Jack

die geist von frankfurt west bahnhof

Photoshop CS2 is so nifty. Still finding new menu items like "Lens Correction..."

frankfurt west bahnhof

23 hours in Brussels

Checked in to the hotel at around 10 PM and found that it was in a fairly anonymous outlying suburb, near the client but far from any restaurant. The bartender advised me not to go outside, for though the night looked cold and empty, gangs of North Africans roamed the neighborhood looking to mug anyone who didn't speak French or Flemish. Must be some kind of rougher version of the Académie française. So all I had for dinner was two Leffes from the bar and a bag of peanuts from the hotel room fridge.

the mercure

Building in back is the hotel.

Mouse on Mars

Saw them at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. These are the only pictures on this blog with no adjustments in Photoshop.

Rucola mit Parmaschinken am Elba

Took me a while to figure out that this tart leaf was the same thing as arugula. This place just off Hamburger Allee put it on the pizza after the bake, along with thin panes of parmesan. At left, Carolina has her Parmaschinken raw.

Frankfurt Hochstraße

Through Günter's car window.

Frankfurt -- outside the Mercure apartments

Victor Hugo a habite cette maison

Browsing for chocolate in Brussels feels like going to the jewelry district. And neither chocolate nor diamonds can be found in the Belgian earth.

Stuttgart park

Walking around the morning after the Mouse on Mars concert.

Concrete Volcanoes in Stuttgart

I called Henry from this park and he surfed over to maps.google.com to try to identify what these things are: art, or some kind of Morlockian forced-air cooling system. Ideas?

Die Lusthaus Ruine

Found this abandoned temple of the Eloi in a park in Stuttgart. Becoming a fan of the Tilt-Shift effect. They really added a lot of digital photography tools in Photoshop CS 2. I guess that's kind of obvious.

Gutenberg Statue

Interesting that they did not rebuild the top of the statue. Downtown Frankfurt.

Frankfurt Fog

This was the view from my hotel balcony while jetlagged. Converted a lamp to a tripod for this shot.

Keyboard v. Mouse

After many years of loyal DragThing use, I finally gave in and installed Quicksilver. Documentation for all the little key commands is hard to track down, but I already find that for me, the keyboard is a lot faster than hunting for an icon in a dock. Even if my hands start from off the keyboard, it feels like zero effort to hit control-space (to bring up Quicksilver) and type i-c-a, enter, to launch iCal.

This definitely has something to do with visual vs. verbal proficiencies, so YMMV. My hands are clumsy at most things, but not at operating a keyboard. There is probably some way in which the linguistic centers in the brain can get in the driver's seat to operate my fingers so long as I am using them to manipulate abstract symbols, instead of, say, a hammer. I wonder if anyone has done any research around this?

Amazon's Mechanical Turk: someone tell Thomas Friedman

"What if... a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"

Well, um, I think that would be The Matrix.

Note to self: defaults write

restarting the finder, and logging out and back in, so far seem to be two methods to force manually updated plist files to take effect. Random example from macosxhints:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1

Afterwards restart the Finder and all hidden or system files/folders should be visible. Now copy the "~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist". Finally, enter this command to hide hidden/system files again and restart the Finder:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 0

(better option, man killall)

note to self: applescript syntax for catching multiple errors

This is from the AppleScript-Users mail list...

try
display dialog "enter the file name" default answer "text.txt"
on error msg number num
if num is in {-1, 25, -128} then
-- respond in the same way for any of the above
else
-- do something else
end if
end try

Note to self: Plists

Mac OS X stores all (text) styles for all (cocoa) applications in the hidden file "~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist"