how now brownpau
As promised earlier, an updated photo of Union Station based on this 1921 National Photo Company Collection photo on Shorpy:
Can you spot the differences? Look closely! For your reference, read about “The Pit.” As for me and Amy, we’re off to go through this same concourse right now, to catch a train up to New Jersey for the weekend.
If you follow How Now Brownpau through a feed reader, change the feed URL to feeds.feedburner.com/brownpau. (The current feed URL will soon redirect.) I’m starting to aggregate to a single stream (with help from a Yahoo Pipe) so that my dear readers are saved the trouble of visiting a plethora of sites (or subscribing to a mess of feeds) in order to partake of my dazzling brilliance. Stuff I post to places like Tumblr, Flickr, Twittr, MetaFiltr, and WeLoveDCr nowr formr a streamr ofr contentr (ahem) in preparation for the day that the site itself can act as a similarly unified point of aggregation from many sources.
Till that day comes (but I don’t have time to work on it right now), I will just have to rely on FriendFeed for my content-consolidation needs; hence the new “View FriendFeed Shared Items” link on the home page, which reveals a simple JS badge. Those of you who are on FriendFeed may want to add me.
I’ve also switched the site feed from excerpts to full text. A few readers complained about the inconvenience of having to click through to the site to read the rest of the content. That’s often the exact intention — getting actual clickthrough to garner page views, ad clicks, or simply design accolades — but on a web where content is going more and more portable, the audience’s convenience wins out over pride and eyeballs, so full text feeds it shall be. I’m also aware this raises the risk of scrapers plagiarizing my entries, but that happened with excerpts anyway, and it’s a risk every webmaster faces and must guard against to be able to publish to the internet.
It all feels very hacked together, which makes me feel I need to do an upgrade, cleanup, and reboot soon. But for now, work.
Some of you may have seen me on TV last night, on FOX 5 News Edge at 11 (news story, video). Our local Fox affiliate sent reporter Jessica Weinstein to interview me at Foggy Bottom yesterday, site of the Metro Escalator Mess that I caught on video. I recall talking at length about Metro delays and mobile video, and Jessica was trying to get a bit of a “citizen journalist” angle into the mix, but the segment appears to have been edited down to just subway news, thankfully cutting out most of my inane rambling. (Sadly they also cut out some of the closeups the camera guy took of my cellphone, which I made sure was running rickroll.mp4 at the time.)
At left, the original video I took of the escalator mess, and at right, a screen capture of me on the news, some Photoshopped improvement courtesy neckro. (Click to view the video on myfoxdc.com, which sadly does not provide an embeddable player. Also interviewed was my coworker, Mike Weinstein, the guy in the blue shirt.)
Update: I let fame and glory get to my head and forgot to mention how coworker Russell’s considerable internet influence played a part in rocketing me to stardom.
Speaking of recreations of old public domain Library of Congress photos, Shorpy has been going through pictures of Washington, DC from the National Photo Company Collection, and each new image gives me an itch to walk over to the location in the photo and snap a “today” pic. I was able to scratch that itch yesterday with “Ghostland: 1920,” a cloudy B/W shot looking north up the rails from Union Station. When I saw that one, I immediately picked up my camera, walked with Amy to the Union Station parking garage, and took updated shots of the scene as it is in the present day: (as always, click the thumbs to see them larger on Flickr)
Of course, this photo was taken in summer rather than winter, and lacks the ethereal gray ambience of the original, and the vantage point from the parking garage roof is much higher than in the 1920 photo (the H Street Bridge now blocks the view from the original height). Still, you can see that the focal point — the old rail lookout building — hasn’t changed much at all.
You can see more of my attempts to match the “Ghostland” view in the “Looking North from Union Station” photoset.
City Desk has more on Shorpy’s posts from the National Photo Collection. I intend to get an updated shot of this Union Station interior photo next.
Amy and I are briefly mentioned in this USA Today story by Rebecca Kaplan on the Flickr Commons, for our restaging of the LOC lipstick photo. The article doesn’t have the photos themselves but I left a comment with a link, and of course you can see them right here:
Ellen Lupton gave a talk on type and design for Refresh DC last Thursday at the CDIA, and it was great fun and education all around. Ellen has published several design books — I have Thinking With Type — and directs the MFA Graphic Design Program at MICA. I didn’t have classes under her, but she was a frequent sight on campus and gave several talks, and Amy had her for Type 1 class.
Ellen delivers her lectures in a free-flowing stream of consciousness, punctuated by witty images drawn, painted, or photographed by herself and projected on a large screen. A good chunk of the talk was devoted to her upcoming book, Design For Life, a collaboration with her twin sister on design concepts intersecting with day-to-day living. (Hence the bras.) After the Q&A I beat the crowd to say hi to her, and pleasantly enough, she remembered me from MICA.
So if you’re in graphic design, Ellen is the go-to author and instructor for contemporary, sensible, readable information and opinion on typography. I recommend her books, and of course her MFA program at MICA. She’s my design superhero.
Good heavens, two Caturday posts in a row due to total weblog non-activity! It has been a long, busy week of late nights, and I feel mostly like doing what Pandora is doing in this photo.
Here is a quick macro video of Pandora doing one of her meow-yawns, a meow that gets interrupted by a sleepy yawn: (Update: As Flickr video embeds no longer work, you will have to click the thumbnail below to see the video.)
When I play back this video on the computer she perks up at the sound of the meow and looks around for the other cat who sounds just like her.
And now, I present to you my first two Photo Booth snapshots:
At right, the “Squeeze” effect is used to greatly exaggerate my hair and chin. At left, what looks like a simple disheveled self-portrait is actually a successful application of Photo Booth’s “Tired Guy in Bathrobe with Messy Shower-Hair” effect. I don’t look like that in real life. At all. Seriously. No lie.*
(* – Lie)
Yup, I got a new MacBook.
First off, a semi-postmortem on my faithful old G3/700 iBook, “Vizzini,” which dropped from a loosely zipped backpack onto a hardwood floor on 29 Dec 2007 while we were at Tali Beach. It has actually continued to work since then, but with an irretrievably broken CD drive, a screen that intermittently goes blank, and heavy black scratches on screen and casing. The iBook is almost six years old at this point, and due for replacing; I had hoped to hold out for new Montevina or Nehalem notebooks from Apple, but first there was the Montevina delay, then a MacMall limited sale event which included deep discounts on mid-range MacBooks with 4GB RAM preinstalled, so I jumped for one. It arrived last week.
The MacBook, which I have named “Hidalgo,” (after the Filipino painter) is a white Penryn Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz Rev E with 160GB HDD, 4GB RAM, GMA X3100 integrated video (144MB RAM shared), OS X 10.5 Leopard, and glossy screen. It’s a lovely machine; streamlined and solidly assembled, runs fast and smooth without any lag — click on an app in the dock, and the icon barely has time to bounce once before the app is open. The extra RAM is definitely a big help, and ensures that the computer is future-proofed for years to come. Plus, not only did MacMall preinstall the 4GB RAM, but the original 2x1GB sticks were included separately in the box, so we swapped out the RAM on Amy’s older MacBook (a lower-end 512MB Rev B) and upgraded that one, much to her joy.
The old iBook ran OS X 10.3.9, and I skipped over 10.4, so 10.5 is my first experience with many features introduced since then. I’m not sure I like “Stacks”, but it hasn’t been much trouble. I’ve kept Spaces off so far — don’t need more than one desktop — and I’m holding off on Time Machine till I can get a Time Capsule later on. I also have yet to try the new iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand. And Dashboard is new to me, though I don’t foresee it replacing functions for which I already have well-established web habits.
I adapted much faster to the wider keyboard than I expected, but the new function key bindings confused me, and I still get thrown off between what a key does by itself and with “Fn” pressed. Double-finger trackpad scrolling, however, is awesome and I have taken to it like second nature.
In the week I’ve had this MacBook I’ve carried it around in a backpack and already gotten it more scuffed than Amy’s MacBook, which she’s had for over a year, so I think I had better get a soft case, so as to keep this in better condition than the old iBook ended up in. I’m pretty happy with the MacBook (much happier than I was with the iBook on purchase), and I want this one to last a while.
(As for the old iBook, I stuck it under the bed with a USB webcam peeking out from the nightstand, and it now serves as a second cat-cam for the webcam page. VNC ensures I can still access it without pulling it out from under the bed.)
Coming soon: must-download software and first Photobooth pics.