Image gallery

I've been busy revamping my website these days, which is why I haven't blogged here at all for a week. It's in Spanish, so that's also why I haven't blogged about it here. Anyway, I'm unveiling an image gallery in order to showcase my photos in a different way from that which Flickr offers. The system is not the best to be found, but I can control it some more. The idea is, I will continue sharing pictures of everything that strikes my fancy on Flickr, but I'll keep the more artistic photos for my gallery. I can't (so far) make a trade out of my photos, but this would be a first step towards establishing an online presence as a photographer with a portfolio.

The gallery can be accesed directly at pedeefe.com.ar/gallery2, or embedded into the website at pedeefe.com.ar/site/?q=gallery; the interface is practically the same. Go check it out and leave comments, critiques, or whatever.

It's a frackin' cracker! (from Pharyngula)

I'm an avid reader of PZ Myers' blog Pharyngula since I discovered it. I don't know how he manages to produce so much content. I'm often lost on his explanations of the complexities of the evolutionary development of weird microscopic organisms and such, but I usually learn something from them. When he makes fun of religion, he makes me laugh. And when he unleashes his wrath — he's actually contagious.

After reading his report of the latest episode of senseless religious intolerance and unadultered religious stupidity (IT'S A FRACKIN' CRACKER!) I felt briefly overwhelmed by the certainty that humanity will never get rid of faith. But then I thought, the only way to deal with these things is make fun of the fanatics and expose their inanity. Well, English is spoken by many people around the world, but Spanish is also strong, and it's spoken in most of the countries where the hateful cult denounced by PZ is the majority belief. So I went to Alerta Religión and wrote Amenazas de muerte por una galletita ("Death threats over a cookie").

English and Spanish are down. Now we need it in Mandarin and Hindi, I guess...

Weekend miscellanea

Picture, web and blog updates...

After I posted a couple of portraits using a simulation of the film technique known as split toning, I was asked to write a tutorial, an idea I'd had for some time. So I went back to my website (which I'd neglected) and wrote this split toning tutorial for the GIMP (in Spanish). I need to expand it to cover other uses of split toning... and I need another tutorial for cross processing.

Last Saturday I went with the Rosarigasinos to the Flag Memorial. We took the elevator and went up to the top of the tower to take pictures of the city. It was just a while before sunset, and there was a noticeable amount of smoke from the island fires in the air, so I got interesting results.

I joined a couple of atheist groups on Flickr, which somehow I had overlooked all this time. How do you picture atheism? Well, while some groups emphasize criticism of religion (or blasphemy), there's one called "Atheists who love photographing churches" (exactly my niche!), and another one called "The Happy Atheist" where you're supposed to show positive, cheerful images — nothing offensive, especially to religion, and no proselytizing; just a celebration of (godless) life.

We had an interesting conversation/debate among several of the Rosarigasinos after the Flag Memorial session. When DrGEN comes we always end up talking about atheism and religion, and that day we'd had some harmless photo fun at the foot of the Memorial, which has a stone cross on a wall and the usual dedications to God and Mary and so on by some archbishop or general. That was in part why I looked for atheist groups on Flickr. Well, the discussion went along the lines of denouncing religion in the public sphere vs. tolerating the need for people to cling to their unsubstantiated beliefs, and it got rather heated, but Marisa and I had to leave early. We had a friend of mine's birthday party at his house in Funes.

Alerta Religión (my blog about the evils of religion and faith) is taking off slowly, with peaks every now and then. I'm at 10 daily visits on average today, which isn't much, but I've been found by the search engine spiders already, and I'm writing mostly for myself anyway.

On Sunday it rained like crazy, so most of the fires on the islands were finally extinguished and the smoke went away. It made for good photos, but it also caused traffic accidents. I started a group on Flickr to collect smoky pictures of the city, and some of the results were impressive. Check it out at Humo sobre Rosario ("Smoke over Rosario").

And that's it for today.

Flickr Places

37 days
till vacation

Just thought I'd let you know, even though this is not one of those blogs. Flickr has just launched Flickr Places, a service that collects and displays pictures taken in specific locations (as long as they're geotagged, of course). I almost always geotag my pics, so you can see them, and those of many people I know, in Flickr Places Rosario. The system chooses some good photos, a couple of "featured photographers", and groups about Rosario. These things rotate every now and then. As I write this, one of the selected pictures is mine:

— coincidentally the one that I have as my desktop wallpaper. As a bonus, Flickr Places gives you a little map and the current temperature.

Rosario BlogDay 2007: a half-review

My review of Rosario BlogDay 2007 will have to be short because I was only there half the time (you'll learn why soon). As usual in all events here in Argentina, things started rolling about an hour later than scheduled. Fortunately there were also two breaks scheduled, one in mid-morning and one for lunch, so the organizers just cancelled those to compensate.

I checked myself in at the entrance, and I was given a heavy full-colour catalog of tech products, a large spiral notebook with hard cardboard covers, and a very nicely designed ballpoint pen. That was my first hint that this was a marketing-oriented event, and I wasn't wrong. In any case, however, this wasn't a problem.

First of all came Pablo Mancini, founder of Argentonia ("Specialists in virtual worlds"), which markets commercial spots in the Argentine section of Second Life. I really don't get the idea of people spending real money to buy virtual money in order to set up avatars of themselves and their own businesses in a slow-moving virtual environment populated by geeks, but — to each their own.

Mancini spoke long and well about the Web 2.0, and how the situation has changed with respect to, say, 6 or 7 years ago. At that time, he said, the idea that anyone with an Internet connection could produce and distribute content, even quality content, through free or low-cost mechanisms, was revolutionary. Today, such independent production of multimedia content is taken for granted, and we must focus on the creation of contexts for sharing those contents. He reviewed RSS feeds, emerging blog communities, NetVibes, Feevy (so far an upstart), and other technologies, and showed us an interesting map of connections between blogs.

There's a core of high-traffic blogs that everybody ends up linking to directly or indirectly, but there are also semi-isolated circles of blogs linked to each other that deal with topics that are not so popular, and which Mancini found to be the most interesting — I'd say, the exotic places, or the odd ones out.

Then came a shorter lecture on an example of a virtual campus, by a guy who worked in the government of Buenos Aires Province and a few other places. He discussed the old paradigm of the school as a hierarchical structure where fixed schemes of knowledge are conveyed through a rigid structure from the top down, and how this has isolated the school from the real world, where knowledge is being produced all the time and we've become accustomed to sharing it horizontally. Nice ideas, except of course only applicable to private schools for upper-middle-class children (i.e. useless in Argentina except as an experiment).

The last part I saw was an exposition of the PrevenBlogs programme. It's a municipal implementation of a plan to get students involved in the prevention of AIDS and the promotion of sexual health. After the grownups spoke, a few highschool kids went on the stage and explained what they'd done, how they told their parents about it, and how everybody took it. They were serious and hilarious at the same time ("refreshing" is the appropriate cliché to use here). Among their creations was a blog showing how to put on a condom and encouraging its use — Usen el fucking forro ("Use the fucking rubber"). The kid in charge noted that the title was chosen "because they told us to use our peers' way of speaking". Amen.

And then I had to go. It turns out that, when I bought my camera, the memory card had a few problems. I changed it once, then again, and then again. The last time I got one that was even more wrecked than the others. Just as I was leaving the Second Life lecture at noon to get some fresh air and maybe something to eat, the card just died on me, apparently losing all the pictures I'd taken. I could almost feel my sanity blowing up in pieces right there. I went home, had lunch, and got myself a recovery program. It was marvelous. I'd looked for similar programs but they were all crippled shareware versions; this one was fully-working freeware.

The program started looking for files in the card, and sure enough the pictures were still there, although a few were corrupted. I breathed. The program continued doing an intensive search and recovering files until the battery died. Surprise surprise, I recovered a hundred pictures taken in July by a couple with kids vacationing in Mendoza! I swear I was about to go blind with anger. Long story short, I took the card to the shop and somehow managed not to kill the salesman while I told him: "You tried to pass a used card for a new one. I don't want anything else from you. Just give me back my money." Sure, he said unblinkingly. I took the money, left for downtown, and got myself a brand new card in a serious electronics shop. I won't trust MercadoLibre's vendor qualification system ever again.

Well, at the cost of a few dozens non-memorable shots, the nightmare is over.

Days of black and white, and a good hair day

I always knew that growing my hair long again was an experiment... Satisfied with the result (that is, satisfied at the confirmation of what I already thought — that it was going to be a massive bother), I ended this experiment last Tuesday. I didn't dislike the long hair per se, but the time it took to take care of it. I reckon I'm saving ten minutes in the morning, during and after my daily shower; that means ten more minutes for me to enjoy breakfast before leaving for work, or ten more minutes to sleep.

The short hair has this one drawback, which is that it makes me look even younger. If I looked 25 before, I think I could now pass for a somewhat battered 20-year-old (especially if I'm clean-shaven). Countless people have told me (to no avail) that that's going to be a blessing when I'm 40. I guess they're right, unless a gene for wrinkles or baldness springs into action somewhere and decides to catch up.

I haven't blogged much lately because I've been writing for my website, about black and white photography, or rather, how to take a regular color image and turn it into a nice monochrome picture using a variety of methods. (Follow the link if you read Spanish, or if you believe that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, I'm ending the cloaking/deniability policy too.)

I've spent considerable time producing pictures and almost none doing anything to them, except posting them to Flickr. I was looking into deviantART as well; it seems more like the kind of exposure I'd like to have for my more artistic pictures, but I'm not sure it's what I want. (I really hesitate on calling some of my pictures "artistic" when a significant part of the work is done by a pre-programmed filter in the Gimp, but many in the deviantART community appear not be bound by such scruples.)

Expect more pictures soon, since I'm going to San Lorenzo with the Rosarigasinos tomorrow. I went to San Lorenzo by myself almost exactly one year ago, and I didn't find it spectacular, but a photo safari is an occasion to socialize, not just to take pictures, and you can always count on someone in the group to direct you to a spot you didn't know before.

September

September's almost over, and on one hand it feels like it's been a breeze. Maybe it's because of the weather — not quite spring-like, cool, sunny, unchanging afternoons, and the same cold mornings that seem to be repeating themselves since May. Spring Day went by, and then it was my birthday and it also went by. I'm not saying this was a bad thing, only unusual. I tend to pay more (excessive?) attention to such dates and events, but I wasn't in that mood this year.

On Spring Day (last Friday) I stuck to the basics and just had mate with friends, lying on the grass in a park, like several hundreds of thousands of other Rosarinos, even though it was chilly and cloudy at times. On Sunday, I celebrated "the last day of my third decade" with an asado with friends, at home (they say it's bad luck to celebrate your birthday even one second before the actual day, so that's my excuse). Monday I took off work and spent the day in deep meditation, or, as some would have me confess, digesting Sunday's copious meals.

On the other hand, September was a long month. The outcome of the election was a factor — I wasn't personally involved in the campaign or anything but, as I told you, I knew the result could change my life. I'd become so fed up with my job as a state employee that I was thinking of getting a different one if there wasn't a change. The change is already noticeable; things are moving in the high places and also very close to me, though I can't give you precise details. There were also several issues on the personal side that got me thinking hard, others that have been falling into place for some time, and a couple of realizations that (excuse the cliché) hit me like a ton of bricks. All that, next to the symbolically important birthday — you can imagine.

I'm speaking to new people. I'm hearing the weirdest confessions from drunk friends. I'm reading a book with a complicated, metaphysical/metaphorical plot where the main characters are in their own ways trying to regain time — time they lost for reasons they don't understand — and I completely get them. My mother, despite my protests, gave me a big wooden trunk for my birthday — for my new apartment, whenever I finally get to move there. I got a website and I'm filling it up, at my own pace, with nonsense and practical advice, as if I could give advice to anyone, and not worrying about that kind of inadequacy. I'm writing this, for God's sake.

It'd be rather stupid of me to suppose that time is beginning to pass differently only because I'm a year older, or that I've gotten wiser specifically this month. It must be true in some sense, though. Maybe it is the spring!

Haunted swing not haunted that we know of

The news today: remember the "haunted swing" in the city of Firmat? The swing that swung itself? Well, a group of qualified professionals from Buenos Aires, called Visión Ovni (yes, that means "UFO Vision"), after intensive field research, has concluded that the swing does not move due to any known physical force. That means, they explain, that there are no measurable electromagnetic fields or alterations thereof, and the swing is made of normal material, the ground under it is just the same as in the rest of the neighbourhood, the wind is not doing it, etc. It doesn't mean, they remark, that there's a paranormal phenomenon involved.

I wouldn't really trust a group of people with a name like that to do scientifically serious research of anything, but at least they seem to be honest and to the point: they've found nothing. Of course, the twisted little minds of the paranormal freaks will turn that innocuous statement into "This is something outside the purview of science and of normal human experience! We were right! Let us dance and praise the Beings of Light from the fifth dimension!". Or something like that.

Again you'll have to forgive me for not writing more... not that I feel really guilty or anything. I've been putting my effort (including the collection and commentary of outrageous news) into my website. I reckon that it may become what I want, structure-wise, in a couple of weeks. Much of the difficulty lies in making the structure solid and the support mechanisms behind it as automatic as possible, so that I can care about content and forget about the little quirks of HTML and CSS. Not to mention the major quirks of PHP and the sometimes mysteriously erratic behaviour of MySQL.

In case you didn't know, my website can be reached also by an alias domain — just spell out the names of my initials (in Spanish) and add the top-level components. If it were in English, you would just go to PeeDeeEff.com.ar, for example. Again I ask, let me play my little game.

Photographers' plague reloaded

I'm just back from a meeting (somebody pompously termed it an assembly) of the Rosarigasinos photographer group (the ones I went to Granadero Baigorria with, and to the boat tour before that).

We've been planning to hold a modest joint exhibition (only 3 pictures per person), and today we wrapped up most of the issues. It'll be held on the 1st and 2nd floors of the Faculty of Biochemistry of the National University of Rosario, which lends the space at no cost to such things, starting on October 8. Matte paper, 15×21 cm, mounted on 3 mm high-impact plastic sheet. The topic is the city, and the name is Mirada Rosarigasina. Not that this advertising will get through to many, but I do what I can.

(I could do some more advertising in the relevant place in my new website, the one you don't know where it is yet, even after I told you specifically to join my three initials —which are the same as the name of a Popular Document Format— with hyphens and add .com.ar.)

After the meeting I had to run to Japanese school to write a composition for a contest. You get dictionaries, a couple of sheets of paper divided into 300 large squares (one per character), and 2 hours to write about some topic. They give you 2 topics to choose from, on the spot. I wrote about "current trends", mentioning the widespread use of mobile phones and computers, the poverty and rudeness of the young generations' language, and the fact that, fortunately, some customs, such as grabbing a quick cup of coffee with a friend, never get out of fashion.

I was relaxed given the occasion — last year I was terribly nervous and made a lot of mistakes, but this time I simply let it flow out without caring too much about using complicated expressions. Better being correct and sound just a bit simple than using a lot of learned words and get them wrong (and let me tell you, Japanese is an irresistible tempter in this regard — for every simple, common concept, the formal register has two or three obscure equivalents that you can misuse horribly without even noticing).

So I wrote, I gave it to my sensei, and now she's sending it to Kyoren in Buenos Aires to be graded. I don't think I'll win a prize, but I came out satisfied with I'd written, so I don't care.

Website incognito

My website (the one I'm not officially naming here) is up, and though still empty, some sections are already open and being filled in with actual content. Initially, I tried a CMS (content manager system) to organize it all in a standardized fashion with a minimum of coding, but I'm an old-fashioned geek and I missed the freedom that comes with writing your own HTML. Throw in a lot of PHP (chaotically written and rewritten), and I'm in heaven, although (or because?) it all takes four times longer to get done. But the result is exactly as I want, not as the programmers of PHP-Nuke, Joomla! or XOOPS would feel like.

As I said before, I'm trying to stay anonymous for a while, and pointing you directly to the site would defeat the purpose, but you could try some things to find it, such as — I don't know — joining my initials with hyphens, to begin with. (OK, that was silly, but let me play my little game.)

The weather's awful again, so I don't think I'll be able to go jogging this week. Argh! I was about to go yesterday, because at noon the sun had come out; I took a nap and when I woke up it looked like the sky was going to fall down. And I felt more tired than before the nap, though that must've had to do with the atmospheric pressure and the heat. So I stayed, and then it didn't rain at all. Today the sky looks even scarier, but I think I'm going to try a short run (I foresee that I will get soaked and catch a cold).

No luck for the photographer, either. With the website taking up my time, and the weather so menacing, I haven't been out there with the camera, seriously, for a week. Last Sunday I was invited to go on a photo safari to the south of the city, but I went out the night before and that killed the plan. I'm told it went very well. There's a whole sector of the city that I don't know — with old mansions surviving along certain avenues, dating back from better times (when in Rosario la Zona Sur wasn't yet a synonym of No-Man's-Land), and a huge park on the municipal border. Well, that won't go anywhere anytime soon.

This blog will resume its usual boring news mode in a few days. Be patient!

My news

If you're wondering why I haven't been blogging lately, the answer is: I've been doing other things. First of all, and most importantly, I got myself a website (a real, personal website, with a domain name and all). It's still quite empty, and I'm not revealing here where it is, since I'm trying to keep a low profile on that. I'll be dealing with sensitive topics (religion, politics — the kind of thing that ruins dinner tables when brought up) and I don't want to be immediately associated to them. You might say this is already what I'm doing here, but this is just a small blog hosted by a free provider, in a language that effectively isolates me from my everyday environment. My bosses and most of my acquaintances don't read this blog.

I've wanted a website for some time, and I wasn't really doing anything about it because I was busy with my blogs, and because I thought it would be expensive. Not prohibitively expensive, but then I'm not going to make money out of it. However, I was under a wrong impression. Web hosting, today, is available at a ridiculously low cost and with reasonable quality even in Argentina. And if you're content with a .com.ar domain, there are no additional costs.

Anyone with a minimum of imagination will be able to guess my identity from my website. Just going to nic.ar should suffice. (If you can't pick up that hint, well...)

Another reason why I haven't blogged as of late is that I started jogging again. The weather has been warm and wet, not a pleasure, but better than the cold, for me. So several afternoons I could've used for blogging were spent on jogging and stretching. I don't live really close to any suitable jogging circuits, so I have to spend some time going to and returning from it.

And finally, as I promised in my last post, I don't want to bore my readers to death with more politics, and since politics is all over the news these days... I'll do a summary of that soon.

Roleplaying on a Sunday afternoon

First roleplaying session yesterday, after a long time, was quite OK. I'd say a success, but that would sound prideful, as it was me who directed the thing, and it's the players who should say, at the fullness of time... There were four of us, counting myself, two friends and a guy who used to work in my office. We stayed in contact and, when I learned he was an active roleplayer, I invited him over. Three players are enough, but not plenty; if someone cannot make it to one session, you have to cancel, since it's a bother to direct only two players. That's for me, at least. The new guy was to bring along another player, but she couldn't make it this time.

The game is World of Darkness, the players play regular human characters (for now!), and the setting is present-day Rosario (with a couple of supernatural touches, obviously). This is the second time I use this setting, and I'm re-using some of my previous notes, but the characters are all new. I find it easier to play this way, and the sense of familiarity with the surroundings allows the players to move more naturally than if I were to stage the game in, say, New York or London or an unspecified Gotham-like city, as others do. With everybody pinned down on the real map of Rosario, we all know (and need not argue over) how much time it takes to go from character A's house in the suburbs to character B's downtown apartment.

I'm not really into roleplaying activism, but I do believe it's a good pastime. In some cases it may be a form of improvisation theatre, and it sure is relaxing, when all goes well. (There are many, many ways in which it may go horribly wrong, but you can see them coming.) So try it if you can.

And, since we're at it, I'll recommend a website... It's a group of RPG fans who try to raise awareness of this hobby, which is still unknown to many in Argentina, and viewed as strange by others, and organize game sessions in events such as Leyendas and (recently) Cinecomix. (My brother is in the group.) They're called Sierpes del Sur and they've just opened up a forum. It's all in Spanish, but there's a chance some of my bilingual readers may find it useful.

Vista Rosario moves

I've just finished moving my photoblog about Rosario, Vista Rosario, to WordPress. It really is much better than Blogger in most respects. I don't intend to move D for Disorientation, since it'd be a lot of work (the "import" feature provided by WordPress is very good, but not perfect). Please, if you follow Vista Rosario, update your links.


And if you don't know Vista Rosario, please, check it out. It's mostly in Spanish, but most of the meaning should be found in the pictures...