Southworth Morning

Good morning, all you commuters…

Hipstamatic

Lens: John S
Film: Big Up
Flash: Off

 

Back in the Saddle

Big news! I’ve recently been hired by Amazon as a production artist & photo editor for Amazon Local. A long stint of unsteady employment is finally coming to an end, and I’m seriously looking forward to getting back to work.

Of course, it means I’ll be commuting from Kitsap to downtown Seattle every day, something I haven’t done in a long time. To facilitate the trip, I picked up a 2007 Yamaha FJR 1300. I’ve had my eye on this bike for a while, and the right deal came up at exactly the right time. So, after 7 years without a bike (since I sold my beloved Honda Valkyrie) I’m back on two motorized wheels and loving it as much as ever. Maybe more. The FJR was all I’d hoped it would be and a joy to ride, and as anyone who rides the cross-sound ferry knows, motorcycles get front row treatment. I actually can’t wait to start the commute again.

Take care, ride safe, and I’ll see you on the road…

-c

Blessed Beltaine

…from ChrissyOne.

(click for a 1920 x 1200 desktop)

My first Xcode project – Calculator

So here is my first program created in Xcode. It’s merely a simple calculator with a custom background image, but it does work, and creating it was easier than I thought, as I had zero knowledge of the C language a few weeks ago.

I’m learning the language with the help of a few books and iTunes U, specifically the excellent Stanford lecture series from Paul Hegarty’s fall 2010 class. You can find info on the course here: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

Happy coding!

-c

Taking a break from photography…

But only for a little while. I’m learning Objective-C and application development for iOS devices, so photography updates will be sparse for a while. Never fear, when summer comes the shooting will begin again, and after that I might even get time to edit some, if my groaning old iMac can still bear the strain. Gotta go for now, the weasels are closing in…

Desktop of the Day…

(click for a 1920 x 1200 desktop)

This is an image from a hike at Paradise last August. The rest of this set can be found here:

http://chrissyone.com/~chrissyw/Mt_Rainier_08_20_10/

Enjoy!

-c

Plummer Peak photos

August 6, 2010

This was one of those truly epic days. I hiked alone from Reflection Lake, at first on a spur to the northwest that eventually led back to Paradise valley. I wouldn’t go that far this day, so after a few long shots of the ridge, it was back south across the road and up the Pinnacle Peak trail. I started in the early afternoon, and ran into a few folks on the way up. But as I reached The Saddle there were only a few stragglers there, soon to be heading down. I follow the lower trail to the right for a bit and encounter a few marmots and a woman looking at them. They don’t seem to care about us. I also spot some far-off mountain goats on a distant ridge. The woman heads back down the trail and I start heading up. My plan was to hike to the top of Plummer Peak, as it looked like a fairly easy climb, burdened as I was with a tripod. It looked like I’d have the whole mountain to myself.
I took the lower trail along the north ridge of Plummer Peak on my way up. This was sketchy at best. Large, loose rocks formed a tentative traverse, covered by the last drift yet to melt. In the thawing day it had formed an icy crust. There is a 500 foot drop to my right. I take no pictures here.
This leads to a level meadow at the foot of a long, progressively steeper climb to the top. I start making panoramas, then the last effort to the top. It takes less time than I thought, so when I reach the summit I drop gear and have a late lunchable.
I sat for a while up there alone. In the distance to the north, I can barely make out the shapes of the last two hikers moving down the lower trail, a mile away. The sun starts to angle across the rocks and crevasses of Mt. Rainier to the north. A trail of cloud bisects the mountain and shades the Paradise Valley. I make frequent stops for photography on my slow way down.
Then, a surprise. I can see a herd of mountain goats back down at The Saddle. They’re far below me now, but I might be able to get them with the long lens. I look down to get it, and one of their friends is standing about 50 feet in front of me. He lets me get a bit closer, but we can both feel the chill in the air, so it’s time to move on. Him sliding playfully down the snow face, me trying not to playfully land on my skull.
Back in The Saddle again, and the herd is gone. The light is getting magic now, as I make my way down the last leg of the trail. Above me, at the top of the Pinnacle Peak rockfall, I spot the wily goats. They really do climb amazingly fast. The sun is setting. It’s fantastic.
Back at the car, it’s nearly dark, and the lake is swarming with black clouds of evil little midges. I throw my gear into the front seat and flee down the road a few hundred feet to escape. I’m the only one on the road.

Crazy Eric’s at dusk.

(click the image for a 1920 x 1200 desktop)

I stopped by Crazy Eric’s in Bremerton tonight to sample the exquisite cuisine and make a few images. I had hoped for an interesting sunset, but the weather took a sinister turn and clouds moved in early. On tonight’s menu, two delicious, deep-fried corn-battered hot dogs on a stick, all for less than two dollars. You can’t beat that deal.

REVIEW: The Daily for iPad

The Daily for iPad is a news magazine application that both Apple and The Daily’s parent News Corp are pushing as the next big step in digital media design and delivery. The App Store bills The Daily as…

“…the first digital news publication with original content created every day exclusively for the iPad. Built from scratch by a team of top journalists and designers, The Daily covers the world: breaking news, sports, pop culture, entertainment, apps, games, technology, opinion, celebrity gossip and more.

The Daily has the depth and quality of a magazine but is delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time like the web.

Great stories, photos, video, audio and graphics come alive the more you touch, swipe, tap and explore. The customized sports section allows you to follow your favorite teams’ scores, pictures, headlines – and even players’ tweets.”

Hopes were high for The Daily, but after spending some time with it, problems with both the technical aspects of the app and the news content of the magazine quickly turn a good idea into an ugly milquetoast-bland exercise in frustration.

First off, the technical issues:

The Daily was the slowest, clunkiest, most temperamental app on my iPad. The first day it crashed twice. After the second day, it took 3-4 launches to get it to run. After that, I tried several times to start the app and got nothing but a blank screen.
Once you finally get it to load, you’re faced with some questionable interface design. The “Turn for Photos” convention is dreadful. It causes the reader to move the iPad from whatever comfortable position they had it in to see all the content. This prevents the user from going through the whole issue in landscape mode, for instance, because then they would miss the story. Rotation should work either way, and not lockout content in either mode. Navigation is spotty, and the rotating-carousel home screen is all fluff and bad, choppy function.

The app DOES NOT REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE. It starts up on the front page each time. This would not be so bad if there was a way to mark your place, but there is not.
There IS a page-save feature, but this is useless because it only saves that one page – if you load a saved page, there is no way to scroll to adjacent pages, you have to back out of the Saved Pages screen and go back to the issue.

After a new issue is loaded, forget about the old one. It’s gone. Want to finish that crossword tomorrow? Sorry, bud.
There is no back button. If you click a link that takes you somewhere else in the issue, there is NO WAY to go back to the previous page, other than scrolling manually back through the pages. Sloppy. Just inexcusably sloppy.

The one truly great thing about the Daily, technically, is something that News Corp probably doesn’t want you to notice – the ads take forever to load, so when you come to an ad page, you see a status-clock icon before you see a page. This makes the ads very easy to just skip over as you scroll through the issue. This is a lot like those phone-sales auto-dialers. You know how you can hear a few seconds of silence while your foreign call-center operator is being connected? It gives you plenty of time to hang up. Same idea.

Now, a word or two on content:

The Daily is news for babies. Nothing but the most obvious and inoffensive details about real stories like Egypt are covered. I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything about the topics at all. It seems to be aimed mostly at football fans who like to make fun of hippies in Portland and who think that show is about real people. The TV spot presenter, Erin Aide (sp?) is blonde and orange and shiny and has all the journalistic credibility you’d expect of a former stripper who now works at a naughty-coffee drive thru. Why in the world does she lead the issue off? It says to me “…if you like the hard-hitting reports in People Magazine and Tiger Beat, you’ll love The Daily!”

Then there’s the fluffy Gossip nonsense, which, given the level of Hard News reporting, is difficult to distinguish from the actual news. Lots of little 1 paragraph blips on some home remedy or strange-but-true fact are easily invisible, and fill space that could probably be used better, but then they’d have to actually report more news. You get a few sports stories that aren’t in the sports section, like “…hey look at these players with their long hair… golly aren’t they interesting!” This effectively lengthens the sports sections and increases The Daily’s likelihood of having zero value at all to me. Maybe Murdoch really likes to look at that Vince Lombardi trophy, but to me it’s just an easy way to spot a section I’ll want to skip. And today (Superbowl Sunday) it’s on the cover. Well hurrah. I do comprehend that some people like football, but The Daily fetishizes it, and people who want that already have plenty of magazines. I thought this was going to be a news magazine.

I wanted to like The Daily. I really did. But there was just nothing to like. The news reporting is beneath amateur – it borders on insulting. The flaws in the app design can’t be ignored and constantly get in the user’s way. I don’t have any desire to even complete my 2-week free trial, much less purchase a subscription for the initially attractive price of $40 per year. If you like your news simple and controversy-free, and you like reading about celebrity baby-bumps and can’t get enough gridiron glory, then The Daily might be for you. It certainly isn’t for me.

So today, Sunday February 6, which is day 5 of the Daily, I have deleted the app. It’s really one of the worst I have ever used, so bad that it caused me to spend the time it took to write the above review, so that maybe you won’t have to waste your own precious time on this spice-less Taco Bell filler. Here’s hoping another news agency will learn from News Corp’s ‘What Not To Wear’ example and creates an app that truly lives up to the New Media promises. The Daily is not it.

Mt. Rainier desktop…

Happy holidays from ChrissyOne!
Enjoy this summertime image of Mt. Rainier on your desktop…