Category: Thoughts

Travelling to Afghanistan

He said at the end of the video that he wants to go back, because the people were just lovely… I can find plenty of lovely people close to home, without having to go to Afghanistan! He had to leave within hours, or he’d go to prison for who knows how long… but… go back because the people are lovely? Uh, no.

He did another video, and went on a train that was actually a step up from the one Bald and Bankrupt went on in India. (Backpacker Ben, a hard-core traveler, was beyond his ability to endure on that trip. If he can’t handle that train, nobody can.)

Joe Fazer was on this train for three days, having to share his bunk bed with strangers, in addition to all of the other wonderful things that Indian trains are known for.

I am going to watch his Yakutsk video, as that is slightly less insane than Afghanistan or India. Just slightly.

I like these kind of videos a lot, because they show more reality than the travel shows I used to watch so often, or the National Geographics where I’ve read about these places. People walking around with cameras, showing what life is actually like in these areas, wheras GlobeTrekker used to try really hard to make the worst places seem so much better than they actually are. (Still a great show, though.) So many of these sources don’t have incentive to show you the real negatives of going there, something apparent in the videos of a regular person with a camera.

And yes, he’s going to the most dangerous or unappealing places on the planet to get clicks, I get it. But like police body cams, people with video cameras are revealing things that were hidden from us by the likes of shows and magazines that didn’t have a good reason to show things as they really are. And still there are a lot of cultural aspects to these places that aren’t fully explored, most of these people running around with their cameras need to get along with everybody, so there isn’t much revealed about pre-teen girls being sold as brides, things like that in these walk-around videos, but they are another step in being more aware of how things work in other parts of the world, other societies and cultures where there are major differences from our own other than language, food, and fashion.

The Lost “Rydberg Construction” Cap

This was my favorite cap when I was a kid. “Rydberg Construction” was the company of my Dad’s cousin, but I thought it was cool because it was a construction company owned by someone in the family, and to a kid, that is a big deal.

I was walking home after a piano lesson, and this older kid on a BMX bike came up behind me and just took it off of my head. I’ll never forget the way he slapped it onto his head with one hand, like it was not a big deal, and lazily rode off as I ran after him, unable to keep up.

So, I get home, and as luck would have it, my big brother and his big friend were there and I was crying. They took off in my brother’s cool Camaro to find this BMX jerk. That’s what good big brothers and their friends do.

Unfortunately, they never found the guy. I suspect that years later I rode the same bus with him as this happened in the same area as the Drake Jr. High bus stop, and there were a lot of jerks on that bus, too. Or, perhaps the world is simply full of jerks.

Anyway. I got the bright idea to recreate the logo, which only took a few minutes, and when I find employment (I’m between jobs right now, http://randyrydberg.com) I’ll be ready-to-go to have a new cap made. Maybe more than one in case someone else gets the bright idea to steal it again.

I did get a new “Jedi” cap for Christmas later that year though, which I still have. There’s a famous photo of George Lucas wearing the same hat, which makes me quite fashionable.

As it turns out, the original logo had two different fonts, but I just went with the secondary font for the entire thing.

PowerMac G4 Tower

This is my PowerMac G4 Tower. It has long since been relegated to my boneyard of old, treasured Macs along with a G3 tower, Quadra 605, and a nice aluminum Pro Tower which was a gift from a friend. I wish I’d kept the PowerComputing 150 clone I used for nine years, but I can’t keep them all. (I try, though.) That one had been Frankensteined with every upgrade possible to keep it relevant. I was so upset when Steve Jobs returned and killed clone licensing, but he was correct to do so.

Because the Quadra 605 requires a simple battery to start up, and the G3 has a bad power supply, this is my only OS9 computer that works. Eventually I want to replace the hard drive with a solid state one, as this old example has just begun to fail.

I have no real need for anything OS9 (Who does?) but there are a lot of old, treasured games that I’d like to have available as well as the nostalgia of firing up QuarkXPress 3.0/4.0, something I spent a lot of time working with back in the day. It is a familiar, comfortable environment that brings back good memories. Plus, although this isn’t as pretty as my aluminum Pro Tower, it is a nice example of computer design done well and not just a box on the floor.

The beige G3 tower had the ability to fold out flat for upgrades, which at the time was pretty fancy. This one did better with its more simple open-door access. It was nice to have a computer that was so much better thought out than what everybody else was using. And that went for the operating system as well. Still does.

That PowerComputing clone I had for so long actually cut my hands more than once when upgrading it because aside from the operating system that it ran, it was just another beige box from the beige world of beige computers, with no thought at all to anything other than slapping parts together in the cheapest way possible.

Efficiency and design must be in balance in order to do the best work, and Apple has always had that going for it while all other computer makers were just slapping parts together in the cheapest way possible, and calling it a day.

I have watched the evolution of Apples’ design over the years, and in this world where there are so many ugly things, it is nice that this company has it in them to make something positive and appealing out of what everyone else overlooks. Which leaves us with tools that are aesthetically pleasing instead of more plastic-generic mediocrity.

Oil Paintings By My Late Aunt Ida

More art by Aunt Ida at: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCS1xn

My late Aunt Ida was a prolific oil painter, and unfortunately we have no idea where her paintings went, other than the four that we have in our house. This mountain painting, which is pretty small compared to the one of the country house, was just found in my Dad’s files. It is nice that we have a fairly diverse collection, even if it is only four pieces.

Work like this is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of “Modern Art”, where people just toss two or three cans of paint on a canvas and declare the result “Artwork”. Or drawing two rectangles on a white canvas, and if you don’t “get it”, than you aren’t sophisticated enough to understand how ground-breaking it is.

Declaring things that are ugly, visually chaotic, insultingly simple, childish, and lazily random to be great art is what happens when standards no longer exist. My aunt learned a craft, practiced it prolifically, and the result were paintings that are unique and beneficial to the soul.

Aunt Ida holding my Dad

Ten Years Flies By

I’ve posted this photo before, but I just touched it up in Photoshop a bit more and felt like sharing it as the Lincoln is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. (As Ferris Bueller would say).

It is a great example of how fast time flies as this photo is ten years old already. This was taken outside the Ralston Road Cafe, which a few years later became one of those classic instances where a business one takes for granted just disappears out of nowhere without warning. Currently, new townhomes fill the space it once occupied.

The parking lot has significance to me as it is where I worked for seven years pushing carts at Safeway, my first job during and after high school. Pushed a lot of carts here. Chased a lot of shoplifters. This lot is now a bunch of townhomes, and there is still building going on in this immediate area, which was admittedly getting a big run-down. I’m not even sure Walmart across the street was open when this photo was taken.

I’m Thankful For: Optical Character Recognition

My Dad, when reading books, uses highlighters on passages that he likes and wants to remember. This frustrates me when buying books: I’ll come across a great book, open it up, and someone has crudely underlined paragraphs all over the place. Often, at a thrift store, all of the books are pretty much common or not of a great topic, except one… and when I open that one special volume? Its pages are all marked up with underlining or markers.

Quite frustrating.

My way of noting special passages is different: I take a photo of the page with my phone, and use Adobe Acrobat’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to turn the text into editable text, as if it were typed in and not just part of a photo of a page. Adobe’s OCR isn’t bad, and I appreciate what it does considering I grew up writing everything with pens, pencils, and manual typewriters. Correction ribbons… ugh.

So, this is how I do things. I have a big file with all sorts of interesting excerpts from books that I’ve read.

But today, I found out about a better way to do this. I was taking a photo of some pages with my phone, when I accidentally discovered that the iPhone now automatically OCR’s text without even asking!

Even better, when I’m on my Mac Mini, to use the built-in OCR, all I have to use is the Preview app to open the photograph of the page, go to Tools > Text Selection (or even better, Automatic Selection), and the OCR goes to work! I just click on the page and after a few seconds, the cursor changes and I can select all of the text! The Automatic Selection option stays selected so I don’t have to do that every time.

Apple’s OCR (I can’t speak for any Windows OCR features) in my experience, works better than Adobe’s OCR, where lack of contrast and warped text due to pages not being completely flat, causes a lot of static junk text.

I just wanted to share that because this is one of those many useful features our phones and computers can do, but most of us miss it. If you would have told me back in the day that something like this was going to be possible, I would have had a tough time believing it. We take a lot of things for granted, and this is one of them. Also, being able to take unlimited high-quality videos and photos with a computer-phone that fits in a pocket. Some of us remember having to:

1 – Go to store, buy film.

2 – Load film correctly, pick shots carefully because there are only 24-36 to a roll.

3 – Unload film correctly.

4 – Take film to store.

5 – Return to store to buy prints.

So, two trips to the store, one opportunity to ruin the film. And, one was limited to how many shots were on a roll. Now, it is unlimited, with many options and features, and no trips to the store.

Anyway. There are more important things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, but this is still something to be appreciated: useful technology that keeps innovating and bringing us more ways to be productive.

Screenshot

An Example Of Insanely Great Design

Years ago, I worked at a job where we had these Mac Pro Towers, and mine was always solid with everything. No matter what graphics we had to manipulate, my Mac Pro was always up for the job, and actually spoiled me as it was faster than my big 27″ 2009 iMac at home.

My first few jobs in the graphics industry involved getting by with as little computing power and technology as possible, so this Mac Tower was something I always appreciated every time I worked with it.

A few years ago, I was talking to a friend about this, and he happened to have a tower just like the one I used to have, and he needed to find a good home for it. I don’t have any urgent need for one as my 2018 Mini fulfills my workload just fine, but that tower was a work of art, like most Macs were to one degree or another after 1997.

I do have some upgrades in mind for this tower, maybe a few projects I can put it to work on, but at the moment, I just like having it around. Having lived through the beige plastic era of computing, the design of this Mac Tower inside and out is something nice to have on display, I have no plans to ever let this one go!