Common Hours
Two quotations floated out of my brain junk-drawer as I contemplated the coming new year.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Conclusion
and
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-Annie Dillard
Trying to pin the Dillard quotation to a specific source I found
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The balance between wanting to fill every second, and wanting a life with a broad enough margin that I can enjoy the quotidian – it’s not easy for me.
I am not a big believer in omens. Still, we can hope that starting off a new year with not just a full moon, but a full moon that is also a blue moon might be auspicious. And if starting with a blue moon is auspicious, how much more auspicious is starting with a full moon that’s also a blue moon on the same day we have a lunar eclipse?
I hope that in the new year we all advance confidently in the directions of our dreams, that throughout the coming year we spend our days as we would spend our lives, and that at the end of the year none of us open our safes to find ashes.
Photography that makes me jealous award
This week’s “Photography that makes me jealous” award goes to Kathleen Connally (@durhamtownship on twitter and http://www.durhamtownship.com/ on the web) for this photo.
untitled
I’m still trying to figure out the problem of clutter. One weird thing is that an image that looks cluttered when viewed as a small print (or a small version on a monitor) will not look cluttered as a large print.
Attention
I’ve noticed an interesting thing while walking in the woods. Every so often, I stop and listen, and what I hear is silence. And then, as I continue to listen, I hear more and more. I hear birds, both close and distant, chattering away. I hear the rain dripping on the ground, and on the trees. I hear the wind, perhaps, sighing in the trees. It’s not that those noises weren’t there before I started listening, it’s that I wasn’t attending to them. Stopping and listening is an act of attention, and as you attend, the sounds emerge into your consciousness. It’s an inward event, not an outward one. The world is the same whether we pay attention or not.
I think this is true for all our senses. We rush along, not attending, and we don’t perceive. Driving along in our car, there are relatively few photos because we’re not attending. We’re listening to the radio, or we’re worrying about whether the propane tank is getting close to empty, and we’ve driven through this landscape a thousand times, and it just washes over us and doesn’t stick. When we stop, and stand still, and pay attention, slowly we start to see the photo possibilities all around us.
I’m left wondering how often I’ve stood in a spot, absolutely confident that there were no good photos to be made there, when I was actually standing on an excellent photo.
The bad news is that all too often, as Wordsworth put it, “for this, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not.” The good news is that we can fix it, just by paying attention. Stop. Look. Listen.
Kodak thinks this is funny. Stop, look, listen. That’s what he does, all the time. That, and take naps. Clever dog.
Show me yours
Got a personal photo website or blog? Post a link in the comments, please. Remember, personal sites/blogs only.
PDF Security Issues
Since I’ve been banging the drum for PDF as a great format for online portfolios, etc., I feel obliged to pass on this tidbit:
A Security Advisory has been posted in regards to the Adobe Reader and Acrobat issue discussed in the Adobe PSIRT blog on December 14 (“New Adobe Reader and Acrobat Vulnerability“, CVE-2009-4324). A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.2 and earlier for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-4324) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. Customers should refer to the Security Advisory for information on mitigating this vulnerability. The advisory will be updated once a schedule has been determined for releasing a fix.
The problem lies with Javascript. The solution, at least until Adobe gets off their butt and fixes the problem, is to disable Javascript in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. This is particularly important if you’re running Windows XP, apparently, as the exploit allows execution of malicious code. On Macs, Vista, and WIndows 7, Adobe Reader just crashes if it’s fed a file that contains the exploit. Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard.
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