Författare: jem

Human ... mostly
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I was wrong, Sean Tucker was right

by jem

Yesterday, I started to read Sean Tucker’s Parable 6 which talks about different personas we take on. I came to the sentence.

Every London photographer knows Soho George, for example, and we all have shots of him somewhere in our back catalogue.

– Ha, I’m not a real London photographer, but I was in London last week, and I have no photos of this guy. I don’t even know who he is.

But he seemed to be an interesting character, so I did a search, and found quite a few pages about him. For example, this article. And when I took a closer look … I recognised him at once, it’s the man I noticed when I was walking around in SoHo, and since I liked his style I took a picture.

So, I need to change my mind, Sean was right, if you have been in London and taken some photos in the SoHo area, you probably have a photo of SoHo George.

Händelser

A surprise

by jem

We got invited to spring graduation ceremony for new PhDs yesterday. To my surprise my teacher in statistics was there, it’s around 30-35 years ago since I took that course and last met her. She was invited to celebrate her ”jubilee PhD”, in other words it was 50 years ago that she was awarded her degree. Respect.

Händelser

Music

by jem

A musical interlude from a university ceremony yesterday.

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Nice

by jem

I’m not saying that the village where I live looks like this all the time, but occasionally, it does … and it’s quite nice when it does.

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Albus

by jem

Let’s continue my ”photo posts” series with two portraits of Albus who is a German Shepard, which is pretty obvious to most people. Although big, he is a wonderful and very kind dog, who seems to be very fond of children … and cats … but the cats are not fond of him.

For those who speaks Swedish: jag antar att alla andra vet om detta men ”schäfer” betyder bokstavligen ”fåraherde” … det är mindre än ett år sedan jag lärde mig detta !!

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Kime no kata

by jem

Jag insåg plötsligt att det är ganska sällan att jag lägger upp några av de bilder jag tar. De hamnar oftast på något annat konto, på nåt ställe där ingen hittar dem eller så laddar jag inte upp dem alls. Det vore nog bra om jag ändrade på detta, så jag börjar med en bild ur dem samling jag sitter och redigerar just nu.

Denna är en ögonblicksbild från en gradering till 5:e dan i ju-jutsu kai, det som du ser är en händelse i katan Kime No Kata som ska utföras just till 5:e dan (det är den enda katan i hela systemet numera).

Händelser

Datavetenskap 30 år

by jem

Under året har Datavetenskap firat 30 år och den 4 december var det lite speciellt. Anställda och före detta anställda bjöds in till ett litet event på eftermiddagen följt av en kombinerad jul- och 30 år middag.

Eftermiddagens event var att fyra personer berättade om sina erfarenheter från att ha jobbat/studerat vid institutionen. Christina Igasto berättade om hur gått från att vara student/doktorand i Umeå, till att nu vara chef på en stor myndighet i Australien. Bosse, Lennart och Erik gav en översikt om institutionens historia.

För mig var det intressant att höra hur programmen skapades. Jag pluggade/jobbade i Luleå under samma tid och där var (är?) historieskrivningen rätt annorlunda. Mitt intryck, jag har egentligen inga insikter, var att Luleå tyckte att det fanns en informell överenskommelse mellan vilka program som skulle erbjudas i Luleå och vilka som skulle ges i Umeå. Sedan så bestämmer sig Umeå för att gå in på områden som Luleå ansåg vara deras. Jag uppfattade det som att det var många i Luleå som var rätt upprörda.

Observationer

Neglect is expensive

by jem

Sigh, just discovered a few things that’s going to cost me some money.

I have a couple of flashes that I used to use a lot, this meant that I had a fair number of AA batteries. About 1.5 year ago I bought a Godox flash with a special battery (+ one extra battery) and I’ve been using that flash exclusively since then. This means that my AA batteries have been left unused since then … and uncharged.

Yesterday, I decided to try a camera that I haven’t used in a long time, so I put the camera batteries in the charger, and also started to charge my AA batteries. And … very sad face … it seems like all my AA batteries are dead, I’ve tried several different chargers but the batteries don’t take any charge at all.

Even worse is that the camera batteries doesn’t seem to charge either, when I put the first one into the camera – after charging it – I got a message ”This battery can’t be used”.

In short: look after your batteries!!

Observationer

A glorious Instagram

by jem

I logged into Instagram and it was fantastic. I scrolled through photos uploaded by friends or photographers that I followed, there were no ads, no recommendations, nothing, just the photos I wanted to see.

And yes, this actually happened.

Let me explain, over time, Instagram has become less and less interesting/useful to. This is, of course, by design, it’s exactly how Meta has planned it. So, I used it less and less. About a year ago, Meta required that users in the EU either agree to being tracked and shown too many ads, or pay a ridiculous expensive subscription. So, I stopped using Instagram. I still had access to Instagram through an organisation, so I could see how the feed looked like … and to be honest, it was both amusing and crazy to see how many ads and ”recommendations” that were shown.

Anyway, a few days ago, I decided to see if I could log into Instagram and check a few things. I could log in without problems, I checked what I wanted to check, and then I thought ”ok, since I’m already logged in, I might as well check my feed”.

I did and after 20–30 seconds, I realised that there was some was something strange going on. It took me a few seconds before it hit me, there were no ads, and no ”recommendations”. Just photos from the people I followed, and it was really, really nice. I could just scroll and see updates from friends, etc.

This made me realise that the basic idea behind Instagram is great, and the implementation is also good (let’s forget about the bloat, etc.). In short, Instagram is wonderful … without the ads, and the ”recommendations”.

Of course, this was a temporary thing. The next time I opened the app, I was met with ”ads or pay” choice, so I closed the app and will not be opening it again for the foreseeable future.

But Instagram is very enjoyable, and I would actually be willing to pay for it, but not the amount of money Meta wants. There is of course one additional reason not to use Instagram. I have zero trust in Meta, and even if they introduced a reasonable subscription fee, I wouldn’t subscribe. I would expect Meta to do all kind of shady stuff … and when they are discovered doing this, they would just say ”opps, there was a bug in the app. We’ll fix it” and then we start over.

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