot of the details yet, but the position involves teaching courses within Adobe’s design suite, which is right up my alley. The idea of teaching got me excited, because I really enjoy it, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing (without actually knowing how to go about it) for a long time.
I got a taste for it back in 1999 when I was working for a web development shop and we were finishing up a custom-built content management system for a local weekly magazine, which had no previous presence on the web. After I’d designed and built the front end for the website, I realized we were going to need to train the print-based staff how to move their workflow to the web. I spent a long week organizing, designing and building an interactive training course for the staff, including some of the first rudimentary programming I’d ever done.
After I got it finished, I showed it to my bosses and they nodded their heads blankly. I found out at that point there was no plan in place for setting up the training courses—they hadn’t set aside a room, I had no provision for computers, and we didn’t even have enough tables.
Working quickly, I scrounged up eight Macs (their production workflow was Mac-based), a conference room, a crateful of keyboards, mice, and network cables, and put together a networked classroom in one afternoon. My company hadn’t made provisions for food, so I organized morning coffee and snacks, as well as lunch deliveries for the break.
The training course itself went off without a hitch—after all that preparation I was feeling very confident, and after jitters at the beginnning my delivery smoothed out and my breathing returned to normal. The staff was trained properly, and they still use the CMS we built to this day.
Fast forward eight (!?!!) years to this email: I knew I had a good copy of the training course archived somewhere, so I went back through my disc catalog to find the best copy and spent a half-hour cleaning up the pages and relinking the scripts on my webserver. I was, and still am, proud of that course, because I put the entire thing together myself, and used the experience to get over my fear of speaking and teaching in front of a group. I found, as the days went on, that I actually liked it, and that I had a talent for finding different ways to explain a concept until everyone understood it.
This experience made it easier to agree to teach a flex design class at MICA a few years ago, which went off pretty well as far as I could tell. While I had some problems feeling qualified to teach a design class while I was employed as an artist at a videogame developer, I felt good about the design problem I created and better about some of the solutions the students came up with.
I followed up with the contact yesterday, linking to the class pages and my resume, and crossed my fingers. This morning I got a very positive response and an invitation to the senior thesis opening where I’ll be able to meet the contact face to face. While I’m told the money isn’t huge (but, then, when did anyone ever get rich as a teacher?) I’m excited to dip my feet back in the water—I’m looking forward to widening my horizons.
The Lockard Tour Van is back in town after a whirlwind three-night limited engagement to support Annie, who kind of got her diploma Saturday morning, and all I can say is that I’m still tired. Our first stop was Ashland, Ohio, to prepare for the graduation ceremony, and as we loaded up the van we were given our itinerary, typed neatly on a single sheet of paper. To the hour, our schedule was outlined in Times New Roman to keep the caravan on track, and even though it was handy to have, we used it to poke fun at Jen’s dad good-naturedly throughout the trip.
Despite some last-minute drama, the graduation went off without a hitch, and even though the threat of rain loomed, it turned out to be a beautiful day. We shared a late lunch with Jen’s aunt and then passed out back at the hotel to sleep off the carbohydrates. Before venturing out for a late dinner, we hijacked Jen’s father into a visit to the CHEESEBARN, an inexplicably-named highway attraction up the road from our hotel. Unfortunately, the CHEESEBARN was closed and we weren’t able to explore its wonders in detail.
However, we did stop for a picture out front.
Then we enjoyed a prolonged tour of the seedier side of Mansfield, OH, looking for somewhere other than a Perkins to eat dinner; the directions given were, shall we say, vague, and it took a while to get oriented until we found an Olive Garden to stop at.
Sunday morning we were under strict orders to be loaded and ready by 8:30, because the day was tightly planned: we were stopping in to visit with Jen’s great aunt, who is in a retirement home, and then on to visit her mother’s gravesite. Her great aunt is still sharp and funny, and we were presently joined by a group of cousins who helped us take over the entire front room of the facility.
Driving on to the gravesite, we passed fields that had been flooded in January of 2005 (we were some of the last cars allowed in before the state troopers shut the highway down that night), through the sleepy, worn-down town, and up the hill to where her marker sat in bright afternoon sunshine. The family had about ten minutes alone with her before a gaggle of extended family arrived, and then we stood around and caught up with folks we hadn’t seen in two years.
And then, it was time to load up the van and get on the road. The trip back was uneventful, apart from everyone in the van (including driver) dozing off after lunch at the Sonic, and we were treated to a tour of the rolling hills of West Virginia and miles of empty countryside until we made it back to town last night. And I’ll be damned if Jen’s Dad didn’t get us home a half-hour ahead of schedule.
The peeling wall of a gun battery in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This place reminded me of the old batteries on the North Jersey shore by my grandmother’s house, and the photos I’ve seen of the prewar fortifications in the Philippines. This kind of stuff fascinates me for reasons I can’t explain; I like the idea of modern concrete castles and huge guns on disappearing carriages guarding the city from attack by sea.