I think it’s finally happened. Unless I’m not reading myself correctly, the days of shooting film are over. I can sum up the reasons in one sentence…

It’s just too much bloody work for the results I’m getting.

36 frames of Tri-X involves the following:

• Buy film and chemicals (5 min. to 1 hour) Pull bag, reels, thermometer, chemicals out of closet and set up (5 min) Load, process, wash film (30 min) Dry film (1 min to do, then 2 hours to wait) Scan film into computer (~2 hours - High res scans to TIF can take 3 minutes each, plus handling) Using Photoshop, remove dust, scratches, hair. Then sharpen and adjust. (1 hour) Print contact sheet and place with film into storage binders (5 min) Print and/or upload images (5-30 min)

Let’s just say 4-6 hours all told. So that puts us in the neighborhood of 10 minutes per frame. Granted several of those items are not required for every roll, and the 2 hour wait to dry might not really count, but you get the idea. Now, if I ended up with great photos, 10 minutes would be a very small price to pay. The trouble is most of them are your basic snapshots and very much undeserving of that much energy.

So, the Leica will be put reluctantly up for sale, along with all sorts of other film-related accessories. I’ll keep the Canonet for those times when a small rangefinder fits the bill or when I get a little nostalgic. In the meantime I’ll fill out the Canon digital kit and snap away.

UPDATE What am I, crazy? Never sell a Leica!

It’s gonna take a lot of training to change the way I pronounce the acronym for “Graphics Interchange Format” There what looks to be compelling evidence that it’s actually “Jif” rather than “Gif” (which sounds better even if it is wrong). Onward.

That is a photo of Jessica driving away on her own for the first time. Ink’s not even dry on her new driver’s license. Not sure I’ve ever felt quite this combination of terrified, sad and proud. Mostly terrified. Hold me.

Boy, if you’re gonna trash a film, do it well. Or better yet, do it very, very well.

“The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves”

“Yoda?…Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.”

“What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?”

When Jesse James Garrett wrote ajax: a new approach to web applications, he was coining a new term, not creating a new technology. While the term is arguably inaccurate, it certainly has folks talking. This is good. But for now, the best advice I can give is to not pay attention until the current hoo-ha has subsided a bit. The signal to noise ratio is way off right now, because there are too many of us geeks jumping up and down screaming “What the hell? I’ve been doing this for years! This is just a fancy marketing term for stuff I wrote back in 2001!” Guess what, no one cares what we did then, or now for that matter, if it sucks.

What’s happening now is different. Talented, creative developers are discovering Ajax and doing amazing, useful things with it. Once the fervor dies down and the crybabies are dismissed, we can get to work on learning to make Ajax more accessible, usable and sensible while discovering where it fits into the big picture.

Ajax needed a fancy marketing term and a bit of hype or the whole suite of technologies could’ve continued flailing about in ugly little web admin areas behind corporate firewalls forever.

The photo pages on Flickr now use DHTML/Ajax to display images and notes. See the this Flickr weblog post. Photos were previously displayed using (an admittedly well-done) Flash app.

Given the recent fervor around Ajax, libraries making cross-browser scripting easier, and very nice implementations on sites like Backpack and now Flickr, I can’t help but believe this is a trend that will gain momentum quickly.

I find this unnervingly funny. On (Design) Bullshit

“In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth – “I don’t know, I just like it that way” – simply won’t do.”

“So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals. ”

I have finally been able to get this Typo install running under lighttpd and fastcgi. This is good. All it took was a little irb> debugging and a small change to dispatch.fcgi. Once lighttpd was running I had to ProxyPass port 80 using Apache to a reserved port and viola!, the site is 10-15 times faster than running Apache/CGI.

My home iMac G5 is at the shop. Thus, I spent 3 nights with no computer, mostly wandering around the house muttering to myself. In order to avoid an entire weekend of that, I packed up my office iMac and brought it home. There, much better.

And then, suddenly, while trying to find something about something, I get a “Page not found” error on Google. Wierd, so I tried again with no luck. 2 minutes later I tried yet again and when going to http://www.google.com I end up seeing a page for the SoGoSearch search engine. WTF? It’s been nearly an hour and the only thing I’ve learned is that a world without Google is a scary place.

Update: Seems it was a DNS issue. Pretty damn serious one I reckon.

I have been a fan of “tagging” content since first using sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. CNN has picked up on it also. This is a sign that soon we’ll be tagging everything, whether it makes sense or not. It’ll mostly be a good thing, at least until the spammers figure it out.

One quote I’m not sure about from the article, though…

“So while you might have neglected to tag your friend’s daughter, your friend can do so.”

There’s just something wrong with that.