Letter to Michael Connarty

It does seem pretty underhand of the government to try to sneak through the Digital Economy Bill on the last day of Parliament before the Election is announced. This Bill will make it much harder for photographers to be paid for the work they do, and that seems wrong in a Bill that claims to be working to protect the "Creative Arts" (see http://www.stop43.org.uk/pages/read_more.html for more information)

Anyway, here's the text of a letter I sent to my MP Michael Connarty today. Let's see what response I get:

Dear Mr Connarty,

Even though it is late, and I am sure your mind will be on other things
today, I ask you to vote against the unseemly shoehorning through of
the Digital Economy Bill.

The Bill has clearly been poorly thought through. It claims to be
trying to promote the Creative Arts, yet in Clause 43 it greatly
reduces the rights of photographers to claim payment for the use of
their own works. Someone wanting to use a photograph need make only
the most cursory of searches for the photographer, and they can happily
go away and use the work without compensating the artist who created
it.

Furthermore, Clause 46 - a so-called Henry VIII clause - allows a
future minister to make changes in the scope of the law without that
being approved by Parliament. I thought we were supposed to be a
Parliamentary democracy - why should a single minister be free to make
sweeping changes to a law without consultation with MPs?

And finally, the suggestion that a family's internet connection may be
disabled because of a SUSPICION of misuse, is clearly contrary to any
form of natural justice. You always come across as a fair-minded man,
so I am sure that you would not go along with something as unreasonable
as that.

I hope you will let me know, at your earliest convenience, that you
have voted to delay this Bill for reasonable scrutiny in a future
Parliament.

Yours sincerely,
etc

Well done Pantone Europe

Colour Calibration of a monitor is the process of making sure that the colours on your monitor match what you would get it if you were to print the same picture out on a properly set up printer.

For this job, I use a Pantone Huey. However, with the recent addition of a second monitor, I wanted to upgrade to the Pantone Huey Pro. This is a software-only update.

I went to the web site for the upgrade, and found that the upgrade was no longer available in Europe. Yet it was available in the USA?

So I sent off a polite letter to Pantone customer support, who confirmed that the upgrade was no longer available in Europe. Disappointed, I asked that this be reconsidered.

So imagine my surprise to receive an email saying that the Pantone Europe people had reconsidered, and the upgrade was to be once again sold in Europe! I was probably their first customer for it, and it undoubtedly works well :-) (The link is here)

So, kudos and thanks to Pantone Europe

The downside of renting your own domain

I have a few domains - thepotters.org is my main one for the family, stagepics.co.uk is another, ross-online.org.uk and sabos.co.uk are domains that I rent and manage on behalf of others.

Completely separately, there is the subject of spam. When spammers are sending junk mail, they know that many mail servers will do a lookup to check that the mail they are sending appears to come from a valid domain.

So spammers create email addresses based on real domains, with any old string before the "@" sign.

That means that when automated reponses or hate mail come back, they go to the domain that the spammer created. And in all of my domains, I have a "catch-all" set up, so that any email sent to that domain comes back to me.

Which is why I have had over one hundred and fifty mail messages telling me that panuche [at] thepotters.org is not a member. Started the morning beautifully, that did!

IT WISNAE ME!

Carbonite follow-up

Well, my Carbonite problems are sorted out. I didn't get an response to the web form I filled in, but the "live help" service worked a treat.

It appears that my problems related to a Windows Defender update that trashed my hosts file - when I updated my hosts file to add 127.0.0.1 as the IP address relating to localhost, everything came back to life.

Carbonite backup...

For several months now, I've been using Carbonite for online backup. Any file I create or change gets copied to a server somewhere in the USA and backed up. If fire should engulf my house (let's hope nobody's in at the time) I can get all my photos back from the server. All my personal papers I have also scanned, and feel comfortable that they're backed up somewhere.

It's hell on my broadband connection, but that's what broadband's for...

Anyway, such a service is only as good as its response when things go wrong. In the past couple of days, all of my Carbonite windows seem to have been replaced by an internet explorer window saying that "This program cannot display the webpage".

I have sent them an email explaining the problem. Let's see how long it takes them to respond.

Deep Zoom Composer

(Second try posting this)

I have been playing with a new Microsoft technology called Silverlight (in this day and age, it's well worth having a few strings to one's bow).

Anyway, one tool built on this is called Deep Zoom Composer, and it's pretty cool. I've thrown together a Deep Zoom panel with over 1000 StagePics photographs at http://www.stagepics.co.uk/sp2

Drag the black surface around with your mouse to see more pictures. Birl the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, or click (to zoom in) and shift-click (to zoom out) if you have no mouse wheel.

I'm very impressed, and am looking forward to playing more with this technology.

Two Shows

This has been an amazingly busy week!

I haven't taken any show photos for a couple of months, but this week I had two productions to shoot - vastly different to each other, too

On Monday, I went into Edinburgh to photograph Edinburgh Music Theatre's production of Hair. As ususal from EMT, I was impressed by the performances. Everyone on stage was committed to the show, and it was clear how much work they had been doing. They knew what to do, when to do it and they were able to rely on their colleagues to do the same thing. They were focused and intent on what they were doing. While the show was not exactly my cup of tea, the quality of performance was simply outstanding.

Tuesday saw me in Dunfermline, watching Carnegie Youth Theatre's Annie. Once again, I was amazed by how well the show was performed. I could not think of the performers as "children" - they were performers who were so good on stage that they demanded to be compared to an adult copmany, and they did as well as most of those!

Congratulations to both - and I'll have your photographs online as soon as possible!