Vanfleteren

The expo shown above by Stephan Vanfleteren, a promising young, in his mid thirties, Flemish photographer of 'De Morgen' newspaper, has been set-up at an unusual venue... a building in the city of Ghent that used to host a permanent circus, years ago. I always thought that circus set-ups were temporary, arranged in open areas, with huge, centrally built tents and lots of trailers parked around them, hosting animals, clowns, and acrobats. The Ghent building apparently defies that logic. Even worse. That circus used to be called 'the new circus' as there was already an earlier one down the road, naturally known as 'the old circus'. I've been living 33 years close to the city and had no idea that in the not too distant past Gentenaars loved circus-going so much! One learns all the time! In the mid fifties of last century (about when I was born, mind you), the circus was turned into the Mahy Garage for Fiat cars (see picture below) and then abandoned in 1979, 30 yrs ago. All this recent time, it obviously served as a refuge to pigeons and spiders (shown somewhere in the clip above, too). Not too long ago the city decided to create and plan a rather ambitious residential and shopping development project (De Krook) that will cover the entire block, surrounded by the canal and a few streets, but building works have not started yet.

Recently Lannoo, the editor and producer of Vanfleteren's books, decided to use the old circus as the venue for this expo in order to basically promote the photographer's recent work and moreover advertise and sell Vanfleteren's latest book titled "Portret 1989-2009".

My daughter, a college graduate in photography herself, finds his work déjà-vu and doesn't particularly think it's either original or creative. In many ways, I must admit she's right, his techniques are indeed familiar old tricks. Very short depths of field, measured in mm rather than cm or m, black and white dramatic effects with very little detail in the shadow parts, vignetting, often shot with wide angle, rendering some facial details quite extreme, and ultra sharp Carl Zeiss glass eyes and aged skin textures.

Vanfleteren shoots celebs in Flanders. Who are these? Mostly people shown in newspapers, books, and magazines. Like actors, TV celebs, politicians, writers, sportsmen/women, comedians, visual artists, in short all those with whom the common people like to identify and look up to. His book contains 335 portraits but that's not to say that there are 335 different individuals shot, as some celebs are shot multiple times. The vast majority of them are Flemish, some Dutch and Walloons too. The Flemish are mostly known in this country as BVs (Bekende Vlamingen). Not necessarily these folks are any better than the rest of us, but their photographs show-up in newspapers more often than anyone else's. So be it!

As I was checking the shots in his book (which I bought for 55 euros, mind you... true story), I couldn't help recognizing that two classes of people were missing from this celebs catalog of Flanders country. These were a) successful managers and industry leaders (incl. doctors, entrepreneurs, top managers, etc) and b) known university and other school professors and researchers. In fact, those who make it happen... the real thing... the economy that drives and steers our daily lives and cares that we all get some crumbs on the table, to eat and drink. In fact, celebs only deal with the entertaining part of our daily life whereas the leaders in those activities that keep the system running are mostly hidden in the shadow of celebs, entirely ignored by the media, simply doing their business. A cyclist celeb in this country is far more important that Pattie Maes, whom most among the 'high intellect Americans' (yep, that's no oxymoron) consider as one of the top female brains and researchers on the planet! But Pattie is no celeb material as she does her job and being under the spot is the last thing on her mind!

Per the author, there's visibly one key celeb's portrait missing, and the photographer makes a hell of a story about her in the prologue of his book. Belgian ex-Queen Fabiola, the 'Spanish witch'! Vanfleteren sez that he's fallen in love with her hair style and he was probably having wet dreams considering the possibility of shooting her portrait, but her Royal Secretary and Personal Adviser, a dude with a gazillion names -- typical of someone with noble origins in this part of the world -- informed the photographer that this was a no-go. If I was that adviser myself and had imagined beforehand what that rejection would have caused in terms of Vanfleteren's hilarious commentary in his book prologue, along with more comments on TV and other media, I'd have never refused the bleedin' photo-shoot, mark my words. But that's again Belgium. Pettiness and ridicule at all levels, turning the indigenous into targets for 'Belgian' jokes, adored by our neighbors, especially the Dutch and the French.

Did I, or do I like Vanfleteren's pictures? As I am neither a certified expert nor I ever studied photography like my sibling, I... love them. There's a lot of drama and variation. Each person shown takes a pose and uses artifacts that have something to say about his/her character and activity. His lens goes deeper, much deeper than the surface. We see aspects of the personages that are very intimate, very personal. From that point of view, Vanfleteren is definitely quite original after all. For Flanders, his work is as monumental as that of the likes of Yousuf Karsh and Mario Testino. Only difference, the persons he shoots or he shot, with very few exceptions, are only dudes known in an area of max 15K sq km, give-n-take, the Flanders country...

Like I said, so be it!

The Condom!

How to make a living without any productive work!

Capitalism is cool. To many though, especially the poor and the weak and the disadvantaged, it often seems evil and anti-social and destroying people's lives and should be dropped. Unfortunately, capitalism goes hand in hand with freedom and democracy, and as bad it may be, it's still way better than any other alternative that we've seen in the last 10 thousand years on Planet Earth, including Plato's Utopia.

It is a challenging statement that this blog has started with, innit? Imagine Johnny boy having a great life, in terms of income that is, while he don't need do no shit to earn a living. All it takes is surfing the net, watching the market, and doing some online day-trading. If you know what you are doing, you are da man! You can make a living with dough others sweat blood and tears to get any near to!

An example! Late July 2009. Johnny boy's watching AAPL moving south. He knows he needs to check upon AAPL's Puts. He likes trading options short term, so he looks no further than August / September expiries, less than one and two months down the road respectively. He decides to sell 10 August and 30 September contracts, breadcrumbs really, both @ 160 strike. AAPL is trading at 167 at that moment, give 'n take. Johnny thinks AAPL will move up. He feels August might be rather tricky for the strike to hold in the clear, but he's rather confident about the September expiry. Johnny will soon make, give'n-take 15 big ones on this transaction. Time needed to make it happen: 6 'productive' minutes. The time to search real time data on some gazillion free of charge URLs, make the sell decision, evaluate risks and send an SMS to his banker, some place out there in the banking universe, waiting for more of his Johnny clients to tell him what to do with their money. In the next 15 minutes Johnny gets a confirmation that the transaction got thru and placed a fresh 15 grand 'n change on his current account. Deal done. Let's go eat supper now, Johnny boy!

Johnny goes on with his life. He hasn't started spending his cash, as it's not earned yet for sure... there's always the risk options end "in-the-money" and then his buyers will come running, but that's ok. Johnny's got a few alternative strategies if things get ugly. Happened before. When things turned out bad, he used to go for some new similar 'sells' at distant future expiry dates. With the proceedings, he then covered his current open positions before too late. And so on. Eventually the stock does a turnaround (they always do) and Johnny wipes away his losses, hands down. In fact, his best bets work when, at expiration, his target stock falls sandwiched in between two rates at which Johnny sells Puts (@ the lower) and Calls (@ the higher). The narrower the spread between the two the better the dough. The higher the risk though. Johnny swears by Apple and its products, but bleedin' AAPL is much too tricky to handle short term. Don't even get me started on medium term! It's a high volatility stock, like the experts use to call it! Anyways, sometime in the past, Johnny tried buying options at "some" price, putin' his cash on the table, hoping for obnoxious percent returns if the stock moved in the right sense but he always screwed this up, big time. There were other Johnnies then, who were singin' their way to the bank, with his money. So, he decided once and for all to only do 'sells' in the future, and avoid 'buys' of derivatives like hell.

Anyways, about early August AAPL suddenly headed south and Johnny felt like his first bet might squeeze him to some panic recovery strategies with the stock closing @ just above 159 bucks, for just a single night. That one was a slight shock. His banker however got cold sweat running all over him, even more than Johnny himself, but... never mind. That's why the bank pays him, poor sod. To 'empathize' with his customers!

Long story short, eventually Johnny secured the cash of his August bet, following expiry Friday on the third week of the month, with AAPL trading safely far above 160 bucks a share. One down, one more to go, Johnny thought. He also treated his woman to a fancy dinner that Friday evening! In the meantime, Apple has been heading north from that moment onwards and never looked back. Analysts have been upgrading the stock almost daily. New targets started with a "2". Cool! El Jobso takes stage at the 09-09-09 event! All the way back from Hades. He's alive and kickin' ass! September Puts @ 160 strike seem a small dot in the southern horizon. Johnny sold them @ 4.4 bucks a share in July and they are trading @ 24 cents as we speak. Do the math! Another week and Johnny's about to pocket the cash for the remaining 30 contracts. He suddenly feels a wee tiny bit of sympathy for those morons who paid him 15 grand to buy his Puts, but he instantly decides to give no shit whatsoever. That's the name of the game. Capitalism is cool for clever and lucky bastards, he thinks. Life is good!

Sad story!

The Macintosh Blues

I've got this friend who's retired (70+) and keeps sending me plenty of Medicare jokes. The picture on the left comes from one of those and is titled "challenging vision-test". Now, this has got nothing to do with the subject of the blog today but I thought it was funny, so I put it there...

Thus, all of a sudden, yesterday, as I was sitting there, minding my own business, both of my Macs decided to die on me. One chance in a trillion years and it happened to me, just yesterday. Started with the iMac. I wanted to scan some old pictures on my Epson V700 and the Mac wouldn't see the scanner. I tried all sorts of simple things but to no avail. Turned off the scanner and went on to reboot the iMac. And then was when the bitch happened. The freakin' thing wouldn't boot! I kept seeing this folder icon with a flashing question mark. Your worst Apple nightmare! Mac's equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death! Meaning that my hard disk, if the SOB was still alive (at that moment I wasn't sure yet), was no more bootable. Something had corrupted the root files that typically care that the OS boots on any given Mac box after the familiar startup 'gong'. WTF?! All of a sudden? Out of nowhere?! Apple support sez to try a number of things, one of them being to reinstall the OS. I tried them all, starting by resetting the PRAM and NVRAM, repairing the hard disk (yep, it was still alive and kickin' and BTW, the Disk Utility repair said 'no problems found...') and eventually re-installing darling Snowy over the earlier system files. You can imagine my 'joy' when I saw that even after full reinstall the darn folder icon with the flashing question mark kept coming back. Seer happiness! WTF was this? A virus? I thought Macs got no viruses, right?

I knew by then that the only way forward was to first recover from the damaged bootable all my content files to somewhere safe and then repartition it and reformat it and start all over from scratch. Blimey! As I am of course 'exceptionally intelligent, mind you' I had never used the Time Machine (for Apple uninitiated, the Time Machine is Apple's way to do automatic backups in the background). Or any backup with any other tool for that matter! I thought computer crashes were for pussies!

Thank Moses, my other Mac (a 15' MacBook Pro) was by my side then, at that moment of need. Connected the two Macs with a Firewire cable and booted the damaged iMac in Target mode (booting in Target mode, as all Apple geeks know, places the box is a 'slave' position with respect to another firewire connected Mac who can then see the slave like any other mounted disk and can do disk maintenance of any sort! Even restore a clone OS install upon it! And even make it bootable via this restore. I wish I had a recent clone then... Excellent feature of OSX that even the dumbest dude from a Windows crowd would admit, hands down). I could then 'amuse myself' in the next couple of hours collecting all my useful files, pictures, movies, documents and music, give 'n take 150 GB, on an external 2TB Lacie. Almost with watery eyes for having lost a quasi perfect installation, I launched a new clean install, after repartitioning and reformatting the bleeding iMac. Long story short, this time Snowy worked. Next thing was to bring back my useful content from Lacie and reinstall about 100 applications, which is my 'usual' footprint. Try now to locate the needed install packages, serial numbers, activations, the works! A geek's worst nightmare. 8 hours +, back and forth! I FOKKIN' HATE IT!

But, wait a min... this wasn't the end of it! As it proved, it was just the start of more hail to come. While I been recovering Gigabytes upon Gigabytes back to iMac, I had to do something simple on the MBP. Somethin' trivial I believe, like checking new mail. I don't remember why exactly but I had to go reboot the MBP all of a sudden because something didn't seem to respond kosher. Imagine my flabbergast when, instead of the familiar apple icon, I see AGAIN (!!!) that freakin' folder icon with a question mark flashing to my eyes wide open!!!! Say WHAT? What the F@CK! Holy donkey that carried Mary and Jesus to Egypt! What the hell is goin' on here? I wish someone videoed my reaction when this happened! I mean it! Not in a Trillion years! Macs don't get that shit! Why me??? Think of that... for a good deal of time yesterday pm, only computer that connected me to the outside world was the bleedin' iPhone! You must be shittin' me!

In the meantime, the iMac was slowly getting back in shape, but no app installs had yet happened. Not that simple, mind you. CS4, MS Office, iLIfe, iWork, Lightroom, Aperture, to name a couple... they all take some cycles to get up and running. Especially that moron Microsoft Office that needs to do all its SP updates sequentially! Can you believe that? It's like pulling teeth! What do these guys eat for breakfast to get that smart? Applepies and donuts? Anyways, again I went to try Apple's advice as a good Apple citizen and again I did a reinstall above the damaged version of the MBP OS, but again, no shit! I had to finally repeat identically the same process as on the iMac earlier in order to restore the MBP back to its initial state. Obviously no backup here as well! Jeez, my IQ should be approaching 200 by now!

And, because I'm so bloody smart, ain't I, I managed, long time ago, to lock the laptop with a firmware password, in order to prohibit trespassers booting from an external source in case of theft! Like that helped... every average Apple geek knows that even that trick is pure BS. If you got your fingers on a firmware locked MB, all it takes is a screwdriver to open up the box and recover the hard disk and its data and read it somewhere else. Big deal. Of course the stolen MBP remains unusable which explains the sweet revenge feeling of its legit owner who locked it in the first place. Anyways, what was that firmware lock password again? Search me! Happily, for non-financial logins, I use a simple algorithm to generate a couple possible passwords that I use, and having tried them all, I finally managed to spot the right one and enter the familiar list of available booting sources (BTW, the MBP disk was nowhere to see on that list!). At least I could now reinstall the OS again. But the problem was the 'T' mode! How do you get the darn thing into Target? In the meantime, the iMac was good enough to help me transfer MBP's data to Lacie safely, but how do I get the firewired MBP into a 'T' mode? Because of the firmware lock holding the 'T' key while booting wouldn't do the trick. Sure! Works as specified, right? Would be stupid if it did! Even morons know that... Eventually a faint candle lit upon my skull and I figured it out! I first booted holding the option key, entered the firmware password and instead of selecting any object from the list of bootable sources and hit enter, I first pressed the 'T' key and then hit enter! Wow! Eureka! Praise Allah! The disk went indeed into target mode, at last. The remaining process was then breadcrumbs compared, and lasted for the next several hours, as usual...

My mess started Friday 2pm CET. 8 hrs later both Macs were almost half done. Snowy could again boot normally in both machines, but the state of each one of them was by far not the desired. From 7am this morning until about now (3pm), the recovery's been still going on. Most data and apps are back to normal and right now the MBP is doing a final task. A Time Machine backup, that is! Lesson learnt! I reckon...

The most frustrating part of the job, when one recovers damaged PCs or Macs, is about content files, that is, pictures, videos, browser bookmarks, emails and email accounts, agendas, contacts, and iTunes music. Problem is, the simple availability of those files is not enough to restore the content in its initial state, because Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture, Lightroom to name a few, have their own way of managing data, and for the purpose of a well done recovery it's not as simple as keeping backups of the content files alone.

I was eventually lucky to be an account holder of mobile.me and I could get email archives, accounts, logins, etc as well as contacts, browser bookmarks, and passwords all synced and recovered in a 'heartbeat'. I was even delighted to see that all those content rich apps I mentioned above, behaved properly after I put all the content back to the original folders and they (the apps) seem to have found and restored everything on their own, like nothing happened, God bless'em!. Especially iPhoto and iTunes did a superb job. Even Parallels!!! After installing it and updating to its latest version 4 point something, the darn app went to find all my Windows virtual spaces and everything worked like a charm! That was a HUGE bonus! Imagine I had to reinstall bleedin' Windows on top, as virtual spaces upon two Mac boxes after this Friday mess! Don't even get me started on this... No way, Borg! I'd rather jump off the window!

Lessons learnt? I dunno! Will I be disciplined enough in the future to keep backups? Doubt it! Spent almost 24 hours (minus some five hrs that I slept, I think) to do a full recovery on my two Macs and was glad I was able to find backups of my app install packages and their activation keys / serial numbers. It's also cool that these days, every supplier has his products calling home for updates and this makes it even faster to restore apps to their latest and brightest!

Where did all this come from then? Was it a virus? That found its way from the iMac to MBP? Maybe... I'll never know. Is it going to happen again? You bet! And when it does, I rather jump in a hole, 6 feet under, and stay there waiting for the Antichrist!

Let's start the month with some real fun...

BTW, how many stores do you know that'd allow this to take place in their premises, before Security showed up? Only the 5th Avn/59th Street Manhattan Apple Store!