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Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood. 06/29/2004 12:00 PM
This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.Grok Headline matches for Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.Las Vegas, Nevada-World Series of Poker
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I have uploaded a few snapshots from Miami (South Beach), Ecuador, and the Galapagos to http://blogs.law.h arvard.edu/philg/pictures/. Enjoy! [Note: all were taken with the Olympus E-1 digital camera system.] |
I borrowed an Olympus
E-1 system for this trip. This is an interesting camera idea
in which new lenses have been designed specifically to fit the
typically smallish digicam sensor area. Here's an example photo
from this morning: 
.
I've uploaded some of the snapshots I took
during a recent trip through indigenous communities in Guatemala. Here
they are, come have a look. 
Boing Boing pal Scott Beale is on the scene with the SRL crew as they
prepare for tonight's show in Los Angeles. He took some pictures of
preparation activities, and here they are.
A most excellent gallery: designs in the milk foam on top of espresso
drinks.
Previously: Latte
art, and La
tte art part 2.
Photos shot before, during and after the war
from a collaborative weblog maintained by members of a family in
Baghdad. American tanks roaming the streets, Mom (Faiza) at work
behind her computer, old brick buildings, a 'net cafe, spring flowers
in the front yard, a stack of sweet watermelons at the market ("it's
the best fruit in the hot summer, we call it Raggi.")
Images from a new gallery show at sixspace
featuring underground art superstar Coop, whose work I was first
exposed to in the form of a devil-babe tattoo on the back of an
ex-boyfriend.
Parts with Appeal is Coop's first gallery exhibit in about five years. For the show, he constructed one contiguous acrylic canvas 78 feet long which contains four separate panels each comprised of a series of 6' x 6' paintings. The snapshots look fantastic, and I can't wait to see the work in person.
Link to
images and more info on the sixspace show in LA, and link
to more info and merch from the mighty Coop.
Ombudsman Attila Peterfalvi said he started an investigation after one of Hungary's three mobile providers ran an advertisement saying: "If you see a good-looking girl or guy on the street, don't hesitate to share the aesthetic experience with your friends via MMS." Mobile phones, kitted out with small cameras used in multimedia messaging (MMS), are selling fast in Hungary, where mobile penetration is a high 75.2 percent.Link (via diepunyhumans)
Portraits of iconoclastic Japanese street fashionistas. I really like
the punk bride images (like the one at left from Meiji Jingu subway,
2001) because they remind me so much of Mexican-American gangbanger
girls' street style here in Southern California. Instead of rhinestone
tears, imagine black inkdrops on a young chola's cheeks.
Link
(Thanks, Invi
sible Cowgirl)
Following up on
this earlier post about museums in Asia that depict Buddhist Hell,
BoingBoing reader Heng-Cheong sends us more photos of the Hell exhibit in
Singapore's Tiger Balm
Gardens, better known locally as Haw Par Villa. Shown here, the Filthy
Blood Pond, part of a special section in Hell reserved for sinners who
have (begin quote)
* kidnapped little boys [Ed. note: AHEM,
cough cough]
* claimed to have lost somebody's deposit (probably an estate
agent)
* are an incompetent physician or
* are a matchmaker
"For this, you are slapped with extreme thirst and hunger, soaked in
ice, dipped in volcano, or forced to bathe in filthy blood."
Link
Disneyland is one of the most-photographed piecces of real-estate in
the world. Since 1955, visitors to the park have been exhaustively
documenting it with photos and slides. Now, the Disnephiles of The
Imaginary World have assembled a "virtual tour" made up of scans of
slides shot at Disneyland in the 1950s and 1960s. This combines the
thrill of fanboy history with the voyeurism of going through family
photo albums found at thrift shops, and just about made my day.
Link
(Thanks, Hork!)
Sweet snapshots taken from a small camera attached to a flying kite.
Link
(thanks,
Jean-Luc!) 
I snapped some quick photos with my Treo while the SRL folks were setting up all the
machines for last night's show in Los Angeles. I'm still coughing up
orange smoke particles, and some metal sparks got in my hair -- but a
fine time was had by all. It was a great show.
Mack Reed of LAVoice sez:
Here's an early, detailed report (2:38 a.m. last night) complete with plenty of pix and silent video shot with a clear view from the roof. Sad that the audio on my Olympus usually-still digicam malfunctioned, but the clips are crisp and slender (max 5kb) adn they do have a sort of dreamlike quality.Link
I recorded audio, and interviewed cast and robot crew. Stay tuned for
a report!
Y para nuestros estimados lectores hispanohablantes: aquà les
presento unas imagenes de los pendejos racistas en Arizona que se
creen soldados.
El fenómeno me preocupa mucho. No puedo ver ninguna diferencia entre
esto y los "lynch mobs" de antaño en el sur en mi paÃs. Ojalá que
el resultado no sea tan sangriento, pero si ellos tienen el apoyo del
gobierno y del ambiente polÃtico del momento -- pues, yo no creo que
puede ser una cosa buena para los derechos civiles de la gente en
cualquier lado de la frontera. Gracias a Mark Ebner, periodista
y amigo de Boing Boing, por los fotos. Su reportaje será publicado en
El Globe la próxima semana.
Links to images: M
inuteman and Jeep, Minuteman Leaders, Young Gun, Minut
emen 1, Minut
emen 2, Minut
emen 3, Minut
emen 4, Minut
emen 5, Minutemen
Message, Minu
teWomen, Spotter
s, Wetback
s.
(Thanks for correcting my awful Spanish grammar, JLB)
Oh, it's just the pay-per-view movies, they're claiming -- no harm there, right? How soon will this include other kinds of video? Won't HBO and Showtime make similar demands, too? Of course they will. Then will come ABC, CBS and NBC and the other networks. The pay-per-view world approaches more quickly than you think -- if the entertainment cartel gets its way. I'll be pointing out some options to this regime. Stay tuned.Mercury News: TiVo , ReplayTV agree to limits. The makers of TiVo and ReplayTV digital video recorders have agreed to limit how long consumers can keep pay-for-view movies stored on future versions of the VCR-like devices. The new technology also will allow Hollywood movie studios and broadcasters to regulate how often movies purchased through pay-for-view services can be watched. Digital video recorders that recognize these new copy restrictions will begin appearing in the spring of 2005. But it could be years before entertainment companies begin to take advantage of the technology, according to ReplayTV President Bernie Sepaniak.
wholemovement.com/galleryWhole.html
track this
site | 11 links
I've been sharing a remotely hosted server at Rackshack.net (which became EV1) with friends for over a year now and it's run amazingly well. The account started with 700Gb of montly bandwidth and after the unfortunate SCO license flap, we got upped to 1 terabyte of monthly bandwidth, with seemingly no network speed cap. For the past year, the server's pushed out a couple Gb of bandwidth a day, tops, from all the sites it hosts. Even when I put a bunch of music online last spring, it hardly made a dent.
This month I figured I'd see just how much a terabyte was. It started when I offered to host the Beatallica songs. After a day the bandwidth jumped to 10-15Gb and it was humming along nicely. Then it hit Pitc hfork's news page, and the bandwidth skyrocketed. The box was pushing out 20Mbit/sec and after a a couple days I had to tell the gang to de-link songs as my monthly bandwidth total reached 100Gb just a few days into April.
I was pretty impressed that the box held up ok (after Chris limited the site to 1 download per user) and was amazed at the traffic a site like Pitchfork could generate from a tiny news blurb. I thought to myself "wow, aside from slashdot I couldn't imagine a blog ever generating this kind of traffic and demand for files."
Then Cory linked my 66Mb file of a Jon Stewart interview over at BoingBoing, and it completely blew away the previous bandwidth numbers. In about 12 hours of the link being directed at the box, the network throughput jumped to almost 60Mbit/sec, and it pushed out 131Gb of data in half a day. The box served up all the other sites fine but as I watched my monthly bandwidth allottment reach 40% of the total before the first half of the month was even over, I took it offline and Andy put it up on his tracker, where it is being downloaded like crazy, but off-loaded to everyone's personal connection sharing the load.
Here's a cool graph of the network utilization on a weekly,
30-minute moving average (click to see the full image):
You can see the initial rise from a bunch of blogs linking to Beatallica, then the peak is the pitchfork hit, which subsided after song links were eliminated. Then a few days of relative calm and Boingboing is the huge peak, which only lasted half a day. I grabbed this right after I started redirecting folks to the torrent.
I've learned a few things from these large bandwidth experiments:
- Ridiculous amounts of bandwidth is out there for a cheap price (the server is only $100/month, shared among people using it). If you're paying $30 a month and getting hit with bandwidth overage bills that go into the hundreds of dollars, find a friend that knows some linux server administration, get one of these leased boxes, and never worry about bandwidth again.
- A thousand gigabytes is a ton of bandwidth and it's nice to have around when you want to share large files with friends or the general public. I host my ten years site there and don't really care about the size of photos or the number of people pulling down the RSS feeds with large images embedded.
- That said, when you get hit with a huge amount of traffic, bandwidth is still going to be a problem. Most colocation hosts cap your line at 10Mbit/sec and I was surprised to see the box creeping up near 60Mbit/sec yesterday. It's still a problem to host one giant file for a ton of people, even with an absurd amount of bandwidth available to you. Bittorrent is the savior here, Andy tells me even though he seeds all the files on his server (which means the original file's still on his server being downloaded if no one else is sharing it), his bandwidth is a fraction of what it'd be if it was just a direct download. The best part is the more popular the file (like the boingboing traffic hit), the more people download it from each other instead of your server.
- Setting up your own bittorrent server still a pain in the butt. This needs to be as difficult as setting up apache on a windows desktop. I want to see a BT server exe I click, install, then seed files easily using a web or desktop front-end (yay! Andy sent this and this). Or make an apache module. Also, build BT support into Mozilla, right now. BT is a great technology that solves a fundamental problem we all face everyday, but we have to walk people through how to download the clients first. In some of the data I saw on the Lessig book downloads, only about 5% of users opted to use BT to download, the rest just got it off the server directly. We need more regular folks using BT, by having it built into browsers.
So after keeping the same design around for a little over 2 years, I decided it was time for a change. My goals with this design was to accommodate more stuff, but still aim for simple and clean (and also, I was looking for a reason to use Travis Beckham's insanely cool patterns -- background images have been dorky for so long they're cool again).
A couple months ago, I noticed I was writing less than usual, hiking less often, and not taking all that many photos. To force myself to spend more time on those things I decided the next design would reduce the importance of daily blogging, and give other features more prominence. The features area to the right is the same size as the blog area for that reason, and while at the moment there is nothing new there, I'm aiming to either write an article, post a photo essay, interview someone, or do some other feature-sized thing once a week from here on out. I also wanted to get myself back into taking daily photos. I did it through most of the year 2000, and I learned a lot by forcing myself to just do it everyday.
The redesign is only on the front page and the weblog archives for now (which are now Movable Type powered, to boot), but eventually everything else will get converted over, and I might add more stuff to the right side, but I'll try not to make it too portal-like. The whole design is liquid, and I used some CSS tricks to have the photos on the right fill their areas -- the smaller or wider your browser, the less or more you see of the images. The daily photo image is the actual full size photo, just positioned centered as a background (yes, a pointless waste of bandwidth, but easier than thumbnaling and clicking on it to see the full sized version is faster).
While this site isn't quite validating as xhtml strict (the stock Flash code is causing the errors), and I did have to use a table to get a consistent layout of the two sides (floated columns refused to work), I've found a really odd bug. If you're viewing this site in a newer version of Mozilla or mac/IE, you should see a nifty Flash map of the US/World (coded brilliantly by Bryan) showing the places I've been recently, where I am currently, and where I'm heading soon. If you're using Opera, Safari, or win/IE, you won't see anything at all. The map works by itself on a page, and inside a table in all browsers, but for some reason, half the browsers I point at this page don't like it and ignore it. I suppose I'll figure out the problem eventually. If anyone is confused, here is what is supposed to look like (screensh ot 1, screensh ot 2)
One thing's certain: after the past couple days of work on this, I could really use some Extreme, Totally-In-Your-Face, Milk Products™
I'm on the plane back to NYC from what was my fifth SXSW. I hadn't been for a couple of years and it was good (and a little weird) to be back. Some thoughts, in rough chronological order:
Best panels I attended: tie between Jason Fried's How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams and Malcolm Gladwell's keynote. Having read Blink and seen him speak on it twice before, there was nothing much new in Malcolm's talk, but he's a fantastic speaker...knows his shit cold, didn't utter a single "um" or "like", could make the phone book seem interesting, but doesn't have to caper about the stage to be compelling.
Everyone was nice. Well, there was that one guy who was an asshole, but I think everyone pretty much ignored him. But everyone else, so nice to get to meet you or see you again.
Overheard in the hallway: "no woman who knows that much about CSS should be that good looking", "here's how I met Marc Canter for the first time: I'm standing outside at a conference, he comes up beside me and farts", "I have no idea who you are", "surf the glue", "no one will get naked in the hot tub with me", and "Ima gine Malcolm Gladwell...with breasts. That's how busy it will be."
My two panels sandwiched the keynote conversation between Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen, so I was only able to catch about 20 minutes of it. But that was long enough to hear Bruce talking about smoking his shoes. LOL for reals.
BBQ! BBQ! In what could be a record for a bunch of
folks who can't pay attention to any particular thing for more than 10
minutes at a time, fifteen of us waited an hour and a half for a table
at Stubb's (cool menu
pictured at right). I can't speak for the rest, but my beef brisket
was worth the wait. As a bonus, Kathryn accidentally walked away with
the primary object of our obsession during our 90 minute wait, the
buzzing/blinking table-readiness notification coaster. I'm sure said
coaster will be a treasured guest at many SXSWs to come.
Bruce Sterling's not-house party didn't really get crackin' until the geeks descended on the Zoob toys. The photo evidence pretty much speaks for itself here.
Ben Brown, because he asked me to. Many, many times. Ben, I expect you to comply with the terms of the restraining order from this point forward.
And finally, I'm at the airport ready to leave just after getting through security and I hear, "your attention please, Jason Kottke to security check 3 for a lost item pickup". Bag, check; rollie, check; coat, check; phone and wallet, safely stowed in the zipper pocket of my bag. What the heck could they have found and how on earth do they know it's mine? I zipped over the security check point and was waved over by a friendly/stern police officer. "You Jason?" "Yep." He holds up my wallet, which I swear on a stack of The Origin of Species was in my bag. "Holy crap," I said. "And that's not the worst part," he says with the most serious look I've ever seen on anyone's face.
Uh oh, I feel a full body cavity search coming on.
He pulls out my social security card and lectures me for two minutes on how I shouldn't be carrying it because it's all someone needs to steal my identity. Relieved that I'm not about to be hauled into a tiny windowless room for interrogation, I'm sort of chuckling at this point, which he takes to mean I don't believe him about the SS card. "Do you see me looking you right in the eye, son? That's how serious I am about this." Mr. Sir, as soon as I'm home, I'm taking my SS card out of my wallet and putting it in the safest place I can...right after I change into some clean underwear.
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: dessarae bradford blessed adventures pub
Here are the rest of the snapshots I took at a recent porn industry
convention in Los Angeles. Shown here: an inflatable swimming pool
full of disembodied plastic genitalia. This, by the way, was art.
