November 29th, 2010, 2 Comments »
I recently read this story on Reddit, the popular social news site:
On Sunday there was a bad car wreck on I-24 near Paducah, KY, which shut the interstate highway for several hours. I was headed from Tennessee to Chicago and made a U-turn to escape the dead-stopped traffic, pulling over several times to let emergency vehicles race past me westbound on the eastbound lanes.
Once I got off I yanked out the map and found an alternative route. And thus for the first time in my life I drove through Cairo, Illinois.
What on earth happened to that city?
The streets were not just deserted, but decimated. The few intact businesses were surrounded on all sides by the abandoned husks of buildings, including a multi-story brick building downtown that had mostly burned down at some point, and which apparently no one thought needed to be knocked the rest of the way down. Right on the main drag.
The only sign of life was a large processing plant on the river bank, which my traveling companion said looked like a rice processing facility. I was going to guess corn, because of the many elevators and football-field sized storage tanks, which looked like they were still serviceable. Practically everything else in town looked like it died.
The top reply on Reddit refers to a photojournalism project at Southern Illinois University called the Cairo Project. I gather the city has a history of race violence, and, starting in 1969, there was a decade-long boycott of white-owned businesses. Wikipedia shows a population decline from a high of 14,407 in 1940 to 3,632 people in 2000.
I did a little more research, and found a speech by Senator Obama from 2005, in which he talks about visiting Cairo on the campaign trail. I also found this Flickr photo pool showing some of the decrepitude. You can also use Google Street View to take a virtual drive down Commercial Avenue to get a sense of the place.
The decline of small towns across the continent is kind of a fascinating tragedy, and one that feels pretty irreversible. Though, maybe there is hope, as here’s a TIME article about the first new business to open in Cairo in four years.
Photo by Dallas Clemons.
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January 20th, 2010, No Comments »
This is the second item in a week on which I’ve been successfully pitched. Either I’m getting busier, or the pitches are getting better. Maybe a bit of both.
Rollip is a very simple website that enables you to apply stylized filters to your photos. You can generate an expired film effect, sepia tones, black and white and so forth. It emulates functionality that you can find in Apple’s iPhoto, and other similar programs.
I don’t need to do this sort of thing very often. When I do, I usually search for a Photoshop tutorial online and follow the steps. This would enable me to have much finer control over the output, obviously. For those without iPhoto or Photoshop, Rollip seems like a viable quick and dirty alternative. Are there other online tools that do this sort of thing?
Rollip offers a freemium model, where you can filter low resolution photos (up to 600 pixels, I think) for free, while you pay for higher res conversions.
One reason Rollip appeals to me is that it’s so obviously a totally boot-strapped, no frills start-up project. The website is aesthetic free–it’s functional only. It’s a bit like Nitobi’s PhoneGap (they’re a client) project, though they’re in the midst of redesigning.
Here are a couple of samples of, uh, Rollip’d images that I generated. That’s the original on top–me emerging from the water after a successful (in that I didn’t get stung by a jellyfish or bitten by an eel) snorkeling session–with two filters applied:
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May 15th, 2009, 3 Comments »
While living in Morocco last year, we made a trip to the Sahara Desert. The last town before the desert was a scruffy little outpost called M’Hamid. Because we’re self-employed, we needed to check our email. Happily, even M’Hamid had a (small, grungy) internet cafe:
Farflung travelers know that, wherever you are on the globe, there always seems to be an internet cafe nearby. I remember admiring one cafe owner in the small South African town of Hermanus. His lazy life of surfing and occasional tech support for young, hot Australians looked pretty appealing.
I got to wondering about where some of the most distant and remote internet cafes around the globe. Off I go to the Flickr.
To begin, here’s one from the other side of the Sahara, from Siwa Oasis in Egypt (photo by Jeff Werner):
A worrying backup power suppy in Manali, India (photo by alles-schlumpf):
A diversified business in Johannesburg, South Africa (photo by Esther Dyson–yes, that Esther Dyson):
There are more after the jump.
Read more…
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November 28th, 2008, 5 Comments »
A reader named Miranda (who, sadly, recently lost her camera on a trip) sent along a link to the terrific blog Found Cameras and Orphaned Photos. The concept, as you might imagine, is pretty simple: people who find cameras or memory cards email photos to the blog, and the photos get posted. If you’ve lost your camera (or if you recognize anybody in the photos), you can contact the finder through the blog to get your photos back.
I might have done the implementation differently (enabling people to search a database by location, date lost, etc), but it’s a good start. The site will become more invaluable once photo-matching and recognition technology becomes more available.
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November 14th, 2008, 8 Comments »
Insert phallic joke here. I was at Blenz last night, and spotted these measures of cup size:
Didn’t Blenz used to eschew crazy Starbucks-esque sizing? What’s with ‘supremo’?
Incidentally, this post shows off the new site design’s ‘light box’ functionality. If you click the above photo, you should see a kind of pop-up thingie that shows you a bigger version (speaking of the tyranny of size). I hope it’ll be handy for instances when I want to share a big image. The cup lids aren’t example a great example, but you get the idea.
UPDATE: At least, that’s what it should do. The light box thingie doesn’t seem to be working at the moment–I’ll trouble shoot as time permits.
UPDATE #2: Yeah, that works for me now, too. Don’t know what’s up with that.
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July 14th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Monique is a keynote speaker down at Portus 2008, a Harry Potter convention down in Dallas. I’ve been enjoying her photos, which provide yet another view into the dorky but lovable world of intense fandom. Here are two favourites. I love that He Who Must Not Ever, Ever Be Named is on a call:
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July 2nd, 2008, 2 Comments »
Irish blogger Damien Mulley devised a generous and clever means of increasing the visibility of Irish tech companies:
The premise is that everyone talks up a company (if they think it deserves to be) on a particular date. Every second Tuesday at it happens. Everyone tech and non tech alike are encouraged to talk about the company so that hopefully a tipping point is reached and a potential investor or journalist or partner hears/reads about the company.
Happily, the first candidate for this bloggy bake sale is our client, PutPlace. The response has been mighty, mighty impressive. For all you Catholics, Eirepreneur suggests that a better name might be ‘Shove Tuesday’.
I was thinking that we ought to do this for Vancouver (or British Columbia) startups. Maybe Techvibes or Bootup Labs could sort that out?
In related news, we’re running a photo contest for PutPlace. All you have to do is photograph yourself making a silly face, submit it to our contest, and you could win an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate. Go forth and panic for the camera.
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July 1st, 2008, 1 Comment »
We were briefly in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get much of a chance for sightseeing, though we did take an enjoyable architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. That’s where we took these fifteen odd photos. They’re unremarkable. This is probably the best one:
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