journalism

Taking decent photographs

Dave Farquhar Photography , , ,

I’m not a serious photographer and I don’t play one on TV. But I’m tired of looking at dark, fuzzy, tiny photographs that don’t tell anything, so here’s a way someone who knows nothing about photography–such as Yours Truly–can take a decent picture.For some examples of my photography, which I consider barely acceptable, here’s a windup train and an American Flyer electric.

The second photograph is worse than the first, for two reasons. I took the second photograph indoors, and used a rug as a backdrop. The texture of the rug detracts from the photo. As does the lack of light.

I took the first photograph outside. It wasn’t all that sunny of a day, and it was about 9 in the morning on a Saturday. I used a white towel as a backdrop. A neutral-colored sheet would have been even much better, but I had the towel handy. The photograph is small enough that the towel’s texture doesn’t detract as badly as it normally would.

So the first trick is to use a decent backdrop.

Light is trick #2. Get enough light on your subject to not need the flash. Light up the room, take a shot, and see what happens. If the camera flashes, get more light. Better yet, take the object outside. In the daytime, of course. Ideally, the majority of your light should be coming from behind you and the camera, rather than from behind the object. A little bit of light behind the object to eliminate shadows is a good thing, but too much will look harsh.

Focus is trick #3. I assume you know to push the button halfway to focus it. That’s the first step. The second step is to take five or six shots because one of them is likely to look better than the worst of them.

The rule of thirds is something they actually teach you in school. (I spent about a month studying photography in journalism school because they make everyone do that. The rule of thirds is about all I remember.) Professional photographers can disregard this rule the way professional writers sometimes disregard rules about sentence fragments. People like me need to follow it. Look at an existing photograph. Mentally draw two horizontal and two vertical lines, dividing the photograph into thirds. The intersection of each line is what the human eye is going to find interesting. So at the very least, position your object so that part of it is hitting as many of those points as possible.

Use a tripod. You’ll get sharper pictures because a tripod holds the camera steady. I didn’t use a tripod for either of these shots, so it’s not absolutely necessary, but it helps. For small objects, a three-inch pocket tripod from Kmart will do just fine. Mine cost about $5. For larger objects, a larger tripod is necessary. Generally speaking, even a cheap and nasty tripod is better than no tripod, so long as it isn’t so wobbly that it can’t hold the camera straight.

And finally: Crop. After you’ve taken the photograph and you get it into the computer, crop it. This lets you make the picture smaller without losing resolution. It also lets you get rid of unnecessary whitespace and/or objects. Did you catch the edge of your backdrop, revealing the concrete or table underneath? Crop it out. Did you forget the rule of thirds? Crop the picture to move the object into place. I cropped both of the pictures I used as examples because otherwise you’d have seen two pictures with lots of towel or carpet and itty-bitty trains. But I wanted pictures of trains, not man-made fibers.

If you follow these simple principles, you can set your camera to auto everything and get a decent shot. The idea is to make the job as easy on the camera as possible. If you halfway follow the rule of thirds, you get an even better shot.

I almost forgot one other thing. I cleaned the objects in the photos. You might be reluctant to clean objects for sale on Ebay for the legitimate fear of damaging them, but at least brush the dust off with a soft brush, such as a makeup brush or soft paint brush. Chances are, anything you photograph looks better without loose dust covering it.

Following these tips won’t make you look like a pro, but your Wikipedia articles will look better and so will your Ebay listings. And on Ebay, a good, clear photograph means more bids and higher prices.

It\’s that time of month again, time to Slashdot the Wikipedia

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , , ,

Slashdot published an interview today with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I found it entertaining reading. Even though I’m a semi-regular contributor over at Wikipedia, I’ve never encountered its founder, possibly because I do my best these days to stay under the radar over there.The discussion on Slashdot was interesting. As always, someone questioned Wikipedia’s accuracy, wondering how anything but chaos can come from something that anyone can edit at any time. A few people read two articles and came back with the usual “99.9% of Wikipedia articles cite no sources and have inaccuracies in them.” Someone else came back and said he’d made a change to the M1A1 Abrams article and was corrected by an Army mechanic. I always like comments like that. It shows who actually has experience and who’s talking out his butt.

Wales was incredibly idealistic, with a vision of free textbooks educating the world and ridding the world of places where people have no sanitation. Free access to the sum of all human knowledge will solve all the world’s problems.

I wish I could be so idealistic.

Oh well, shoot for the stars and maybe you have a chance of hitting the moon, right?

I found the discussion on credibility more interesting. Someone asked how an encyclopedia produced by anarchy could have more credibility than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica or even World Book. Linux Kernel hacker Alan Cox weighed in, pointing out that there’s plenty of bias in academia too, that academia is a tyranny of the day’s popular ideas and that generally ideas change by one generation dying out and a new generation with different ideas taking over. At least with Wikipedia, the divergent ideas get a chance to be heard. He had a point.

I disagree with Wales that his project will drive Britannica out of business, but I agree with Cox about credibility. I had an argument with a college professor over using the Internet as a primary source of information. This was in 1995 or 1996. I wrote a short paper on the Irish Republican Army, and I wanted to find out what people sympathetic to the IRA were saying. So I went to Alta Vista, did some searching, and cited what I found. I wanted to know what the people who made the bombs were thinking, and figured the people who made the bombs were more likely to have Web pages than they were to write books that would be in the University of Missouri library. But my professor wanted me to look for books. I decided he was a pompous, arrogant ass and maybe I didn’t want to minor in political science after all, especially if that meant I’d have to deal with him again.

I forgot what my point was. Oh yes. In journalism we have a sort of unwritten rule. You can cite as many sources as you want. In fact, the more sources the better. If a story doesn’t have three sources, it really ought not to be printed. That rule gets selectively enforced at times, but it’s there. Your sources can spout off all they want. That’s opinion. When three sources’ stories match independently, then it’s fact.

So what if Wikipedia is never the Britannica or even the World Book? It’s a source. It’s much more in touch with popular culture than either of those institutions ever will be. Most people will think you’re a bit odd if you sit down with a volume or two of the Britannica or World Book and read it like you would a novel. I know people who claim to have done it, but that doesn’t make the behavior unusual. Hitting random pages of Wikipedia can be entertaining reading, however. As long as you don’t get stuck in a rut of geography articles. But that’s become less and less likely.

So I don’t think it matters if the Wikipedia ever attains the status of the paper encyclopedias. You’ve got what the academics are saying. Wikipedia gives you the word on the street or in the coffee shop. Neither is necessarily a substitute for the other.

I’ve appealed to this before, but I’ll do it again. Visit Wikipedia. See what it has to say about your areas of interest. If it doesn’t say enough, take a few minutes to add to it. Resist the temptation to go to the articles on controversial people like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It’s a good way to get into an edit war and get frustrated. Find something obscure. I mostly write about old computers, old baseball players and old trains. Not too many Wikipedians are interested in those things. Especially the trains, so that’s what I write about most. (Other people seem to be; when I troll the ‘net for more information on those old companies, I frequently find copies of what I’ve already written and put in Wikipedia. It’s flattering.)

I look at it as a way of giving back. It’s relaxing to me. But there’s a community who’s written a ton of software, including an operating system, a web server, and a blogging system, and they’ve given it to me and never asked for a dime in return. I can’t program so I can’t give anything back in that way. But I have interests and I have knowledge in my head that doesn’t seem to be out there on the ‘net, and I have the ability to communicate it. So I give back that way.

It won’t change the world. Maybe all it’ll accomplish is me seeing fewer “Mar” trains on eBay and more Marx trains. But isn’t that something?

Your Fair Use rights are in danger (again)

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , ,

In case you haven’t yet, you really need to read about The INDUCE Act. The potential is for any device that could be used to illegally copy copyrighted material to become illegal, and the manufacturers of said devices liable for their use.

This is wrong for so many reasons. Take the example of the crowbar.I can use a crowbar to break into my neighbor’s house. By this logic, a crowbar should be illegal. Never mind that a crowbar is a useful tool. I own two of them. I bought them so I could pry out the rocks that make up my patio so I can put down a weed control mat under them. I hope I’ll never have to use one to free someone from a car whose doors and windows won’t open, but I can. If I use a crowbar to free my neighbor from a car wreck, I’m pretty sure he’ll be glad I had that tool. Even if I could have used it to break into his house.

The main target is P2P networks. But the bill is too broad. Under some interpretations, an iPod would be illegal because you might load CDs that you borrowed from me into it. I suppose a camcorder would be illegal too, because someone might take it into a movie theater. Never mind that 99.999% of camcorder owners use them to shoot home movies. The risk of someone using a camcorder to make an illegal copy of a movie is too great to allow you to preserve family memories.

Is this really the direction we want to head? Do we want to be a dictatorship run by big media conglomerates?

Mr. Hatch, I suppose you believe that when someone uses a firearm to kill someone, the manufacturer of said device should be held liable? I suppose you believe that the risk of consumers using firearms to kill one another is great enough that firearms should be illegal? Am I following your logic correctly?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pinko Commie who doesn’t want to pay for anything. I’m actually a Republican. But real Republicans believe in balance. I respect intellectual property. I’ve written and published a book. A few people even liked it. I really didn’t make enough money off it to make it worth my while–I could have made more working the late shift at a fast-food restaurant. The biggest things I have to show for it are a published book on my shelf with my name on it, and the thrill of having walked in to Borders and seeing it.

So I didn’t make as much money as I would have liked. That’s my problem. I don’t blame photocopiers and scanners for my book not selling 4 million copies. I can blame my publisher for not promoting it and not getting more copies of it into the niche marketplaces where it sold well, and I can blame myself for not promoting it and not sending out news releases saying I got published, and I can even blame myself for not targetting it properly.

If I write a book that people want to read, and my publisher and I do a good job of getting the word out about it, I’ll make money. If I can make more money fixing computers or mowing lawns than writing books, then the answer isn’t to try to manipulate the legal system. The answer is to either figure out how to make money producing intellectual property, or spend that time doing something else.

If my desire to protect my rights starts infringing on your ability to do things you need to do, then it’s gone too far. As my former journalism professor Don Ranly was fond of saying, my constitutional rights end at the tip of your nose.

Why do Orrin Hatch and his buddies cooperate in the creation of what’s essentially a welfare state for large corporations, at the expense of our liberties?

Would you please ask your Congresspeople these questions?

Scribus isn\’t a bad open-source DTP program

Dave Farquhar Linux , , ,

A Slashdot mention of a MadPenguin review of Scribus brought up a very insightful lament: No reviews of Scribus appear online from someone very familiar with the competition, namely Adobe PageMaker and InDesign, and QuarkXPress.

As a University of Missouri journalism graduate, I’m going to tell you what I think of Scribus and simultaneously try to amuse you.Let me first get something out of the way: Microsoft Publisher is a toy. And I mean “toy” in the most condescending manner possible. I’m not talking a charming vintage toy that brings good feelings of quality and nostalgia. No sir, I’m bringing to mind cheap, mass-produced junk from a factory that makes its workers pay to work there, sold in vending machines in seedy-looking stores in seedy neighborhoods.

And I’m not talking the nice vending machines that take two quarters either.

I’ve been forced to do production work in Microsoft Publisher. I wish they’d just gone all the way and handed me a copy of Print Shop and told me to use that. At least Print Shop doesn’t have any delusions of grandeur.

I didn’t go to the best journalism school in the country and endure classes taught by professors with nicknames like “The Nazi”–I took a class from the instructor who inspired Brad Pitt to drop out of journalism school and run away to Hollywood when he was a mere three hours from a journalism degree, and I endured her class and I passed it, but I do have to say I don’t blame him–I’m sure I lost your train of thought there, but I didn’t endure all of that to have my hand held by a misguided wizard that looks like a #^%@$ paperclip.

There. I feel a lot better now.

Wait. Let me say one more thing. Microsoft Publisher isn’t the competition for this program, nor should it be.

The proper introduction to desktop publishing is Adobe PageMaker. It’s the easiest to learn of the “serious” DTP tools, and while it’s not well suited to particularly complex designs, and quite possibly the buggiest piece of software not manufactured by Microsoft that I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with, it does the best job of teaching people how to throw a bunch of text into columns onto a piece of paper without overwhelming them with too many tools.

But QuarkXPress is king. At Mizzou, once we’d learned QuarkXPress, we j-students were known to ditch word processors entirely and just use XPress for everything because of its enormous text-handling capabilities. And in spite of its features, it’s a much leaner, meaner program than any word processor on the market, taking up less memory, loading faster, and generally doing everything else faster. I even used it to write term papers for my history classes. I hate Quark the company, but I’ll tell you how I feel about its product.

Rolls-Royce tries to be the QuarkXPress of cars.

(I couldn’t tell you if Rolls-Royce ever succeeded or not, having never ridden in one of its cars.)

OK, so what about Scribus?

Well, you already know my bias. From an ease of use standpoint, I found it somewhere between PageMaker and QuarkXPress. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ease of use has never been the goal of this type of software. Frankly I don’t know how you make a program of this type any easier to use without dumbing it down to Publisher’s level, and by the time you do that, you might as well just go all the way and create a Print Shop clone. That way you’ve actually created something useful.

Concentrating too much on making DTP software easy to use is like trying to make a chainsaw that’s incapable of injuring the operator. The end result isn’t going to be very useful.

But I’ve digressed again.

Feature-wise, I’ve found it to be at least the equal of PageMaker. Whether it lacks some of the features of QuarkXPress or I wasn’t able to quickly find them, I’m not sure. So while I wasn’t able to quickly figure out how to make it bend and distort text, it took me about 30 seconds to figure out how to do the really important things like scaling text and changing tracking and leading.

I wasn’t able to work as quickly in Scribus as I could in QXP, but that’s not a fair comparison. For a semester I spent more time in QXP than I spent in Word, if that tells you anything.

I also spent more time in QXP than I spent in Civilization and Railroad Tycoon combined. (Not by choice though. Yes I’m crazy, but not that crazy.)

I guess I should come to a conclusion here.

I’m really glad to see Scribus. I think it’s pretty good stuff. I think it’s really incredibly good stuff for the price. You see, QuarkXPress is priced like a Rolls-Royce. Scribus is free.

Better than Publisher? Of course. Then again, so is a trip to the dentist.

Better than PageMaker? I’m inclined to say yes. Better enough that if both programs cost the same amount of money, I’d buy Scribus.

Will I use Scribus again? You bet.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with for version 2.0.

Wikipedia hits 200,000

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , ,

Over the weekend, Wikipedia reached the milestone of 200,000 entries in its free encyclopedia. Dan Gillmor praised it in his syndicated column.As usual, Slashdot got wind of it, and as usual, people who’ve never even seen the thing started spouting off about how something that anyone can change can’t possibly be accurate or useful. (Wonder how many of those people run Linux?) At least one person ran over there and vandalized some pages to demonstrate his point. And I’m sure the edit got reversed within a few minutes when someone noticed a change in a watchlist. I, for one, visit occasionally and whenever a change pops up in my watchlist, I look at it out of curiosity. Sometimes I learn something and sometimes I find defacement, which I can then fix.

But I guess if Slashdot discussions were the only thing I ever read, then I wouldn’t have that high of an opinion of something written by random people at will, either.

A more valid criticism is that Wikipedia, by its very nature, can never be accepted as a source for scholarly work. But then I thought back to the papers I wrote in college, and I don’t believe I ever used an entry out of any encyclopedia as a source in any paper that I wrote. And being a journalism major who was 3 credit hours away from a history minor and who filled most of his electives with English and political science classes, I wrote a lot of papers in college. When I wrote my paper on the influence of William Randolph Hearst on the William McKinley administration, I may have looked up both Hearst and McKinley in an encyclopedia to get background information, but I doubt it. Why use an encyclopedia when there are so many good, specialized texts available?

There is still valid use for questionable sources in scholarly work anyway. One professor actually encouraged us to look in Mother Jones and American Spectator when possible, just to get the views from two extremes on the topic at hand. And Wikipedia can give you leads to follow, even if you don’t end up citing it in your bibliography. The material in Wikipedia came from somewhere, after all.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia for the past year or so. I left it entirely when I got tired of an overzealous editor deleting my additions. I guess I wasn’t the only one who complained about her; she’s since disappeared. I used to look at the day in history and try to fill in the gaps; for example, I noticed on one of Jesse James’ anniversaries that he didn’t have an entry, so I put one together. Unfortunately, high-profile stuff seems to be what attracts both vandals and overzealous editors.

So when I came back, I decided to concentrate on things like baseball, obscure old computers, and things that have connections to Missouri, particularly Kansas City and St. Louis. Those are more my areas of expertise anyway, which makes writing them a lot less work, and the topics are obscure enough that I’ve been mostly left alone. Those edits that do pop up usually are true improvements, rather than someone going on a power trip. My entries get linked much less frequently on the front page now, but I’m happier.

Another thing that I’ve taken to doing is to always check Wikipedia whenever I’m researching something. Sometimes Wikipedia has good information, but may be missing some detail I found elsewhere. Sometimes it has very little information. In either case, I try to enter the information I found. I recently created entries for Lionel Corporation, American Flyer, and Louis Marx and Company. Of course I got interested in them because of my recent renewed interest in toy trains, and during the time period I’m interested in, those companies were the big three in the United States. Some of the information about those companies is difficult to find online. Or it was. Now it’s in Wikipedia, which makes it easier to track down.

According to Wikipedia’s records, I’ve contributed to 323 entries. Most of those are pretty minor. There are lots of people who’ve contributed a whole lot more than me.

But I often notice a domino effect on my entries. Soon after writing the Lionel entry, I wrote one for O gauge model railroading in particular, and made an addition or two to the main model railroading article. Soon, other people were making their additions to specific gauges and scales, or creating them when entries didn’t exist. Within a few days, Wikipedia had some good information on the topic. It’s anything but exhaustive, but I’ll put it up against any other encyclopedia’s offering.

One difference that I have definitely noticed about Wikipedia, as opposed to conventional encyclopedias: Wikipedia has a much better pulse on pop culture. I’ve often lamented that people who have entries in the more traditional encyclopedias don’t have entries in Wikipedia, but every teenybopper band that’s come along in the past couple of years has an entry. But I guess ultimately that’s going to prove to be Wikipedia’s strength. In 30 years, it’ll be possible to go to Wikipedia to find out what the hubbub about Justin Timberlake was about. And in 30 years it may be the only place. (One can only hope.)

And in 30 years, those people who deserve more attention undoubtedly will have gotten their entries as well.

I definitely encourage people to look up their topics of interest over there and think about adding some of their knowledge.

How to heal

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , ,

I had a conversation with a friend over the last couple of days. I won’t go into specifics to protect the people involved, but this friend is in the unfortunate situation of being surrounded by people with problems.
One of those people called on Tuesday night. It was a two-hour conversation. I asked how it went. Short version: The caller received a long list of things to do that will help solve the problem. But my friend wasn’t optimistic and fully expects to hear back from this person again in a couple of weeks, miserable as ever, and having not done a single thing on the list.

Someone else in this person’s life is facing a horrible disease. This disease wasn’t my dad’s area of specialty, but it was an area of interest for him. He wrote about a form of the disease in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association in 1979. I wished aloud that Dad was still alive so I could get his opinion on what this person needs.

Then I realized it doesn’t take Dad’s Bachelor’s degrees in physics, chemistry and biology and his Doctorate of Osteopathy and his 23 years of practicing medicine to understand what this second person needs. I don’t know much about this second person’s needs, but I saw a common thread between the first and the second.

Neither of them want help enough.

I’ve been there. I battled depression from the ages of about 14 to 21. I wasn’t willing to do anything about it until spring of 1995. I was used to it and I’d always managed to live with it. Part of me believed I thrived off it. My favorite writers were always depressed, so to me, being pessimistic and gloomy all the time was an asset. And I still believe to this day that some of the best stuff I ever wrote was written during a mood swing. I knew–or at least suspected–that I had a problem, but I wanted that problem.

Then one day, that problem became too much to bear. I woke up one morning and realized I couldn’t live like that anymore.

I relapsed a couple of years later. You see, I hadn’t wanted the depression to go away. I just wanted a milder form of it. Or I wanted to be able to invite it back over for a visit, because it was my crutch. I was fortunate. When it came back, it came back harder. It crushed me under its weight. I couldn’t get to work on time anymore, and when I did get there, I was unproductive. Most of the people I worked with couldn’t stand to be around me. My friends from that time period felt sorry for me, but I only have one friend left from those days. Some of those friendships would have gone away anyway, but I think part of it was just that it was too much work to be my friend right about then.

I knew life couldn’t go on that way. And in both cases, getting help was a lot of work. I came away from my therapy sessions with more homework than I got from some of my college-level classes. And the work was harder than a lot of my 300-level Journalism classes.

When you’re lurking in the Valley of the Shadow of whatever, and it took a culmination of events that took place over a lifetime to get you there, you can’t expect a two-hour phone conversation to change it. And you can’t expect it to go away on its own.

But I wanted to beat it badly enough. I was willing to do my homework. I wanted it gone, at any cost. If that meant I’d never write again, so be it. Better to be unpublished and happy than published and miserable. And–this will come as a shock to some, and as an “oh, duh!” to others–once I was rid of my problem, I found I didn’t need it. I went on to publish a book that went so far as to be Amazon.com’s #1 seller in Canada for a couple of weeks–and the concept was something I thought of after therapy, so it’s not like I developed it in depression and saved it up for afterward–and then I published a handful of magazine articles across the Atlantic.

So take it from me. You can turn around, even when you think you have everything to lose by facing your problem and getting it fixed.

So how do you pray for someone who doesn’t want help?

I think it helps to remember that there is one prayer that God will always answer yes to, no matter who prays it, no matter when they pray it, and no matter how they pray it. When someone says get lost, God complies immediately. And when our lives without Him become so miserable that we can’t take it anymore and we want Him back, He’ll come back even more quickly than He left, if that’s possible. But I think those are the only two prayers that are guaranteed to be answered with a yes.

When a person doesn’t want help from you or me or their doctor or their therapist, they don’t want help from God either. And it’s not really in God’s character to butt in uninvited and give unwanted help to somebody. It seems like sometimes He intervenes anyway, but I have to wonder if it isn’t because His back was against the wall and He had to do it for somebody else’s sake. (This is just me talking; don’t get any ideas about me being a prophet or anything.)

So how do you effectively pray for someone in that situation?

I think it’s pretty simple. They have to want help. They have to want it enough to be willing to change. I knew I was on the right track when I wanted my depression gone so badly that I didn’t care if I ever wrote effectively again. I was willing to pay any price to beat my problem, including giving up the most important part of my identity.

You can’t truly be helped until your problem is so big and so crushing that you’re willing to do absolutely anything to get rid of it. My friend Mark once said that nobody knows that they have the will to survive until they really need it. I’d rather say nobody knows that they have the will to survive until they really want and need it. Mark would probably agree. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the distinct impression that he didn’t really want the will to survive until he had to pick out his own coffin. The problem wasn’t real to him until then. But something about picking out a coffin did it for him. But once the problem became real and he wanted to beat it, he did. “There’s no way… I was going to let them put me in that box,” he told me. And even though it was more than 10 years after the fact, he still had the determination of a marathon runner in his eyes when he talked about it.

So when a person doesn’t want help, I think it’s premature to pray for healing. Pray for the problem to become real to the person who has it. Pray for the problem to become crushing if necessary. Pray for something to happen that will make the person want help. At any price. It hurts to pray like that for someone you love. Even when you know God loves that person more than you do.

I know, as Christians we’re supposed to pray for miracles. But you know what? I’ve spent a lot of time around apathetic people. I think being cured of apathy is a bigger miracle than being cured of almost any disease. Praying that way still leaves plenty of room for God to work, which opens the door to lots of other nice possibilities, like praying with that person be so much better than merely praying for that person. And of course, that’s the perfect time to pray for that second miracle.

Outages

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Yes, I’m still alive and so is my server. Unfortunately (note to self: cue up “I Hate My Frickin’ ISP” by Todd Rundgren in the background) Southwestern Bell seems intent on proving my theory that their technicians’ favorite thing to do when bored is to run around unplugging stuff to see what happens.
What usually ends up happening is my Speedstream DSL modem gets hopelessly confused and I fall off the ‘Net. Although this weekend the problem wasn’t that my modem couldn’t connect, it’s that I couldn’t authenticate. Hello? How could I have changed my password? I was offline!

Now, maybe my Speedstream is a piece of junk. Maybe Southwestern Bell is a piece of junk. Were I in the habit of looking around in toilets, I’m pretty sure I could find a better modem and ISP. Unfortunately, I signed a one-year contract. It expires in October. I look forward to telling them to find another sucker.

Meanwhile, yes, I’ve been on a bit of an unannounced sabbatical. What happened? Well, an editor on a power trip over at Wikipedia turned me off to all writing for a time (Zoe, if you’re reading this, just because you don’t know how to write or research doesn’t mean you need to take it out on the world, OK?) and then I found myself swimming in a video editing project that made me believe anew in curses, because I don’t think I’ve seen so many things go wrong since a weekend about four years ago when Steve DeLassus and I tried to install about 4 different flavors of Linux on his 486SX/20 and turn it into a router. When I finally put that project to rest, my leisure activities tended to drift towards anything that didn’t involve a computer.

So I’ve been tired and just haven’t had the energy or will to write much or deal with questions. It happens sometimes.

I guess the Wikipedia snipe deserves a little clarification. I love the project idea. I love writing history. Unfortunately, the project is tainted by several editors who delete anything they don’t like, often without much reason. An article I contributed to about osteopathy garnered a comment from an overzealous editor saying the article raised more questions than it answered and if those weren’t answered he was going to delete it. Well, duh! A lot of things raise questions. If osteopathy didn’t raise any questions, then allopathy (the medical techniques practiced by your friendly neighborhood M.D.) wouldn’t exist. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and if you don’t understand that you really have no business associating with anything with the letters “pedia” in its name.

Working along with one or two others, we were able to answer enough questions to save that article. But I was mad. The osteopathy article had minor problems and was on the chopping block, yet the article on Joseph Smith was so biased and incomplete as to be unusable, but was being ignored?

At one point I got into the habit of checking the historical events of the given day and looking for holes in the linked articles. It was fun, I learned a lot, and I think some articles improved for the better. I fondly recall writing about Joseph Pulitzer (as in the Pulitzer Prize). He’s a very misunderstood figure in history. On one hand, he was one of the biggest innovators in journalism, ever. On the other hand, he and William Randolph Hearst pretty much created the Spanish-American War just to sell newspapers, which is despicable. (Hearst falls a bit lower on the slimeball scale though; at least Pulitzer didn’t ever openly advocate the assassination of a president.) I came out of that endeavor with more respect for Pulitzer than I’d had before though.

But one day I found a photograph of Booker T. Washington at the Library of Congress and uploaded it. It got deleted when I neglected to answer a query as to its copyright status after 24 hours. Was the picture copyrighted? Very highly unlikely. Washington died at the turn of the 20th century and any published work prior to 1922 is now in the public domain. The Library of Congress isn’t willing to guarantee that particular picture is in the public domain, but they provide a huge, archival-quality TIFF for download, suitable for commercial printing use. So they must be pretty certain. You think the Library of Congress wants DMCA-related legal problems? William Jefferson Clinton may be above the law, but the Library of Congress isn’t.

Yet it turned into a controversy. A huge controversy. That particular editor wasn’t interested in improving the quality of Wikipedia; she was on an ego trip. Somehow she got gratification from teaching me and the person who re-uploaded my image (and then replaced it with another one) a lesson.

Meanwhile, an unattributed image of Britney Spears remains.

Of course there’s another lesson to be learned: When you’re trying to be an open-content encyclopedia, you need to attract people. You attract people by having lots of articles. The more articles you have, the more people read you, and the more people you have reading you, the more readers you’ll be able to convert into contributors. The Wikipedia would be a much better place with that editor writing articles and not harassing people who are also doing their best to make it a better place.

I do expect to return someday, but when I do, I’ll be writing the biographies of people like Calvin Schiraldi. Few people besides Red Sox fans care about Calvin Schiraldi, but that’s the point. I’ll get left alone if I linger in the obscure and I don’t upload images. I’m less valuable there, but we’ve already seen what happens when I think about value.

But in the shorter term, I need to find a paying gig. I’ve got a couple of leads on that. I can really use the money, but besides that, it’ll be nice to do some writing for magazines again. For me, writing stopped being about money at about age 19.

Sorry I’ve been away

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I meant to post last night, then I noticed nobody had written a Wikipedia entry for Daniel Pearl. I had to jump on that one. We’re talking about a guy who wrote a feature story about Iranian pop music and got it published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, folks. Who gets those kinds of ideas? And then gets them published in a venue like that?
OK, OK, getting it published on the front page of the WSJ isn’t quite the accomplishment it first seems–the WSJ seeks out stories like that to put on its front page to break up its notorious monotony. Still, this is one of the holy grails of journalism.

He also wrote a story about a Stradivarius violin being found on a highway on-ramp. That’s not something you hear about very often. The best story I ever heard like that was about someone finding a working Micron laptop on a highway on-ramp. The reason those things ended up on the on-ramp was the same: both of them allegedly were placed on top of a car before the driver absentmindedly forgot and drove off.

In the case of the Stradivarius, it’s also highly possible the thing was just stolen. In the case of the Micron laptop, it’s the theory of my coworkers that the guy who did it just wanted a new one and wasn’t quite as thrilled as everyone else when the laptop was returned to him in perfect working order. But, as usual, I digress.

There was a lot of drama surrounding the Daniel Pearl story. He was a highly-regarded WSJ bureau chief, chasing the trail of shoe bomber Richard Reid. He was kidnapped because he was an American Jew in a Muslim country. (Never mind that there’s every indication that to Pearl, being Jewish was just a label and he had no particular hatred of Arabs or Mohammedanism, and that Pearl was known at the WSJ for being one of its most outspoken critics of the U.S. government.) His loving wife was pregnant with their first child. That child was born several months later without a father. His grisly death was highly publicized because it was videotaped and released.

It’s easy to forget in all of that that Daniel Pearl was a human being, with a sense of humor and the unusual quirks you find and enjoy in your best friends.

So I had to jump at writing his story.

Can I ever buy a record again?

Dave Farquhar Music , ,

I read something today that tells an awful lot about the record industry, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Usually when I write a Wikipedia entry, it’s because something popped up on my watchlist, I read it, and found a reference to something that hadn’t been written yet. Today, a link to Doug Hopkins showed up, so I wrote it. It would be a nice break from writing journalism history, which I’m more qualified to write about, but pop culture is more fun.

Doug Hopkins isn’t a household name, but if you’ve listened to popular music for the past decade, you’ve heard his songs. He was the songwriting talent behind the Gin Blossoms, an alt-rock band from Arizona that rocketed onto the landscape in 1993 and then faded fast.

There isn’t much information out there about Hopkins now, but it’s a typical garage band story: Hopkins founded a band in 1987, the lineup shuffled a bit, they spent a few years writing songs, recorded a one-off album that they sold themselves that contained early versions of what would become all their major hits, then they got discovered, and in 1990 they signed a big-time record deal. They recorded an EP that went nowhere, then recorded a full-length debut, only there was a problem. Hopkins, for whatever reason, couldn’t handle the pressure. He was a self-destructive type anyway, prone to depression and alcoholism and had first attempted suicide way back in 1983. He’d get nervous so he’d drink, then he’d go into the studio and flub up his guitar parts so he’d drink some more to feel better, and then he’d go in the next day and be even worse. Supposedly most of the guitar work on the songs that made the Gin Blossoms famous was actually Jesse Valenzuela, who was normally the rhythm guitarist, and little of Hopkins’ playing actually appeared on the album.

Eventually it got to a point where the band was wondering if they still had a record deal, and Hopkins became the catch. If Hopkins was in the band, they didn’t. If he was out, they did. So in April 1992 they put Hopkins on a plane back to Arizona and had someone back there tell him he was fired. They hired one of their groupies to play lead guitar, paid him half of the salary due to Hopkins ($760 a month–Hopkins got half and his replacement got half), and went on tour to support their album.

A year later, “Hey Jealousy” was being played on every modern rock station in the country, and by summertime, it would be on MTV and on the mainstream rock stations as well. I remember I couldn’t go anywhere in 1993 and not hear that song. Not that I’m complaining.

The deposed Hopkins wrote a few new songs and formed a new band, then another, but he was bitter. His friends were getting famous off his songs and downplaying his role in their creation, while he played small-time bars in and around Phoenix. He wrote a few pop songs for other people to try to make ends meet. But in late 1993, he started to self-destruct. In November, his girlfriend left. One Friday in early December, he went into a detox center for an evaluation, and on his way home, he stopped at a pawn shop and bought a gun. His sister came over that night and found the phone book open to gun shop ads. When she said goodbye to him for the last time, she knew it was the last time.

You probably can guess the rest. One of his new bandmates found him at 1:15 Sunday morning in his apartment.

The guy was obviously self-destructive, and everyone who knew him knew it and tried to get him help, and, having had my own struggles with depression, I know you can’t be helped until you want help. His band members knew it–when you listen to the lyrics, the the Gin Blossoms songs on New Miserable Experience that weren’t written by Hopkins seem like they were written about him–and his family members knew it.

But on top of that, he had to deal with the question of how you pay your bills. At least when I struggled with depression, I didn’t have anyone hounding me for money I didn’t have. I was pulling in a couple thousand a month before taxes–not huge money, but enough to live on. This guy was making $380 a month, plus whatever he could manage to get from songwriting gigs and playing bars.

After his death, Hopkins’ lawyer guessed that his future songwriting royalties would be worth at least $500,000. Not bad for a two-hit wonder, and who knows how much staying power he was anticipating. (The two hits the Gin Blossoms would have after NME weren’t written by Hopkins.)

So Hopkins had a solid financial future ahead of him and anyone could see it. But he died with $498 in his pocket. He had no money in the bank.

There’s a word for that. Exploitation. Hopkins’ depression made for some good songs and some good money, but not for him.

And I’m supposed to run out and buy a bunch of records? When this is how the people who make them get treated? I don’t think so.

Windows potpourri

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

I’ll give some random Windows tips tonight, since it’s getting late and I don’t really want to think. So here’s some stuff I’ve been putting off. So let’s talk utilities and troubleshooting.
Utilities first. Utilities are more fun. So let’s talk about a pair of reader submissions, from Bryan Welch.

Proxomitron. Bryan wondered if I’d ever heard of it because I’d never mentioned it. I’m sure I mentioned it on my page at editthispage.com because I ran Proxomitron for a couple of years. Proxomitron is a freeware proxy server that blocks ads, Javascript, cookies, and just about anything else undesirable. I’ve found that these days I get everything I need from Mozilla–it blocks popups just fine, and I can right-click and pick “Block images from this server” when I run across an objectionable ad, and of course I have GIF animation turned off and Flash not installed. That works for me, and it saves me memory and CPU time.

But if you want more than Mozilla gives you off the shelf, Proxomitron will give it to you. I used to recommend it wholeheartedly. I haven’t looked at a recent version of it but I’d be shocked if it’s changed much. If any of that interests you, I’m sure you’ve already run off to download it. It runs on any version of Windows from Win95 on.

98lite. Most of my readers run Windows 2000 or XP at this point, but about 20% of you are still running Win98 or WinMe. If you want to get a little extra speed, download and run 98lite to remove Internet Explorer and other not-quite-optional-but-mostly-useless cruft. It’s been pretty well established that Windows 9x runs 20-25% faster with IE gone. That’s more improvement than you’ll get from overclocking your CPU. Or from any single hardware upgrade, in most cases.

If you need IE, 98lite can still help you–it can break the desktop integration and speed things up for you, just not as much.

If you’re still running 98, I highly recommend it. How much so? When I was writing Optimizing Windows, Shane Brooks probably would have given me a copy of it, on the theory that its mention in a book would cause at least sales he wouldn’t get otherwise. I mentioned it (I think I dedicated half a chapter to it), but I didn’t ask him for one. I registered the thing. If I liked it enough to pay for it when I probably didn’t have to, that ought to say something.

Troubleshooting. Let’s talk about troubleshooting Windows 2000 and XP.

Weird BSODs in Premiere under Windows 2000. I haven’t completely figured out the pattern yet, but my video editing computer gets really unstable when the disk gets jammed. A power play at church forced me to “fork” my new video–my church gets its edited, censored, changed-for-the-sake-of-change version (pick one) while everyone else gets the slightly longer how-the-guy-with-the-journalism-degree-intended-it version. Re-saving a second project filled up nearly all available disk space and the machine started bluescreening left and right. After I’d done some cleanup last week and freed up over a gig on all my drives, and then defragmented, it had been rock solid.

So if you run Premiere and it seems less than stable, try freeing up some disk space and defragmenting. It seems to be a whole lot more picky than any other app I’ve ever seen. I suspect it’s Premiere that’s picky about disk space and one or more of the video codecs that’s picky about fragmentation. But if you’re like me, you don’t really care which of them is causing the BSODs, you just want it to stop.

Spontaneous, continuous Explorer crashes in Windows 2000. Yeah, the same machine was doing that too. I finally traced the problem to a corrupt file on my desktop. I don’t know which file. I found a mysterious file called settings.ini or something similar. I don’t know if deleting that was what got me going again or if it was some other file. But if Explorer keeps killing itself off on you and restarting and you can’t figure out why, try opening a command prompt, CD’ing to your desktop, and deleting everything you find. (I found I had the same problem if I opened the desktop directory window in Explorer while logged on as a different user, which was how I stumbled across the command line trick.)

I can’t say I’ve ever seen this kind of behavior before. First I thought I had a virus. Then I thought I had a corrupt system file somewhere. I’m glad the problem turned out to have a simple cure, but I wish I’d found that out before I did that reinstall and that lengthy virus scan…

Defragging jammed drives in Windows 2000 and XP. If you don’t have 15% free space available to Defrag (and how it defines “available” seems to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century), it’ll complain and not do as good of a job as it should. In a pinch, run it anyway. Then run it again. Often, the available free space will climb slightly. You’ll probably never get the drive completely defragmented but you should be able to improve it at least slightly.