My new MacBook Pro arrived yesterday. This will replace my aging, 2-year old version. It’s a thing of beauty. Whenever I get a new machine, I’m tempted to just run the simple data migration to move everything over, but never do. Instead, I start from scratch. This is a complete pain in the ass, but very much worth the trouble. It just feels so good! Below is a list of things I installed this time.

Blogs and Twitter have been passing around a couple links recently that I find discouraging — both the links and the passing around of them. The first is Clients from Hell. This is a collection of anecdotes about difficult clients and each takes great pleasure in ridiculing some (thankfully anonymous) person. Now I know, every industry enjoys sharing war stories, and it can be a nice relief valve for frustration. Perhaps that’s what _Clients from Hell_ is meant to be, but it strikes me as snarky, angry and unproductive.

I have a darkroom. This has happened before. My first darkroom was in what my grandma called the “fruit cellar” of my old house. It was a small, musty place full of pipes lined with asbestos. I hated it, and printed maybe a total of 20 8×10 photos there. Eventually just gave everything away. But that was a long time ago, and I’ve mostly forgotten how awful it was. So, I built another.

Rory Marinich: Why I’ll Never Be A Photographer I’m not here to stand on the edge and watch you be beautiful, asshole." Rory Marinich: Career Plans That sort of ruined my whole morning.

Washington City Paper on Recycling and Trash: Together Forever: After the truck releases the Dumpster, the garbagemen get their hands on something that doesn’t mix well with all that rotting garbage: the recycling. They roll up with bins holding newspaper, cardboard, bottles, and cans — all dutifully separated by employees at the bookstore and other businesses on this upper Connecticut Avenue strip. One by one, the men tip the contents of the recycling containers on top of the refuse — the bottles make a tinkling sound as the glass shatters against the truck bed.

Life in the Time of Virtual Photography: There’s a satisfaction in being able to refer to a piece of processed film that no virtual image will ever replace." Shutterfinger

Bill Wadman on Robert Frank’s The Americans at The Met That’s 1000 selects, which had probably gone through quite a distillation process to even get there. Let’s figure that he chose maybe one image per roll on average, so that’s like 20,000 images over the course of two years driving around the country. Anybody is going to take some great pictures (though I’d like to say that as a rule, the images were not very good from a technical point of view.

Marco Arment on Apple’s Magic Mouse: “But it comes with a cost. Setting the auto-unlock wheel mode requires the Logitech software, which screws with the standard OS X pointer sensitivity and scrolling acceleration. To get mine to work the way it should, I had to install Logitech’s software to enable the auto-unlock wheel, uninstall it, and install SteerMouse instead to enable most other functionality.” Marco.org He describes my experience _exactly_.

NYTimes on Megan Fox: Fox has a quality that sets her apart: Fox is sly. Canny. A devoted student of stardom, past and present, she knows how to provide her own color commentary — a narrative to go with the underwear. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for The New York Times NYTimes I have such a crush on Ms. Fox. I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help it.

Discourses of stasis If one examines semioticist situationism, one is faced with a choice: either accept subtextual nihilism or conclude that art is part of the genre of language. Therefore, Debord suggests the use of dialectic narrative to challenge outmoded perceptions of society. Lyotard uses the term ‘the precultural paradigm of expression' to denote not discourse, but prediscourse. “Culture is fundamentally unattainable,” says Bataille; however, according to Hanfkopf1 , it is not so much culture that is fundamentally unattainable, but rather the failure, and some would say the stasis, of culture.

Photo courtesy LIFE magazine I want to be the type of person who always brings a camera along. You know the ones, dedicated to their craft even when it’s inconvenient or unnecessary. I read about people like that and think, “That should be me.” So I try. I leave an old Canonet in the car. When the weather calls for a jacket I stuff an Olympus Stylus Epic in the pocket.

Roger Ebert: Of all the gizmos forced upon us by the modern world, is any more melancholy than the leaf-blower? The device is manifestly useless. It blows leaves from one place to another, and then the wind blows them back again. Leaf blowers are noisy, polluting, silly things. Leaves are beautiful, natural, _normal_ things. How did we get to the point where we feel we must use the former to get rid of the latter?