Put Your Hands in The Air

JWise Photo of the Day

Phoenix Police arresting a suspect with guns drawn

Listen, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, nope, that’s a helicopter – and it sounds really close! Time to investigate, look out the front door, and what do I spy? Six policemen with weapons drawn and aimed at a man who apparently hadn’t been as cooperative as the officers would have appreciated. With the potential for fifty-four bullets to bring the suspect fully to his senses, he unflinchingly followed orders to the letter and immediately turned into what appeared to be a model arrestee.

Dion & Tassia

JWise Photo of the Day

Dion Terry and his girlfriend Tassia visiting Phoenix, Arizona

After many a year not being able to visit with one another as every time Dion would visit Phoenix, Caroline and I were on a road trip, we had the chance this evening to sit down for dinner and catch up. All those years Dion would visit on long holiday weekends, the very same long weekends that offer us great opportunities for travel. And, unfortunately, our destination so far has never been San Diego where Dion lives, as nature is our draw. Dion and his girlfriend Tassia were on a short road trip of their own this time, only stopping in Phoenix to say a quick hello to friends and family before continuing on to Gallup, New Mexico, Window Rock, Arizona, and other points on the Navajo Reservation from which Dion hails. Though we only had a short three hours to talk it was nonetheless nothing short of wonderful to see this old friend. While not traveling Dion practices the starving artist routine, check out his blog MuttonDagger.

Racism on Drudge Report

JWise Photo of the Day

Anti Muslim racist headline at Drudge Report February 16, 2009

There are times at the Drudge Report where my skin crawls and I bristle at the manipulation of the news this service provides. Today, the top left column of the Drudge Report features the above headline, “NY Muslim Charged with Beheading His Wife!”. The original headline from The Buffalo News phrased it as, “Prominent Orchard Park man charged with beheading his wife”. No exclamation point but way more importantly, no mention of the man’s religious affiliation. When the Drudge Report reports about the “average” American, such as the girl last week charged with setting seven arson fires in the Philadelphia area she was just a “Woman” charged, not a Christian Woman charged with arson. My other pet peeve regarding the Drudge Report is my perception that the reporting is misogynist, has anyone else noticed how there appears to be a propensity to feature some of the worst photography when it comes to Democratic women and liberal female celebrities?

35,405

JWise Photo of the Day

Eleanor Burke, my ninety-seven year old great aunt on her birthday in Phoenix, Arizona

Thirty-five thousand four hundred and five – days that is, that Eleanor Burke has been alive. Today celebrates the 97th year of my great aunt Eleanor’s life on earth. My aunt has been the inspiration for my interest in gardening and a great help for me in my pursuit of photography. I must also credit her for my sense of compassion to help others due to her selfless dedication to my great grandmother Josephine during her long life and being in my sister and my lives for much of our first years. Auntie as she is known to family was in her late sixties when she first married. In the years prior she cared for her mother who also lived into her nineties. Her husband Kenneth Burke passed away some years ago, since then Auntie has lived with my mother who is caring for her as my great aunt has become quite frail. Knowing a relative whose life has been so long, someone who seems to have always been happy, who is maybe the sweetest person one may know throughout one’s own hopefully long life is a treasure. I wish to always know her.

Windows 7

JWise Photo of the Day

Windows 7 Screen Capture

On January 27 I bought the components to build myself a new computer. What motivated this was the rave reviews I was reading regarding Microsoft’s beta release of Windows 7. As a lot of what I do with a PC revolves around photography, moving to a 64-bit operating system that would allow me to go beyond 4GB of RAM was appealing, upgrading to the 64-bit version of Photoshop and Lightroom also held sway. I started with downloading the Windows 7 beta and then began my search for what it would cost to build a new computer. One of my hopes was to upgrade to a solid-state drive if I could afford it. Turns out the prices for components in comparison to what they are delivering are fantastically low right now.

Not long after lunch I was on my way to Fry’s Electronics to buy a new motherboard, an Intel 3.16Ghz Core2Duo CPU ($189), 8GB of DDR3 PC1600 RAM ($240), a 1.5TB hard drive ($129), an NVidia 9600GT video card with 512MB DDR3 RAM ($99), a 650W power supply, a new case, and a 64GB solid-state drive from Patriot. The rest of the parts would come from my old computer. What really amazed me about today’s purchase more than in previous years was the exponential difference of this computer to the ones I was building in the early to mid-’90s. For example: in 1993, my 486DX-66 cost about $400 for the CPU alone and packed 1.2 million transistors. The E8500 from Intel on the other hand has about 410 million transistors, is approximately 648 times faster than the 486, and cost me $189. Six hundred forty-eight CPUs running on 648 motherboards 16 years ago would have cost about $2 million.

But that’s not all. I bought 8GB of RAM. Back in the day, I had three PCs for rendering and modeling 3D images, each had 64MB of RAM – the maximum. I will never forget that we paid $100 a megabyte. If memory were still to cost that much, I had just purchased $800,000 of RAM. This new PC will inherit two of the 500GB hard drives plus the new 1.5TB drive and the 64GB SSD (solid-state drive). This amount of storage capacity would have cost $2,564,000 in 1993. I’ve tried to price a video performance comparison but this has proven too difficult. I’ll leave this with that today’s expenditure of $1200 would have cost approximately $5.6 million in the mid-’90s.

Windows 7 – wow. This operating system has been performing flawlessly, so much so that I took my old PC, added a new video card, a new solid-state drive, a 1.5TB drive, and installed Windows 7 on it for Caroline. For a beta o/s, this is amazing. I had tried Vista for a short while before going back to XP feeling Microsoft blew it and maybe had lost its touch – it has not. The only thing not working for me is my old discontinued Garmin GPS, not a deal-breaker. There have been some minor glitches getting the networking to function properly but forums and trial and error have ironed those speed bumps out. The performance is astounding, the load time for Windows 7 from the solid-state drive is well under a minute, and that’s with Yahoo and MSN Messenger loading along with Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Southwest Air’s Ding, Skype, and EA Download Manager. Once the o/s is up and ready, opening Photoshop CS4 64-bit takes less than 5 seconds. iTunes with 4678 songs opens in about 4 seconds. OpenOffice needs maybe 3 seconds to launch and be ready to type. Finally, Lightroom opens and is ready in about 20 seconds, mind you, it is managing more than 200GB of photos, that’s about 70,000 digital photos.

There are some great new features in Windows 7 and IE8, together they bring some of the fun back to my computer – it has been a long time since I felt so enthusiastic about spending time on this box that in its own right is a bit of a miracle. I can’t wait for the next release from Microsoft.

Ports O’ Call

JWise Food, Photo of the Day, Travels

Ports O' Call Village in San Pedro, California

Like Eddie Izzard debating “Cake or Death?” so Caroline and I debated “Disneyland or Something Else?” It is Superbowl Sunday today, and supposedly, two out of three Americans are watching the game, implying Disneyland will be nearly empty, but since it is Sunday, our time in the park would have been short due to the drive back to Phoenix: Disneyland doesn’t open until 9:00, we would have to leave by 4:00, but knowing us we will stay until 8:00 or 9:00 pm, with the hour we lose on our drive east we won’t get home until 3:00 am in the morning. Cake or death?

Ports O' Call Village in San Pedro, California

How can we be so close with nothing else better to do and have to choose NOT to go to Disneyland? And so the decision was made to visit San Pedro. Like the idea of choosing cake or death, how does one come up with San Pedro as an alternative option? Easy, look at the map of L.A. and find somewhere you have not been and go there.

Ports O' Call Village in San Pedro, California

Ports O’ Call Marketplace was the first place to grab our attention upon reaching San Pedro. We arrived to find the place nearly empty, parked in front of the Crusty Crab restaurant, then meandered along the harbor before overhearing three old crusty crabs talking about “dagos” – their words, not mine.

Caroline Wise at the San Pedro Fish Market, California

We had eaten breakfast only three hours earlier, but the fish beckoned us to indulge before leaving for Phoenix. One of the fishmongers at the San Pedro Fish Market suggested we try cabrilla, so we picked one of the speckled, biggish piscine, paid for it, and hauled it across the way to have it dropped in the fryer.

San Pedro Fish Market, California

While our fish boiling away in oil, we handed a bag of shrimp to another of the women behind the counter to have it prepared with fajita veggies.

Caroline Wise at the San Pedro Fish Market, California

We sat outside in the sun to eat our prize catch, the only Anglos amongst a few hundred Hispanics. We often wonder out loud why we are the only whites as we sit down in a Cuban bakery, stop for boba tea at Ten Ren, eat at a Filipino cafe, watch a Bollywood movie at Naz8 in Artesia, or are but one of just a few when we go shopping at Marukai – the number 1 Japanese Specialty Store in the United States. With the largest culturally diverse population in America, it is hard to fathom that we two visitors from Arizona are the only other people in all of Los Angeles who are curious enough to try new things. Everyone else must be eating cake.

Along the ocean in Southern California

Seeing we are saving so much time today by not going to Disneyland, we might as well use this little luxury to see a bit of ocean before we turn inland.