Restoration • YEA!

As you know (or can find out by clicking upon "Rotten Apple Explained" on the right-hand sidebar. See it?) a massive number of my blog's images were deleted as a result of the caprice of Apple, Inc. Sigh. Well anyway... I'm slowly but surely restoring hundreds and hundreds of postings and doing it by portfolios. So... I hope that you'll visit them as the come back on line by clicking on the appropriate portfolio there on the right-hand sidebar as they appear.

It's a lot of work gang! And I will really be in your debt if you'll visit some of them and let me know if all is coming into place? And of course, new comments on particular postings will especially warm my heart.

Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks... Thanks...

Ted

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FALL COMES TO EAST DENNIS


THERE'S A PROBLEM
WITH FALL
IT LACKS
A HAPPY ENDING....

Anniversary Today

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On September 10, 2006 I launched ImageFiction. And I am not home today... nowhere near my images. So... so... since Apple managed to lose my original, first-ever, post... (See Rotten Apple Explained over there on the right)... I thought you might like, as much as I liked, "Heavy On Metal". Y'know, I'm still reeeeeely proud of this. Happy anniversary to me.. Tah-Dah!

WHY THIS BLOG IS A MESS!

It's said that Steve Jobs has a life view that goes, "I'll like you until I don't." And as Adobe knows, it is not good to have Steve fall out of like with you.

Well, sometimes, and they aren't often, I find my like for Apple is not unconditional.

This blog is a mess right now. If you scroll backward you will quickly notice that hundreds of postings are now missing. Why? I subscribed to a .Mac and for my money received a website service. You can find what is left of it by CLICKING HERE!

And you will see that you can page through scores of empty URLs. All of the graphics have been trashed by Apple!

Yes, they warned me that they would no longer allow postings to that site when they arbitrarily notified users that they were ending the service. BUT... they also wrote that posted graphics would remain. And then after about a year of supporting those postings, WUMP! They dumped all of the graphics.

And mostly all of the postings on this blogspot prior to a few months ago were linked from those postings on hompage.mac.com/byrneprintmaker. And without those links, all of those graphics here on ImageFiction, were extinguished.

Do I have backups? Sure. But... to replace the broken links, I shall have to tediously go to each of the previous postings, figure out what the linked graphics were named, Find them among my old files. And then reload them... one at a time. It will take countless hours.

I'll try slowly to replace some of my favorites, but I fear that visitors to this blog will not graze page, after back page, to find the few that I repost. Nope, unless I do them all, or develop some alternative system... all of that work is gone with the Apple.

And so, in spite of the many things that Apple has done to make me like them... I am falling out of like. Sigh.....

And I guess the moral here is, if you can't trust Apple to protect a service that they charge you for... How much faith should you put in any of the "cloud" services which promise to store your valuable backups?

To see what I've fixed look at the ROTTEN APPLE - REPAIRED POSTS FROM THE PAST link on the right hand column. I will try to slowly add my favorites over there.

Rondo

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Art has to be something more than a perpetually running nostalgia machine. Sometimes it's got to go places that weren't where our memories are.

Here's what I mean.

Have you ever noticed that an abrupt odor... a scent... transports you back to a perfect journey into the past? So many images, particularly photographic based images, rely upon us feeling as if we've been there, or could have been there. And it's by stringing together those common pieces of memory that the artist makes us go, "Wow!" And it happens even if we've never actually been there, but we agree to suspend disbelief and agree that, well, we could have been. The artist plays upon our nostalgia for somewhere we never were.

This time I want to not do that.

Instead I want to take you into a design made up of people... going round and round, like a corkscrew into somewhere below. I want it to be all strangeness except for the movement. The sense of tight spaces. The feeling of moving from light to dark. I want to take you into a tunnel from day to a place that doesn't sleep.
In the city that doesn't either.

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Here's the virgin image directly from the card of my new Canon 40D.

Semi-Bummed

Got my MacBookPro back from Apple repair today. Yeah, it was yet another Seagate drive that crashed destroying all data upon it. When I bought the first machine the Seagate drive was 120 G, the second time that drive was replaced after spectacular crashes Apple gave me a new MacBookPro with 150G hard drive. That's the one that crashed this week and the replacement drive is NOT a Seagate!!! It is a 200G Hitachi (Yea!). The new 200G drives are no longer maed by Seagate. Looking at the results when I Google (Seagate +MacBook Pro +malfunction) well the evidence is grim. The Seagate drive seems to have a design fault.

But even so, I must be the unluckiest user in the world having three of those things crash on me since last October. Of course I lost all of my data including two graphic files that you can see here... one of the Pigeon Point lighthouse and the other of the way-cool Muscle Worker. Sigh... These jpgs are all that remain. I work in a very large space at 270dpi. It is not unusual when a finished file approaches a gig in size. I do that so I can eventually have the option of printing the image VERY LARGE. That will never happen now with those files. No way I will try to recreate them. Sigh.

Apple has been very supportive during all of these problems. Their repairs have taken two or three days at most (except for the new machine they swapped me for the old one... that had to come from China and took about a week). The biggest problem is in rebuilding all of the data. I hope I can do it over the course of this weekend.

So, while I am less bummed now that I have the machine back with a new and larger drive, I remain semi-bummed by the work I have to do, the data I lost, and the fact that I cannot really ever trust this machine again.

Your thoughts?

DAY THREE: Computo Reviso

Sigh... Spent lots of last night reading a book on .Mac and getting fuzzy headed. Why was I reading it? Well aside from getting a rush from being fuzzy headed, the new machine and my current .Mac settings appeared incompatible. So I now know lots of things about .Mac that I will never need again, but that part of my repair and reload is finished but more remain. I hope that by the weekend this will all end and that this new MacBookPro will be vastly more efficient for me than the old one. However... once again I have not had enough brain power left to focus upon my image making.

Sorry... Hope that by Saturday... hope hope hope... I shall yet again feel and be graphically creative.

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Did you ever wander around in a florist shop at the very end of Valentine's Day? Just before closing when the setting sun bathed the remaining corpses?

DAY TWO: ComputoReviso

As explained yesterday, Apple replaced my defective 14 month old MacBookPro with a brand new, top of the line, machine. It arrived yesterday and during my non-working hours I am teaching it to dance, sing, and think. In most ways one can sense it is very similar to my old machine (which must be sent back to Apple in 29 days or else one of my credit cards takes a humongous hit) so while it's exciting to have brand new machine (fresh off the assembly line in Shanghai) there isn't quite the same rush you get when you unbox a toy that's stuffed full-up with new geegaws, flashies, and thunder thingees.

This is NOT a complaint. The thing is faster (2.16 to 2.4), it's got a bigger hard drive(120G to 160G), and twice the RAM (1Gig to 2 Gig). The old machine's memory maxed out at 2gig, this one will accept up to 4, and given my graphic needs, this should also reduce rendering time. While the improvements are marginal, they're nice. Oh yeah, it also comes with Mac's new OS: Leopard. What's most important is that I shall be able to trust that the disk drive won't go defective losing everything on it and necessitating yet another trip to Macintosh and the time it takes to rebuild everything.

Of course that's what I am doing now, rebuilding the new laptop from the old. Which consumed last night and will probably consume tonight. It also means that I'll probably need to buy a book on Leopard since no manuals come with op systems today. And that means yet an additional learning curve.

Hope to be back uploading images tomorrow, but I'm a tad worried that life is intruding on my photography. Darn. Stop back for the latest news.... K?

New Computer Came!

If you will recall my rant back on January 25th over my MacBook Pro's capricious tendencies to break? You might recall my whining about Apple's reluctance to replace the machine even after two disk drive replacements by them in 90 days (click on the keyword "Apple" below)? Well again this month the thing began crashing and this time Mac agreed to replace it with the new, top of the line 17" MacBook Pro. Yippee. They didn't have to do that. I offered to pay for the difference between the value of my defective one year old machine and the new model. They insisted, and of course I reluctantly accepted a faster processor and a larger disk drive plus double the ram all running on Mac's new OS, Leopard. I'm easy.

So, while the process took a while, I'm pleased to say that my twenty some years of using MacIntosh machines exclusively will continue into the future. And now I'm pricing a new MacPro to replace this massive G4 I'm typing on now. Thats a couple of months of though (and hopefully some of my photography sales will subsidize that purchase).

But tonight and tomorrow I'm going to be working on the new machine that's just arrived today from Shanghai. So, I suspect I shall not post again until Thursday. It's too much fun to play with the new laptop and... and.... WHEEEEEEEEE!

Evidence?

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Bogan peered at the fading image from the box and again tasted the stink of cigarette smoke and spilt beer. He recalled that Yosarian in his white shirt and apron muttered something in a spitting language and jerked from the camera with a movement so quick it was no movement at all. Yet that woman didn’t seem any more bothered by the lens than a stone by a creek.

“Yeah,” Bogan muttered recalling that while she wasn’t beautiful, not even pretty, that she looked as if things would happen anywhere she was. And where she was that night twenty years back was Pulaski’s Saloon. He remembered she shook his hand. “Clammy hands,” he frowned and recalled thinking “clammy hands and people who own them make me edgy.”

And while he scanned it for fresh clues, seeing the picture again brought Bogan back there to that spot instants before Pulaski’s got leveled by the bomb.

DAMN!!!

I have just discovered something disconcerting. Last week my MacBook Pro crashed for the second time in ninety days. Apple placed yet another hard drive into it (even though I offered to pay the difference between the second hand value of this 1 year old machine and the present model) and in all of the time it took to get it reconfigured (or once again configured) I prepared the image above on that machine. OOOOPS. I only just discovered how terribly out of calibration the reconditioned MacBook is.

The image I now see is nowhere near what I intended. I guess I should take it down. I lack the time or energy to begin it again from scratch (since minor tinkering won't fix it) and I apologize to everyone for posting it in this shape. In the past I frequently composed images on that machine which has a 17" monitor capable of high quality graphics. I have just recalibrated it and can understand how far this... and the image I posted of Grand Central Station last night are from my standards. AAAARGH!

Pity.... Lemme think upon removing it. If it disappears, you will know why... OK?

CRAAASH!

Earlier this week I wrote about my MacBook Pro crashing for the second time in about 90 days. Once again the internal Seagate HD experienced a catastrophic crash. The first time this happened I was in Florence, Italy - but I'd backed everything up meticulously. Still it was messy and took endless hours first working through diagnostics with Apple on the phone (it's a fairly new machine and under full warranty), then I sent it in, got it back and spent the best part of a day reconfiguring everything.

When it happened again this week I was unhappy... very very very .... unhappy. On the phone with Apple, I first requested a new machine. They refused. I then offered to pay the difference between the used price of my machine (a 17" MacBook Pro - BTW) and the latest model. After all, I could have received that used machine price if it had not crashed as a result of their problem.

They refused and wanted to begin the telephone diagnostics again. I refused. They then asked that I schedule an appointment at a distant Apple Store with a 'genius'. I refused and demanded they send out a box. They did. They also promised that they would replace the entire machine if it went down again.

It was gone from Monday until Wednesday while they once again discovered the toasted HD and put in another Seagate. But I cannot put aside the necessary hours until tomorrow to retro fit everything on it.

Oh... this time I had NOT backed up key data. I lost two folders. One involved interview notes for an article which I cannot reschedule (I am a writer and a magazine editor). The article is lost. The other involved an equally important set of notes for a marketing program I am constructing. It is also lost.

I have first to copy all of my key info from my home MacPro to the laptop. That puts both machines out of service until the procedure is finished. It took several hours last time. I've started that process, but I suspect that I shall have no useful computers when I arrive home, nor will they be usable tonight. So.... NO POST here today. Damn!

I'm doing this post on my Mac Mini here at my business office. Hopefully all will be fixed in time to do a post here at ImageFiction tomorrow (Saturday).

Still, the whole thing has me spooked about trusting my laptop again. Apple apparently has a quality control problem. Others have complained about this Seagate drive but neither Seagate nor Apple will admit to a problem.

Warning, if you want top-of-the-line cutting-edge performance... buy a Dell or an HP... you'll save a lot of money and gain confidence if you avoid Apple's best laptop machine.

Ted

Fabulous Fotos - NOT!

To Everyone Whose Sites I Normally Visit: My MacBook Pro has crashed and will be gone for a week to the Macintosh repair shop. I do my site visits on that machine while I am near to wife/friends/people. I do my images up here alone on my "good" machine. So.. I hope until the laptop returns, you will forgive my absence from popping around?

And now for the rant-of-the-day...

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HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! - when I do this. See this perfectly exposed night time shot? See that it's perfectly framed? Perfectly colored? See the perfect reflection shimmering across the Tiber in down-town Rome? See how the composition is a textbook square? With textbook inner framing of the leaves? See how the mass of the boat in the lower left just balances what I think is Hadrian's tomb lit against the night-time sky? See how controlled, how .... how... perfect, perfect, perfect every little detail, including the color palette is?

And now see that it adds absolutely nothing to our package of ideas? The feeling's been captured a zillion times by anyone passing this point with an Instimatic. GRUMBLE!!!!

So why the hell did I waste my time taking this thing? And I've got dozens and dozens of images like this on my Italian discs. Why do we feel a compulsion to repeat what others have done at least as well? I could have walked forty feet to a tourist store and bought dozens of postcards with this view. Why is it that our own imagination becomes stunted at moments like this? All that I saw was what others saw more times than your Hollywood star goes to rehab.

I'll tell you why... Because our imagination leaves us at these moments. It's as if a mass of photographic ghosts suddenly SCREEEECH all together with such din that they overwhelm our own ideas and feelings. It makes me want to cover my ears and scream...

Instead... I take their picture rather than my own, and come home and grumble.....

The moral: When it isn't your idea in the viewfinder - Don't trigger the shutter.