I know, when you think about ‘adult toys’ usually have something different in mind, but I think, these here are the real adult toys.
But then again – maybe not – because men never really grow up…
Presentation will open in new window when you click the image…
This is history as we made it!
It was in the early days of the internet, a time when Google did not exist yet, when we used Alta Vista to find things on that interweb. When Netscape was strong and the driving force for new developments on this world wide web. When there were pages at Netscape where you could tell the world about new sites or pages – and the world came.
It was 1995!
This is when we started something that would later be called a blog. Sure, there was no PHP (at least on the web) and certainly no WordPress, so the blog entries had to be crafted by hand, usually in a simple text editor and the blogger had to know HTML. Not that there was much to be known – the leading edge of HTML tags were background images and music.
This was the year ‘My Hobby Kitchen’ was born. The plan was to publish one Thai recipe every few days, or how often we managed. If we had kept it up, by now we would have – at one recipe per day – close to one thousand recipes. That number shows that it was just not possible, as nobody knows 1000 recipes. We did – maybe – foresee that and invented the ‘guest blogger.’ But only one came on board, shortly before the project died.
The amazing part of the story is that these pages survived. After a multitude of ISPs, and moving between different domains, these pages are still there and they are finding a new home now on this (real) blog.
I kept the pages as they were, just made some adjustments to fit into the framework of this blog, removed any pointers to websites that don’t exist anymore, and anonymized it to protect the guilty. But I left all the tacky background music (at least it does not start automatically) and images intact so that all those young people can see how it all started. It was written from the perspective of my significant other who is Thai and knew what she was doing – yours truly was just the webmaster.
Without any further ado, here is
I got myself some nice Canon T4i but I can’t figure out where to put that film in, of which I still have a few rolls and which I don’t want to let go to waste.
I think I like Nikon better because on the old 6006, I still have, there was not problem with that – I just opened the back – and there is the space where the film fit in. I got the back of my new T4i open but there is still no place for that roll of film, only all that electronic stuff, chips and wires and such – hmmm.
But, jokes aside, I know there is no more film produces any more – at least not in form of a mass production – and that I would have a hard time to find a lab these days that could still develop film. This roll on the right is probably about 15 years old and expired so solidly that there would be hardly anything on it any more, even if there was a process to develop it with.
But I got to think about that when I ran into a video of photographer Steve McCurry, securing the last role of Kodachrome produced in 2009 and going on a world tour to shoot that last roll ever to leave the factory.
Reminded me of the beginning of my photography career back in Germany. Obviously, with the German arrogance, I did not use Kodachrome – the colors were just too American to satisfy a German eye – we used Agfachrome which displayed a softer gradient of colors and saturation. Back then I always shot slide film and I don’t really remember what my reason was to suddenly get into film for color prints when I got a much better camera – the Nikon 6006 – after coming to the US of A. It might have been because there was an affordable service to give me, with the prints, a scan of the images I could download from the lab’s web site. Another reason probably was, that I was not a purist any more and did break down and took memory photos – back in my early days that would never had happened – the shutter was pressed only when art came out.
This very selective pressing of the shutter was paramount for Steve McCurry when he shot the very last role of Kodachrome. Here is his report…
This documentary got me very interested in Mr. McCurry and I found this interview with him.
You can see the gallery of the 31 images from the last role of Kodachrome on Vanity Fair. (Seems to be behind a paywall now.)
PS: Reminded me that, during my early days of photography (with Agfachrome), I considered it a good outcome when I got one good shot from a role of film.
When I was in my late teens, starting to read science-fiction, I was sure that by now we would regularly traveling to other planets and had settlements on the moon, and the flying car was a given.
But many of these things are still only subject of science-fiction, but something totally unimagined has materialized – a network that did make the world’s knowledge accessible from the palm of my hand. I knew there would be talking robots but that I would be able to access all data with just a query – I just hadn’t thought of.
Found this interesting video of visual thoughts of how the future might look like…
But with that last experience, what’s really going to happen, will be something totally different altogether.
Sometimes we might not realize that we are standing at the cusp of a new world.
Looking back it is easy to see that something new and exciting had been happening at a specific time, but while you are in the middle of it, it might not be so obvious.
Watching the slow motion video, Louie Schwartzberg presented at his TED talk, drove it home that this is similar to the wonder people experienced when they watched the first ‘movies’ around the previous turn of the centuries (the one from the 1800s to the 1900s), especially when the subject was either so far away that the chance of experiencing it oneself was minimal or total creative fiction like a trip to the moon.
Movies really allow you to experience a different reality, either far away in term of location of far away in terms of speed of time as in this example…
If you want to see more from Mr. Schwartzberg, you can check out his Youtube channel and dig out your 3D glasses because he has some really good 3d videos to show.
Thanks, Beverly, for sending these pictures my way. I enjoyed them and want to pass them on here…
I saw talks by Hans Rosling on TED a while back, but it seems his presentation of statistical data has gotten even better…
Ran into a video at the YT Academy (YouTube) of autonomous little robots ganging together to play the James Bond theme. Sure, they did not build all the instruments themselves but I am sure this is just a matter of time.
But all these little guys jamming it out makes them really look alive and having fun…
I had to look a little bit further on what that actually is all about, and found this TED talk…
We found a real nice house that is more or less perfect in many regards:
Altogether, it just feels right, we all like it – so we want it.
Now we just have to create the reality that within a month we move into this place and one of the reasons for this blog post is for you all to help create this reality.
So, now altogether please – create the picture of us being in this house with plenty of money left over from the sale of the old house. Oh, yes, and the old house is bought by a friend for whom it would be real good as he wants to have a family.