“photos”

There’s been a recent, unnacounted-for change in me regarding architecture. Never having so much as glanced at it before, I now found it supremely soothing, liberating—it suddenly seems the most important thing in the world. This computer mockup of the Louvre Abu Dhabi with its canopy of light, for instance, has had me transfixed all day. See NYT’s feature, The Louvre’s Art: Priceless. The Louvre’s Name: Expensive.

Never would’ve thought designing calendars was this fun. (PokeCalendario, btw, is a great turn of phrase by James P. Wack)

The diptych is a fascinating art form—the boundary object between comic and picture.

Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).

Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged Ideas^AM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form¹), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…

Fees in malls’ parking lots are a recent development here in Guadalajara^WP that has been welcomed with the fervent outrage one would have imagine reserved for true wickedness. It is all the more interesting then how quickly the new mode swept the city—I can only think of two malls that remain complimentary, Plaza Acueducto and Plaza Outlet, and it’s clear that they refrain from charging only to attract customers to their rather forlorn premises.

Despite the somewhat frequent calls that something should be done about this, that some new law should be passed to protect us customers from yet another new instance of capitalistic rapacity, I take them as nothing but inconsequential bursts of anger at the inconvenience. I take it as a given that we can all see clearly that mall owners have the obvious property right to charge whatever they want for the use of their premises. We, in turn, have the corresponding right of shopping wherever we want.

So instead I want to discuss here the deeper question of whether or not these parking fees better society. Is the money Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) earn the reward for a valuable service or ravenous plunder hiding under the banner of property rights?

Jaron Lanier’s answer to the 2007 Edge question, What are you optimistic about?, is, predictably enough, post-symbolic communication. But the more I hear about it, the more I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur and sheer magic of the vision. As beautiful a dream as I’ve ever seen.

There was a fire tonight in a warehouse a couple of blocks from the house. Everyone was pretty scared because it was just a stone-throw away but it seems to be contained now. The warehouse, on Mariano Otero Street, turned out to be from the uncle of one of my little sister’s best friends. Weird, that.

Anyway, I went as closed as I dared and took many a picture (until a drunkard started harassing me for taking his picture). Most turned out to be crap—my camera totally sucks at night-pictures—but I gathered the best in this photoset.

And here are two short videos. The first from my very street, the second from Mariano Otero.

Last Saturday, Gwyn invited me to the First Flickr Phototour of Guadalajara^WP. I didn’t know what to expect or what the hell a phototour was (I brought my camera rather as an afterthought), but I wanted to meet that mysterious Gwyn and get some air. (My parents wouldn’t let me go at first, having read in the day’s newspaper about some local murderers that met their victims through the web. When they finally read the article more carefully and found the victims were local gays hooking up dates online, they exhaled, relieved, and let me go without further ado. Which was homophobic and then some but I can’t change the world all at once—I was too late already.)

Well, it was unbelievable fun. I read somewhere that as we grow old we stop seeing things and only name them instead. You look around your room and instead of seeing the bed—its shadows, texture, pattern, perspective—you call it “bed”—and move on. Precipice locals, from John Brunner’s ^WP Shockwave Rider^WP novel, had a very peculiar way to fight this tendency:

With my formist^ELZR obsession and my “My kingdom is not from this world.” joke, I am of course guilty of such distracted overnaming. (It has been, in fact, a point of pride.) And so it was a revelation for me to be forced by the shutter to shut up and simply look around.

There was a point, while we visited the Hospicio Cabanhas, when my euphoria was reaching religious-experience proportions. Everything was suddenly so sensual, so fresh and poignant^EEM, so physical, so there. I looked and looked at stones and tree bark and white walls, and they seemed suddenly infinite in their detail.

I have to go back there soon. Sit in the middle of that huge, geometric patio, and read, design, or program the morning away. Which reminds me, I had this weird impossible idea before breakfast^ELZR (I skipped it) that with its many patios, its huge rooms, and its beautiful cloisters, the Hospicio Cabanhas would be the perfect media hotel!^ELZR We’ll see when we can afford it.

So, yeah, I had a great, crazy time. Check out my photoset, Gwyn’s, and Pedro’s.

Here some of my favorite shots:

Been obsessed with this six-megapixels of Santorini^WP all day. Obsessed like one obsesses about a dream.