My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on June 12, 2020

Regular readers have likely noticed a few “hopefully” discrete ads running on My Desultory Blog. It is a way for me to experiment with ways to help my customers choose or forgo the use advertising services like Google Ads on their sites. For the most part it has been relatively painless (although nothing to retire on to be sure in my case).

Last week, Google “bots” (or a complaint?) flagged an old post from 2011 referencing my background in photography and photojournalism and the “what not to do” when composing/framing photos. Nowadays it is an even bigger deal with all the photo manipulation and deepfakes. My point was that “tweaking photos” was done even before digital Photoshopping became a thing. Often it is used to “better compose” a photo as I cited with the iconic 1970 Vietnam War protest photo on the campus of Kent State University. It was  a darkroom manipulated photo for Life Magazine of Mary Ann Vecchio and removed a fence post. Still a “no-no” in the photojournalism world.

Obviously recent events and sensitively by Google (and others) regarding content or in my case photos depicting “acts of violence” or “gruesome, graphic, or disgusting accounts of imagery” are no longer acceptable. I’ve disputed the flagging of my site and content as historic photos are posted on websites (including Google’s own) everyday. This one isn’t posted to glorify violence but as photojournalism instruction.

What should be done: Should I just remove the offending post and photo, bending to the will of the tech giant or resist their pressure to clean up what they determine to be offensive? It sure seems like Big Tech’s policing has a lot of cleaning up to do considering they seem to be targeting the low hanging fruit (my personal blog).

Category: Blogs, Financial, Personal, Photography, Photos, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: 1970, adsense, big tech, deepfakes, google, kent state, life magazine, manipulation, mydesultoryblog, photo, photojournalism, photoshopped, riot, tech friday, techfriday, violation

Posted By RichC on June 11, 2020

Dorothy Jean Gerber passed away peacefully at her home on May 30, 2020, in Twinsburg at the age of 93. Jean, as the name she went by, was born August 2, 1926 in Moran, Kansas to Reverend Roy and Bessie Truesdale. After graduating from McPherson High School in Kansas, she went on to attend Kansas State in Manhattan, Kansas, then Northwestern Oklahoma State in Alva, Oklahoma, and graduated from Oklahoma State College in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1948 with a teaching degree. She married Earl Evans Gerber, the love of her life, in 1948 and they were married for 65 years. Earl passed away 7 years ago.

After their marriage, they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and happily raised their children, Janet, Joyce, and Gary. Jean worked as the head teacher at Pepper Pike Preschool at Lander Circle for 18 years and loved children. The family lived in Moreland Hills for over 30 years. Jean was very popular with many of the preschool parents and remained friends with them throughout her life.
(more…)

Category: Obituary | No Comments »
Tags: family, jean gerber, obit, Obituary

Posted By RichC on June 11, 2020

After listening to the loudest protestors from around the U.S. seemingly unite around the “defund and dismantle the police” manta, it is natural for people to ponder the questions regarding how this movement of angry people intend to “keep the peace.” As some point laws aren’t going to be followed, gangs and thugs will intimidate residents – someone will have to keep order?

While “police reform” has been a process that has been in place for my entire lifetime (and likely will be after I’m gone), we are not really any closer to a completely infallible person or robot (yikes) handling law enforcement duties (trigger thoughts of robots and a new for us Netflix movie pick for this weekend: Chappie). No doubt Boston Dynamic type robots will be in our future … and thankfully they are not here yet. So in my opinion, it make the most sense to continue police reforms with better training and trying to eliminate those who aren’t disciplined enough to do the job without racial or any other bias. I can’t imagine living or doing business in a high crime area without some kind of law enforcement … and certainly can’t support something as radical as “defund and dismantle” before there is a realistic plan “to protect and serve” society.

 
The advancements in robotics is frightening – Boston Dynamics

So the question is, how realistic is for some cities to eliminate police, at least as we know them. Is it political or serious? It sounds like there is a growing movement in response to the latest George Floyd incident and ensuing chaos. Politicians like Lisa Bender of Minneapolis (CNN segment below) will very likely hurt more people by eliminating the police if she gets her way. She sounds thoughtful and educated and not like the anarchists, ANTIFA or many in the BLM movement who use violence and promote destroying businesses, cities or harming police. To me, it makes more sense to improve police training and work with their unions to weed out the bad apples (no surprise there are a few considering 900,000 people work in law enforcement).

This discussion reminded me of a Mike Rowe podcast “A Novel Hero” we just listened to that ends by him sharing his thoughts on “Safety being the highest priority.” Years ago he commented that it would make more sense for companies to agree to “Safety 3rd” since every  business has risk and each profession faces it everyday. We take precautions but eventually we live with a certain amount of risk. His comment was in reference to shutting down the country from the coronavirus until it is safe. The comment of New York’s Governor Cuomo set him off in reference that “even one life saved is worth keeping the state closed for whatever amount of time it takes.” That’s crazy … we mitigate risk, but refuse to live in a bubble. When it comes to policing, you may say that its my “privilege” that has me thinking this way, but the statistically those who face the police where lethal force is necessary are nearly always criminals who are using guns … and even in those cases, “a police officers is 18.5% more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is by a police officer.”  LINK

Something to ponder if you support “defunding and dismantling” the police.

Category: Movies, News, Politics, Technology, Video-TV | No Comments »
Tags: boston dynamics, chappie, cnn, coronavirus, covid19, defund, dismantle, george floyd, lisa bender, mike rowe, minneapolis, podcast, police, prager, protests, riots, robots, safety

Posted By RichC on June 10, 2020

Wishing my son a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY today. I know he is getting older, but I don’t think he is THIS old yet. Yikes!

A couple weeks ago Taylor sent a FaceApp photo with his college friends (a post from when they were backpacking together in Kauai). It is frightening how technology can add a few years to your looks nowadays … but interesting enough to archive on MyDesultoryBlog.com. Have a great birthday Taylor.

Category: Friends, Personal, Photography, Photos, Software, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: aging, backpacking, birthday, faceapp, hawaii, kauai, photo, taylor, Technology

Posted By RichC on June 9, 2020

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Category: Archive, Books, Personal, Photos, Video | No Comments »
Tags: annalyn, brenda, drew, ellerie, family, grilling, katelyn, megan, pool, richc, taylor, waldo, yard

Posted By RichC on June 8, 2020

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Category: Entertainment, Music, Video | No Comments »
Tags: ballerina, move on up, mp3, music monday, musicmonday, van morrison, youtube

Posted By RichC on June 7, 2020

Just an automotive kind of filler today after sharing Erwin Wurm’s “chubby” Volkswagen Hot Dog “microbus” from NYC last week on Tom Appel’s Twitter feed. The discussion started when I commented that the Fiat 500X Sport reminded me of the “plump when you cook it” Ballpark franks commercials in the 1990s.  Eventually I shared the modified VW creation that definitely is “plump,” and unique enough to turn heads.

Category: Automotive, Business, Marketing, Photos, Social Media, Volkswagen | No Comments »
Tags: 500x sport, ballpark, erwin wurm, fiat, franks, hot dog, plump, tom appel, twitter, volkswagen, vw microbus

Posted By RichC on June 6, 2020

It is hard to imagine the lawlessness and chaos we would see without a fair bit of law enforcement of some kind? Perhaps Americans aren’t really hearing each other and are unwilling to have a logical debate … but “defunding the police” make no sense to me whatsoever? If fair minded people were talking, there would be room to discuss the excessive militarization of law enforcement, but unless cities want to return to slums, ghettos, high crime and to live in neighborhoods run by gangs and crime syndicates, we still need the police. Businesses will not locate where the only protection is self-defense and private security. Who would work in an unsafe city … or what family would ever move to where the law-abiding had to fend for themselves and criminals were unchecked? It makes no sense.

On a brighter note, neighborhood policing like this (left) leaves me optimistic. Have a great weekend … and guess what I’ll be doing (below)? A new Weber Grill – #SomeAssemblyRequired

Category: Human Interest, Personal, Photos, Politics, Sports | No Comments »
Tags: ani gif, basketball, cities, defunding police, grill, law enforcement, neighborhoods, opinion, protests, riots, weber

Posted By RichC on June 5, 2020

Size matters when emailing or just saving PDFs. It is easy to create them for paper-free archiving, but sooner or later most of them are larger than they need to be. Years ago in the printing world, almost every project was archived on CPPnet’s connected servers for our customers, usually in the Adobe PDF format. It was important to keep the quality high, but the storage size low … a delicate balance. In those early days (1990s) few of us had high speed Internet, so optimizing the compression made sense. Eventually we gravitated to using a few of the web-based conversion services (paid versions) as a way to batch process. Now in 2020, most people just create or “print-to-PDF,” save and attach a file without thinking all that much about it … until their cloud storage, hard drive or email archives become unwieldy.

Apple Macintosh users for the most part use bundled Preview software that I use all the time (out of habit, I still use an old version of Adobe Acrobat Pro or PDF Reader or Adobe Distiller when working on a Windows PC). Included within the Preview app’s default setup are a few compression filters (above) to use when “exporting” to whatever image format you want. I’ve never found the handful of “filters” all that helpful … in fact the ultra-compressed “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter is nearly useless – way too blurry.

BUT … one of the little known tips, is that the Quartz Filter tool can be tweaked with the Apple ColorSync Utility using the “live preview” inspector. To set this up follow these 3 steps THEN you’ll have a “Reduce File Size” filter for Preview exporting that will reduce the file size and keep a PDF file that can be comfortably emailed or archived for your paperless office.

With a few “live preview” adjustments, I’ve reduce a normal scanned 8-1/2 x 11 page to nearly a fifth of the original PDF scan with only minimal blurring … very useable.

Modify PDF files with Quartz filters in ColorSync Utility on Mac

You can use Quartz filters to modify a PDF document by adding effects, changing the colour space and even reducing the size of the file by recompressing graphics.

1. In the ColorSync Utility app on your Mac, choose File > Open, then select a PDF document.

2. When the file opens, click the Filter pop-up menu at the bottom of the window, then choose a filter.

   The effects of that filter are reflected in the window, but the file is not modified.

   To step through the pages of the PDF document and see the filter effects on each page, use the navigation arrows in the toolbar.

3. Click Apply when you want to save the changes.

If you choose Live Update from Filter Inspector, the appearance of the PDF document changes as you select and edit a filter in the filter inspector.

Category: Advice, Apple, Computer, Productivity, Technology, Tidbits | No Comments »
Tags: adobe, apple, colorsync, filters, mac, macintosh, pdf, preview, quartz, resize, size, tech friday, techfriday, utility

Posted By RichC on June 4, 2020

The “to-do” list is slowly being chipped away at as last weekend Brenda and I enjoyed the nice weather at home to work on yard chores. She is still struggling with a back issue, but felt good enough to use the Kubota (against my advice BTW – bumpy lawn) to mow the front lawn. I spend my time continuing the pool opening, patio and teak furniture cleaning and starting to cut down a few dying trees (photo bottom).

The sense of smell doesn’t get enough attention, in my opinion. It is amazing to me just how a slight whiff of something can trigger a long lost memory (at least for me). As I was preparing to put the skimmer baskets back in the cleanouts, there was a bunch of leftover buds, bugs and pollen that had collected. I didn’t think much of it, but put my hand in to dip out the floating “scum” so as not to push it under the basket. As I did, the smell hit me and triggered a strong memory as 6-11 year old boy of going to Al Szuch’s Bait Shop with DadC, my Grandfather Bluhm and Uncle Bob during our summers living on Lake Erie (here’s a #TBT photo from 1967). It was a good time and I so enjoyed tagging along for the routine of getting minnows to spend the day fishing and late afternoon cleaning a basket full of yellow perch. Even writing this, I can close my eyes and remember clipping open the lid of the minnow bucket .. “and smelling that scent” (and not a smell in a bad way). (more…)

Category: Human Interest, Memories, Personal, Photos, TBT, To-Do | No Comments »
Tags: bait shop, chores, memories, opening, pano, pool, smell, trees, trigger, weather, yard