philly

First Bloggiversary

This blog is now one year old.

An Elephant Shooting Safari W

I saw the above paste-up on the wall on South St between 15^th and 16^th Sts earlier today. How would you caption this shot?

Italian Market Festival Photos: Final Edit

I've whittled down my 200 or so shots from last weekend's Italian Market Festival to five portraits and they're up here.

Warren Beatty Talks Policy at Berkeley Commencement

I remember seeing Bullworth many moons ago and not liking it, but thinking it was good; does that make sense? Warren Beatty seemed to know what he was talking about, he should have, he's been pretty involved in politics for decades. He delivered the commencement speech [via AlterNet] at UC Berkeley's School of Public Policy, the #1 school of that sort in the nation so says Beatty.

He took the time to call out California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on his decisions and lack thereof. He put out some pretty good jabs to that gigantic chin of Ahnold

It's become time to define a Schwarzenegger Republican. A Schwarzenegger Republican is a Bush Republican who says he's a Schwarzenegger Republican.
...
When did conservatives decide to just borrow more money without raising taxes? Is the Governor now to the right of the head of the Fed? Even Alan Greenspan has started to talk taxes. This is serious stuff. Tip O'Neill said politics ain't beanbag!

Bipartisanship? We don't have it here. And let's not mistake the exploitation of the name of one of the greatest liberal families in American history for bipartisanship. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Governor, you're no Kennedy Democrat.

Stop trying to milk the illusion of bi-partisanship. You are a conservative Republican who likes to have a few Democrats around for show. This is good advice.

Do I think Arnold will eventually take it? I think so.

Of course he can joke that I want to defend the nurses because I'm closer to needing one, and the elderly because I'm nearer to being one, and the blind because I can't see past tax-and-spend liberalism. And then I can joke that he should defend the teachers because he has so much to learn, but finally it's not funny.

Government is not a joke, and despite what he's said, it's not a movie.

Take a read, it's a decent commencement speech. What makes a decent commencement speech? One that doesn't make everyone fall asleep.

Opium's Call

Afghanistan produces about 87% of the world's opium, the United Nations estimates. The LA Times has this story on the lure of the opium trade in Afghanistan.

Still, the U.N. and the Afghan government predict that this year's opium harvest will be at least 30% smaller than the record 4,200 tons in 2004, partly because of a more aggressive eradication effort. The law of supply and demand has helped too. A glut has driven down prices and profits. But this year's smaller harvest is expected to push prices back up and encourage more planting and trafficking.

The administration brags about how they've cut the amount of drugs going out of Afghanistan by 30% this year like it's some great thing that they were responsible for. The reason why there were fewer drugs is because the world market was super saturated. But as that quote suggests, a year with fewer drugs leads to another big year to follow.

The article states how now many druglords are too well connected to be kept in jail for long. Too many corrupt officials letting them out of jail so that their own private cash flow can continue. The drug trafficking situation is bad and getting worse in Afghanistan thanks in large part to the powers that be here in the U.S. Yep, I'm looking at you dubya. How bad is it?

"Trying to get rid of drugs in Afghanistan is like trying to clear sand from a beach with a bucket," said an American counter-narcotics agent.

Summer is Here

Memorial Day Weekend brings with it the summer and with the summer comes my summer 'do. I done cut off my coif. Buzzed is the better word. It feels good.

First Gig

So that's the shot they'll [most likely] be using from the shoot I did. They'll probably do a much better job in cleaning it up a bit. The ceiling was pretty high and a very dark brown and it was wood. Hell for bouncing the flash. I ended up manually setting my SB-600 to 14mm with the bounce/diffuser cap on and pointing it almost directly at my subjects. Not the ideal flash, but it's what I had to do with what was available to me there at the shoot. Oh well.

I much prefer taking photos of people/things in natural light. No foils bouncing fill light. No flash filling in shadows. I like to shoot out there in the sun, in the shade, wherever. I dislike using flash, but the SB-600 has made it more fun. I may end up getting a LumiQuest flash accessory for my flash for situations like this, when there are high ceilings I can't bounce the flash off of. Yes, I could've bounced the flash off of the walls, but it left hot spots in the images.

EXIF: Nikon D70 |  2005/05/24 11:09:01.9 |  JPEG (8-bit) Fine |  Image Size: Large (3008 x 2000) |  Lens: 18-70mm F/3.5-4.5 G |  Focal Length: 50mm |  Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority |  Metering Mode: Multi-Pattern |  1/60 sec - F/5.6 |  Exposure Comp.: 0 EV |  Sensitivity: ISO 200 |  Optimize Image: Custom |  White Balance: Auto |  AF Mode: AF-S |  Flash Sync Mode: Front Curtain |  Auto Flash Mode: Balanced i-TTL |  Auto Flash Comp: +0.5 EV |  Color Mode: Mode IIIa (sRGB) |  Tone Comp: Auto |  Hue Adjustment: 0° |  Saturation: Enhanced |  Sharpening: Auto |  Image Comment:  |  Noise Reduction: OFF |  Bounce

Mid to Late May

For the forseeable future, mid to late May will be a special time for me. May 13^th is when Lady and I moved to Philly. It's been a great year and change and I don't see myself leaving this town anytime soon, sorry NYC.

And May 29^th is the date I started blogging. Sunday will be my one year bloggiversary or whatever. 1100+ posts, 600+ comments and 50+K hits in my first year. Let's see where year two will take me. This site started off as a way for my family and friends to keep track of what I'd be up to without having to call me and check up on me every week/month/whatever. They could sit at their computer at work or at home and while they were doing other things, they could click and see what kind of trouble I had gotten myself into — remarkably, none.

But this site has become much more than that. It has become a place where I come to vent. It has become a place where I can discuss my politics. It has become a place where I can help other folks learn new things or just find out info. It has become a place that has opened doors and friendships in my new hometown. I've made tons of friends directly and indirectly though this blog. The internet, who woulda thunk it? Thanks Al Gore for inventing it.

Human Impact in China

The above image is no mirage. It's the Crescent Lake in the middle of the Gobi Desert in China. It's been there for a long time, but now, it is rapidly receding, as you can see. I just read this NY Times article on the reasons as to why this is happening.

In this desert oasis where East once met West and that is home to one of the world's greatest shrines to Buddhism, the water is disappearing. Crescent Lake has dropped more than 25 feet in the last three decades while the underground water table elsewhere in the area has fallen by as much as 35 feet.

An ancient city that once served as China's gateway to the West, Dunhuang is now threatened by very modern demands. A dam built three decades ago to help local farming, combined with a doubling of the population, have overstressed a fragile desert hydrology that had been stable for thousands of years.

"I would call it an ecological crisis," said Zhang Mingquan, a professor at Lanzhou University who specializes in the region's hydrology. "The problem is the human impact. People are overusing the amount of water that the area can sustain."

Here as elsewhere in western China, the country's poorest region, the emphasis in recent decades has been on economic development at all costs. Isolated by the desert, Dunhuang has virtually no industry, so agriculture has dominated the local economy. In the 1970's, the government dammed the Dang River, which once flowed past the city, to provide better irrigation for farmland and to help relieve poverty.

Farming did improve, but in a fashion that brought a larger burden: a desert oasis that had fewer than 100,000 people before the dam now has roughly 180,000. As more people arrived, the underground water table that is the city's main source of drinking water started dropping.

This Wold Heritage site may very well disappear, like a mirage, in the next decade or so as a direct result of what we humans do/did to the earth. It's sad. They didn't know they were doing anything wrong and now, it's probably too late.

"As local people, we are very worried," said Fan Cun, who heads the agency overseeing the lake. "We would have failed future generations if we watch this lake disappear."

The fate of the lake is now in our hands. I had never heard of the lake until reading this article, but now I want to go there and see it with my own eyes. I don't think I'll make it there before it is gone.

Photo: Michael Zhao for The New York Times

Firefox Extensions

Just added a few new Firefox extensions to my Firefox and to my list down on the right.

• Unread Tabs allows you to open up a whole set of tabs and the ones you haven't read yet are italicized. I like to open up a bunch of tabs all the time, and while I do get to all of them most of the time, I'm sure I've closed some that I thought I read.
• Flashblock blocks all Flash things from loading on a site. It displays a "play" button where the Flash object is and you can click it for it to start. This cuts down on initial load times and those annoying Flash ads sites use now. The Flickr zeitgeist is a Flash object and can slow down page loading, but I love that thing and I want it there on my site.
• PDF Download allows you to specify exactly what you'd like to do once you click on a .pdf on a website, knowingly or not. It will prompt you to download it, open it in a new tab, view it in HTML or cancel and not do anything. I hate clicking on something that I didn't know was a .pdf and then Acrobat starts loading up and bugging the crap out of me. Yes, I know that I can, for the most part, see what the file is by putting my mouse over the link or looking at the status bar at the bottom, but sometimes those bastards hide what it is.

Me likey Firefox.

And yes, Microsoft is including tabbed browsing in their next releast of Internet Explorer, but I'm sure it will suck major balls.