Archive: 2008 March
I just upgraded my website to Wordpress 2.5. The administrative area is a lot nicer, though not much changes for my readers. The Printable View links aren’t working; let me know if you spot any other problems. Update: print versions are back, as the creator of the WP-Print module has updated for the changes in Wordpress. I added my modifications again; it’s the same as before except with an improvement: if I link to a URI twice, it’s only displayed in the endnotes once and referenced with the same number in the text, saving ink.
Also, I’ve added more advertising to help my adventure to become profitable; there are Google link ads in the sidebar, footer, and above the list of comments for each entry. If you read my donations page, you know how unsuccessful I am at solvency, so hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
The profit police are as old as eternity, but insidious as the devil. They threaten to steal our happiness, to sour us with envy, hatred, and guilt. Their orthodoxy is codified in institutional policies all over the world. They kill everyone. They are us.
Profit is not just money. Profit is also prestige, notoriety, and mere exposure. The profit police take keeping up with the Joneses to the extreme. They tell us that promoting our names or starting a business is selfish, greedy, and wrong. They are responsible for the professionalization of jobs that have no business being bureaucratized. They create sad terms like vanity press, as though not having a book approved by a committee makes the author an egotistical lunatic. Their influence starts with us, at the micro level.
The Junior Anti-Profit League is alive and well on the forums of the Internet. Well-meaning adults persist with policies of “no advertising, no self-promotion, no links to your website, no ‘commercialism.’” They cry foul at affiliate links, for no reason further than to stifle the success of their users (my photography articles are proudly littered with them). Brilliant computer-programmers publish free software with the clause, “no commercial use,” as if every dollar earned with the help of their applications comes straight from their wallets. As if profit is bad. As if the very act of seeking prosperity—called the American Dream by many—is the bane of humanity. Run the phrase,
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A yellow grasshopper from my yard, with my attempt at isolating him. I did alright, so I’m releasing this as a resource to the world. 
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Glossy finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
To download, right-click the thumbnail and click “Save Link As” (Firefox) or “Save Target As” (Internet Explorer).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
You can download the source image (JPEG, 573KB) or the edited version in loseless PNG format instead of the JPEG above (1.4MB, make sure to use the sRGB color space). Both images are released under the same license. For editing, I added contrast and removed the background using the eraser brush in Adobe Photoshop. The best way is to use the pen tool and layers, but I hate layers.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/30, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO74, 2006-07-07T16:42:13-04, 2006-07-07_16h42m13
I tried to register my name at blogger.com but got the error message above. Turns out someone’s swiped the name: http://richardxthripp.blogspot.com/ is just a parked spam blog, set up just over a month ago (2008-02-20). It’s about two thousand spam link ads.
One thing that I’ve always counted with my name (Richard X. Thripp a.k.a. richardxthripp), is that it is so unique that I can go to any website and register as richardxthripp with no fear of my identity already being taken. Apparently, I’m picking up a bit of notoriety and that is changing. The only thing to do next is to launch a pre-emptive strike against the thieves.
http://richardxthripp.deviantart.com/
http://richardxthripp.livejournal.com/
http://www.xanga.com/richardxthripp
http://technorati.com/blogs/richardxthripp.thripp.com
http://richardxthripp.stumbleupon.com/
http://digg.com/users/richardxthripp/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Richard_X_Thripp/593538525
http://www.animalcrossingcommunity.com/user_profile.asp?UserID=28254 (must log in)
http://www.43things.com/person/richardxthripp
http://del.icio.us/richardxthripp
http://www.flickr.com/people/richardxthripp/
http://profiles.friendster.com/richardxthripp
http://richardxthripp.hi5.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardxthripp
http://www.myspace.com/richardxthripp
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=15787114936809567549 (must log in)
http://www.photoblog.com/richardxthripp
http://www.photoblogs.org/profile/richardxthripp.thripp.com/
http://reddit.com/user/richardxthripp/
http://richardxthripp.sheezyart.com/
http://slashdot.org/~richardxthripp/
http://www.squidoo.com/richardxthripp
http://www.thoughts.com/richardxthripp/blog
http://www.tickme.com/member/richardxthripp.html
http://twitter.com/richardxthripp
http://richardxthripp.wordpress.com/
http://youtube.com/richardxthripp
How do you like them apples? Twenty-six websites where I’ve claimed my identity. Some are old, but there are sixteen ones I registered in the past few hours. Obviously, I won’t update any of these, but at least no one else will be carrying on their evil plans in my name.
These are two great articles on stopping the new-fangled cyber-squatters:
SearchRank: Securing Your Brand on Social Networking Sites
ProBlogger: When Seth Godin isn’t Seth Godin
I ran across these before, but wasn’t motivated enough to take action, unfortunately.
So tell me, is there any killer social networking, blogging, photography, or art network that’s missing from my list?
2008-03-29 Update: Added Animal Crossing Community and YouTube; forgot about those.
Yellow flowers from an roofless flower shop; you can find good photos anywhere. I took this from a low angle, so you can’t see any people or products in the background; just the sky. There’s interesting stuff among the stems and flowers below, but most people just look at the flowers at the top.
I spent a while changing the colors; I was debating between cooler blue tones or warm red and yellow, finally choosing the latter after comparing. There was an out-of-focus flower that creeped into the bottom-right of the frame that I cloned out, and I applied contrast enhancements and a subtle glowing effect. I let the sky go to pure white and the shadowy jungle below the flowers to black, because those areas don’t deserve detail.
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
Canon PowerShot A620, 1/1000, F4.5, 7.3mm, ISO50, 2007-06-08T14:23:26-04, 2007-06-08_18h23m26
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
An orange rose with water drops; I took this at a Lowe’s flower shop. The bubble in the center is a droplet that looks to be floating; I didn’t use a dropper as this was after a storm.
The flower is a red hybrid-tea rose; I made the color shift by changing the white-balance setting in-camera.
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
Canon PowerShot A620, 1/15, F2.8, 7.3mm, ISO50, 2007-01-18T16:29:42-05, 2007-01-18_21h29m42
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
A bright-red leaf out-of-place in a field of sickly brown leaves. I happened upon this idea as I saw a red leaf amongst all the brown leaves in our yard, so then I went and found a better leaf and positioned it like this. It was rainy and overcast, so the lighting was lower contrast and a bit blue, which is fitting for this image.
This didn’t need much spot editing, but it did benefit from added contrast and a shift to cooler colors. I added red to the leaf and desaturated the background (just a tad) to make it stand out more.
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
Canon PowerShot A620, 1/10, F7.1, 7.3mm, ISO50, 2007-01-08T14:07:05-05, 2007-01-08_19h07m05b
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
The Sacrificial Pepper: An Analysis of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Green Chile.”
Essay by Richard X. Thripp.
2008-03-25 — http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/essays
PDF version (70 KB).
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Green Chile” is a poem of love and sacrifice, symbolized through two types of chile peppers. The author blandly states that his preference is for “red chile over my eggs / and potatoes for breakfast” (1-2), but his grandmother “loves green chile” (11), chopping one up with “mysterious passion on her face” (31). Baca says that “red chile ristras decorate my door, / dry on my roof, and hang from my eaves” (3-4), showing that the red-colored versions are used frequently as decorations, giving an “air of festive welcome” (7), yet they often go uneaten. His grandmother offers him the green variety “with beans and rice,” (34), which he calls “her sacrifice / to her little prince” (34-35). This makes green chile sound different, more sacred and mysterious, while red chile is not as special. The author shows us “a well-dressed gentleman at the door” (19), and then writes of his grandmother “rubbing its firmly glossed sides” (21), which is more like the description of a chile pepper than a man. Referring to “her little prince” (35) may be an allusion to the author, her grandson. The peppers take on a life of their own, in the grandmother and the author’s minds. They are “her sacrifice,” (34), perhaps meaning that she has given up her youth and ambitions to raise and protect her grandson and the rest of her family.
The green chiles are not Baca’s favorite, as when eating them, he says “my mouth burns / and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water” (37-38). However, he does not refuse them, evidently out …
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Cherry tomatoes that I arranged in a line. The yellow table makes a great background for red-colored still life. They look good enough to eat!
I cloned out the dirt that was on the tomatoes and table, removed background reflections and distractions, brightened the image, and added contrast.
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
Fujifilm FinePix A360, 1/74, F2.81, 5.8mm, ISO64, 2006-08-07T14:27:03-04, 2006-08-07_14h27m03
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
A thirty-second exposure of my house at night, with the lights on. Our house has creatively applied stucco that is painted yellow, so it makes an interesting and reflective texture, particularly with the yellowish indoor lights. The ghostly figures are of me standing next to two windows and in the light behind the house; I stood still in each spot for eight seconds to achieve the effect (took four tries). I don’t own a proper tripod, so I used a step-ladder; it does well in a pinch.
For the glowing effect, I used a gaussian-blurred layer with soft-light blending in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Other than that, I added contrast and color, burned the sky, and dodged the ghosts.
Buy a 4*6 copy for $0.95 (USA only). Lustre finish. After adding, go to your shopping cart.
Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 30″, F3.5, 18mm, ISO400, 2008-03-22T22:11:14-04, 20080323-021114rxt
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
