Fade

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

One of those magical nights when the mist and the lights fade into the past…

This photograph, “Fade, 2012-01″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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Break

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

No new photograph this week. Taking the week off (or, more accurately, spending my week focused on code rather than on photographs).

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Queer Portraiture

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

Friday night, catching up on Google Plus reading, I discovered Molly Landreth and her magnificent portraitures of queer people in their lives. I read an article about her, followed her website, watch the video about her…

And felt my heart melt.

Not that my heart is very icy to begin with.

I emailed her before the night was out to express how beautiful I found her work. I hope to sit for a portrait and become part of her collection if she ever returns to Austin.

Her website is http://mollylandreth.com/. She has her work available for sale on Etsy

And, finally, the blog for her Embodiment project

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Full Moon, 2012-02

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

Oh, Moon, how you spite me.

I thought that I finally got a shot of the moon face in this image. Once again, no go. One day I’m going to get it right and it shall be a day of great rejoicing. Until then, I shall simply love the photographs that I take.

This photograph, “Full Moon, 2012-02″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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California’s Proposition 8 overturned in federal court

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

The fight’s not done, and it’s not much of a victory given that the political climate of California weights everything in favor of social justice, but I would love to see this sanity spread across the entire country. I wish that a national Supreme Court case were a guaranteed victory for my side.

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples,”

Damn right.

The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins said that the ruling “is not about constitutional governance but the insistence of a group of activists to force their will on their fellow citizens.”

Bullshit.

The insistence that somebody should not be allowed to marry because of their sexual orientation is the heterosexual population forcing their will, their demands of conformity, on the homosexual population. The homosexual population insisting that they should have the right to marry doesn’t affect anything about heterosexual marriage. It does not demand that heterosexual people engage in a homosexual relationship or marriage. It does not invalidate heterosexual marriages. It does not, in fact, affect them at all.

Bigotry. Hypocrisy. The so-called “Defense Of Marriage” people have it!

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Vote with your dollars… consciously

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

Some weeks ago I wrote a post in which I included one gem of a line:

Or just stop consuming altogether

Almost immediately, on my G+ feed, somebody very intelligent pointed out that, in fact, some level of consumption is necessary for every artist. It is necessary to see what other artists are doing. To see what works and what does not work.

While she did not say it, something else is rather obvious once I spend a bit more time thinking about it. With no consumption, and thus no view into what others have already done, I’m working in an echo chamber. I have no way of seeing that my art doesn’t measure up or that I’m not actually improving.

So, I was wrong on that. Consume. But do so consciously. Start with a default state of Creating. During a slow time, consider the possible things that have piled up, clamoring for attention, and choose one of them. Maybe sample all of them to see what will be best for you Right Now, and then choose one. Read/Listen/Eat/Watch/Play. Savor every last second of it. And, when you are done, be sure to carry with you whatever you learned.

Or, try. Because for all this high-minded consciousness talk, I somewhat fail on a regular basis. There’s something to be learned in failure, too.

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MUST LEARN ALL THE THINGS!!!

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

I posted something about this on G+ a couple days ago, but I’ll go into more detail here.

At my current job, I’m launching into a new project that requires a whole set of skills that I have not used all that much in a long time.  In some cases, at all.  So, here we are, the new skills that I am wrapping by brain around all at once:

  • Editra — a GUI-based editor written (and thus extensible) in Python.  Because I can’t actually script vim and I also wasn’t able to make gvim on Windows look like vim in the Linux terminals and I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and learn something new.  Sadly, no markup or smart-indexing for Clojure or reStructuredText.
  • Developing on and for Windows — because I don’t have an Ubuntu installation yet.  I’ll actually be targeting several platforms.
  • wxPython (and wxGlade) — hells yeah!
  • How to use Python thread to ensure that absolutely no thread, whether GUI or the screenscraper, causes any other thread to block.
  • mock – because, like in Clojure and Perl, mocking out portions of the system is a really useful technique for code isolation
  • ZeroMQ — the documentation may be quirky as all hell, but using this actually vastly reduced the number of lines of code I needed to dedicate to communication.  The big win was completely eliminating a bus-style event dispatcher.

I’m feeling the urge to learn git. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is just because almost everyone talks about git and nobody talks about Mercurial. Maybe it’s because Heroku only uses git for deployment and I’m wanting to try building an application or three to deploy to Heroku. Maybe there is a serious technical advantage to git that I just haven’t seen since I haven’t tried it to any significant degree.

And, of course, amongst all of this, I’m improving my ability to write Python, figuring out wx, and really internalizing Test-First Development.  Or Test-Driven Development.  Or Behaviour-Driven Development.  Or whatever the Agile buzzword of choice is called these days. Eighteen months ago I finished a project at work and joked (derogatorily) that the project was more test code than running code. Now, I find that totally natural, though I find that most of the tests for that project are far more integrated than I would like them to be today.

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TOCI Flower Garden

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

I’ve been studying with the people at Toltec Center of Creative Intent for about eighteen months now.  In September of last year, I was able to get several really fantastic photographs at our Autumn Equinox celebrations.  We had lots of candles set out, but I particularly liked this batch right here around the gardens.  I made a point of photographing this.

And, as illustrated by the ghost, other people were walking around the area.  At this stage, they were cleaning up.  Normally I would remove a ghost, but my attempts to do so tended to damage this photo.

This photograph, “TOCI Flower Garden, 2011-09″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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Code, code, code, cljblog

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

Damn, it takes a long time to write code.

For the fun of it, and to scratch an itch, I tried creating a tiny weblog app similar to Toto.  Except in Clojure, not Ruby.  Possibly with the more than one possible markup language.  I’d love to get around to being able to deploy to Heroku, also, just like Toto can.

Standard tools for a Clojure webapp: Compojure, Enlive.  Plus a few more as I can find them: reStructuredText parser, Markdown parser, YAML parser (for non-reStructuredText documents).

Anyways, three hours of work and I have only a portion of the indexing module, a memory-only index, working.

Ho-lee-cow!

But, I am doing a good job of test-driven development.  Except that sometimes implementation has shown weaknesses in the API and I’ve had to change that, and thus change the tests.  If you want to take a look, it’s a public project.  Eclipse license at the moment, but likely to become GPL.

cljblog

Seeing as I didn’t finish it tonight, I’m not sure when it will get done.  I wanted a lot more working.  But, I’ll try again later in my “free time”, whatever the hell that is.

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Creek Bed, 2011-11

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Savanni D'Gerinel

All of you in Austin remember last year.  For those of you not in Austin, suffice it to say that I have never seen such an extensive drought.

So, of course, we all started celebrating when the rains returned in October.

Strangely, in November I get up one morning and everything is different.  Crystal clear.  Luminant.  I discussed it with one of my friends and we decided that what we were seeing was likely the result of a recent rainstorm cleansing more dust from the air and then the moisture in the air… *capturing* the light.

This concept of capturing light tantalizes me.  Photography amounts to painting with light.  Light is so hard to direct and understand.  Our eyes both let us perceive the light around us and deceive us at the same time.  They don’t always let us see what color light has fallen in the scene.  They let us know that something is different, but they don’t tell us exactly what that thing is.

They leave us in wonder.  And in the soul of the photographer, success is when that wonder makes it all the way to the screen.

This photograph, “Creek Bed, 2011-11″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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