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I did a trip to the zoo with my son and one of his best friends recently, and,
true to form, split my time between kids, camera, and conversation. These days,
I wander around with a pretty hefty chunk of glass jutting off the end of my
toy. (There's a reason it's called a Canon.) So I tend to get envious looks
from everyone carrying an SLR.
Here's the thing, though. I stop, I watch the critters, I see something I want
to capture, I pull out the camera, I line up, possibly wait a while, and shoot
when I see what I want. I'm shooting what I've already experienced - though as
you can see, the shooting is often an experience of its own. More often than
not, I see guys (and yes, it's always guys) with SLRs who are not stopping to
see what they're shooting.
If you don't care enough about the subject to take a moment and experience it
while it's live, why do you think you're going to give a damn about a photo
later on? Stop and experience the shot. It'll improve your shooting, but it'll
make it worth having the shot to begin with.
-rbarry
I'm still towing along a 20 megabyte, hard-drive-based mp3 player. I've never
really tried to get all the media properly tagged and organized, so I've never
come close to having the thing full.
Well, I just organized. Between the audio books I bought when I was driving a
long commute and the CDs I've acquired since March, 1991...
It is full.
To recap:
Full. 20 Megs.
Take a deep breath and fathom:
At roughly 1 Megabyte per minute, that is 20000 minutes, 333 HOURS of audio.
For comparison, my first computer had just enough memory to store one second of
that collection. Closing the circle in a nice, ironic loop: that computer
stored all its programs as audio-encoded bits on an audio tape recorder.
-rbarry
UPDATE (30 seconds later.)
I'm trying to decide what to play first.
UPDATE (30 minutes later. (I had email to cover.))
Problem solved. Turn on shuffle and start the first song an the list and
hit next. Clement Philibert Leo Delibes' Lakme - Duo Des Fleurs wins.
The internet truly is an infinite number of monkeys. What really worries me is,
they occasionally leave their keyboards to do other things. -rbarry
Something has been troubling me lately: the use of quotation marks in the
English language follows a set of rules that is ambiguous when used in technical
writing.
The American use of quotes requires that any ending punctuation in a phrase fall
inside the quotes:
"I'm leaving now," she said as she closed the door.
While this is legal, "correct" English, it is an inaccurate citation of the
speaker. In writing our language, nobody ever cares that the speaker didn't
actually pause in the middle of her phrase (the comma) only to leave the rest of
it unheard by the writer. She spoke a period, but we intentionally misquote her
for the sake of narration.
Again, nobody cares. But maybe you should.
Why? In technical writing, the only mechanism available for conveying exact
phrases is the quote mark. However, obeying the rules of the language leaves us
with ambiguous instructions:
Unless you type "disarm," without typos, the nuke will detonate.
Well, do you type the comma or don't you?
-rbarry
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