Ghostland: 2008

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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)

"Ghostland: 1920" - from Shorpy IMG_2943

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.

Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC

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Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC

Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC Ellen Lupton at Refresh DC

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.

Caturday!

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IMG_2904

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.

Caturday!

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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.)

Pandora Meow-Yawns (cat 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.

Photo Booth

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And now, I present to you my first two Photo Booth snapshots:

Photo 1 Photo 2

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)

New MacBook: “Hidalgo”

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Cat and MacBook MacBook

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.

Caturday!

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Not much to show this weekend other than a couple of blurry photos of Pandora looking up at the camera with her blue and green eyes, and rubbing her head on a couch leg:

IMG_2861 IMG_2862

Oh, and this quick snap of her looking perplexed at a new arrival to our home:

Cat and MacBook

We Love DC

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I had stopped writing for DC Metroblogging earlier this year, at a point when my posting frequency was down to about once a month and my work/home life simply did not give me time for it. There was no drama or conflict involved, just simple quiet lapsing into dormancy because I had too much on my plate.

I recently got back in on local weblog action, however, when I met up with my friend Tom Bridge to help start a new DC site, We Love DC — lovingly designed by John Athayde and coded up in WordPress by myself. The launch of We Love DC did involve some drama, as the current team of writers (not including myself, since I had left earlier for different reasons from theirs) simultaneously pulled a surprise public resignation from DC MB to move over to WLDC — a Fourth of July stunt which caused some anger. Being a nonconfrontational type, I’m kind of glad I threw in my writing hat before the conspiracy had surfaced, making me less implicit in it and guilty only of going where my friends were — though I still did support the “rebels” by doing their WordPress development work, which prompted this thought on my Internet alignment.

Anyway, check out We Love DC. Against my better judgement, my DC-interest writing pants are back on, and I’m an author on the site. Most of my material will be shorter snippets for the Daily Feed, but I’ll have an occasional longer feature, like my entry in the “Why I love DC” series.

My author archive, and my author feed, which I guess I should add to Feedburner or something.