Articles from the Archives
These were all written a while ago. They range from ridiculous to drop-dead serious... see if you can tell which is which.
Buying Myself a Birthday PresentI wrote this article for a wristwatch forum called TimeZone (yes, I said "wristwatch forum") and then it was picked up by the Singapore Business Times for the feature article in their Sunday wristwatch supplement. I don't know how often they print the wristwatch supplement. Probably no oftener than once a week, right? Never been to Singapore... in Boulder, nobody knows or cares about wristwatches, and so we don't have such things.I tried to bring humor, drama, adventure, and suspense into a story about a shopping trip. Only the humor part was easy. |
Review of the Pulsar Analogue-Type Men's StrapNot only can I write wristwatch adventure stories, but I can write a wristwatch review. (Well, actually, I don't think I could write one today, but I used to be able to write one.) Here's my favorite one, written for a special day. It's a lot funnier if you read my "serious" wristwatch reviews first, so here are some links to them:Chronoswiss Opus JLC Reverso Duo Lange 1 Revue Thommen Cricket 1997 The Lange 1 has a starring role in the Buying Myself a Birthday Present article (link above), and the JLC Reverso Duo has a minor supporting role. |
Illustrated Guide to Watch Styles, Shapes, and FeaturesThe wristwatch articles are from a page of about 18 that I wrote during my wristwatch phase. While I was reading them again for the first time in years, I came across one more that you might enjoy. If nothing else, it will help you understand my afliction, now cured, and that will help you to manage yours or perhaps assist your loved ones in their time (!) of need.(I just now noticed that I completely left out an entire style category whose prototype is the Pulsar Analogue-Type Men's Strap. None of the 22,000 readers of the page noticed this glaring omission!) |
The Source Code Control SystemThis is a really well-known paper, and if you Google "Source Code Control System" in quotes you get about 155,000 hits. It's the system that all modern version-control systems are based on: RCS, CVS, SourceSafe, Subversion, you name it. SCCS itself is still used, too.What happened was that I was hired by Bell Labs in 1970 as a Mechanical Engineer, but I really wanted to work only in software, so I managed to get myself transferred to a software division of the company two years later, and they asked me to do something about their source code mess. I was only about 24, had zero experience with large software projects, so, not knowing any better, I came up with SCCS. There's no text file for the article; the PDF is a scan of a copy of the paper I had in my file cabinet. Sorry for the long download time. SCCS has had one permanent effect on the way I work now: Whenever I have a few versions of the same source code file laying around in various directories, I say to myself, "You really should be using some version control." And, sometimes I actually do. |
Moonrise at 4:05 PMI can't legally show you the picture here, not even by linking to the image, but you probably know this Ansel Adams photograph. (If you don't, click here.)Our local Boulder daily paper ran a story in August, 2001, about this photograph, in which they quoted none other Mary Alinder, who co-wrote Adams's autobiography, as saying that the picture was taken in mid-afternoon and was printed by Adams to make the sky darker. Something about the mid-afternoon part didn't sound right, as I remembered reading something else about the time. So I did some research and wrote this letter to the editor, my first ever. |
Photography Articles
Raw Conversion: Better Never Than Late April 24, 2008
Scanning in India by Way of California With ScanCafe February 15, 2008
How To Back Up Your Personal Computer January 30, 2008
Every Camera I've Ever Owned January 25, 2008
Sharpening JPEGs for the Web January 4, 2008
Lessons Learned From My Memory Problem December 20, 2007
Hunting Down a Mac Hardware Problem December 20, 2007
Trimming GPS Tracks With GPSTrackViewer November 13, 2007
The World's Shortest Camera Buying Guide September 22, 2007
Transporting and Storing Portable Backup Drives August 26, 2007
"The Luminous Landscape" Teaches Me to Print August 4, 2007
Creating a Google Photo Map (Revised) June 26, 2007
Sony GPS-CS1: Not Good Enough for Geotagging Photos June 24, 2007
Epson P-3000/P-5000 Multimedia Storage Viewer March 10, 2007
Trying Out Infrared January 20, 2007
Stupid Designs Hold Digital Back April 1, 2006
Galleries
A small collection of my best photos (click the image). You can order prints, too.
Software
| ImageIngester |
| ImageVerifier |
| LRViewer |
| LRVmaker |
| PhotoSelectLink™ |
| ImageReporter |
| SpanBurner |
| GPSTrackViewer |
Books
The 2004 2nd Edition, a so-called "update" of the 1985 book, which turned out, not surprisingly, to be a re-write. Covers Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin (Mac OS X).