This is your brain after finishing your PhD coursework

This is my brain. This is my brain after finishing my PhD coursework.

This is the third piece in my "brain on post-its" series. The other iterations are from the end of the last semester and the end of last year. The piles represent my stickies from circa 50+ books, countless articles, and grading (NB: this semester's is the largest). Post-coursework my graduate experience continues: I have to study for orals, write my prospectus, and then research and write my dissertation, but this is a momentous milestone indeed.

On tap this summer: prep for teaching photohistory in the second summer session at BU, work on a paper accepted to SECAC, and above all, reconnect with friends and family and take stock. It's been an instructive, productive, and wild ride!

Back to blogging, hopefully, and "This is your brain on grad school, Number II"

I've been a bad blogger. Such is life as a PhD student. I thought I'd do an update of my "brain on post-its" post/pic from the end of last year as a placeholder. The above pile represents my post-its from circa 40+ books and countless articles from last semester.

Before things get too crazy in my last semester of coursework, I hope to provide a few short updates on life and the following projects: the SPE-NE conference at RISD, the show Traces that I curated at PAAM, the essay I wrote for Sandi Haber Fifield's forthcoming book, Between Planting and Picking (Charta, 2011), and anything else that comes to mind.

Until then, enjoy the pretty colors!

Geek post: Photography jokes

It's summer, finally, in Boston. Summer makes me happy. I guess that's why I have been on a humor kick. For fun, I started searching for photo jokes, but oddly didn't find many at all. Over on the Prairie Home Companion's "Pretty Good Joke" portal, I found a few, mostly geek/art-related jokes. Below I present a few of my favorites as well as two photography related Prairie Home "sketches" - one on digital cameras and the other on a one-hour photo shop. Feel free to share any photo jokes you know in the comments!

If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
- Emma Coate, Pompano Beach, Florida

How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A fish
- Randal Chou, Charlotte, North Carolina

Catchup Advisory Board, "Digital camera,"
from Saturday, June 8, 2002
LISTEN HERE

Barb's One Hour Photo from Saturday, April 24, 2003
LISTEN HERE

Geek Post: My blog looks like mold

Yep, that's my blog pictured above! While searching for images tagged "blog" on flickr (don't ask me why), I came across the following flickr group (websites_as_graphs). This led me to a program/little piece of code that will visually render any web site. (I know you are going to love this DK!) Neato says the inner and outer geek in me! I LOVE information translated into the visual (see my previous Geek post) and vice versa.

I quote the explanation/key of the graphic rendering from the author below. If you go to the link directly, you can see the graphs of dozens of other web sites (google, boing boing, and mac) for comparison. They are quite beautiful, no?

You can try it out here. Try typing in any url - www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph - and watch it grow!

The above image is my blog and at the very bottom of this post is the PRC web site (dreamweaver) and the PRC blog (wordpress). As you can see, the PRC web site uses tables and is fairly simple - a good thing! On the other hand, the blogs use lots of links. Enjoy!

Websites as graphs

Everyday, we look at dozens of websites. The structure of these websites is defined in HTML, the lingua franca for publishing information on the web. Your browser's job is to render the HTML according to the specs (most of the time, at least). You can look at the code behind any website by selecting the "View source" tab somewhere in your browser's menu.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I've written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.

I've used some color to indicate the most used tags in the following way:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

www.prcboston.org


www.bostonphotographyfocus.org

Geek Post: Quote for Friday

Friday is nigh, Bruce has an opening, my parents are coming into town and get to meet his parents for the first time. Things are hectic, but good. For a happy Friday, I share a quote I came across from an excellent post by a friend we simply call DK.

For all of those wondering the exact words Steve Martin said in the "paddle ball game/lamp" scene in The Jerk--and we all know we have attempted to quote this part many, many times...Oh my, I just got lost in his website. I adore Steve Martin, *love* Pure Drivel, and especially crack up over his art related writings, which you can read here and here and here -- and oh joy, here is one about photography and philosophy! Without further ado, here are the words from that infamous scene in The Jerk, courtesy of this most excellent site, Quote Geek:

Well I'm gonna to go then. And I don't need any of this. I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this. And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.

Geek Post

I am excited to debut a new periodic post category, the "Geek Post." Every now and then, I will present something that might not have anything to do with photography and nothing to do with anything but geeking out. I have no idea if anyone else is interested in this or if they will be scared of the crazy things I find interesting, but in honor of conversations this week on the "geek" topic, we all have our geek side or inner geek. (This is also a diversion post as I have been tagged with the "5 things meme" by Jeremias Paul and have a lot of work to do too this weekend, like look at 1500 images to finish jurying Critical Mass.)

So...I was double checking one of my artist's statements this week and she used the term "jury-rigged," which I thought was a typo and supposed to be "jerry-rigged." After poking around online, I found out I was wrong (Update, apparently I am one of the few that thought this. Funny...but we all have these things stuck in our heads that are wrong. Go on, you know it's true!) I found this great site by Paul Brians that explains common errors in English. For those who are chomping at the bit, here is the distinction between "JERRY-BUILT/JURY-RIGGED":

Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.”