Month: April 2008

Dave Winer has a post out this morning about some incredibly terrible service he received from your friends over at Comcast where they kinda sorta called him a criminal. Apparently he’s got some kind of high-end high speed internet service from them where he pays them $180 a month, but they still thought he was using more internet than he should.

What a crappy company.

Dave speculates that the reason why his bandwidth usage was so high was that he’s using his program FlickrFan on 5 Macs. FlickrFan allows you to download all of your contact’s flickr photos and keep them in a slide show to watch on your high def TV.

I’ve used a similar service with Slickr. Slickr allows you to download large sized version of your Flickr favorites to your hard drive.

I download my favorite photos from Flickr (I’ve got over 33,000 photos marked as favorites on Flickr at present) and then put them in a folder where my Media Center PC can access them. I can then watch giant full screen slide shows of my favorite Flickr photos on plasma screens around my house.

Some of your photos on Flickr look really, really, really cool on a 58 inch plasma floating across the screen with music playing in the background.

I haven’t tried Dave’s service yet, but I’d guess it works similarly to Slickr.

SFMOMA | Press Room | Recent Announcements

The SF MOMA is out with a press release on a very new acquisition that they are quite proud of. It’s a new painting called Two Bathers by David Park.

Go ahead, click on the link above and go see it. Their photo of it is about 1/10th the size of my iPhone. It’s an eensy weensy little thumbnail pic. I’m sure David Park, who died in 1960, would be proud with such a stellar presentation of his work online.

If you wanted a bigger view you could always try to go to the SF MOMA and go take a photo of it yourself, but, alas, photography is not allowed at the SF MOMA. You can of course take photos at the much more prestigious NY MOMA. You can also take photos at NY’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The de Young here in San Francisco also allows photos. As does the Legion of Honor. As does the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. As does the Oakland Museum of California, the Norton Simon in Pasadena and the Getty down in L.A.

But not the SF MOMA.

Nope.

They’d rather you look at a smallish boring little thumbnail pic of their latest David Park painting then let you come in and take a photo of your own. Of course if you could come take a photo of your own you could share it on Flickr or Zooomr or your blog with the rest of the damn world that will never set foot in San Francisco ever in their lives. People that live in places like China and India and even places like Kentucky and Florida.

Inevitably the over protective copyright zealots jump onboard. But, but, but, but… if we allowed photography, then artists wouldn’t show their work at the SF MOMA anymore. We have to have that policy, otherwise we’d never get any visiting artists.

Riiiiiighhhhhht.

Just like the same artists who refuse to show their work at the NY MOMA?

What’s really going on here is that the SF MOMA is being proprietary with their collection. They’d rather you buy their books at their bookstore than allow you to take photos of art yourself.

I used to boycott the SF MOMA because of their daft anti-photo policy. But I felt like I was missing some of the good art up there. The current photo show by Friedlander for instance is simply amazing.

Now instead I go (but usually on the first Tuesday of the month when it’s free) but take photos anyways. The first Tuesdays of the month are crowded and it’s harder for the guards to stay on top of you and your camera. If you’re careful you can still fire off a good 200-300 shots in the museum with only a dozen or so admonishments from various museum security guards.

On the other hand… I have a paid family membership at both the de Young and the Oakland Museum of California. I’m happy to support those fine institutions and their more enlightened photography policies. I’ve especially been enjoying Friday nights up at the de Young. They have a bar, a band, and have great artistic projects for the kids.

Photoset of images from the SF MOMA
Photoset of images from the de Young
Photoset of images from the Oakland Museum of California
Photoset of images from the SF Asian Art Museum
Photoset of images from NY’s MET

Photo borrowed from the Daily Mail.

Graffiti artist Banksy has struck again. This time he’s painted a mural behind a security fence with a CCV camera pointed at it.

Pure brilliance!

Thanks, Wooster Collective!

Trapped: Online Only Video: The New Yorker

Once I was stuck in an elevator. It was at 50 California Street. It was on a Sunday. I’d parked my car outside illegally because I was just going to run up and get some tickets from my desk and shoot right back down. I ended up stuck in the elevator for about an hour. Fortunately for me the call system worked and they had me out of there eventually. My car wasn’t even ticketed.

Nicholas White was not so lucky.

Nick Paumgarten has an amazing and meaty article on something we take for granted every day, the elevator. Included in the piece is a time lapse video of Nicholas White’s harrowing 41 hour ordeal that eventually ruined his life.

Thanks, Andy!

My photoset of elevators here.

loose wire blog: Facebook is Dead. I’m Not Being Facetious

Jeremy Wagstaff has a blog post out saying Facebook is dead. It’s not dead really, it’s just that he’s noticing that he’s not getting any significant news feedy like information.

I used to really be into Facebook. When they first opened it up I joined and really was into it for a while. The poking thing was a novelty and fun at first. I liked seeing when my friends were breaking up or getting hitched. I played around a bit in the Photowalking group. Made a few groups of my own. The news feed was fun to watch.

I think what really started to annoy me though was when they “opened” Facebook up and I started having all these incredibly inane messages pushed out at me about whether or not I wanted this widget or that widget, superhugs, bearhugs, cocktails, superhero of the year awards, show me what’s in your medicine cabinet, etc. etc. Boring drivel and crap.

For a while I was actually using the email messaging on Facebook more than my regular email. But soon this got filled up with all kinds of drivel as well and so I just stopped checking it mostly. I can barely keep up with my regular email — which is *a lot* better these days since turning over it’s management to gmail.

Every so often I still get an interesting message on Facebook. A few weeks back a woman asked me if I’d remove her name from a photo I published of her and her child (I did). That was interesting. But generally Facebook is mostly crap. The only thing I really do there anymore is confirm friend requests every so often.

Conversations just aren’t happening on Facebook and so maybe Facebook really is dead. Like the critics said originally, kids these days are pretty fickle.

Where am I going to find conversations instead? Well all over the web really. In the past 48 hours I’ve participated in conversations on Flickr, Zooomr, Pownce, Twitter, Friend Feed, my blog, other people’s blogs. Conversations are happening in very fragmented places. But they are not happening on Facebook, at least for me, and so the site is largely beginning to be ignored by me.

On Flickr I participate in a forum called Delete Me Uncensored, don’t bother clicking through unless you’ve set your Flickr preferences to see “adult” material. The group is not for the weak of stomach as it truly is uncensored and many people are frequently offended there, but it’s a real community with real conversations. Some of them are ugly and crazy and pointless. But others are super interesting.

In the past 24 hours there have been all kinds of things discussed there. From sensor cleaning, to legalizing marijuana, to guns and crime, to politics and whether or not Obama is regurgitating Marx, to Ian’s new 80,000 Audi. Interesting links and articles are exchanged and about 2,000 people hang out with many of the regulars practically living in there.

This kind of stuff is NOT happening on Facebook. At least for me.

On Zooomr I can push messages out on the Zipline and participate in conversations with an outstanding group of highly talented photographers. These messages can be set to automatically forward to Twitter.

I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter but mostly interact with it through Zooomr’s zipline and through Friend Feed. Friend Feed is better than Twitter for me because it includes people’s Flickr and Zooomr photos as well as the action going on at Twitter. I like photos more than words generally so I like that mixture better than just words on Twitter.

And Pownce is great too. I can post something on Pownce about Firefox and get 14 people to respond back. It’s also a great place to share mp3s with your friends and discover new music. Real conversations are happening there too.

And conversations still happen on my blog. In the last week some great conversations have happened about fine art vs. graffiti and whether or not a New Mexico Christian Couple should be forced to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony and all kinds of other great conversations. I still love blogs for conversations, I read the comments and contribute regularly to other conversations on other blogs as well.

But Facebook. Well, like I said, Facebook is boring as hell. Which is crazy given how much hype people are always making about the place.