Friday, August 29, 2008

I took the plunge and got a Kindle. It arrived on Wednesday. So far, I'm relatively impressed, although Caecilia? As a default? The wireless shopping is seamless and very nice.

My fundamental problem right now is the first book I bought on the Kindle is geekporn. I'm going to enjoy reading it (I already am enjoying it), but I'm going to feel a little dirty when I'm done. Like I shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I should. And hopefully, by making the setting 1700s England and America, Stephenson will manage to avoid another interminable Coyote == hacker metaphor. But as I write this, I realize he still has Loki to make his point.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Two New Books

I've been pretty bad about updating this blog, and especially after reading K's blog and S's blog, I feel like I should make an effort to write more. Since I got two new books this week, I figure that's a good enough topic for now.




First up is Wolfgang Tillman's Lighter. Unfortunately, it's still sitting on the kitchen table and even still in the shrink wrap. I'm not sure how I feel about Mr. Tillman's work. Some of it I find great. For instance, I'm still deeply in love with the Concorde series of pictures. But then, there's the random disaffected youths that I can't quite get. But the book wasn't that expensive, and I can see if the disaffected youths grow on me.


Next book is Stephen Shore's A Road Trip Journal. I've been consciously playing around with my journals over the past few months, trying to figure out how I want them to "work." My biggest problem right now isn't so much that they don't look the way I want, but that the overhead of making a page is too high. I've been using InDesign to create the digital pages, and firing that up is just too much effort for the most part.


A Road Trip Journal is low tech: done in 1972, it's not clear what tech there was to use. But there is everything in it, from gas receipts, to shooting logs, and a few photographs (polaroids?). One of the things that struck me is that a good day had 16 pictures taken. These days, with digital cameras, you take 16 pictures of a single object.