Tag: Photography

Luck of the Draw Book Cover

Seth Anderson11 Comments

Crime Scene

Sold this image1 to St. Martin’s Press to be used as a book cover for a forthcoming murder mystery by Anthony J Cardieri. Hard cover, print run of less than 10,000, scheduled to be released by the end of the year, but I’m still fairly pleased. Received my check today2, on my birthday, so am less maudlin than normal for a birth day.

here is the preliminary mock-up of the cover, which looks like what Amazon.com has listed as well:


“Luck of the Draw: A Crime Novel” (Anthony J. Cardieri)

When Detective Deke Durgess finds himself at the scene of a brutal murder in Lower Manhattan, he has no idea that it’s just the beginning of the most prolific murder spree in New York City history, one where entire families will be wiped out by a vicious killer dubbed The Daily Killer.

The murders are being meticulously committed, with no forensic evidence left behind except for the killer’s callous calling card, a short note left on the body of the victim. The mayor and police commissioner are coming down hard on Deke to make progress, but Deke and his team of detectives and FBI agents are at a standstill until a series of events, and one misstep by the killer, leads them toward cracking the code in the victim selection pro – cess. Believing he knows where the killer will strike next, Deke sets up a sting operation, only to be slapped back down as the killer turns the tables on him, forcing the police department to take a good hard look at its own finest.

Anthony J. Cardieri’s first crime novel is an adrenaline-charged ride through the streets of New York.

About the Author

ANTHONY J. CARDIERI has worked for the city of New York for the past 18 years and currently serves as District Superintendent in the Department of Sanitation. He lives with his wife and three young children in New York City.

Buy a copy! Support the arts! Whoo hoo!!

Footnotes:
  1. the image was of an actual murder that took place about a block from my apartment [↩]
  2. $800, if you are curious [↩]

User Generated Theft

swanksalot8 Comments
Piney Woods TRI-X 400
Piney Woods TRI-X 400, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

outside of Leesville, LA

Republished with really lousy credit:

www.treehugger.com/files/2009/03/carbonfundorg-reforestat…

Discovery Communications, the parent of TreeHugger, market capitalization exceeding $2,000,000,000 apparently doesn’t mind bending the rules when it comes to User Generated Content. Flickr hosts my photographs, and has printed clear guidelines outlining what is acceptable usage:

Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere.

The Flickr service makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to outside web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.

[From Flickr Community Guidelines]

TreeHugger downloaded my photograph from Flickr, stripped out the copyright information that was embedded in the photo, changed the photograph’s name, uploaded it to its own server, and added it to a blog post without linking back to the original photo1. Now this image has become public domain, available for anyone to download from TreeHugger’s high profile site, to use, sell, or whatever, without ever realizing where the image came from2.

I actually don’t usually mind my photos being used on other websites, as I say on my Flickr profile page, or else I wouldn’t bother to upload images anywhere on the internet in the first place. But multi-billion dollar corporations should try a little harder to respect the rights of the little guys.

Suppose I copied some content from the Discovery Channel, a documentary about American Loggers, for instance, and rebroadcasted it on my own television station, while putting a small on-screen title at the end of the broadcast saying, “all content originally created by the Discovery Channel“, I’d soon receive a sternly worded letter from their corporate attorneys. What rights do I have? What cause of action do I have? None, other than this whiney-ass blog post, and a big spit on the ground in TreeHugger’s direction.

Update, left this comment at TreeHugger

So I’m curious, why did you strip out all of the copyright metadata on my photo when you republished it, and why didn’t you follow the terms of use (which are simple: attribution, and link to the original photo). Is this TreeHugger policy? Discovery Communications policy? In effect, you have released my photo to the world as uncopyrighted, is that your intent? Would it bother TreeHugger/Discovery if I did the same with your work?

Curious as to your response, either here, or at my blog where I ask the same questions.

Update: 9:10 CST, TreeHugger didn’t publish my comment, just removed the photo. Now, they are stealing Brion V.’s photo, without a link to his photo page. Still scummy, but not my problem any more. Just wish I had bothered to take a screenshot of their theft before blogging about it. Remind me to steal as much TreeHugger and Discovery Channel material as possible before I die. Or get served with papers.

As twitter and Flickr pal Friendly_Joe suggested, I should still invoice TreeHugger for the time3 that my photo was on their site.

Footnotes:
  1. they did write below the image, Photo via: Swanksalot, but without a link to the photo they borrowed, or bothering to use my actual name. [↩]
  2. my trip to East Texas on a day when both of my grandfathers died [↩]
  3. somewhere in the neighborhood of 36 hours [↩]

Dance

swanksalot0 comment
Dance
Dance, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

West Loop sign, for a dance studio, surprisingly. I don’t know why exactly, but I like the type face. Boeing Headquarters in the background.

Republished with partial credit (no link to the correct page)

http://blogs.webmd.com/all-ears/2009/03/dancing-with-scars-emotional-ones.html

Reading Around on March 17th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading March 17th from 13:38 to 14:12:

  • Taste of a thousand lemons – Los Angeles Times – On a wiltingly hot late summer evening, when all the plants are fainting and there’s not a breath of wind, you pour a tiny glass of limoncello straight from the freezer. It’s colder than ice, and it explodes in your mouth with all the freshness and optimism of lemon. Each sip seems to say, “Poor kid! Poor kid! What a scorcher that was! But everything’s all right now — your old friend night is on the way.”They know a lot about hot summer evenings in Sicily, where limoncello was invented about 100 years ago. It might just be the most sympathetic after-dinner drink there is, as bracing as a gin and tonic but more cheerful and fragrant. Limoncello’s fans have found a lot of other uses for it too: spiking lemonade, flavoring cocktails and splashing onto ice cream, poundcake or fresh fruit

  • Pallini Limoncello

  • Seattle Food – After Homemade Limoncello, You’ll Accept No Other – page 1 – Limoncello, the southern Italian after-dinner treat, is an invigorating refresher with an aroma and flavor unmatched by any citrus-flavored vodka or dessert wine. It’s the sensory equivalent of eating lemon meringue pie on a lazy Sunday picnic in the middle of Paolo’s lemon grove. It’s a potion that gets you to stop and live in the sun-drenched moment, even when it’s cloudy outside.

    The Luxardo brand that your state liquor store may carry is all fine and well, but once you’ve had homemade limoncello, you’ll accept no other. This recipe is a monthlong project that yields huge rewards for just a little patience and hardly any work.

  • Swanksalot’s Solipsism: Fifth Ward – Milwaukee, with biker – “As a billionaire, there would be a lot of buildings I would purchase in Milwaukee. This was one, for some reason. I’d turn most into art collectives – cheap studio space for artsy-fartsy types”

Another Time perhaps

swanksalot1 Comment
Another Time perhaps

Another Time perhaps, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

A Bushmills bottle filled solely with sunlight

As I’ve blathered before, despite having a large percentage of my DNA derived from Irish ancestry, and despite having a mighty thirst for alcoholic beverages, I think St. Patrick’s day is a stupid holiday. Amateur night indeed.

Yelp is Fucked

Seth Anderson9 Comments

Too many allegations of manipulation: I’d be surprised if they survived the year without substantial changes to their business model. Too much controversy: I know I would never look at a Yelp review on my iPhone without wondering if it wasn’t paid for. Until Yelp address this article directly, and credibly, they will not be trusted again. I know I’ve deleted their application off of my iPhone.

Monica Eng investigated the local Chicago variation of the story:

With the Web site Yelp still responding to allegations by San Francisco businesses that it manipulates the prominence of positive and negative reviews, some Chicago merchants are adding to the heat.

They allege that Yelp representatives have offered to rearrange positive and negative reviews for companies that advertise on the site or sponsor Yelp Elite parties.

Ina Pinkney of Ina’s restaurant in the West Loop said that last summer a Yelp salesperson offered to “move up my good reviews if I sponsored one of their events. They called it rearranging my reviews.”

The owner of More Cupcakes, Patty Rothman, said that last fall a Yelp Chicago staffer walked into her Gold Coast shop and “guaranteed us good reviews on the site if we catered one of their parties for free.” Offended but resigned, Rothman complied. And just as promised, positive reviews bloomed for the business right after the party, Rothman said.

Other Chicago businesses told the Tribune of similar experiences but asked to remain anonymous.

Since the allegations were first reported in a San Francisco alternative weekly in mid-February, Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been taking his side of the story in this controversy to the Web, the media and even Twitter.

[Click to read more of Chicago proprietors add to Yelp allegations — chicagotribune.com]

In other words, standard operating procedure. Pay for good reviews to be at the top, or else, your business will suffer. A Yelp mafia. “You wouldn’t want your pretty place to be messed up, would you?!”

Kathleen Richards of the East Bay Express started all the hair-shirtery:

During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.

Because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads. Several, including John, even suspect Yelp employees of writing them. Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. And in at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee.

Many business owners, like John, feel so threatened by Yelp’s power to harm their business that they declined to be interviewed unless their identities were concealed. (John is not the restaurant owner’s real name.) Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. “Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this,’ … then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing.” To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp’s sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.

“That’s the biggest scam in the Bay Area,” John said. “It totally felt like a blackmail deal. I think they’re doing anything to make a sale.”

[Click to read more: East Bay Express | News | Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0]

Sepia

I wonder if my review of Sepia was buried for this exact reason [my Yelp review]. If you peruse Yelp’s page for Sepia, most reviews on the front page are raves, not the negative reviews like mine, and so many others.

The New York Times was interested too:

Local news outlets have raised questions about the company’s practices, including a recent article in the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly, with the provocative headline: “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0.” It reported that Yelp sales representatives had promised to move or remove negative reviews for advertisers.

Mr. Stoppelman said that Yelp does not move negative reviews for advertisers and applies the same ranking system to all companies on the site. Many advertisers, including Mr. Picataggio of Tart restaurant, have negative reviews.

Some of the confusion may come from the fact that advertisers, who pay $300 to $1,000 a month, are allowed to choose which review shows up at the top of their profile page and block ads from competitors. For other businesses, the first two listings a reader sees could be an ad for a competitor and a one-star review.

“If there’s no clarity about that process at all, it exacerbates the suspicion,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and the former general counsel of Epinions, another review site.

Yelp’s lack of transparency does not affect its relationship with businesses alone. It also risks eroding users’ trust in the site. Eric Kingery, an engineer and frequent Yelp user in Chicago, discovered that a review he had written of a jeweler disappeared. “It just makes me suspicious of the impartiality,” he said. “It is a very useful service, but this kind of harms the integrity of the site.”

[Click to read more of Review Site Draws Grumbles From Merchants and Users – NYTimes.com]

Like I said, would be surprised if Yelp survives all this negativity without substantial changes to their methodology and business practices.

High Speed Rail proposal

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High Speed Rail proposal, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Awesome. Would love for more transportation options, especially ones that used Chicago as a hub.
[view large: www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/3312216345/sizes/o/ ]

via The Chicagoist [ chicagoist.com/2009/02/26/chicago_closer_to_high-speed_hu… ].

More info at NPR:
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101073906

these are just the monorails, of course, there are other connections. Also, note the date (lower right corner), 2005. So none of this is new, just possibly funded, if our whole country doesn’t go down the debt hole first. But I’d rather we spend money on infrastructure than on Boeing and Halliburton largesse.

I’m on board, figuratively, with any big national rail program, with super trains, or just adding some zing to the existing cobbled-together Amtrak system. I’d love to see America catch up with the rest of the developed world and have a rail system that wasn’t an afterthought.

Reading Around on February 16th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading February 16th from 00:25 to 12:47:

  • WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial – Test Page FireFox 3 Safari – FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop ColorManagement – The above “Tagged WhackedRGB” example also will clearly show if your web browser is colormanaged or not — both Tagged and Untagged files are identical except the top image has an embedded ICC profile — the rollover is in essence stripping the profile. … FireFox 3 (Mac and Windows free download) Note: Color management in FireFox3 is off by default. TO ENABLE COLORMANAGEMENT: type about:config into the address bar. To turn it on, change the value of gfx.color_management.enabled to true and restart the Fire Fox browser. In addition to enabling color management in Firefox, you also should enter the name of the monitor profile – it’s next to the enable/disable parameter in the parameters list that you get to by entering about:config in the address field.

  • Chilly scenes of winter « STEVENHARTSITE – Movies don’t come any more hardboiled than Frozen River, even if virtually every scene of the film is is covered with snow and ice. Courtney Hunt’s refreshingly blunt and unsentimental storyline centers on Ray (Melissa Leo), a housewife abandoned by her husband and stranded with two young sons in a dead-end job at the Yankee Dollar. By chance she falls in with Lila (Misty Upham), a troubled young Mohawk woman who smuggles illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River via tribal lands overlapping Quebec and the New York state line.

Reading Around on February 8th through February 9th

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A few interesting links collected February 8th through February 9th:

  • The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln – The Forensic Evidence – Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis {6}. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight
  • Breaking Down the 2009 Trade Deadline | Dabullz – Photo by swanksalot on Flickr

Seth and Joshua Starbuck 1986

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Seth and Josh 1986, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

My first car – a VW as old as me. Dig the porn-stache, and also Josh holding a can of WD-40. That same can lived in the back seat of that car as long as the car ran.

Taken in front of 906 Post Oak, in South Austin, circa 1986.

Reading Around on January 26th

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Some additional reading January 26th from 10:22 to 22:31:

  • The Washington Monthly – This Explains a Lot– “On the one hand, the Bush administration released some detainees who apparently turned out to be pretty dangerous. On the other, the Bush administration refused to release other detainees who weren’t dangerous at all, and were actually U.S. allies.How could this happen? In light of these revelations about the lack of files, it starts to make a lot more sense.But to put this in an even larger context, consider just how big a mess Bush has left for Obama here. The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who’ve been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren’t hard enough to clean up.”
  • The three primary roles your local website should play | yelvington.com– “Journalists tend to gravitate to only one of these roles: the town crier, the quaint colonial-era village character who walks around ringing a bell telling you what’s happening. It comes naturally. This is why 24×7 coverage teams and the “continuous news desk” concept take root so quickly when newsrooms suddenly awaken to the urgency of taking the Internet seriously.
  • But the other roles aren’t secondary. They’re coequal, and they’re grossly neglected by most local news websites.Moreover, they consistently surface in qualitative research as poorly met needs. The language people use is a little different, but recognizable: “Help me connect with people.” “Help me get answers I need.” “Help me find people like me.” “Help me pursue my interests.”
  • drop.io: simple private file sharing, free internet file sharing – Hmm, seems useful
    “Use drop.io to create drops and privately share your files by web, email, phone, fax, and more. Drops are protected from search engines so you can conveniently share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.”
  • Undercover Black Man: Bad news for David Milch fans– “Now I hear that HBO has pulled the plug on Milch’s latest project, a New York City cop drama set in the 1970s called “Last of the Ninth.”They filmed a pilot episode… with British actor Ray Winstone (pictured) as one of the leads. Evidently HBO was not digging it.That’s a show I wanted to see. Since the ’90s, Milch has talked about creating a series based on Bill Clark’s early career in the NYPD.

    Clark spent two years undercover as a white radical. He hung out with Black Panthers (including Tupac’s mama).”

  • Food Is A Weapon
  • Mirror, Mirror on the Wall – Errol Morris Blog – NYTimes.com– Awesome! “Photographs make this somewhat more difficult. They are a partial record of who we were and how we imagined ourselves. …The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. …. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way.(The photos are reproduced here with their original captions, unedited.)”
  • Tijuana Bibles– “If you are offended by depictions of sodomy, bestiality, “alternative sexual practices,” racial and ethnic stereotypes, or just about anything else, you should leave now.Tijuana Bibles were pornographic tracts popular in America before the advent of mass-market full-color glossy wank-fodder such as Playboy. A typical bible consisted of eight stapled comic-strip frames portraying characters and celebrities (eg. John Dillinger, Popeye, Disney characters) in wildly sodomistic situations. Many could be considered grossly racist, sexist, and otherwise wholly “politically incorrect.” Browser discretion is advised.”

Reading Around on January 25th through January 26th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected January 25th through January 26th:

  • How to Replace a Sky in Photoshop – “Got an image that is great, except for that lifeless dull sky? Learn how to replace the sky in an image using Photoshop in this tutorial.”
  • Op-Ed Columnist – Will Obama Save Liberalism? – NYTimes.com – “This is William Kristol’s last column.” Awesome news.

  • Blog-Sothoth: netflixed What Times Is It There – Sounds awesome. Added to my Netflix queue.”What Time is it There? is a quiet masterpiece–and literally quiet, because there is about ten minutes of dialogue in a two-hour film. If you need traditional plot in your flicks, avoid this one like the plague. It moves like an ethereal dream.”
  • Media Matters – Goldberg publishes badly doctored version of Rose/Brokaw interview as purported evidence of Brokaw’s bias – Bernie Goldberg is just a hack, talentless, bitter hack. “In another house-of-cards example of purported media infatuation with President Obama offered by Bernard Goldberg in his new book, Goldberg echoes Rush Limbaugh by printing badly doctored “snippets” of an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw. Goldberg’s doctored transcript of the interview falsely suggests, among other things, that Brokaw expressed the view that “there’s a lot about [Obama] we don’t know,” when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to “conservative commentators” and that comments Brokaw and Rose made about their lack of familiarity with the candidates applied only to Obama when, in fact, they were referring to Sen. John McCain as well.”