Driving Miss Daisy

More pictures here

We met Daisy during her trip from Texas to West Virginia. She’d been pulled from a kill shelter in Louisiana, fostered for about a month in Texas, and by now is settled in with her new permanent family. We don’t know anything more about her history, but we do know she is relaxed with everyone she meets, calmly watches scenery from the car window, and isn’t camera-shy.

Stopping some of the evil in the world

Learning to read access logs can be a blessing and a curse. It’s good to know exactly who to blame for sudden surges in bandwidth, but getting rid of it can turn into an obsession. I’m now looking at logs far too many times every day, knowing I’ll find referers for poker and drugs. There are no redeeming qualities to any of this — their ever-shifting tactics, their use of other people’s resources, and the products they’re pushing. If only they were trying to get hits on sites for feeding the poor or saving puppies. But no. It’s porn and drugs and poker.

I’ve been using a couple of solutions with great success. But since I’m becoming obsessed with stopping these guys — if only there were a way to keep them from even making it into the logs — I’ve added another layer of protection: Bad Behavior. All the configuration was done automatically; just upload and activate. The spammers are already getting consistently 412ed.

Hauling pups

More pictures here

Paying attention

I bought my first real camera back in the late 1970s when I finally had a job that allowed for little discretionary income. It was one of the first compact SLRs — a Contax 139 Quartz with a Planar 50mm/1.7. A simple darkroom setup came within a year or so, and I spent hours shooting images and meticulously noting exposure settings, then doing the same when developing negatives and printing enlargements.

The darkroom was a converted pantry in the basement, and though there were white spiders in the joists, the room was otherwise perfect, with no windows and a sink right outside the door. It was impossible to tell what time it was in the outside world — no clocks or sunlight, no street noise. Nights would pass quickly while I would carefully weigh the differences between Ilford and Kodak papers, learn how to push film, and work on the fine muscle control needed for burning and dodging. Even after printing hundreds of images, watching one emerge in the tray was still nothing short of magic.

But eventually I returned to college, and immersed myself in the abstractions of the printed word rather than the visual image.

In the past few years, though, I’ve started taking pictures again. There’s a little more money left over after bills than there was twenty-five years ago, so I’ve finally been able to return to an SLR. This time it’s digital — the Canon EOS Rebel XT. After outgrowing a few less flexible digitals (an early Mavica, a Cybershot), I figured it was time to spend money once rather than upgrading every two years or so.

I’m not yet worthy of this camera, but once in a while it looks like it could happen. A few pictures are here. The images show some degradation because they’ve been considerably reduced, but they give an idea of what the camera can do.