September, 2007

Travel — 1 Comment
30
Sep 07

Sleeping in the Car

Am I naive? This summer I’ve been on lots of excursions to the mountains by myself, and I usually sleep in my car. I find some quiet forested side road or turn off, park the car, lock the doors, fold down the back seat and sleep with my legs sticking into the trunk. It’s quite comfortable, the car is old enough that’s it’s not airtight while still not having large enough rust holes to let the mosquitoes in. Then I can wake up at dawn, and get anywhere I want quickly enough that I can take pictures in the early morning light. It really works out quite nicely. No problems.

So now I’m thinking of going on a road trip to Yellowstone. I haven’t been to the states in ages, so I was reading up about longer road trips. I started reading Road Trip America, which is a really valuable site by the way – especially the forums. So I started reading about people sleeping in cars, which seems quite natural to me. Apparently not so to most people. I had to laugh when I read about the dangers of sleeping in your car. People seem really scared in the states. One place even talked about the possibility of private property owners shooting at you. And this seemed to be justified to them. But then I got to thinking, is it really that dangerous in the states? I can’t believe it’s that much different than here. Are people just more paranoid? Or am I just weird and do most Canadians see things the same way?

So anybody on Road Trip America who thought that it was ok to sleep in a car recommended only sleeping in a well-lit truck stop, and notifying the attendant so that they can keep an eye on you. This just seems backwards to me. Then you’re sleeping in a grungy parking lot, surrounded by traffic, with artificial lights blinding you. I would much rather find a quiet gravel road in the country, where you can watch the stars and fall asleep to the sound of wind in the trees, or crickets chirping. And what danger is there? Are there nefarious criminals patrolling backroads, looking for all the poor saps dumb enough to think they’re safe in their vehicle? And what, would they just shoot me, and then break into my car to get at the trail mix? Or maybe they want my sleeping bag to sell on the black market.

So tell me – is this a real danger or are people paranoid?


Web Development — No Comments
30
Sep 07

Site Upgrade

I just recently changed hosting providers, and with all the messing around with databases and ftp, decided to upgrade wordpress right away. So I am now with Hostgator instead of Powweb, and so far I am pretty impressed. Yesterday, I thought the site had slowed down again (like it always did at Powweb), but then I did a traceroute and found out that it was my ISP that was timing out, not Hostgator. So I have three domains hosted on one account, and they all seem pretty speedy. At Powweb I had to do some .htaccess magic to make multiple domains work, and they never worked quite right. At Hostgator they have a beautiful little tool that does it all for you (with the $9/month package), and it works flawlessly. Of course, I’m sure I’ll have complaints at some point, but right now I’m really impressed. Oh yeah – those three domains are tuxable.com, where you are now, JoelKoop.com, a photography portfolio site I’m working on, and TravelsAndTrails.com, a very unfinished travel site where a person can look up places they might be interested in going or add places they’ve been to. This one is going to change significantly, so it might be unrecognizable in a couple months.

The control panel at Hostgator is not as flashy, but more powerful and easier to use than Powweb’s. Although “easier to use” doesn’t mean “easy to use”. Someone, at some point in time, needs to do usability testing on these control panels and get a designer to create them.

Photography / Travel — No Comments
14
Sep 07

Taking or Making Photos

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about taking pictures as compared to making pictures. Now I take a lot of pictures – I enjoy taking pictures. In my design classes, there has been a fair amount of photography, and thinking of photography as both a technical process and an art. In design, generally, you are expected to make pictures: to arrange the world into a state that communicates an idea, and then capture that in a photo. Usually when I take photos for my own enjoyment I’m not making pictures, I’m taking them. For me this is a way of experiencing the world around me, not arranging it to my specifications. This is generally how I approach life in general, – I’m an experiencer, not an arranger. This has a significant effect on the images I produce. Sometimes I’m tempted to think that taking pictures is a lesser art form than making them. I’m not sure this is the case though. Either way you’re capturing a subjective view of the world around you, and all the same composition and color theory principles apply. Your pictures say a lot about your life, whether you experience or create, and either approach can communicate a variety of messages. I think that the result of taking pictures is often un-original, and I think that’s due to the fact that we all experience many of the same things, and in general, life can get boring. So maybe taking and making photos are the same, but what with taking photos, you’re manipulating your life rather than a composition of objects or people in front of your lens. So there’s the challenge – create an interesting life for yourself and you can *take* interesting photos.