To celebrate a Sunday that showed some signs of pulling out of the greyness that this winter has been, I went out early-ish and picked up a dozen bagels and, almost as an afterthought, a six dollar copy of The New York Times, which some of you may not know is an actual newspaper, published on big ol’ soy-ink chugging presses nightly from a couple of dozen offset printing plants around the country.

Yes, we bought the paper. Now, for someone who went to journalism school and contemplated life amidst the ink-stained before being seduced by the blue crackly glow of television, this may not seem that surprising. But truth is, as much as I love the idea and honor the history of newspapers, reading the news on newsprint is amazingly unsatisfying, as if I’m pawing through two-day-old printouts left in some newsroom’s recycled bin. It feels, old, stale, expired. Didn’t we see that Style section story on the web on thursday? Where are the Times blogs breathlessly updating the story of the Cablevision-Disney battle that threatened cable viewers’ view of the Oscarcast?

I’m not one who believes that when magazines and newspapers make the switch to iPad-like delivery, they should become some sort of multimedia animation-fest. in fact, I think they’ll do just fine if they avoid discarding a handful of things:

• Layout matters. Columns, headlines, callouts, color, and big photos will look superb in a tablet. You really don’t need to go much beyond the classy approach you’d see in the print Sunday Times Magazine.
• Ads in context. Part of the charm in paging through the NYT Arts and Leisure section on Sunday always was (and remains) seeing the huge ads for moveis and shows interspersed with the editorial content. Again, if they’re NOT flashfests or blink-monstrosities, they’ll get noticed and appreciated for what they are…advertising wrapped around some of the world’s most prestigious content.
• We always will welcome and find ways to pay for well-edited, carefully sourced, copyedited, and corrected content. Shovel dross at us and we won’t care how much it animates…it’ll be dead to us.

The upcoming iPadThingie can be my BBC Newspad, perfect for reading whole eating mysterious earth-tgoned puddings in zero gravity, or accompanying fresh-made bagels on an Atlanta Sunday morning.

The Apple folks have announced the day-it-shall-be-buyable of the iPad, and, for the wi-fi only versions, it’s April 3rd, a mere 8 days before my birthday (in case you need any last minute gift ideas).

I continue to be intrigued by the paradigm-shifting possibilities of the device, especially for those out there who, truth be told, don’t really need a computer in their lives…they need a fancy doohickie that reads email and surfs the web and shows photos and plays games. For those people, if they never see a filesystem, they’re fine with that. If they never have to mess with another preference file or repair permissions, their lives will be that much better.

And I want to see as many of those folks as possible with these in their hands. But I also want this as a hackable, playable, messable-with device for folks like me, and it remains to be seen how completely this fits into that paradigm.

But there is one thing I’ve heard quite enough of. I’m looking at you, Apple marketing and PR weasels. You know that whole “magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price” thing you keep saying over and over and over again? The Steve Jobsian thing to do would be to put this device out there and let us be the judge of that. There’s gotta be a law somewhere where you can’t call your own innovation “magical”, and you’re violating it again and again.

Let us buy the thing and take it around the block and we’ll let you know. Even if the verdict is “yep, magical,” it’s for us to say, and you to smile and count our cash.

Photo by Duncan Rawlinson, one of many cool ones at his ‘Last Minute Blog’.

After speeches, anthems aplenty, and flags raised, lowered, and passed along, Neil Young sang “Long May You Run”, the Olympic torch was extinguished, and with it, any air of sobriety left in Vancouver’s BC Centre.

What followed was folly: William Shatner, with a dramatic reading plus Keynote presentation on what it means to be Canadian (ien?). Catherine O’Hara, swept in by curling brooms, with comedic variations on that theme, and an apology for being apologetic. Michael J. Fox, yet another sometimes-expatriate, tugged on a heart or two.

And then came the the giant inflatable beavers, the floating mermaids with maple leaf wings, and a gigantic tabletop hockey game, batting about a small child dressed as a puck. And moose. And canoes. And, oh yeah, Michael Bublé singing some snippet of maple leaf doggerel over and over again accompanied by mountie babe backup singers…segueing into the famed Hockey Night in Canada theme.

And how did it all end?

Well, we don’t quite know, on this side of the border. At 10:30 eastern, NBC did their best attempt at self-parody: they cut away (abruptly!) from the ceremony, promising to pick up where they left off in a hour—on, yes, say it with me, tape delay. had to run that Seinfeld Marriage game show thingie, y’know.

After that odd acid trip of an experience, it’s hard to believe Seinfeld was ‘More colorful.’

Friday, February 19th is the 20th birthday of Photoshop. Yes, the software that liberated me from paint systems that cost six figures is two decades old, and in that staggeringly long time (when you measure in ones and zeroes) has grown from a simple way to make and alter bitmapped images to a complex, multilayered, largely 3d and multiframed behemoth that has all kinds of horsepower to handle massively megapixel-y frames of stuff in lots of different formats.

It also, increasingly, has the tools to help ordinary joes create retouched reality that is nearly undetectable except by those who examine their work on a fractal/pixel level.

I spoke at a SMPTE conference 20 years ago about how to use the tools of the time to work with multigenerational video to create layers of graphic design (back in a time where television’s on-air look was distinguished by a distinct lack of layering. The demo I showed used the state-of-the-then-art, a $160,000 Quantel Paintbox, to create text, color gradients, and the raw material that I would layer into multigenerational creations. And this was a device that could only work at the (amazingly low) resolution of standard definition (ah, we used to call it NTSC) television.

A month later—a month later—Photoshop was released. And yes, that changed everything.

So in 1993, I gave a talk to a bunch of NBC promo execs (back when they could have deluxe retreats and talks) about everything having been changed, and I, well, kinda geeked out about the possibilties of working with desktop systems and this cool program called Photoshop and vector files and a new compositing program called COSA After Effects. I went on at some length, and in a terrifying amount of detail, as I’ve been known to do, and, well, I suspect I baffled more than enlightened my audience, but now here we are.

Everyone knows the word Photoshop, and most use it as a generic to mean “mess with an image.” There are websites that celebrate and call out the overuse and misuse of the venerable application’s powers. There are songs—not very good ones, or I’d link to them—venerating and trashing the app.

So thanks, Knoll brothers and Adobe, for extending what was only the work of a few specialists now into the grasp of nearly anyone with a laptop in a coffeehouse. And as we sit here in the ‘now’ where fancy tablet computing thingies are about to ship that may well open up even newer digital highways for those who find computers way too computer-y and spell the sunset of some of the desktop machines we’ve delighted in for two decades, I’ll still, I suspect, be firing up the venerable program most mornings to design cool things. Or scribble, as I search for an idea.

Oh, and if you (uh, as I do) like to see computer guys who were young punks when they invented the thing get together decades later to reminisce, please enjoy John and Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman sitting around talking.

Run for your lives! Well, on second thought, don’t. We had four inches (expert meteorologists…top men, I tell you..told us) of frozen precipitation, which, I think in the greater country-wide scheme of things, means we got off very lucky indeed. We were able to get up to my dad’s 84th birthday yesterday through the snowy beauty with nary a skid, and when the sun rose today, it was a good time to get out and shoot a few pictures.

…and there are a few more here.

Back from a weekend hanging with archaeologists and looking at things archaeological down on the Georgia coast. On Sunday morning, we took a ferry over to Sapelo Island, one of Georgia’s barrier islands that has (they tell me), been intensely occupied over the centuries, from native peoples who built shell ring mounds (one 100 meters in diameter) way way back in BC sometime to the Spanish to the French to sugar cane growers who forged their operations on the backs of slave labor to the descendents of those slaves (and, along the way, a Detroit auto engineer who bought up a big chunk of the island, North Carolina tobacco emperor R.J. Reynolds who built a big old house there, and bunches of researchers, some who live on the island full-time.)

On the ferry over (a zippy modern catamaran named after Katie Underwood, the island’s last resident midwife), three kids from what seemed like widely variant socialeconomic backgrounds (that is, some seemed to be dirt-poor and some didn’t) nevertheless had iPhones or iPod Touches, and they and their friends exhibited the now-familiar behavior “look at this cool app! look at this picture I just took of you! listen to this song!” Modern mobile kids, doing the new social, poking, pinching, and sliding on tiny glass surfaces.

Once on the island, at least for us, it was a decidedly low-tech wander, packed into a beat-up minivan, bouncing along dirt roads with deep puddles from Friday’s rain. We did collect lots of GPS points and digital photos, and we learned about the island’s history the old-fashioned way, listening to the stories of those who had spent decades investigating the centuries of human occupation on the island.

Hey, I’ve been around for a while. I’ve seen Johnny Carson’s last show. Heck, I’ve seen Dick Cavett’s last show. I saw one or two of Tom Snyder’s last shows. (And I’m talking when they aired, when they were broadcast to an still fairly monolithic american tv viewing public.)

Conan O’Brien’s last Tonight Show, last night was a classy
and entirely on-key farewell.

The guy is creative, talented, smart, works hard, and seems to inspire loyalty in his colleagues and guests. You can’t ask for much more than that.

It was, in some ways, all the more compelling coming on after the, uh, George Clooney show—a prime-time two hour fundraiser for the earthquake victims in Haiti, which, aside from the considerable good charitable work, was a modern masterpiece of live television. The music, interlaced with simple, straight-to-the-camera pleas for help (delivered by a-list movie talent), seemed to be exactly what tone you’d hope would be struck after a bad couple of weeks in the world. ‘Hope for Haiti Now’ reminded me how elegant well-produced LIVE musical numbers can be when done with restraint (hey, no audience!) and style, in glorious high definition.

Me, I hope television continues to function as a common electronic hearth, every once in a while, for us all to gather in realtime and, uh, tweet about it. Last night was a good night to do both. And hey, no Jay Leno show at ten…they ran Dateline!

One chunk of Conan’s closing comments is getting a lot of note in the hours after, and deservedly so. After the comedy stylings of Steve Carrell and Tom Hanks, and after the chords of Neil Young’s “Long May You Run” (I know, eh?) and before the comedy chord stylings of Will Farrell and company performing “Free Bird”, the Host Of The Tonight Show said this:

“All I ask of you, especially young people…is one thing. Please don’t be cynical, I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.”

I can’t disagree.

I think one of the reasons I like Flickr, the photo sharing site put together by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake way back in 2004 (and sold, ca-ching, to Yahoo about a year later) is that not only do I get to upload and share my photos with the greater, uh, planet, but I do so in a way that makes each picture a post of its own…each one has a headline…sometimes a caption…and tags.

And, if you so permit, folks from the greater, uh, planet can add comments and generate a bit of a dialog right there on the page about what the image holds, signifies, or conjures up in their own overactive imaginations. (The picture of J.C. Salyer at top right, where he’s almost in the frame, even netted a quick comment from cofounder Fake herself.) I’ve ‘met’ some interesting people from the comments…neighbors, and people, well, anywhere.

And as a guy who used to really enjoy writing headlines back in the days when they involved equal amounts of copyfitting and wit, I try to put the same kind of work in the photo titles (which are, after all, little headlines) as I did in taking the picture. So I cobble together odd phrases like Watch this tower grow. and Ohio occurs in various colors. and The long shutter, en fuego. and teton zombieland. and But how do they hold the pencils? and Better than ‘Sindiana’ or ‘Swest Virginia.’ and Food that pleases at 2 am.

And yes, just like here, for some reason, the periods at the end of the headlines are important to me, so don’t mess with them, OK?

Some folks who upload (sometimes hundreds of) images don’t even bother to change the title, and so have a bunch of headlines resembling “IMG2137.JPG”, and some others elect to write little haikus of poetry in the tags, like:

• cold
• frozen
• I was so cold
• brrr

…and I think all of these idiosyncracies make browsing through the 2 billion or so pictures all the more interesting.

And yes, there’s the actual photography too…the technical approaches and styles used to create Flickr images inspire imitators, trends, and way too much discussion. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that after a blizzard of uploaded tilt-shift fake photos —that’s a technique that takes the characteristic shallow depth of field you see in miniature photos…why the model railroad layout has sharp trains and fuzzy cars in the foreground—and applies that (often digitally) to real-world objects to make them look like tiny toys. Anyway, there’s an Allstate commercial out there now that uses the technique, and if it hadn’t become fashionable online, I doubt they would given it a go on Real Network Television.

So every few days I try to make sure I upload a few choice-ish pictures to le Flickr and I give my brain a little headline-writing practice and I get a small smile knowing that you there in Kuala Lampur can sit there and look at a picture of my old Apple //e or Bob Beasley operating a 1970s-era video switcher or ‘Bowling from the future!’—a bowling alley in Wapakoneta, Ohio.