1404 - Time Passes

Sigma 28/1.8 No Responses »
Aug 192010

OK, this is a strange format for a post, but it’s a strange format for an image as well ;)

Yesterday morning I took the tram for work. It was one of those old trains that I sometimes take images of, and while I was in there and wondered at which station to get out, I took some images from the same position. Some were not sharp, but some were, and they were easily aligned in Photoshop. At first I wanted to do some trick with masks, but when I tried simply arranging them vertically, I liked the result.

The other image is a night shot. I stayed at work until 8pm and, regardless of the temperatures, had this winter feeling while walking home :)

The Song of the Day is “Time Passes” from Paul Weller’s great 1995 album “Stanley Road”. Hear a live version on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 7:45 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1399 - Train Fare Home Blues

Sigma 50/1.4 No Responses »
Aug 152010

Here’s a Friday image. Friday 13th it was, but nothing bad has happened :)

I was more concerned with programming than with photography, it shows, but I can’t help it. It’s just the way it is. Still, it’s better than Saturday and Sunday, because I have no image for them at all :D

The Song of the Day is “Train Fare Home” by Muddy Waters. It’s on many collections, “His Best 1947 To 1956″ is one of them, and YouTube has the song as well.

Posted by andreas at 5:17 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1386 - Notes From The Underground

Sigma 8-16 4 Responses »
Aug 012010

I like to take small roads that I don’t know, like to see where they take me. On Saturday one of them has taken me to this place where the highway crosses the railway. Actually, now that it’s Sunday evening, now that I am on the train back to Vienna, I must have come through that place just minutes ago. I noticed too late though.

The Song of the Day is “Notes From The Underground” from the 1987 Manhattan Transfer album “Brasil”. YouTube has a live performance, and to judge from their looks, it must be from about that time.

Posted by andreas at 8:26 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1359 - Wicked Game

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
Jul 062010

Allow me please to make an indecent proposal.

As we all know, fame and fortune are a direct and automatic consequence of merit, right? Just work hard, be good, and it will be recognized, yes? No?

Well, probably it is not just that automatic, probably at times we need to help Fortuna along, take her by the hand, lead her in the right direction. I suppose this is such a time :)

Yesterday night (yeah, yeah, this is supposed to be the blog post for Saturday, and now it’s already Tuesday morning again, I’m late, I know), after only about three months, I have finished my Eclipse / GlassFish / Java EE 6 Cookbook, a blog post on my Programming blog. Being here for photography, most of you won’t be interested in it. Still, it’s a damn fine tutorial about a topic that is not broadly covered. It’s comprehensive, well researched and would print to about 80 pages. That’s not shabby. It needs exposure though.

May I make an indecent proposal?

Could we perhaps play a game together? The wicked game of creating public interest? Even when Java programming is probably the thing that interests you the least, may I beg you to go to my tutorial, scroll down to the very bottom and use one of those icons, to share my tutorial on Facebook, to digg it, to stumble it, set bookmarks on Google, Yahoo or Delicious, whatever you use, whatever you happen to have logins for. It would drive users from those social bookmarking sites to my tutorial, some may return later, and that would greatly help in building an audience for this fledgling blog of mine.

Of course this is a little bit dishonest, this is tricking the game, but on the other hand, this is just what advertising does to us all the time, and I don’t even sell something, to the contrary, I’m giving away a compendium of my experience … for free. Thanks a lot for considering.

The Image of the Day is from June 20 and was taken in Lavagna, Liguria, Italy, just the next town north of where we stayed. I didn’t take any images on Saturday. The Song of the Day is of course “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 4:35 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1319 - I'm Painting The Town Red

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
May 242010

It came as I thought it would. I made a single image today, that I want to spare you. Thus we are back to yesterday’s trip to Croatia, this time to the ancient City of Pula, a city where you can still marvel at a Roman temple and arena, medieval churches and … Austrian architecture. Pula was the harbor of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s war fleet, and though the harbor has lost since much of its importance, it is still more industrious than touristic.

This is part of Pula’s railway station, once directly connecting to the harbor. I saw the poppies and the yellow flowers, and thankfully the area is not fenced off, thus I got the chance to take some images.

The Song of the Day is “I’m Painting The Town Red” by Billie Holiday. I have it on a collection that’s unavailable, but from what I see, “A Portrait Of An Artist 1935-1946″ with 25 songs for $5.99 is a decent offer.

The point is, all those early recordings are in the public domain now, thus it’s really important to look at the price. Remember my “Ultimate Jazz Archive”? This collection of 168 Jazz CDs that I bought for 99€? Well, it’s all public domain, but still, the price was more than OK.

On the other hand, I recently saw some of those CDs sold separately, in fact it were not even CDs, it were MP3 tracks, and I saw them for $9.99. Each. Not each track, but each “album”. Now multiply that with 168 and you get approximately $1680. Depending on the exchange rate of the Euro, this is a factor of roughly 15 – for the same thing, so, I can only tell you, try not to get shaved. There is no decency in the world.

YouTube has the song.

Posted by andreas at 8:57 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

1316 - Number Nine Train

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
May 212010

No, I won’t complain about the rain. Why should I? It almost didn’t rain at all today, only from when I left home until I arrived at work, and then once more from when I left work until I arrived at the train. Why would I want to complain??

The Song of the Day is “Number Nine Train”, which is actually wrong, because what you see is a window of Number Five Train, but anyway, I couldn’t think of any better title.

I have the song on a collection of 10 CDs with R&B classics that I bought a year ago. I don’t have it with me, thus I can’t check who sings it, but I guess Tarheel Slim, like on this collection of 111 songs that I found on Amazon, won’t be completely wrong.

I didn’t find it on YouTube, but I think this modern recording by “Tigerman” Fathead can’t be so far off.

EDIT: Found Tarheel Slim on YouTube :)

Posted by andreas at 5:30 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

1281 - Cars Hiss By My Window

Sigma 50/1.4 1 Response »
Apr 162010

The Sigma is a cream machine. I say it all the time: this is the best 50/1.4 you can get for Nikon cameras. Small wonder, it’s big, heavy and more expensive than the Nikon 50/1.4G.

This is an image, straight from the camera, taken this morning in one of those few old-fashioned tramway trains on Vienna’s line #5. Normally you can’t open windows, here you still can :)

The Song of the Day is “Cars Hiss By My Window” (quite literally :) ) from the 1971 Doors classic “L.A. Woman”. YouTube has it.

Posted by andreas at 5:18 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

1274 - Deep Forest

Nikon 70-300 VR 4 Responses »
Apr 102010

Oh my, how many things I wanted to do today, and now? I slept almost the whole train ride, I arrived late, had dinner, did some administrative things, and now it’s midnight :)

But then, I was so satisfied with yesterday’s “dancers”, I guess we can tolerate a mediocre train station image today, can we?

The Song of the Day is “Deep Forest” by Earl “Fatha” Hines. I have it on disc 77 and disc 136 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, this fantastic treasure trove of 168 CDs full of classic Jazz. I got it for 99€ some years ago, and now I see it from an Amazon Marketplace dealer for $159.95. Still a killer price at less than $1 per CD. Only one left though :)

Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 12:02 am Tagged with: , , , ,

1270 - This Is How It Goes

Nikon 18-200 VR No Responses »
Apr 062010

As I said in the morning, it was mostl ycloudy today, it only got better in mid-afternoon, when even some sun came out.

It didn’t bother me at all, because I had to work on the tutorial for the Programming blog anyway.

In fact, most of the time I was held up with CSS. The matter is, when you do kind of a technical documentation, you very often refer to places in the user interface of the tool (like I might say “From the context menu use New Class“), you explain important terms, and you refer to things a user has to type in or the system prints out. You also want to structure your post into sections, subsections and maybe sus-subsections. It does not happen that often on this blog, but I had to find a solution for the tutorial on the other blog.

This is the kind of text that I will write very often, and I really want to use structural markup for that. Thus instead of using italics and bold fonts or such things (that’s visual markup), I instead use a span with a class “term” for terms, a class “gui” for user interface objects, etc. This way I can use a CSS stylesheet attached to the whole blog, and when I ever change my design, all occurrences of terms and references to user interface elements get changed together.

That tutorial is something that I write at work as well, and at work I use our Wiki. That’s the same software that runs Wikipedia, and I only realized today, how much easier it is to write documentation, when you’re not forced to plain HTML.

I could set up a Wiki of course, and maybe it would be even a better resource than a blog, but blogging is what I want, thus I maybe have no choice but using that verbose HTML/CSS crud.

Today’s three images were taken on a short afternoon outing, all within 100 meters of each other.

The Song of the Day is “This Is How It Goes” from Aimee Mann’s 2002 album “Lost in Space”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 4:17 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

1232 - Stuck In The Middle

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 5 Responses »
Feb 262010

One more image today and we are in sync again. I took it this morning in the tramway. Nuff of words, the train is almost in Villach, I have to hurry :)

The Song of the Day is “Stuck In The Middle” from the 1992 Inner Circle album “Bad to the Bone”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 6:58 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,
Older Entries
© 2010 Andreas Manessinger Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha