Pasta! Say it with me now… PASTA! Atkins can just bite me. Carbs are your friend. If you’re fat, get off your ass. Jog on down to the nearest Krispy Kreme and enjoy yourself. I’m about 20 pounds (or so) overweight. I’m just guessing here, but I’ll bet that it would be healthier to cut back a little overall on my food intake and move around a bit more than to eliminate an entire food group from my diet.

The last straw was when Tracy offered me a low-carb Dorito. Yep, a low carb Dorito fer chrissakes. It was not unlike eating paper with some sort of Dorito flavor sprinkles on it.

No thanks. Just pass the bread, please.

I guess I just wanted to believe the story of the girl riding a motorcycle through Chernobyl with a camera. Turns out it’s mostly, not entirely, but mostly fabricated.

I’d link to her site again but it seems to have been, at least temporarily, taken down.

I just wrote my first plugin for Textpattern. All it does is automatically styles posted images with a fancy CSS dropshadow, like this…

Tip of the iceberg? Maybe.

I made quite a fuss earlier about how foolish it is that so many poor saps are losing their digital images due to hardware or other failures. Well, that’s not much worse than losing your negatives to incompetence. I just dropped of a roll of XP2 at the local Walmart. An hour later I picked up the CD full of images and headed home. Loading the CD into my laptop, I eagerly started copying them over to the drive. The odd thing was that not only were the photos in color, I didn’t recognize any of the people or places in them! Why? You guessed it - they weren’t my photos. I drove back to Walmart and they of course couldn’t find mine. Sigh.

After about a month of (very) beginner Kung Fu lessons, I’m hooked. My hips hurt and I sweat more than anyone in the class, but I’m having a ball for some reason. It’s pretty suprising considering that I’m a sedentary beast and typically dislike things that are good for me. I’ve even got Jessica going now. After her second class she says it’s “a lot of fun.” Imagine that. From the school’s web site …

“There are over twenty traditional hand forms, including tiger-crane, tiger-leopard, and the famous five animal form. Training includes an internal breathing form called Iron Wire Fist, which is used to strengthen muscles, organs and bones. Additionally, there are over eighteen weapons sets including batons, the staff, spear, three sectional staff, wind sword, whip chain and double edge straight sword.”

Cool!

Garry Winogrand didn’t just talk about being a street photographer. He didn’t dream about it while his camera grew old in his bag. Winogrand was a street photographer - and a damn good one. Some notable examples…

You’ll find a nice article about him here. From the article…

“Garry Winogrand died of cancer at age 56 in 1984 and left over 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rollso of processed film, 3,000 rolls of contact sheets that evidently hadn’t been looked at–a total of 12,000 rolls, or 432,000 photos Winogrand took but never saw.”

Wow. I guess the fella dug taking pictures.

Here are some photos of his last Leica

I hope mine looks like that someday.

I hadn’t noticed, but Subversion went 1.0 a few months ago. This is meant to be a replacement for the aging CVS version control system. The idea is to “fix” the long-standing problems with CVS without completely abandoning its concepts. It has directory versioning, common-sense branching, file renaming support and efficient handling of binary files. Sounds great! Let’s try it out…

First off, it’s a bitch to install.

I just spent the past 3 or 4 hours doing it. Gotta install Apache 2.0 with web-dav modules, can’t find the Berkeley DB libraries, autoconf is too old, gotta compile arp-utils first, then configure and make so it’s bootstrapped, then checkout the real svn client, then configure make make install that one. I honestly don’t know how I actually ended up with everything working, but it does - and it’s nice.

I’ll probably tinker with it more tomorrow, but I’m definitely going to find a project to import into it for real-world testing. Don’t tell anyone at the office. They’ll kill me if they think I’m even considering switching yet another software package out from under them!

Well, that would be me. My name is Jack Baty.

By day (and many nights), I’m one of the partners at Fusionary Media. There’s not a better place to be and I love every minute of it.

Nights are usually spent trying to become a better programmer, photographer, cook or whatever else seems interesting this week. Otherwise, I’ll just read and watch movies.

Sometimes I’m on IM (AOL) with screen name jackbaty2k.

Just testing the image upload feature of Textpattern. Aren’t we cute!

Yes, I know, I switched blogging platforms again. But Textpattern, so far, feels so much better than WordPress. WordPress is nice but it has that built-by-geeks feel to it that can wear on you after a while. I hacked around with the admin area a bit and improved it some, but it felt a lot like swimming upstream.

Textpattern on the other hand feels, well, nice. It’s actually more a full-blown content management system than just a weblog tool, but it doesn’t suffer from feature bloat - yet.

Let’s see how it goes.