I’m looking through our huge gallery of not-yet-posted photographs, looking for a good shot of Hallie to put on her webpage. The quality of our Canon PowerShot S50 is amazing. Eye-popping detail of very difficult-to-compress scenes – like gravel walkways through leafy woods. Mesmerizing detail, in fact.

Then I compare those shots to similar shots taken indoors with the same camera. Dullsville! The flash provides all of one angle for the light to bathe the scene. Everything looks flat and boring. On the other hand, the indoor shots I took with natural lighting all seem vibrant and alive.

One of my few quibbles with the S50 is that it doesn’t have a hotshoe to use with an external flash. I’d love to be able to do a bounce-flash with it or something – something to add more light angles. When I use that technique with my film camera, the images come out twice as interesting, at the very least.

I love what our new PowerShot does for us now, but I can only imagine what fun I’ll have when I explore some of the manual settings and really get into the creative side of things.

(And on another note, as soon as I find a good gallery script, you can see these pics, too. Hint, hint!)

The terror alert has moved up to Threatcon Ernie from Threatcon Bert. If it moves up to Elmo, we’re all in a heap of trouble.

Yesterday Kelly, Hallie and I went down to see the Pulitzer Photograph exhibit at N.C. State, which was fortunately extended through December 28th. I knew we’d see great photographs: you can’t top the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. What I wasn’t prepared for was the morbid quality in the photos.

So many shots were of people dead, or dying, or carnage of some sort or another. Many photos showed scenes out of nightmares; things you’d never, ever want to witness in your lifetime. It didn’t take long for me to wish we hadn’t brought Hallie along with us.

How do you explain a world like this to your child? She’ll soon be old enough to start asking those kinds of questions. And there are no good answers as to why we kill each other. Who can explain it to anybody? It’s insane.

They weren’t all pictures of tragedies. Baby Jessica was there, being rescued from the well. Boris Yeltzin kicks up his heels in one. Kennedy and Ike take a stroll at Camp David. A baby is born to beaming parents in another. Still plenty of good in the world.

The exhibit left an impression on me, that’s for sure. I am reminded of how I felt when I visited the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki, seeing horrid photos of children who were just exposed to the atomic bomb, the ultimate, indescriminating tool of man’s hatred for another. You can’t help but put yourself in those kids’ shoes, watching wide-eyed as your whole world is instantly obliterated in a senseless act of destruction.

So many people who clamor for war never witness the costs. They never see the bloodshed. The look on a person’s face as their life drains away from them. The shattered cities. The human toll. The orphaned kids. The leftover munitions which will continue to kill indescriminately year upon year.

Yes, the photographs are harsh, but they tell an important story. This is our world, presented in black and white. It is what we make it.

The FCC has officially caved in and sold the American media to Rupert Murdoch. They approved Murdoch’s purchase of a controlling interest in DirecTV. Now Murdoch’s company owns the skies.

The ruling stated the merger would “create a bigger competitor to the cable industry.” Say what? Seems like DirecTV was doing a fine job WITHOUT the FCC’s help. It doesn’t hurt that the cable companies like to make a game of pissing their customers off.

With Congress’s recent smackdown of the FCC’s ruling on media ownership, I really cannot see how Powell and Co. thought this was a good idea. I also can’t see how the Feds can green-light this deal when it recently nixed the EchoStar bid for the same company. Then again, Murdoch can afford the best lobbyists.

Once again, the circle of companies controlling the media grows smaller and smaller.

I’m starting to miss democracy.

I’m poking around my music collection while I do some checking into PHP gallery scripts. I settled on Scarce‘s album Deadsexy. I first heard this band back when I was a Music Choice subscriber. Their single “Sideways” caught my ear, and it would’ve caught yours, too. The song is so damn erratic, lurching in so many directions, yet its so compelling.

Back when I paid $6 a month for a taste of new music, I’d hear lots of good songs. Occasionally, I’d buy a band’s CD. Frequently the rest of the songs sucked, but not this Deadsexy CD. Each song is different, each a flavor of its own.

While poking around the web for news of the band, I found out about the sad fate of Scarce, as told by one fan:
Scarce is the greatest live band I have ever seen. Back in the day of grunge, when bands would just get on stage wearing flannels and jeans, Scarce put on a show. Bassist Joyce Raskin would wear a formal dress and gallop all over the stage, while guitarist Chick Graning, in a tux or a silver suit, would look wild-eyed at the audience as if he was about to come out to attack us, then rip off an incredible slide guitar solo only to toss the slide aside at the last minute and resume the song. I saw them more than ten times, and everyone in Providence where I lived thought they would become huge rock stars. My band Salty Timmy even opened for them once. Then the accident happened.

Scarce was about to release their first major label album, Deadsexy, when one morning Chick didn’t show up for practice. He actually lived next door to me and Big John Lund that summer on East George Street in Providence, and when he didn’t answer the door Joyce freaked out and broke the door to his apartment down. Chick had experienced a brain hemorrhage and was rushed to the hospital. The single, “Honeysimple,” was pulled off radio after one play, and the album, which had come out in the U.K., was postponed over a year in the U.S. Chick spent the next year relearning how to walk, talk, and play his guitar.

They could have been huge, had fate not intervened. What a shame.

Okay, I’m lazy and the Power Of The Blog must be utilized. I’m looking for an image gallery script for mt.net. It needs to be smart enough to create albums on the fly, based on finding pictures in a webserver directory. Ideally, it will be PHP-based, though Perl is welcome, too.

I was thinking Image Display System, a Perl-based CGI, was a good choice, but it doesn’t get along with Red Hat 9’s ImageMagick modules:

/usr/bin/perl: relocation error: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/Image/Magick/Magick.so: undefined symbol: SetWarningHandler

Any suggestions? What are you using for image galleries and what do you like or dislike about it?

Deadlines at work have put a damper on my postage. With the holiday season near, I’ll have plenty of time to get my thoughts arranged in bits.

Until then, entertain yourself with the Burger King Song.

Today is the 100th anniversary of powered flight. The Wright Brothers flew the first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC on December 17th, 1903. A big celebration will take place at Kitty Hawk National Park today, with gazillions of dignataries present.

For the occasion, festival organizers have recreated the Wright Flyer, a notoriously hard-to-fly airplane. I’ve put up a new poll on the page here to take bets on whether the thing will crash today or not. The weather is about as sucky as could be imagined, with a strong cold front moving through later today. My bet is the sucker crashes. Cast your vote to the right.

I’ve been pondering this occasion for a while now and will have more thoughts on this occasion later tonight.
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