Arranged Delirium

Abstract and White Sands are showing at Xavier University in Cincinnati. The opening reception is Friday evening. Details are in the image below and you can find more information on the web. Thinking of that, I’ve got a new web site up for my photography. You can find information on all my current shows and those that I’m currently working on at: http://www.samfee.net/photography/.

My writing on Facebook and Google+ sparked some commentary regarding online privacy. Usually when the topic comes up, people tend to have either strong opinions or no opinion at all. My hope is that more people will come to think about it because it is an issue of some complexity that is getting decided for us, and I’m not sure that’s what we want. In fact, we all need to care a bit about the Internet if we want to see it continue to be a tool for democratization and not something controlled by specific interests.

There’s a particularly good article in the Chronicle that lays out the argument for why we should all care about privacy - even if you have nothing to hide. It deserves a thoughtful read.

Then, if you want to think more about the separate issue I mentioned of who controls the internet you may find this article from I, Cringely to be a good jumping off point for a number of ideas…

I finally got to see the concluding film of the Harry Potter series last week - very well done. I was particularly pleased with the storytelling, even if it departed from the text - that was a hard story to tell visually and they did a great job of it. On a related note, this October will see the release of a new web presence for the potter books. What is most exciting though is that they ebooks will be released DRM-free. That means I can read them on any device I choose (Apple, Amazon, or Android, etc.) without having to go through the labor of stripping out the DRM before I can move the files around. This is the way it should be!

Now that our country can actually pay the bills that we are obligated to cover, I wanted to throw out a few final thoughts because this has bothered me more than anything since the Iraq War. My biggest concern is the amount of misinformation that informed the invective around this entirely concocted debacle - much of it helped along by the ignorance of the supposed “Tea Party” caucus. I have yet to hear one of these members of Congress be able to speak intelligently on the issue. So, I have real fears when I think that some of these folks are responsible for making major decisions regarding the running of the country and the direction of our collective future. It true - we voted them in. But I hope we’ll just as enthusiastically vote them out…

Despite that, I’m sensitive to their ideological position: we have too much debt and as a nation we are overextended in our obligations. But the way in which we handled the situation with this near-default only weakens us and likely sends us into another stage of recession. But enough on all this. I did find a couple of other articles that I found of interest during the ‘debate’ and I list them here:

Fiddling While Rome Burns and
Wake up GOP: Smashing system doesn’t fix it

Oh, and you might be interested on this quiz to examine your knowledge of the debt.

Don’t get me wrong - the Democrats didn’t have the right of it here. Our entire representative government failed us - but the folks who couldn’t compromise and held to positions based on ignorance pushed the gridlock into crisis. Compromise is the only way to work through large issues in a representative democracy - everyone gets an opinion. Is it the most direct way to address an issue? Hardly ever. But its the only way to make sure everyone gets a say. Even the Tea Party Caucus should have a say; but they should not have been able to hold the entire country hostage.

In the end the US has to pay its bills. We incurred the debt, and now we have to pay it off. Its tough - there’s no good solution and everyone is going to lose. But this has to be done through thoughtful budgeting. That’s the place for this discourse. In the end this debt-ceiling debate wasn’t about the debt - we already have the debt, and we have to pay it - this brinkmanship should have happened during the budget process and not cast the credit-worthiness of the country into debate. We’re all going to suffer from an effective tax of higher interest rates when the economy heads south again. Perhaps we should that the Tea Party for raising our taxes : )

The incremental upgrade fo the Adobe products has seen a lot of debate - and at times, I think the question of whether one needs to invest is a good one. I’d say that its a very good investment for anyone using CS4 or earlier versions, but questionable for folks who already have CS5. One notable exceptions though includes InDesign 5.5 which sports some new features that make life a bit easier for folks creating electronic publications. There’s a handy MacWorld article that lists the primary features. This version of the software makes creating publications for the iPad or in the EPUB format easier. That’s of significant interest to me, given my own mobile application development - this software takes some of the hassle out of that process - especially if you already have your content in InDesign format.