Archive for September, 2010
I haven’t driven since May. Stupid brain. Got the all-clear today, so The Boy™ and I went for a quick drive on an errand after supper.
I shot with a Fujifilm point-and-shoot 15 years ago, and with my trusted E510 just a few years ago. They were both nice little compact cameras. But Fujifilm’s new X100 is fracking gorgeous. It looks like it pulls the best of the old school 35mm camera designs, and mashes them into a full on decent digital camera. Metal case. Rings and controls that work when the camera is off. I love everything about this camera. Or at least the press release…
The case reminds me so much of the old Pentax Spotmatic. It’s a good thing the X100 is priced out of my budget (rumoured to be $1500-1700US, or about $1700 more than my camera budget), or I’d be picking one up ASAP. If nothing else, I really hope this means we might see a shift away from plastic cases and cheapness. The old school of camera design blows away anything made in the last decade or so.
I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with my iPhone4 for almost a month now. The IOS 4.1 update’s new HDR photo mode is pretty fracking amazing. Here’s a quick test shot I took in my extremely interesting living room. Hand held, in low light. The first/top shot is “normal” exposure, the one that the iPhone would have picked for a regular shot without the flash. The second/middle image is HDR tonemapped. The third/bottom is the HDR version, pumped through Aperture to apply my usual tweaks (adding some contrast back, setting white balance, vignetting, etc…)
The lamp in the “normal” (top) version is blown out, without any details in the lampshade. The HDR version (untouched in the middle photo, and adjusted in the bottom) looks pretty close to what my eyes see. No chrome halo effects in the iPhone4 HDR. Just pulling details out of blown out or underexposed areas.
Evan plays on the 50 year old pinball machine, as seen through my 40 year old Pentax Spotmatic, backed by my iPhone.
I took a quick break from reading and writing to play a bit on the guitar. almost got Ghost Riders in the Sky down…
the first snowfall of the season, a little earlier than usual. thankfully, it won’t last long…
An article in The Atlantic describes Christina Dunbar-Hester‘s PhD course at Rutger’s. It sounds absolutely fascinating, delving into media theory, technological determinism and change, politics, etc…
In order to answer these questions (or at least deeply consider them), the course starts with an introduction to theories of technology and technological change, drawn primarily from the scholarly field of Science & Technology Studies. From these readings, we gain a nuanced sense of how social relations get “inside” technology, including the assumptions about society that may come to be embodied in technical artifacts and knowledge. So for the first half or so of the course, we are mainly just getting our feet wet with these theories of technology.
However, I teach in Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information, and this course is for our Ph.D. students. So the challenge is to make these general theories about technology, culture and change relevant for thinking about media and information technologies specifically. Fortunately, this is becoming easier to do: more work that forges links between these areas of scholarship is coming out all the time, which is exciting and makes now a great time to offer this course.
I want to take this course.
She’s posted the topics and readings. Perhaps I’ll take the course vicariously. Perhaps this is a candidate for a MOOC. Anyone interested in following along?
another visit to the dentist. remember to floss every day, kids!
I stayed home with The Boy™ today, and we spent some time working on homework together.
I’ve grown to feel completely disenfranchised as a Canadian citizen, at all levels of government. I’ve tried voting with my head. I’ve tried voting with my heart. Every election, I feel as though my vote is wasted. So, now I’m trying something different.
With the civic election next month, and with what will hopefully be a federal election in the next few months, I’ve decided to base my vote on a single issue.
The candidate that puts forth the best set of policies and plans to most improve bicycle infrastructure will get my vote. I don’t care what party they’re with. I don’t care if they’re new to politics or are a 40 year veteran.
Show me how you will make bicycles a safer form of every day transportation. Show me the infrastructure and support you will create. Show me the legal strategy and social policies that will make it possible, even preferred, to use non-motorized transportation on a regular basis.
Then you’ll have my support, and my vote.