September 2002 Archives

There will be another street fair here on Broadway today. There will be the generic corn stand, the cheap underwear stand, the bedding stand, the bonsai stand, the fruit mix makers. I hope that the stage with the performers will not face our windows again. Having the best seats in the house is not always a good thing.

Walter Smith takes quite exceptional pictures, and seems to shoot some interesting moving pictures as well, but somehow all his skill is devoured by the interface of his flash driven site. The design looks really great, I like the little arrow, and I also like that the way the typography cuts into the random cover images once the user finds out how to activate the popup. The user also soon finds out that moving the mouse to the left or to the right triggers subsections of the site (Print or Photo). It all feels very much like a fun interface at first, but then the pictures that pop up are so tiny, the sections jump, the logic of the interface feels puzzling. Oh. I think I am going to maybe request a portfolio, just to look at the images in person, on paper, human size.
Or is it me? Is the site navigation actually great? Am I not intelligent enough to see the brilliance of the information architecture? Tell me.

On my daily exploration for a client, I came across the site of Karen Melvin, a photographer from Minneapolis. I like how her site works, how the rollovers work, what the site makes me do. The creators of this site are VO2 Media. Their site also feels pretty smooth and good. And I actually really like this tiny toy in their game section. Such a simple little thing. Just thought it would be nice to share both sites with you.

the New Yorker, of course... oh and, of course, relationships. Noah Baumbach brings them all together in his current Shouts and Murmurs piece. It is the Zagat history of his last relationship. The next piece could be a play with a similar theme, based on New York real estate ads. (I am not kidding, this would really be a nice piece to write, no?)...

A team from the Kyoto University researched the secrets of the most famous Zen Gardens in the world, at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. This BBC NEWS-Article tells more about the results. You could read it. Or not.

Where were we when Marko Lukovic designed his sweet little MOONSTER. Yes, please, I would like this car.

Wow, just pressed this wrong button here on the keyborad and all that was published was The title of this post as well at the link to the site of (the one and only, wickedly smart and funny): Todd Levin. So what might have looked like the announcement of some twisted event for all of you who can not wait and just click on any link that pops up on weblogs or movabletype.org was in fact supposed to be the announcement of Todd’s show tonight. (There will be others performing too, but there will also be other people in the audience, not just you, so relax.) I am just going to quote Todd this time, because I have to fix this dangerous post here. He also says it much better than me. Here we go:

boyakasha!

i love you to (accidental) death,
.todd

As for the softly blown i love you to (accidental) death, kiss, this is an announcement he sent to several people (among them fans, groupies, and influential publishers). He is neither the one who sent the flying SUV to get me in the middle of the night, nor is Todd (or I..., I think..., as far as I know...) gay. (But, who knows? and does it matter? Aaaargh... self censorship is suicide.)...

How could one not enjoy this real gem of an opinion article by Maureen Dowd. No More Bratwurst! (For the readers who see this post out of context. The author of this blog is a Polish born German citizen who is now a legal permanent resident of the United States, New York City to be precise...) I really like this article... it feels like straight from a blog, doesn’t it... well, ok, a very well educated blog. :) thank you for the “link”, Brad.

We are most definitely related, really. We will never find out if really or how. Maybe we will, there are people out there who might be working on it right now. My far away relative found me at the subway station. Something made her return to the 96th Street station and there she found me. Sarah is definitely a relative, very far removed, of course. I can not reveal why we are related, because it would be giving away more than Sarah was willing to disclose on her site. I am really glad she found me though... through this blog, through NYC Bloggers, through the web, through Manhattan.
Stuka v1.2 [is calming down a bit], at least at the moment.
New York is a small town after all, isn’t it?
Oh, and boys, no weird tricks please, or Luke and I will kick you harder than you might have ever wished for. It’s family, ya know.

The new gallery season is here. New York, are you ready? Tyler Green posted a very extensive listing of shows to happen this fall in New York. Get ready for a great listing of NYC Galleries, and their Fall 2002 shows. How could one not love New York?

The new New York Neighborhood statistics are out. It looks like we live in a pretty happy place. Only three murders in the year 2002. Now that’s not so bad. Take a look. My Neighborhood Statistics - Mapping

Brad Jacobson, a writer I work with on a current project pointed me towards a site made by a friend. Eugene Kuo traveled to China, for the spring and the summer of this year and he created a personal flash site, recording his experiences. The site is really breathtaking. Many of the photographs are stunning, incredible shots. The site navigation, the information architecture is one of the best stuff I have seen in a long time. Not only was I always aware of where Eugene was at the time of his journal entry, I also always knew where I was on the site. There are hundreds of images to see here, but the navigation through them is easy, straight forward and still gave me some sense of exploration. All viewed images become marked once viewed. (The marks are lost however once the user leaves the chapter.) I wish it were possible to put together my own little album containing some of the images I have seen on the site, or to bookmark some of them, or send them to friends, basically to make a little recording of my own virtual journey through the China as seen through Eugene Kuo’s eyes. But this is not the point. The site is a travelogue, not a precooked online experience. It is one of the best travelogues I have seen online. You should definitely take your time and explore: Three Months in China, a travelogue by Eugene Kuo. (Flash five is required to view the site and a fast connection is recommended.)

the sky is pink. The western sky is pink. Bright and glowing band of pink sky. Right in the middle of the blue. How can it be? The sun is rising in the east, behind us, and here it is. The band of brightly lit saturated sky.

i was getting toilet paper from the supermarket... where else would i go out to get toilet paper this late at night?...
As i was returning, on the corner of 96th and broadway ... screeching breaks... HIT i turn around and about 10 yards behind me, maybe less a Ford Explorer, a large SUV flies through the air and hits a phone booth with its roof. The driver climbed out of the window... The SUV seemed to be on fire at first, the entire area is now blocked off. There are four fire engines.
The ford was hit from the side by a “shelter express” delivery van. Firefighters are working on the SUV. The driver of the van is being taken out on a stretcher. Had I been on my way just 2 seconds later, I would now probably be dead now, Hit by a large flying SUV...in Manhattan in the middle of the night...clutching to a 12 pack of toilet paper jumbo double rolls. (not the prettiest exit.)

Did you just come here a few minutes ago and the page just did not want to load? Was there a strange delay for you?
it was my fault. I had changed the preferences of the main index display to show 10 instead of 7 days. No big change really, right? What I did not realize was that Internet Explorer filled in the “missing” numbers for me. So instead of 10, which I thought I had eneterd into the little window, I enetered my zipcode, which is 10025. Now my entire blog, about 850 posts were being rendered to one single page. No wonder it took so long to download. All is fixed now. Page loads fine. Enjoy.
(I just tried a print preview of the one page version of the blog. When printed on letter size paper, this blog is now 249 pages long. I need to write longer posts. I currently have almost 4 posts per printed page. Talking about short attention span writing...)
Oh, wait, this post will be as short as most of the other ones. Should I write more? Add more atmosphere to it? Let the fall into the room through an almost closed door? Let the sounds of the television set and the conversations of my parents enter my dark room? Should there be shadows on the walls?, Moving objects, animals, people, plants?...
Maybe some other time. : )

There was a young writer in the station this morning. She had a little spiral bound book into which she wrote with the tiniest of handwritings. She was secretive about the writing itself, but her eyes would scan the station for even the sest movement. She was a very intense observer. I sat next to her and skimmed the paper. I had just missed my local train as well as the express which I could have taken to 72nd street to catch up with the local. All I could do now was to wait. She made little drawings into the book too. The book was used intensely and somehow was an extension of her now. I wondered if the style of her handwriting revealed something about her personality. She was probably the perfect quiet observer.
The train was packed. She entered the train through a different door. A very well dressed man sitting in front of me reached for his calendar in his attache. On the inside of his bag was his business card. He was the Europe correspondent for a major Newspaper. He probably was what she would one day become, a successful observer, a reporter, a correspondent. He opened his little book and the pages were filled with almost the identical handwriting that I had just seen in the book on the subway platform.
I had to move to the side, the blind man with his harmonica made his way through this can of sardines which was the 1 train to Brooklyn. Most of us spilled out on 50th street. I think the young writer and observer left in the same station. Midtown is where the publishing houses are. I wish her all the luck... and really intriguing observations.

Not even quite sure in which direction we were flying at that time. I think we were returning from the westcost already. Moni Friebe and Alex Oppermann, the founders of Stardax, later Arosa 2000, later saasfee and I drove all the way from Toronto to the westcoast. It was a very strange trip. There was plenty of hate to go around. I will not say more. I think I told them in Detroit that I never wanted to travel with them again.
Hmm... I only have a blue version of this photograph here. I think I used it as a desktop background once. The original is now lost, I think. I first scanned the picture when working on the promotion of the first generation of PhotoCDs at Kodak headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. But this is yet another story. Click to enlarge.

Christa’s blog is one of my favorite places on the web. I am surprised that her posts do not start wild discussions. Her style is witty, the posts are about the real kind of life we all would like to have, she writes in an honest, real, great way. Go over to Christa’s, read some of her bloggings and leave some comments (leave a mark). You know you can.
And now the call to action >>>Click Here!
(Just remember to come back. I will keep on blogging too, you know...)

West Nile Virus / Mosquitoes. Be careful kids. (And you too, grandma.)

It feels like a bit of a miracle, really. The whole story really started with this tiny Jade plant, in a tiny pot, maybe three inches in diameter. She is about 4 years old now and around 21 inches tall. I can not really measure her correctly, because she is busy growing and winding and intertwining. And she has kids now too. In January I cut of seven of her branches, because they were just really out of control. Five of the branches are now very independent little plants. It is really an odd thing to say, but they all have developed personalities. They are all from the same mother tree, they all sit by the same window, and yet each one of them is different. There is the perfect one. It is not too big, not too small, just perfectly a shaped little plant, with one main stem and a little branch, there is the sly bolder one, still small, but with three branches now, all in a bright and happy spring green. We have the medium leaner, she is the one with red rimmed leaves and she is shy and likes to hug the ground. There is the big one, already 10 inches tall, but only because held up by chopsticks. The tallest one got the biggest pot too, so I have the feeling that it would really like to outgrow the mother now. The fifth little Jade tree is the tiny one, it is closest to the mother and it grows slowly and barely grows at all. It seems shy and the leaves are smaller, darker, but not as vigorous. I know this all sounds a bit ridiculous, of course, looking at my description it seems I am writing about children, not Jade plants.
And the ?garden? does not end with the jade plants. I salvaged this almost dead little plant a year and a half or so ago from the office. It was somewhere in a dark corner under somebody?s desk. It had 8 leaves maybe, all really pathetic, hanging off the sides of the pot. People were laughing at me when they saw me on the train with this thing. It was really a sad image. I gave the plant the standart rejuvenation treatment, by leaving it under running water for 20 minutes or so. She also has seven children now, and also keeps developing these really long stems with flowers, which end with new plants. I have to keep her from going int the pots of the other plants. Her current stem is 33 inches long. Three feet, seven branches. I really started cutting these down, because it was all out of control.
There were two other visitors I had to cut down completely. One of them was a large plant that just plantet itself in one of the pots and grew to almost a yard in size. She then started throwing these little black seeds all over the place. She had to go. Another visitor that I am currently in the process of removing is this really strong grass that just grew out on the side of one of the jade plants. It took the grass about a week or two to be about two feet tall and to drain most of the water from the jade plant. (The crawling one, with the red rims.) So I cut down the grass, which was a very sharp edged, but sweet tasting grass. (Wheat grass?) And it just does not want to give up. Even after the second cutting down, there are shoots that keep coming back. I have the feeling I will need to give it its own pot and just harvest it now and then. I will need to buy some potting soil anyway, just for mr.Potato. Yes, this one is a funniest of the stories. Somebody had dropped a potato in the Amish market on 50th street and 9th Avenue. The cashier had kept the potato by her register, so she can throw it out by the end of the day. I asked her if I can have it, just to have a little pet experiment in our overly air conditioned and windowless office. I put potato into one of my drawers and just left him there. After about a month or so it was time for us to move and now I could have just tossed Mr.Potato and moved on, but he really was a survivor. He managed to grow about 22 or so white shoots and attached to these are little round objects that almost look like little potatoes. I could not just throw him out. I took him home in a plastic bag. He now lives by the window in a flat dish with some water. Some of the shoots are slowly turning green in places and I have the feeling that I will need to emerge him in soil soon, so he can turn into a grown up plant.
The reason I started even writing this post is a plant that managed to grow in the pot with my tallest young jade tree. I know that it must really strange if I say that a 12 inch plant could have grown unnoticed, but it has. I have no idea when it got so big. I discovered it yesterday. It is a long (12 inches) red-blueish stem, with six relatively large leaves at the top. (more developing) and a tiny leaf about half way on the stem. I was not quite sure what it was at first, and then I remembered that I once had put this Avocado seed into the soil. It was so beautiful, I did not want to throw it out. It was also big and so I thought that it might be a nice addition to the soil in the big pot of the large young jade plant. I just pressed the seed into the soil, covered it with two large fallen off Jade leaves and completely forgot about it. The plant is not in the shade, it is not in the right potting soil, but (knocks on wood) it is somehow growing. I will need to find a new place for it perhaps, I just do not want to disturb it in any way now. Let?s see what develops. (I just read this, and it seems that the tree grew against all odds so far.
This is truly a garden of wonder I have here by my window. And I have not even mentioned some of the plants. I really thought that I have a great talent in killing plants. I certainly do not have a green thumb.

And this story continues

Courtney Shanks was this incredibly passionate producer on our Powerade account, back in the day. She is one of the coolest people one could possibly meet. Such a honestly good heart from Kansas. I assumed that she had moved there, actually, her and her brother. I knew for sure that she had left the whole interactive, online, party like it’s 1999 world.
And she has. She went back to Kansas, it seems, but she came back, with her brother, and now they opened this cute little store which I still have to visit. It is called Rejoice!
(For our non native speakers, here a definition of the word: VERB:
1. To show joyful satisfaction in an event, especially by merrymaking: celebrate, revel. Idioms: kill the fatted calf, make merry. See LAUGHTER. 2. To feel or take joy or pleasure: de, exult, joy, pleasure. See HAPPY.
not sure about the calf.)
The illustration for the logo is by Jeff Davis.
Yippiee...
(their website does not work just yet, but this will certainly change.)

1. Would you say that you're good at keeping in touch with people?

Hmm, it really depends. No, I am bad. I am really bad about keeping in touch with people. I am bad in keeping in touch with myself sometimes. We sometimes do not see each other for years, and then things just pick up where we left them and things are good.
So while it might seem impossible to be in touch with me at all times, I am still very much connected… spiritually. You might think that I forgot your birthday, but this smile you had on your face all day, that was me thinking of you very intensely, just not being able to send that card I wanted to send for a month or so before your birthday came up. I admit it. I have a problem. (One more.)

2. Which communication method do you usually prefer/use: e-mail, telephone, snail mail, blog comments, or meeting in person? Why?

In person is naturally best. Nothing beats the real in person conversation. I usually adapt to whatever is possible. I spend a serious portion of my day replying to emails. Emails are now my main form of communication with the people I care about.
My answering machine at work barely gets a call anymore. I do not like to pick up the messages anymore either.
Blog, yes, blog does work for me. I write comments into some blogs with quite a great amount of love wrapped around every word. (It sometimes does not show, of course.)
Meeting in person is king.

3. Do you have an instant messenger program? How many? Why/why not? How often do you use it?

I use iChat. (Which is compatible with AOL instant messenger.) And I actually left in the bubbles (it comes with bubbles look!). I make little pictures for my buddies and this way chats feel like mini icon parties.
I leave iChat on sometimes during the day. If you would like to chat with me, my AIM is witold212. Now you know it.

4. Do most of your close friends live nearby or far away?

Well, some live just a trainride away. (Or a click.) and some are across the ocean.

5. Are you an "out of sight, out of mind" person, or do you believe that "distance makes the heart grow fonder"?

Distance makes the heart grow fonder. If we were friends once in our lives, we are very likely to stay friends. At least I will not forget you. I know this is not what this question means, I just had to say it. I am a Sagittarius. They say that those born under this sign tend to be able to have their heart (also the friendship heart) targeted at somebody who can be really out of sight. Our sign is the sign of an arrow shooting centaur. I think that says it all.

Tomorrow, when this week ends, I will step off the Subway, (we do not use planes too much within Manhattan) and I will kiss the ground. This was a week on the harsh side. It contained hours and hours of workworkwork. I will be so happy when this is all turned into a weekend. When I can rest a little and maybe finally get to the projects I should be working on. There are many, and they are great. I just do not want to give it all away. That would not be too much fun now, would it? You would probably be disappointed, maybe angry, sad, (insert feeling here).
So I will keep quiet, work like a little buzzybee and then once we are through the production cycle, we will all look around us and will not quite remember what it was all like before. This might happen.
And I will probably not really kiss the ground. I will probably kiss the pillow I will sleep on. Some dreams just make a man do that.
Oh, what a week.

Another quieter moment on television. It’s ooooh sooooo quiet.listen to this, my dear. (Thank you for the link, T.)

It turns out that my hosting plan comes with a free forum software setup thingy. Not sure how to describe it better. It is a bit like waferbabyfor everyone (who hosts with aletia). I am currently spending my days and nights at the office and do not get anything done beyond that, but chris managed to turn the key on his new low resolution forum. It is a cute little forum, with a few topics (YOU can change that, by making it big and with many topics!). Right now the forum is called low rez, but it is more of a low attendance numbers. There are three members so far. Two active. I could basically call up Chris and tell him all about it (if I finally managed to remember his number.) I am going to sleep now, but you, yes you, should go to the low resolution forum and join the discussion, or start the discussion. Do something dramatic, come out of the closet, tell the world that you like me. (do you?) It is all allowed. Chris will let you say whatever is there to say. He is cool like that. Cheers. (boy, am I tired)

I just stuck a pin into a soft wall. It felt really nice.

There is an article in this morning’s New York Times describing a very interesting piece of real estate: 3 Bedrooms, 3 Baths (the Missile's Extra). The underground building used to be a missile silo and is now being offered on eBay as The Most Unique Real Estate In The World. Feels a bit like Tora Bora, NY.

I looked so tired today that the man at the starbucks counter told me that he put an extra shot into my latte, just to help me wake up. I am focused on work, I do not really leave the building. I do not really leave my desk. I am focused before a deadline. Now a second deadline, parallel to the first one. I am focused on the work. My project will end in a few weeks. We will then go to the westcoast to hug some 2000 year old trees. I see less, I am focused, I think less, I am focused. The world around me went dark for a split second this evening. I have not been moving much all day long. Just my left index finger kept clicking away. Worked on 26 Photoshop files at once. Synchronizing items. Had the idea that they could be linked across documents. Thought of numeric controls in Photoshop.
Had a photograph of me taken today. Grant Collier will paint a portrait based on the photograph he took of me today. Maybe he will. Maybe.
My eyes are telling me that it might be time to close them. They are quite clear about it. Quite clear. I will close them for the night and see what worlds I will discover with closed eyes and a brain that spent the day looking at the pointer in Photoshop and listening to an online radio station.
There is a serious presentation on Thursday. I will try to have a smooth f through work until then. Backed up some work onto the server. Just to sleep easier. There will be changes, there will be changes. I have been doing this for 13 years now. I am relaxed about my work. I still take my clients very seriously.
And now... sleep. good night. : )

Two tiny little magazines. Just the way I like them.
tiger magazine (Thank you for the link, K) and This is a Magazine (yes indeed.) (Thank you for the link J and M.)
Sweet work. We will contribute.

Michael Dodt just sent me t a link to this very interesting project by Priam Givord and Martin Lenclos. The movies presented on this site are 3D environments that were assembled from photographs taken in New York city. The results are very familiar and completely new at the same time. The installation is interactive, the presentation here are flythroughs. Fascinating work, take a look at: NEWYORKEXITNEWYORKENGLISH

It was a short weekend in Connecticut. hmm. It is not all Martha Stewart up there. Slow recovery.

hmm... Just thinking.

I saw velvety photographs today. They were exactly what I was hoping to find. I have the feeling that this might be a perfect solution for an idea I had for quite some time now. Something very exciting might be straight ahead. Let’s knock on wood.

I saw a lot of this in the last few days. So, for future reference, I will try to remember this.

What is going on? How can all these things be happening all at once? Current status of my adventures with Jaguar.
I have one G3 Tower in coma. It contains most of my crucial information, but does not want to come back to live.
I have a powerbook that has only a barebone version of osX Jaguar installed on it. I had to reformat the drive several times, had to remove RAM, I had a dead keyboard, I saw icone of osX I never thought I would see. I saw flicker and I saw various screens of death. I was ready to send the Mac back to Apple, and to send my drive back to IBM, I was ready to send my memory to transITL, or other world computing, and I was actually ready to just go completely analogue again.
But now I aw writing this, tired, barely able to see the screen of the powerbook.
I will go to sleep now. I am not sure what might have caused this whole trip to computer hell. I was able to extract a little piece of metall, that could have caused some problems with the memory. It is one of these cute little spring pieces that make sure the heatsink over the motherboard sits there correctly. The heat must have loosened the glue. THe thing might have touched some part it was not supposed to... This sounds a bit too out there though.
I still do not trust this peace in the machine. I will report more.
Right now... the only thing i can think of is sleep.

More info on my new found “friend” Darwin. (He is the guy who works under the sink in the Mac OSX. (They should just rename the thing to ESX. THis is what they mean anyway, don’t they?)

It all started off in a very harmless way. My PowerBook told me that it was running out of Battery power and that it would go to sleep soon. I closed the lid, I put it away. I was happy that it lasted for around 9 hours (not continous). I did not think too much about it. Then later, much later, at home, the PowerBook did not want to up anymore. It was plugged in at that point and I was just wondering about this barely visible text box that appeared in the center of the otherwise dark screen. Was it some important information burned in? Was the screen not off after all? I held the power button for several seconds and the mac shut down.
I restarted, and all I saw for the next 4 minutes or so, was a gray screen with a spinning clock thingy. Then the computer restarted again. Again gray Apple, the Aqua interface came to life, the entire familiar startup process went through, the desktop was ready to launch.
All that came up was a black screen with a brief greeting. Darwin.
>login:
I entered what I thought was my username, my password, but Darwin would not let me in. (I realized this morning that i was using the wrong username, so it is actually possible to log in at that point...)
What was there to do?
I restarted. This time the entire system came on. Everything seemed to be fine, I could log onto my home server, I took a file from the server and opened it with Photoshop and ... The screen dimmed. In the center of my Digital lifestyle was a box in 4.5 Languages.
Something like: “You have to turn off your computer now, please hold down the power key for several seconds.”, and then again in French, in German, in Japanese, and FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:
I was basically FF:d
I got to see the screen several times last night. It would just pop up randomly, while I was doing something or about to do something.
I tried the Disk Tools that came with Jaguar and they were very happy to point out that:
Verifying disk "xbox".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 431788)
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195555 instead of 195556)
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195556 instead of 195555)
The volume xbox needs to be repaired.
Verify completed.
I could not repair the disk from this point of view, because it was my startup disk, so, what shall a Mac User do? Startup in OS9.2.2. You wish.
The screen just went gray and remained so, until I restarted.
So I used the Jaguar CD to run Disk tools. And Disktools was able to repair the disk. Or so it seemed. A verification of the repair gave me the following report:
Verifying disk "xbox".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 431788)
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195555 instead of 195556)
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 195556 instead of 195555)
The volume xbox needs to be repaired.
Verify completed.
Yes, same as above.... Take a look at the number of files. The number of files is off by one. One file too little, one file too much. An endless circle.
So, what was left to do but to back up all of my crucial data to my recently created home server. (Remember, I created a backup system, when my PowerBook died a few weeks ago.)
I filled the drives on my G3Tower with all the information that fit on them, moved Gigabytes of Pictures from my PowerBook to the Basestation, via firewire, until even this process crashed, bringing down my G3 Tower. Now the tower would just come up with a white screen with a non blinking cursor.
(I was getting used to the Error Can’t open message of the SCSI card.)
I reinstalled the OS. (It took several attempts again, because the OS would not install on the machine, unless I removed the SCSI card. Once up and running, the card is recognized and works perfectly fine.
Plan for tonight:
1. Finish and confirm all backup of data.
2. Format and Install a fresh version of Jaguar on the PowerBook.
3. Bring back all the data. (Except maybe for the photographs, which might be happier on a server.)
4. Order a large backup drive. (I currently have to spread the data onto 5 drives and partitions.)
5. NEVER let the PowerBook run out of battery power while in osX.
6. Reply to all the emails I was not able to reply to in the last few days.

The wind is so strong in New York today, it is as if thousands and thousands of Souls were rushing through the streets, trying to touch everyone, all at once. To twirl their hair, to tear on their clothes, to let them know that life does not end where we think it does.

... a year...

There is an entire section in the New York Times today, devoted to the events of 9/11/2001. A Nation Challenged One Year Later.
I hoped that they would not use the page to sell anything. And at first sight there is only a banner for Project Libery, a help line for those who still suffer from the events emotionally.
When we scroll below the fold, however, there is a link to the Shop. Portraits of Grief for $30, or 4 for $100. I know that they are not about to give these books away, (They actually make the information available not far above the ad.) but does everything have to be used to make a buck?
Sad.

There is a series of photographs in a special online edition of the New York Times today. Take a look at Above Lower Manhattan by Vincent Laforet.

A Full band of Bag pipers just walked by the window walking slowly towards ground zero. They started their march at 1AM in the Bronx.
They were accompanied by several fire trucks, a flag bearer, and hundreds of people.

Sunset was at 7:13PM today, but the sky is still excited, the clouds still glow in shades of pink and orange and purple. Simply spectacular.
THe boy across Broadway is back in the quickly zooming world of his videogame.
The family who lived there before used to have a child who loved Elmo. There would be a large red head on their TV throughout the evening.
I blog. Parallel realities.

The city just turned from a dark, deep, leathery brown, into bronze into a golden shade of honey. The sun will come out in just a few minutes and wake up the entire palette of colors, one by one, one at a time.

if you have Jaguar installed on your mac, and would like to subscribe to a screensaver featuring some photographs not available on this site, then do the following:
1. go to "screen effects" in your system preferences. (under the apple menu)
2. select .Mac as your Screen Effect
3. click configure and enter "witoldriedel" into the Membership Name field.
4. Make sure witoldriedel | Public Slide Show is selected
5. Click OK and enjoy the (slide)show.
Today’s slide show consists of 16 macro shots taken back in April.
There will be new shows now and then. Surprise, surprise.

There is fine cotton lining inside of my eyes, and a heavy cat sits on my shoulders. My tongue’s being held by a furriest of paws and my face must be glowing like amber. There is led on my chest and some stones on my feet, and my arms have been filled up with water. My glass is now emptiest up to the rim and I’ll sit here for just a short minute or two and imagine the flow of the emptiness to just another one filled up with order.
So, so, so incredibly tired.

What is there to do on a beautiful September Sunday, other than to enjoy the sun, to grab the last rays of the Summer, or maybe do some good, vitamin D amplified thinking? Well, one could just spend the day mainly indoors, confused, with an attention span of a siamese fighting fish, and get something close to nothing, not done.
This is where I am at today.
I will now try to get something done again. I might fail. How is your Sunday so far?
Oh, and my browser just randomly points to the old and the new server. Which makes me the last person to not be able to see my site. Cheers.

Even though many of my German friends have now given up on me (out of sight out of mind?), some still stay in touch. I am so glad that Alex Hefter is one of those who still talk, even though I left Germany almost seven years ago.
Alex is one of the important figures in contemporary German design and his influence can be very well seen (with the second eye, at least), as his complete redesign of the largest Television station in Europe has been a mammoth of a project. I am glad that he was able to take some time off in the last month or so and am very glad that some of the days were spent here in New York.
Alex shoots out of passion. He is an incredible photographer. His shots have this incredible sense of humor, just as he does.
I always admired his sense of observation, the incredible ability to be in the right place at the right time.

He sent me one of his shots from New York, and as you can see above, it is nice, complex, witty photography of the right moment and place. In this case a UPS delivery in front of the Loius Vuitton Store on 5th Avenue? I guess?
Picture is not altered.
I hope that I will be allowed to post more of his pictures, but I hope even more that he will make his collection available on his currently closed site, hefter.net
Alex shoots with a Leica CL, using a crazy Voigtländer Lens (it is 15, or even 12mm, I do not remember). He also shoots with a Hasselblad 500cm.
On this trip, his tool was the new Leica Digilux1. A camera which I did not find very attractive at first, but which now looks pretty tempting.

If only I knew how to properly HTML, you would see a speech-bubble over my head and in the bubble would be this announcement that Chris DiClerico has reignited his blog big time and that not only did he make it so much more fun than many other solo-blogs by letting his friends blog thre too, (me too!) he also made everything look very, very cool. You should definitely check it out. Chris made these little picture portraits of his friends, you can zoom in on them.. all this really neat stuff.
Oh, and I think the things I will post on Chris’ blog, will probably be sly different than what I write here. You’ll see... ;)

5763 is here. At least according to the Jewish calendar. 5763... years of continous awareness of being the chosen ones. I have the feeling that this makes the Jews the longest running sustained, self aware culture around? Could this be? I mean being “on Broadway” for 5763 uninterrupted, somehow recorded years is a bit beyond the usual expectations. Just to give ourselves some perspective... when the Jewish Calendar was on 2002, or as far away from year “one” as we now are from Roman Times, the year, according to the Gregorian calendar was 1759 B.C. This also means that we will write 5763 in 1759 years (7765 will be the year on the Jewish Calendar), Dave... and if we keep going at the pace we are going now, I am not quite sure if there will be anybody left to actually write the year on anything, anywhere. : o
Osama Bin Laden will be gone by then though. As will be Saddam. If that’s in any way comforting to anyone.

I wonder how many more days it will take for the DNS to translate. The “forwarding page” was supposed to be up for half a day or so. (it was a complete afterthought, really, I did not even think I would need one.)
Aargh... Frustrating. Silly, but frustrating.

Many visitors to this site come here because of a tiny post I once wrote about “Trading Spaces”. My favorite designer on the show is, hands down, Vern Yip (I am, however, not a member of his yahoo fanclub.)
There is a major article about Vern in the House and Garden section of the New York Times this morning. Looks like he is a very popular designer among those who are able to pay more than the $1000 price ticket on Trading Spaces. (Apparently much more.) He is good, isn’t he... and yet "Not Quite as Seen on TV" (He is supposedly really, really anal... but we knew that.)
Extra message to Vern. Please get a computer desk. (there is a photograph of Vern, which did not make it to the online edition, showing him in a very unhealthy pose, typing on his vaio.)

The interview with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the New York Times this morning offers an interesting angle at the planned war against Iraq. The interview is interesting because it offers a glimpse at the way American foreign policy is seen from the outside by one of its allies. I also very much enjoy the ability of certain heads of state to express thoughts more complex than... oh I should not even start. Here is the interview: Title of article removed.

My parents were sure that I would get a combination of all incurable diseases if I joined a kindergarten. Maybe this is the truth, as I know it, maybe the full truth is that my parents did not get a place for me in a kindergarten? I grew up on the 8th floor of a large apartment complex in Jastrzebie Zdrój in Poland.
My was supposed to take care of me when my mother worked as a teacher in school #6 during the day, all day long. In order to accomplish this, my had to work the night shift in the coal mine, Manifest Lipcowy. This meant that he was asleep most of the day (Or at least as long as my mother was at work). I would listen to my records, build towers out of chairs and climb them, fall of towers built, build new towers, and climb into a forgotten shelf with all the books I was not supposed to see, the art and medical and the psychology books. I remember finding the book about child behavior and how certain behaviors in this book were underlined with a pencil and accompanied by side-notes describing me, Witek.
My mother had the handwriting of a teacher who had to teach children how to write. It was incredibly fascinating to spend hours discovering her detailed notes on my psychological development. She was a teacher and a psychologist. I was her son and a patient. I do not remember ever being her student.
I guess this is also how I managed to be especially good at these silly tests. Not only did my mother observe me, she would sometimes take me to other psychologists for tests. I was the “ultimate right brained child”. I kicked with the left foot, I did everything with the left hand, I even peeked through holes in fences with my left eye. After reading that left-handed people might be more creative, I did it even more of the left handed kind of stuff.
How does this have anything to do with the walk I took today? How could this be in any way connected to a quiet moment in the library of the Hudson hotel today at lunch time?
I might need to think about it a bit more. Maybe with the left side of my Brain?

We have recently received a request to change information in our database. We cannot process the request however, because we cannot verify its authenticity. As a contact for this record, you have the authority to agree or disagree with the modification request. To do so, follow the instructions provided below.

Seems like it will take a little while until everything falls into (the right) place.
Sorry for the strange URLs and all the weird annoying missing images in certain places of this site. Please feel free to report any broken items to me. You know my email. Or just comment on this post. Thank you. : )
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Update...
Modifications for the domain name registration shown below have been completed.
Every day at 12:00 Noon and 12:00 Midnight Eastern Time, new and corrected information is shared with computers all over the world. If your modification or request is processed by either of these times, your changes will be included in these updates. You'll be able to view your updated record in our WHOIS database 24-48 hours from the time your request is processed.

This is just a test post. The blog is now moved. It is not completely functional, but it is on a new server. Hmm. And you might be able to track back to it now... it has been upgraded. Thank yous to Ben Trott for installing it all. I will now ned to try to move the DNS pointer. Argh... so much to learn.

I know this will sound really strange, but it might be a good idea to not comment on this blog until it is completely moved. It seems that some portions of it are still pointing to my old server. When you click on the permalink of this very post for example, you will land on my old server and the post will be a completely different one than this one.

Quite a lot of my activity in the last few days has been on screen. With the introduction of the new MacOS 10.2 it was really time to switch, and so I finally moved to MacOS X. (I have been trying to befriend all versions of osX so far, starting with the Beta, but came out with scratches every time.)
I had to say good-bye to my favorite little application, which had followed me around since 1990. The name of this little gem is “Capture” and the creator is Yves Lempereur. My Apple-“,” key combination would allow me to create a screen-grab of any portion of the screen at any time in any situation. Capture was a really important little piece of software for me. (I know this sounds really nerdy, but it really was.) It was programmed so well, it worked equally well under System 6.0.7 as under MacOS 9.2.2. Hmm. I really wondered if Yves was about to write a Jaguar version. I found him via Google, of course, since he wrote the original application before the invention of html, or browsers or the WWW. He responded very nicely and even sent me an upgrade for the software, (written in 1996) but he had no plans on ever writing a simple screen-capture application for MacOSX… So it looks like I will have to use Snapz Pro from now on? I think I will need to write to the Ambrosia guys about capture. The beauty of Capture was that it just did not get in my way whenever I wanted to make a screen-grab. It just sat there in the background, waiting for my key combination. And when I typed the key combination, my cursor would just turn into a little cross. I could then make my selection, and then paste the grab into Photoshop. No menu to look at, unless I wanted to change some settings. Otherwise, OsX is just quite excellent. I am feeling a bit like in the early days when it was so important to adjust all the little settings in all the little control-panels and change the look of things to create an ideal working environment.
I upgraded all of my Adobe applications to run in X, and they still have their own little secret screens, like back in the days, at least Photoshop and Illustrator do.
The next step was to find the right little hacks and apps to adjust the macOSX user interface. First thing to add was TinkerTool. It fixes some tiny little things about the dock as well as about scrollbars, among other things. Next thing that needed a fix badly was the upper right corner of the screen. There used to be an Application switcher menu there since the very first Macintosh operating system, but somebody must have decided that the new Dock could replace it. Well not quite for me, and thus there is the very useful ASM (Application Switcher Menu). It brings the full functionality back. Very nice. In the other corner of the screen used to be the Apple menu. It used to contain some of the stuff that somehow belonged there, the Calculator, the Control Panels, the recently used applications. It was now replaced by some strange promotional item (“Get OSX software”), but not for long. Under my Apple is now FruitMenu, a little helper application that brings back the old functionality and even some of the stuff we liked in FinderPop. Next stop on the interface improvement journey was the Dock itself. It somehow began to become cluttered with all the little helpers and friendly utilities which wanted to be there, so they could be easily accessed, but really did not need to be in my face all the time. The helper here became Dock Extender, a nice little application that allows up to 10 (in the paid version) menus that sit in the dock. They look like any application or any icon you can find on IconFactory, but are in fact popup manus which can contain anything the user desires. Way to go. While in the dock, let’s take a look at the home icon and the trash… They might need some help, you think? Try CandyBar, a beautiful little piece of software by Iconfactory and Panix. Candybar can turn any of the original OSX system icons into one of those (yeah, you like them, and yes, I know that I am repeating myself here).
So what is left to adjust after all this? Well, the fonts in some of the older applications just did not look quite as smooth as what I now really liked about the new Quarz look. And there is help in shape of Silk it smoothes all fonts in applications that do not do it correctly themselves. It makes the system feel pretty nice.
Oh, one more little friendly app. It is called WeatherPop and puts, when it works, a little weather station into your menu bar. I like it very much. I hope the glu.com people fix it, as promised by September 3rd. I actually bought this little friend. Yes, I am one of the guys who pays for their Shareware at some point. Can you imagine?
Have a wonderful labor day. All the best.

-why are you keeping things so brief?
-very very slowly are my eyes adjusting to the inside of this house. and what I see is not as pretty as i hoped. things are quite sad actually. and there are so many things I have broken while looking for a path in the darkness. i still do not know much, but the things I see do not make me happy.
“All will be good” is now more an expression of hope than certainty. please give me time.
September is weeping.

The plant in the window is a black silhouette against the white sky. One single insect still plays an evening song. There is a soft, soft whisper coming from the city perhaps?