Rubin Starset

And at last, all my photos from when the event was actually open! Half of these were touched up in Aperture, the other half I just did under Lightroom in the past two days. I must say I’ll be sticking with Lightroom from this point onward. None of these photos have actually made it out onto the net yet, so for most of you these will be brand spanking new.

Now that these are up I can allow myself to take more photographs, yay!

Finally, after a long long long wait, here are my photos from before the event ever opened, high rez and cleaned up, tagged for the most part. All done under Aperture. While on the playa I uploaded a large number of these photos in a very very small rez. Those will remain on my Flickr stream but I think I’ll be killing off the sets they’re in.

Computer screens don’t look the same. Different manufacturers, types of displays, etc. Printers also don’t print out identically colored things. This is why color management options were created. A means to allow users to fine tune how a computer should interpret color on the display and print out. This information gets trickled down from the OS to individual applications, such as, let’s say Photoshop. At the same time photos can be saved with color management settings, thusly making this whole thing fairly more complex.

What I’m getting to is Firefox, IE and mostly everything else that isn’t Safari, at this point in time doesn’t display many photos at their true color. As an example, if you’re on the Mac load up this photo I have of myself on Flickr in both Firefox 2 and Safari. If your on a PC, load this photo up in whatever browser, and also save locally then open up in something like Photoshop or irfanview. Notice a difference? Firefox and IE default to some whack ass color profile, while Safari and Photoshop are are to display this correctly.

Firefox 3 should offer the option to display things true, but may not be enabled by default. For the moment if you’d like to view photos off of my Flickr stream, try running Safari. I know that sounds stupid, but boy do my photos look better.

Whenever I get a friends request over a social networking site, the first thing I ask is, “Do I actually know this person outside of the context of the internet?” Most of the time the answer will be yes, I met this person while hanging out with so and so, or at some party, or through a mean trick I played an another friend. When that question gets properly satisfied I’ll go ahead and friend this person back. Most of the times it’s from folks that we’ve met in passing in real life, who found me interesting and want to create a stronger connection, which I think is great.

I started doing this over 5 or 6 years ago. Before then my ICQ buddy list was over 300 contacts deep. Most I had some contact with, about something, maybe due to a Team Fortress clan or web design of some sort. But there was no sort of connection, just a passing of sorts. Around 10 to 20 of those 300 I actually got to know in real life, not behind the glowing box.

Since then I elected to do what I described initially. Ask myself if I know this person. And so far it’s worked well. As it turns out for me, people I meet in real life I have a better, longer lasting bond with, then folks online that show up in passing. To sum it up, I use social networks of different flavors to socialize with others I know, not to find those I don’t.

All this brings me to a short communication I had over Facebook in the past week. This chap friended me, and the name nor the user icon of a face drawn out with chalk looked anywhere near familiar…

Me: Do I know you, if not I don’t friend people I don’t know.
Chap: i dont think so. thats kinda sad though…how do you make new friends?
Me: I leave my computer to go outside and live my life.

I don’t know why I found this interacting so interestingly odd. As I sit here, reading his words, I’m only able to think of how sad his perspective on socializing is to me.

I should eat some food then go outside to play.