Being a well-trained father, I did exactly that:

Subject: HOLY MOTHER OF FRAK YOUR FAMOUS
DAD.

DADADAD.

YOUR GODDAMN PHOTO.

FROM THE FIRST BLOWOUT.

IS.

THE.

PHOTO.

FOR.

DOOMTREE.

ON WIKIPEDIA.

WAT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomtree

At least it is RIGHT NOW

(We’ll blame his failure to use the correct version of “you’re” in the subject on his abject excitement.)

Jeez O’Criminey Pete! – It’s true! If you head on over there, the picture of five rappers that they’re using is indeed one of mine from our first Blowout nearly two years ago now. That’s even Thomas’s arm and hand sticking out of the green sweatshirt sleeve in the foreground :-) (This link points to today’s version of the page in case they come to their senses and swap in a different picture down the road.)

There are certainly better photographers and photographs of the crew out there, so I’m a little surprised. I suspect my liberal Creative Commons licensing has a lot to do with it, as I’m pretty Wikipedia/Wikimedia friendly in that regard. Still, it’s super cool to see people using my photo this way.

I should also make it clear that it almost certainly wasn’t someone at Doomtree that made this choice. Wikipedia strongly discourages/disallows people creating or editing content about themselves, so I’m guessing this choice was made by someone outside of the crew.

I should also point out that the content of the entry is pretty thin and kinda sad. I think some folks should get on that – we gotta make sure there’s good text to distract people from the lousy picture up at the top :-)

Thanks to Thomas for the pointer!

Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.

In the meantime, we have had a ton of snow this winter. Just sayin’

The University of Minnesota, Morris, recently open its new Welcome Center, a major renovation of what had become a sad little building into a shining, spiffy new space. Among other things, it’s a real tribute to the campus’s commitment to sustainability:

When certified, the Welcome Center will be the first LEED Platinum building in the University of Minnesota system; the first LEED Platinum building on the National Register of Historic Places; and one of only thirteen higher education LEED Platinum certified buildings in the world. The Welcome Center is also the first building in Minnesota to use energy efficient chilled beam technology.

They’ve put out a call for art for the building, with a particular interest in work from alumni and others connected to the campus. In a foolish moment, I’ve submitted 20 photos. Now we wait and see if they want to purchase any of them!

I took over 1,000 pictures at yesterday’s 2010 graduation ceremony at UMM, and will sometime be putting the least bad of them on my events account on Flickr, but at the moment I have a ton of deadlines looming (grades, etc.) so that’ll have to wait a bit.

The wind ensemble and choir both did an excellent job (as they always do); these are from before the ceremony started while people were filing in and taking their seats. I really loved the reflection in the euphoniums, especially the mirror sharp reflection of the Student Center, trees, and sky in the silver instrument.

I took quite a few pictures of that reflection, and struggled a bit with the final presentation. It’s not clear to me whether the emphasis provided by the desaturation above, or whether I’m better off leaving the color alone (below).

The top one makes a really nice desktop image, by the way :-).

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

Mom Loves Me, originally uploaded by nailbender.

I don’t get enough time to look at the wonderful photos that other people are posting on Flickr, but every now and then I carve out a few minutes. This morning over breakfast I discovered this gem and had to share. There is so much to like about this: The cool and unexpected subject matter, the generous treatment, the wonderful lighting and color, the tilt of the mother’s head. So, so nice. Well done to nailbender and thanks a ton for sharing!