April 30th, 2011
Why do so many people modify their photos to resemble an image taken by a poor quality camera? Here’s a sample of the filtered, post processed, “how ugly can I make this photo” results from Instagram, one of several popular photo defacement apps for the iPhone.
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April 25th, 2011
Here at The Ranch (and it is vast, almost 2.5 acres!) there are still a few Monarch butterfly stragglers. By rights, they should have headed north and east in search of milkweed which the female selects as the only plant where she lays her eggs.
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April 24th, 2011
For reasons that remain unclear to me, I stopped writing in this blog 16 months ago. Maybe I lost the password? Something mundane.
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January 1st, 2010
Steve Rubel writes about the virtues of correspondence. His post includes a picture of the machine Thomas Jefferson designed which copied his hand written letters as he wrote. Who knew.
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October 29th, 2009
This item about ongoing declines in the food service industry is mildly interesting. Is the Great Recession really over? What caught my eye was a new (to me) term: Daypart. Here’s some context (emphasis added):
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October 29th, 2009
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September 23rd, 2009
My offer to write letters “Remember when people wrote letters?” has started to bear fruit. Not a LOT of fruit, mind you. I’ve written and mailed two letters so far, with five more names on my “letters to write” list.
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September 18th, 2009
Remember when people wrote letters, on paper, instead of sending email, instant messages or Tweets?
As an experiment, I will write a letter to anyone who asks. You will receive a letter composed for you, by me, about something or other that is not illegal or rude. It will be typed on a typewriter (Underwood Champion manual portable, circa 1950, or IBM Selectric III, circa 1981). It will bear an interesting postmark.
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September 18th, 2009
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July 6th, 2009
From an essay by Cory Doctorow: “…the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures how-to and fiction have effectively merged into one master story, the “plausible premise.”
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July 3rd, 2009
This surprised me: My laptop is an HP DV4, with 4 GB of RAM. I am watching a DVD (Foyle’s War: The German Woman”) playing on Windows Media Player, running on Vista 64. At the same time VirtualBox 3 is running, and on VBox Ubunto 9.04 is running.
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June 25th, 2009
My $75 (used, on Craigslist) video camera works. I’ve shot a few (lame!) minutes of video, and have sucesffuly imported it into a computer via Firewire. That process was easy peasy.
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