Early cherry blossoms.

Click the shutter, & your photo is online.

Thom Hogan and others have been calling for camera makers to make "social cameras". The idea being that since your cellphone can take snapshots and upload them to facebook, why would you want to carry a point-and-shoot camera that can't, but that instead requires messing with memory cards and cables, etc.?

Well, the "social camera" is here: It's any camera (that takes an SD card), with an Eye-Fi card loaded in place of a normal SD card.

Remarkable and revolutionary. We've tried it, and we can report that it really works.

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"The truth is more important than the facts."

Frank Lloyd Wright said that.

My cat, Truthiness, photographed by Jim.

The multitouch microscope.

Once upon a time...

[View from a Southbound Amtrak train, yesterday.]

Something about a story is not a story.

If, upon watching a video on an organization's web site, your description of the video is, "It's the story of what they do", or, "It shows what they do", you've viewed a message, or a description, or lots of information, not a story.

If your response is, "That's a great story about what the organization accomplishes," or, "I could really relate to [the protagonist]", or, later that day, you find yourself sharing what you have seen, now that's a story.

Outside.

To make a bicycle work, we have found that it is not sufficient to pedal it, you must also keep air in its tires.

To put air into our bicycle tires, we got a great big floor pump with a silly name, which, to our surprise, came with a magazine subscription.

At least, that's what the magazine told us, when we asked then please why are you sending us your magazine, they said, you're getting it as a gift from the big online retailer from whom you bought that great floor pump. Maybe among all those papers we recycled along with the box that had the pump was one paper that said thank you for your business we are giving you a magazine subscription. No problem. But no thanks. We don't need to recycle that magazine every month.

So, we went to that magazine's website and entered the subscriber ID from our subscriber's label and selected 'cancel subscription' – and were offered three more free issues:

"Would you consider not canceling at this time if we offer to extend your current subscription by 3 issues at no extra cost"?

What was that old joke? The two old ladies are at dinner, and one says, the food here is so bad, and the other says, yes, and the portions are so small.

Beer warning.

Beer drinkers, be wary!

You might be offered something called "Old Dominion Oak Barrel Stout" without being properly warned that the stuff is dominantly flavored with vanilla, giving it a relationship to actual beer which is perhaps not entirely dissimilar to that enjoyed by root beer. Or cream soda.

Same magnolia, different day.

Here is today's view of the magnolia we brought in to the dining room to shoot four days ago:

Change, movement, & friction.

Just one sentence from "Democracy 101: Mark Twain's farewell address" by Lewis H. Lapham in the April 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine:

Democracy is a dangerous business; it allies itself to change, which engenders movement, which induces friction, which implies unhappiness, which assumes conflict not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of its existence.