I've had a couple of dogs in my lifetime although I don't have one now. New York despite it's abundance of smells is a cruel place to keep an animal who's great love is roaming around in the woods. I am thinking of a particular dog from my childhood. He's been gone for a while now. I was wondering if he ever dreamed of me and if so was I me or was I just some friendly anonymous human. Did he dream in color as I sometimes dream in black and white?

Often if I see a tourist taking a picture of something, I will step into frame just as he puts the camera to his face. Sometimes if it's a group shot and I'll step behind the group while the camera is being adjusted, step out quickly for the shot, and then head off before anyone notices. Over the years I've done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I've never told anyone. My wife will learn this small secret when she reads this post. I think of those pictures sometimes... I imagine them pasted in albums, lost in Parisian shoeboxes, and perhaps even hung by magnets on a few Japanese refrigerators... out there... somewhere. Do they wonder about the guy standing there with the slight grin?

My son is into bellybuttons right now. He likes to poke them and explore their depth. If you meet him don't be shocked if he goes for yours and gives it a good poke. Watch out.

The first picture is of two of my great aunts and my father's sister. The second is of a weekend barbecue. My grandmother is dead center. This is a lost world.

My web friend Angelica is the curator of Swapatorium a website full of compelling found images. Check out her recent find of 1970 Rice University yearbook. The student portraits are photobooth strips. Man o man is that groovy.

From an old journal:

It's almost 3am. My friend died today. Cancer. She was only 26. I couldn't sleep.

I drove up PCH. The clouds were low. The ocean dull, dark, almost invisible. Hungry and awake, I drove inland and stopped at a diner somewhere in Ventura county. As always at diners I ordered a burger and key lime pie. The place was empty and Janet, the waitress poured herself a coffee, sat down with me, and talked about a dream of horses she had had many years ago. I talked about India and the things I had seen there. She asked a lot of questions about camels and monsoons and holy men. Except for the cook and a sleepy bus boy named Manuelito, there was nobody else. I didn't tell her about my friend. When I got up to go she told me to come again, turned the TV to old Star Trek episode. Kirk was fighting some alien guy. Janet said she had seen it before. "The Gorn," she says, "They are unstoppable."

I drove back down the coast past the lights and stopped on a deserted beach. I like to open the windows, crank the heater up, and listen to the waves. I sat there in the dark for a while with the radio playing static. The world seems less round on nights like this. Hard to imagine tommorrow much less ten years from tomorrow.

I keep seeing lists of 10 must have Mac programs, but the lists is they are well known can't-live-without programs like Launchbar and Windowshade already installed on Machead machines. Here are some slightly more obscure programs I use every day:

1. Inquisitor. Inquisitor adds live search to Safari. You start typing it starts searching/suggesting. 90% of the time I never even have to go to the google results page because I find exactly what I am looking for right in the search window.. After installing this program Safari will feel better, smarter, better looking.

2. Saft. Saft is another Safari enhancement that adds the function of many of the most popular Firefox extensions to Safari. Think fancy ad filtering, tab restoration on quit, history search etc. My favorite addition: the ability to drag tabs from one window to another. This + Inquisitor have brought me back to
Safari after a several month hiatus to Firefox.

3. Flip4Mac is an extension that allows you to view unprotected Windows Media Player content within Quicktime. Why would you want to use this when Microsoft provides a free player? 1. Because it's better than the MS player. 2. Because the MS player is now discontinued and Microsoft is now supporting the flip4mac extension.

4. AppleJack. If you're lucky you'll never have to use Applejack. It's a little utility that hides in the bowels of your machine and gives you simple non-techie access to most of OS X's built in maintenance routines. What does this mean to you? If your computer starts acting funky you can boot up with command-S and type in "applejack" and repair a host of common OS X problems. It can be a lifesaver.

5. Growl is a utility that gives you translucent status messages from background applications. That description is deeply unsexy, but once you start using Growl, you'll forget what it was like to work without it. Basically it will tell you when downloads are done, what song is playing, etc without you having to move from your work.

6. Chax adds a host of large and small improvements to ichat.

7. Screensavers are never essential, but Soundstream is at least sort of fun. It's a screensaver that responds to the ambient noise in the room. Fun when the stereo is blasting. [Short aside] Here's the screensaver I want: Screensaver captures images from your iSight camera at defined intervals and then plays the images as a looping movie onscreen. When you return to your computer you see what happened while you were gone.

8. Are you a keyboard navigator? If so Witch will make you happy. It lets you jump from window to window easily without touching your mouse.

9. Sbook is a little notepad with smarts. Type in an address and it knows it's an address. A phone number is a phone number etc. Handy.

10. Delicious Library is probably the least obscure item on the list, but I'm surprised how few people know of it. This program lets you scan your book, cd, and dvd barcodes looks up info about the media (title, cover, etc) and stores it all in an easy to use database.

11. Here's an 11th one for free. Jumpcut allows you to keep multiple clipboards. It's simple low weight and it just works.

Update: Someone in the comments reminded me of Texpander. I use this program so organically I had forgotten about it. Texpander allows you to create abbreviations that expand as you type them. So instead of typing my name into forms I just type rrgg and it instantly expands into my full name. You can add bits of text (and images) at will. Darned useful. Also the sBook site is back up.

Why is a dot alone only a dot, but when joined by others a polka dot?

A few days ago a friend doubted my childhood East Texas accent. How wrong you are my friend. How very wrong you are: Recording dated December 28, 1977 (mp3 format)

My brother-in-law Paul pointed me to a page with about 50 images of Korean village life in the 1930's. You don't see images like this much... I thought they were cool. (note page loads slowly)

As I was reminded today.

Q: Why did you leave LA?
Answer 1: In an entire year of LA dinners with friends, acquaintences, and business people my wife and I never had single meal in which the conversation did not eventually turn to diets, celebrities, or hit movies (often all 3). I am happy to note that in the last year our NY dinner conversations almost never end up being about diets, celebrities, or hit movies... Real estate is the pornography of this city, but even real estate never seems to dominate. People talk about things that actually matter.

Answer 2: In LA you have to schedule friends. Months go by between the times you hang out and even your closest friends will often break out of a lunch to discuss a deal on the cellphone. In NY people drop by and I have never once had someone run out of a lunch for an "important call".

Answer 3: I like seasons.

Answer 4: Earthquakes scare me more than terrorists.

Answer 5: Walking is fun.

I don't miss LA much, but just a moment ago I had a flashback to driving my 53 Caddy up a winding road up to Muholland Drive in the early evening. Windows down. This song on the radio. Smell of damp honeysuckle and palms and I full body missed the place.

Blogging can sometimes be a seemingly thankless endeavor. Even reading reports of x number of visitors from this country or that, the task of posting images or words sometimes feel like something we do for ourselves rather than some theoretical audience on the other side of the screen, but recently I installed a bit of code from gvisit onto my site which plots out ip addresses on a google map and gives you an rss feed of the actual cities of your visitors. Put that feed into a ticker and suddenly you feel a bit more connected to the world. Hello Long Beach, Dubai, Istanbul, and Chino. Yo yo yo Ruesselsheim, Tblisi, Chicago, and Brooklyn. A shout out to Perth, Malaga, Herdon, Berlin, Jersey City, and the scores of other places that scroll by all day. If you are a blogger yourself I recommend this.

I've been looking forward to this interview with Mark Powell ever since I got wind of it a few weeks ago. Both Michael David Murphy's questions and Mr. Powell's answers do not dissapoint. Mark is one of the rare photographers whose words are as compelling as his images.