Downtown Casper, Wyoming

I picked up twenty sheets of developed 4×5″ film from the lab today. Although I made hundreds of photographs with my digital camera, these were certainly the most enjoyable to produce and also the ones that filled me with the most trepidation. I’m pleased to report that the results were rather good. Not 100% what I would like . . . but then again I’m a perfectionist who is getting spoiled by the quick (and virtuous) feedback cycle afforded by digital capture and editing.

I really only used my large format camera about a dozen times on the trip, since I bracket most of my exposures, making an extra photograph with a different amount of light reaching the film. The goal is to have a better chance at getting the “right” exposure. On those dozen occasions, the responses from the people around me ran the gamut from indifference to excited interest. I talked to a few people while composing the scene with my head under the focusing cloth; disembodied voices asking me about how my camera works. There were also several people who thought that because I was incapable of seeing them, I also couldn’t hear their conversations about me.

I think my favorite conversation was with a British fellow about my age in Yellowstone.

“That’s some serious gear.” Most people’s first realization that something is up occurs when I unfold the camera as it sits on the tripod. “Are you a professional?”

“No. I’m just a guy with a very expensive hobby; but I’m having a lot of fun.”

Over the next minutes, I attached my wide-angle lens to the camera, set up a photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, focused the camera, took a few meter readings, set the exposure time and aperture, and switched closed the shutter. At that point almost everything is done. I just had to insert the film holder and trip the shutter.

“WOW! That’s some serious gear!” Something about the Quickload film holder touched a geeky, gadget-loving part in my onlooker. I put a sheet of film in the holder, waited for the wind to subside a bit, and tripped the cable release.

“That’s it?” While I find something immensely charming in the mechanical sound of the shutter winding down the fraction of a second that it’s open, most people think it’s anticlimactic, as though fireworks should shoot out from the camera. But then again, I suppose we’re accustomed to thinking that if someone spends fifteen minutes getting a camera ready, the result should be a poster-sized print that magically appears.

The funny thing is, my mom had the same reaction. She wanted to see how my view camera works, so we collaboratively made the image you see above. And I have to admit, it was a bit disappointing that I had to make her wait three weeks to see the result.

But I talked to several very nice people, and a few even took me up on the offer to pop under the focusing hood and see the image on the ground glass. That reaction is the one that makes me the happiest. It usually goes something like this: “It’s dark under here. . . . WHOA! That’s amazing.”

Anyway, enough accentuating the positive. Let’s talk about mistakes.

Fourteen: My ability to get the “correct” exposure sucks (to put it bluntly). As I mentioned, I have been taking a second exposure, usually 1/2 stop brighter, in an effort to get it right. The darker images — which use the exposure values suggested by my meter — are usually 1/2 to one-and-a-half stops underexposed. So I’m going to change my exposure compensation and start bracketing in whole stops. (And eventually I’m going to get an instant film holder to check the images in the field and finally be able to show onlookers something tangible.)

Fifteen: I forgot the filter compensation factor for my polarizing filter. I guessed two stops at maximum effect and seem to have gotten it about right.

Sixteen: Camera shake is quite visible in a 20 square-inch image. Evidently, I need to wait for the camera to settle after the wind stops blowing and after I pull the dark slide on the film. A couple of the image were a bit blurry and not because of focus.

(And for the curious, I’m working on my “ghetto film scanner,” since I still don’t have a scanner that accepts 4×5. The images lack quite a bit of resolution, dynamic range, and color fidelity. But by adding an opaque mask around my film on the light table, I’ve at least managed to get rid of some of the annoying fringing at the edges of the images. I still must use Photoshop to crop the image, correct the perspective, and “fix” the color; and I don’t feel right using it for anything other than showing off here.

I made a couple photographs of my pathetic setup. Yes, it’s made with two hanging file folders taped together which are held flat by whatever I happen to be reading. (Right now that’s the excellent Devil in the White City.)

Like a copy stand but not as functional

The film holder and light shield

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Spring is officially over, but I’m continuing to make mistakes with my large format camera. Not a lot of mistakes. Not major mistakes, just little mistakes. But I’m really glad that I’ve been learning close to home so that I can make changes before our big trip. (Next Monday we start a four week jaunt around the West, starting in Denver and making a sweeping northward arc before turning around in Portland, Oregon.)

I’m at the point now where many of my mistakes could be solved — or at least ameliorated — through the judicious use of instant film for proofing. Sadly, Polaroid is discontinuing instant film by the end of the summer. The silver lining is that Fujifilm makes instant pull-apart film. The yet-more bad news, though, is that I would have to buy another $125 film holder. (Photography as a hobby is akin to heroin use — or golf; you always have the opportunity to buy something more.)

Nevertheless, I have good news to share. Last weekend I took my camera with me to Winchester and made a couple of exposures before viewing the juried show at the Griffin. (More on that later.) One of my photographs was unpleasantly dark; but the one that I spent about fifteen minutes setting up turned out quite nicely, if just a tad underexposed. It was quite gratifying to be able to use all of the features of a view camera to make an image I couldn’t really do with my SLR.

As for mistakes and lessons learned. . .

Eight: Those little numbers on the lens and the incident light-meter matter. I think the reason that one of my photographs was so underexposed was that I didn’t exercise sufficient care in setting the f/stop. It’s also possible that the shutter on my lens needs a 1/3 - 1/2 stop correction factor. But there’s not a lot of distance on these lenses between correctly set and wildly wrong. I must exercise more caution.

Plus the off-camera meter specifies exposure down to 1/10 of a stop. f/45 plus 0.7 is not equivalent to f/64. If using a large format camera has taught me anything, it’s that you pay dearly for the smallest bit of laziness.

Nine: Always take another exposure reading before tripping the shutter. Light changes slightly even on a mostly sunny day.

Ten: Focusing is pretty tricky, even though the ground glass is enormous (four-by-five inches, fer-goodness-sake). You see, I’m what you might call very nearsighted. So I wear glasses, but when I look at things very close to my nose while wearing my glasses, everything is blurry. What to do?

Fancy-pants photographers buy expensive loupes with rubber edges so they can place them right on the ground glass. I use an inexpensive plastic magnifying glass. It has two magnification levels, seems to do the job very well, and doesn’t take up much space in my bag.

Eleven: It gets pretty hot under the focusing cloth. Wear cool clothes on a hot day . . . or at least ones that won’t show how much you sweat.

Twelve: Use that graduated neutral-density filter to equalize sky and foreground exposure. I mean, I own a pair of them; I might as well avail myself of their awesomeness. (It’s been too long since I’ve been on top of my game.)

Thirteen: My film scanner doesn’t support 4×5 film after all. To “scan” the picture below, I had to take a photograph of it with my digital camera. It’s not a great likeness. How ghetto.

Spare yourself, and don’t click for larger

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As promised before, here are some more notes from the classes that I’ve taken as part of my soon-to-be-completed Master of Software Engineering degree. This time: (software) project management. Most of this information comes from Effective Project Management by Robert K. Wysocki.

FYI, this was one of the few classes where most of my in-class notes weren’t about the course material at all but were reflections about how we do project management where I work. Once I discovered that I was a project manager, I realized that I had best become better at doing it. Funny how obvious that seems in retrospect.

Basics

Project = “A sequence of unique, complex, and connected activities having one goal or purpose and that must be completed by a specific time, within budget, and according to specification.” (Wysocki, 4)

Program = A collection of projects with multiple goals.

Most “interesting” software projects involve some degree of unclear requirements or unknown solution. These projects should ALWAYS use an adaptive/agile or iterative approach.

• Examples: Evolutionary waterfall (for low risk/easy projects), SCRUM, Rational-Unified Process (RUP), Dynamic Systems Development Method.
• These methods separate high-level and detailed planning. Each must be done, but the detailed planning is not done all “up-front.”
• (These are not iterative approaches: Pure Waterfall, Rapid/Parallel Development, Staged Delivery.)

Continuous quality managment and process quality improvements appear as keys to successful projects.

What every project should have . . . to some extent or another

Linear/waterfall, iterative/agile/adaptive, and extreme project management techniques all have the same phases, they just appear in different ways. They are:

• Define the project: Take the problem, proposed solution, and objectives and make a project charter and scope document
• Develop detailed plan(s) — preferably iteratively and just-in-time
• Launch the plan(s)
• Monitor and control project progress: Reporting, change control, problem escalation, revising plans
• Close out the project — Acceptance, installation, party! Seriously, you must party.

Risk Management

The major responsibility of the project manager is to manage risk in the project.

• Identify risks:
• Quality and performance with respect to technology
• Resource allocation
• Planning process
• Organizational support
• Changing legal and regulatory requirements/availability
• Suppliers and contractors
• Assess risks:
• Separate risk, magnitude, and probability
• Exposure = Probability of loss times cost of loss
• Consider using a risk matrix (high-medium-low cost v. high-medium-low probability) to track exposure
• Consider whether solution costs more than the loss
• Assess risks at each project phase/iteration
• Respond to risks:
• Accept — Do nothing
• Avoid — Don’t do that part of the project
• Contingency planning — Reframe the plan to deal with risk
• Mitigate — Reduce the probability and/or the magnitude of loss
• Transfer — Outsource the risky part to someone more capable of handling it
• Monitor and control risks:
• Make a risk log.
• Review risks at status meetings.
• Add triggers to risks so that countermeasures are taken at the appropriate time.

Project estimation

The average worker efficiency in IT is 50-65%. That’s the amount of time actually devoted to project work. That doesn’t include ad hoc interruptions, which takes another 33% of so of the workday. And there’s a lot of variation in duration for the same task, since everyone works at different capacities. So . . . It’s best to think in terms of task size and not the time that it takes to complete a particular time.

Methods for estimating task size:

• Similarity to other activities already done — Usually a very good predictor
• Historical data — Usually very objective and concrete
• Expert advice — Be weary of using just this
• Delphi technique — Iterative planning poker. Result is the average of the third round (or consensus)
• Three point technique — E = (Optimistic + 4*Most Likely + Pessimistic) / 6 for however you define those three terms
• Wide-band Delphi — Delphi technique with three point computation instead of a simple average

You can (and should) determine duration from the effort values and from that cost.

Project task management

Having a work breakdown structure (WBS) does not mean that the project must be managed like a waterfall, with all of the tasks defined to a fine precision before implementation can start (though some tools make this more likely).

Parts of the WBS can (and should) be high-level at the start. The plan gets more detailed with each iteration. Instead, treat a WBS as a represention of the functional/modular breakdown of the system. It’s useful for visually thinking about the project, designing the architecture, planning and estimating, and reporting status.

The network diagram is more useful in actually planning the project than a Gantt Chart, which is good because Gantt Charts suck. Then network diagram contains sequencing information, and you can use it to find the critical path of tasks that define the full project duration.

Random thoughts

This stuff — plus copious amounts of Hindi and Arabic scribbling — filled the spaces between my notes from reading Wysocki.

• If I had a time machine and could redo parts of a project, when would I go to add more value or lower costs?
• Lucky + smug = ?
• Consider keeping a historical journal for estimation: size of project, time, resources, technology.
• Engineers are creative, problem-solving people. Rule-following is not a creative act and implies a solved problem. If software engineers are going to do project management, the project management techniques must not get in the way of actually solving the project’s problems or it just won’t happen.
• I am the very model of a modern major general.
• How well does agile planning and development scale? Can you do critical path analysis with it? Is it even worth trying to do that?
• Measure quality, productivity, maintenance work v. feature work, time to market. Measure when starting, when passing milestones, when encountering defects.
• I like postage stamps.
• Iterative development should have deliverables that can actually be met at the end of each iteration. The iterations should be tied to deliverables. Milestones shouldn’t just be mile markers; that’s what a calendar is for.
• Do risk management at every stage of the project.
• Use a pull system for features with insertion for bugs and technical support assistance. Translate “do interruptions now” to “do next.” Finish up what’s in progress if it’s worth doing.
• Product != Project != Program != Product

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Avoid str2double and str2num. Use sscanf instead.

For scalars, you’ll see a modest improvement.

>> str = '0009';
>> tic; for p=1:1000, str2num(str); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.126388 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sscanf(str, '%d'); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.022299 seconds.

>> str = '3.14159265';
>> tic; for p=1:1000, str2double(str); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.056466 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sscanf(str, '%f'); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.017805 seconds.

For vectors, you’ll see a more hefty speed up.

>> str = '0009 3.14159265';
>> tic; for p=1:1000, str2double(str); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.480512 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sscanf(str, '%f'); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.027449 seconds.

Also favor sprintf instead of num2str.

>> tic; for p=1:1000, num2str(p); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.101599 seconds.
>> tic; for p=1:1000, sprintf('%d', p); end; toc
Elapsed time is 0.018325 seconds.

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It’s still spring — even though it was 96ºF outside today and 92º in the house — and I’m still making mistakes. If you missed it, you can still read about the first batch of mistakes I made with my newish 4×5 large format camera.

The first go-round assumed that I was doing things right to get light onto the film. An assumption that I wasn’t immediately able to test.

Mistake Five: Have a post-exposure plan. After I made some test black-and-white exposures in March, I didn’t consider what I would do with the film after tripping the shutter and putting the dark slide back into the film holder. (The dark slide is the thing that blocks light from striking the film while it’s in the holder and which is pulled out before tripping the shutter.) I don’t have any developing equipment. Nor do I have a lightproof box to hold the film until I can get it to the lab. So I still have a film holder loaded with two sheets of exposed film. Hmm. . . .

The B&W sheets are just for practice, since I plan on doing most of my work in color. Fortunately, I have a Fuji QuickLoad holder, which really simplifies things for certain color films. QuickLoad wraps the film in an envelope that does double duty as the dark slide and a convenient light-tight container before and after exposure. (”Naked” B&W film is about five times cheaper per sheet, though.)

Click for larger

So I took a few sheets of Fuji Velvia 100F QuickLoad film with me when we went to Marblehead on Memorial Day. On Saturday I took the three sheets of film to Newtonville Camera and dropped them off with the same peace of mind that I would 35mm film.

Click for larger

Six: Be sure to set the ISO dial correctly on the handheld lightmeter. Large format cameras don’t have a TTL exposure meter. (Actually, large format cameras don’t have much of anything that other “modern” cameras do.) So you have to use some kind of off-camera meter. I use a Sekonic incident/reflective meter, but I forgot to set the film dial to ISO 100 when I switched from shooting Tri-X film, which is ISO 320. (The bigger the ISO number the more sensitive the film and the less light that it needs for a “correct” exposure.)

When I returned home from Newtonville today with my newly developed film, I discovered — as you might expect — that all three of my exposures were about one-and-a-half stops underexposed:

Click for larger

Seven: If you don’t read the camera manual, you won’t know that the camera has a front swing mechanism. I didn’t read the manual.

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One of my colleagues frequently needs relationship advice. We do our best and give generously, but we’re a diverse lot so the quality varies. As for myself, most of what I’ve learned about “going steady” I learned from a short pamphlet from the 1950s that I found in the Kelly Walsh High School guidance counselors’ office when I worked there in the summer of 1994. I present a scanned version of Understanding the Other Sex by Lester A. Kirkendall and Ruth Farnham Osborne with the hope that it might be useful.

Click on any page for a larger image. . . .

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It feels like spring today.

This year is turning out to be like the last. There are still no flowers, although the bulbs we planted last autumn are pushing through the ground. The leaves will likely come late, too, despite budding after a 70 degree day in January.

Even though it might snow tonight, I’ve come out of my den to look around and survey a winter’s worth of earnest work. Here are some random thoughts mostly in a software engineering vein that I’ve had over the long, cold winter. (If you’re looking for something related to human vision, consider V1, a site about “the primary visual cortex.” If you come here for photography, stay tuned.)

Makefiles are what UNIX-based programmers (and ambitious Windows programmers) use to build software, manage dependencies, and create a common set of compilation parameters. Working with makefiles is hard, and I think that most of the difficulty comes down to the difference between imperative versus declarative languages.

In the real nonacademic world more than 99% of software developers develop applications in imperative languages, where you tell the system how you want it to do things. Makefiles take a radically different approach. As a declarative language, you tell what you want the result to be and then leave it up to the make application to figure out how to do it. It takes a bit of brain rewiring to shift from working with code where you can trace what’s happening to code where you look at the inputs, the desired outputs and the parameters. It’s a shift from knowing what individual commands do to knowing how the whole system works behind the scenes.

Construx Software, Steve McConnell’s software best practices company, published a white paper on classic software engineering project mistakes a couple months ago. I participated in the survey and was interested in seeing the results. Here are the biggest mistakes according to risk exposure:

1. Unrealistic expectations [2]
2. Overly optimistic schedules [1]
3. Short-changed quality assurance [4]
4. Wishful thinking [7]
5. Confusing estimates with targets [9]
6. Excessive multi-tasking [3]
7. Feature creep [6]
8. Noisy, crowded offices [5]
9. Abandoning planning under pressure [11]
10. Insufficient risk management [8]

The numbers in square brackets are the ranks of how often the mistakes happen in projects.

Jeff Atwood posted a very interesting article about software process. He doesn’t come right out and say “Process! Bah, who needs it?” But he does invite a contrast between what professional software organizations need when they aim for process compliance and the open source projects that frequently shun repeatable processes. He also highlights the trade-off between process management and delivering features. The comments provide interesting food for thought for people seeking to optimize their process and/or deliver new features.

This is the final week of the spring semester. Shortly I’ll be 7/10 done with my software engineering program. This is my first semester without any theory classes, which is why I’ve had to go to the web for the deep insights. Instead, this semester I’ve been learning about the mysteries of UNIX programming: users, filesystems, processes, pipes, etc.

If all goes according to plan, my last three courses will be all C++ all the time, with an object-oriented design course thrown in for good measure. It’s nice how all of my courses have dove-tailed with what I’m doing at work. I’m going in a new direction at work, and I think this pattern of learning things I can use right away will continue. . . .

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A while back, I bought myself a new camera. Then about a month later, I figured out how to attach the lens to the lensboard. So, for a while I had a camera without a lens. Things were improving after adding the lens, but I still had no idea how to put film into it. Obviously it involved the “film holders” I bought. Clearly, I had a lot to learn.

Today, I embarked on my “Spring of 100 Mistakes” as I teach myself the practical techniques related to large format photography. We’ll see if I actually make it to 100 mistakes, or perhaps I’ll blow right past. My goal is to have a pretty solid intuition for how to operate my camera before taking it on our month-long summer trip through the American Rockies.

(Short side-story: I first started photographing in the summer of 1990 when we moved to Wyoming. On part of the six-hour drive from Casper to Yellowstone, I read the whole manual for the family’s mostly abandoned Sears KSX-P camera. By the time I got there, I was shooting Kodachrome slides without fear, just like everybody else. That was a great little camera with a Pentax K-series mount. I’ve been telling myself that I should sell it; I haven’t used it since buying my two Nikon rigs a couple years after graduating college, but there’s still a soft, squishy place in me for the camera. Anyway, I like the historical echo of going back to Yellowstone with a new camera and working without a net again.)

So here are the first few mistakes:

One: When loading film in complete darkness — a nonnegotiable requirement — know how to determine which side has the emulsion. The film is right side up when the notched corner is the upper-right-hand one.

The right way (Click for larger)

The wrong way (Click for larger)

Not a mistake I made, but still a helpful hint: The dark-slide, which blocks light from hitting the film until you pull it, has an “exposed” side and an “unexposed” side. Before turning off the lights, know which is which. The handle of the “exposed” side feels different.

Two: Know how to load the film before you get into the pitch black laundry room darkroom. There’s a flap on the end of film holder — it’s on the opposite end from the dark-slide handle — and it flips open for loading. You slide the film into this end and then flip it closed after loading. Load gently without actually touching the film. You figure that one out.

Open the film door after pulling the dark slide (Click for larger)

Loading the film (Click for larger)

Three: Have everything between the camera and the ground tightened down as much as possible before loading the film holder into the camera. Unlike 35mm cameras, you load the film at the last moment by pulling the spring-loaded ground-glass away from the camera and sliding the film holder between it and the bellows. If something isn’t tightened down, the scene that you photograph will look different than the one you composed. In my case, I locked down all of the tilt, shift and swing knobs and the tripod pan, tilt and swivel controls, but I hadn’t adequately tightened the quick-release plate onto the camera before mounting it to the tripod, so the whole camera turned quite a bit while I loaded the film.

Four: Know your film’s ISO speed in the field. There’s no ISO dial to set, just a number that you enter into your handheld lightmeter. I couldn’t even remember what kind of black and white film I had: T-Max 100 or Tri-X, which I thought was 400. I split the difference and said 200 ISO, which was close to the real value of 320 but not perfect.

Now I just have to figure out how to develop the film that I exposed today. . . .

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It’s Friday here at The Metrowest Homeopathic Imaging and File Rehabilitation Center, the day when I usually spend part of my time on 20% projects. [1] But I’ve basically been working on the results of my last such project full time, so perhaps it’s time to take a moment and look at the world rushing by and catch up on a few things before getting too far behind.

I moved offices for about the tenth time since I started working last week. That’s not a bad thing; we’ve been growing consistently over the last 9 1/2 years, and the company likes to keep work groups physically co-located without stuffing people into cubicles. While packing my office, I decided to purge my files, getting rid of a lot of old, old papers. (The process was actually a lot like Merlin Mann’s War on Clutter.)

It was during this time that I realized how much information I have tied up in paper notes. The same goes for e-mails. (Over those 9 1/2 years I’ve managed to keep more than 13,000 7,000 messages.) That information isn’t doing anyone other than me any good at all . . . coworkers, amateur color enthusiasts, no one! So expect to see some random color-related stuff coming your way.

[1] - A 20% project is a self-directed project that’s “off the books.” There are two main reasons for doing projects like this. It gives people freedom to explore and dive into topics that are risky or somewhat out-of-model. These projects also add slack to a system, preventing workers from being overutilized. Studies show that beyond a certain point the more you use any resource — whether it’s an engineer, a highway, a drillbit, whatever — you get lower productivity.

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I want to share my del.icio.us bookmarks with you. Some of my “statistically improbable” tags with many items include:

• color
• high-dynamic-range
• formats
• metadata
• hdr
• DICOM
• maps
• nukes
• suburbia
• photography
• osx

So what’s this all about?

Thirteen years ago when I was new to the web, I made bookmarks for every interesting web page that I came across. (Search was in its infancy.) After a while my bookmark list became too long, leading me to organize my Netscape bookmarks the only way available: a hierarchical tree of folders. I’m not sure it was ever any easier to find a bookmark in a big, “organized” tree of folders or a huge, unorganized list. The unreliability of computing solved this problem for me; every six to twelve months I would get a new computer or browser, and *poof* all of my bookmarks were gone. Fortunately, after living five years with this dilemma and death-cycle, someone told me about Google. But Google isn’t perfect, and I still like keeping a separate, personal, durable list of pages and PDF documents on the web that I might eventually go back to . . . a collection that’s already relevant to my needs.

Enter del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service with a geeky cute name. I no longer make browser bookmarks, though I still keep track of interesting and useful pages. And I no longer fit links into a hierarchy. Instead, when I go to an interesting page I push a little button on my browser and enter tags, which are essentially mnemonic keywords, many of which the service suggests via some computing mojo.

Later, when I’m interested in looking up that information about, say, the TIFF file format, I simply go to my del.icio.us page and click on the tiff tag, and I see all of the pages I previously tagged. In addition, del.icio.us also lets me look at all of the pages everyone has tagged “tiff”. Letting other people do hard work for me is great!

(I told a little white lie earlier. I actually do keep a handful of links within my browser’s bookmark bar, but I only keep track of sites that I use almost every week: intranet pages, movie showtimes at my local theatre, NOAA Conus weather forecasts, my Netflix queue, the admin page for this site, etc. The key is that I use them all the time.)

How about you? Do you use a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us, scuttle, or ma.gnolia? If so, what are your more unusual, high-content tags?

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A bunch of us around the office were talking about the cool content aware image resizing algorithm that we saw on Doug’s blog.

The idea behind Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir’s work is to find information-neutral “seams” in the image and fold or expand the image along those constantly shifting fault lines. Unlike traditional methods for resizing images, “important” areas don’t become smaller at the same rate as low information areas. As a result, things can move around a bit in the resized images. Take a look at the video above to see this in action, or read the paper for information about how it works.

Personally, I think this is another step in our cultural evolution with respect to imagery. First we believed every photograph represented an actual event that was faithfully transcribed. Photography was an optical-mechanical process of transcription, according to its earliest practitioners (and detractors). Then mid-20th century we realized imagery could be manipulated in order to entertain, mislead, or manipulate us; but we still more or less believed that images were inherently truthful. After another half-century we’re still coming around to the fact that images are surfaces that we project our thoughts and feeling onto and, as a result, must be treated rather skeptically.

Image manipulation techniques such as this — which change image content in a way that moves around visual elements automatically while attempting to retain the information within a scene — may finally highlight some latent connections between our mind’s images and those that are recorded. We’re constantly evaluating the content of scenes and unconsciously throwing out most of the “uninteresting” information, transforming the world’s “truthiness” along the way. Recorded images have no more inherent truth than people’s faulty memories do.

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Eleven days after my webhost (DigitalSpace.Net) “upgraded” their servers and broke my website quite brutally, I once again have the ability to edit these pages. It only took seven phone calls and e-mails to their tech support to get a resolution. I ended up doing the debugging and finding the resolution on my own and then had to wait for someone else to do the work that I couldn’t do myself.

As someone who did more than two years of web site and software support, I found this experience extremely frustrating. The slowness indicates that the staff is overworked, has poor task tracking tools, lacks motivation, or worse. I don’t want to say too much about that, except to mention that one of the support people I talked to on the phone was thoroughly unsympathetic when I complained that they broke my site and didn’t describe what they were going to do. And one completely dismissed my suggestion that they could have communicated information about the transition better.

Two results: I’m switching from MovableType to WordPress for better stability, and I’m considering different web hosts. Let me know if you have suggestions on the latter.

I think I’m going to like WordPress, but transitioning a weblog from one content management system to another is never without hiccups — which is why I’m finally posting a week after getting my website back. Expect some more changes in the coming weeks.

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If you use e-mail for work or school, you owe it to yourself to watch Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” talk. I think it’s probably one of the most useful productivity ideas around, which you would expect from the man behind a great productivity site.

For some reason this works well for me at work, but not at home. Probably because I’ve set things up so I rarely get “important” e-mail at home. Or maybe I have no friends. Nah, I’m just a packrat!

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I got everything off the hard drive that I could get, which was about 80% of my photographs. The crash spared most of the older data, while toasting many of the newer images. Ironically and tragically, all of those older images were backed up to DVDs. Not so with the newer ones.

So what lessons did I learn?

1. R-Studio does a pretty good job retrieving data off damaged drives. It’s a long process, though. I think I spent about 20-30 hours scanning drives, recovering files, sifting through broken files [1], and reconstructing the directory structure I like.
2. R-Studio and other similar applications won’t work on network attached storage devices. They’re actually computers (usually running Linux). Apparently there is no way to recover a network attached hard drive, which is pretty lousy.
3. Don’t chain together multiple external hard drives.
4. Make physical backups of really important data. Using a second hard drive is not good enough. Using a service like Mozy is probably even better (as long as they don’t go out of business).
5. I can’t prove it, but I think that using the media server on the LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini recovered poorly after the power failure on the attached disk, taking all of the data with it.
6. LaCie’s tech support seemed thoroughly incurious when it came to what might have caused the drive to fail.
7. Image and audio import software should be as fault-tolerant when reading files as possible.

I’ve had my moment(s) of anger about the situation, but now I’m moving on.

[1] Some of the files were actually copies of deleted images, which contained nothing but garbage. I was going to say that it’s basically like dereferencing a freed pointer, but that’s a bit geeky.

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