parisc

Seriously, there are few things which are both Western and Eastern.

I’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, even though I’ve done quite a bit of motorcycle maintenance, and poked at Zen with a sharp stick. Excellent photography is something which I feel within myself as sort of a balance type of thing. When its right, there is balance, there is focus, there is excellence. I don’t know it when I do it, but I know it when I see it.

People usually refer to photography as “taking pictures.” Think about that for a moment. How can you take what doesn’t exist? The photograph hasn’t been created yet. How can you take it? Can you take a picture with a camera? No! You take a picture with your hands—you take it down from the wall! You make a photograph with a camera.

Photography is a journey which will be over when I die. Then I will not be able to photograph. Photography is an action, it is an art, like dancing. If it is not practiced, it does not occur.

Many people think that the photograph is photography. It is not. The photograph is like footprints left by dancers. It is an artifact, not the action itself. The photograph is an enhanced moment of time. It is edited and dramatized. It will pass, as the moment of time has passed.

The camera isn’t important. Neither is the enlarger or paper or film. It is the process, the art of photography, which is important. The practice of the excellence of photography sometimes results in an excellent photograph. More often than not, it is practice which results in the need for more practice.

Strive for excellence, and perfection may be glimpsed.

A person would think that Sun would have tested this out before foisting it on an unsuspecting public! First I mucked about installing Solaris 10 on a system which already had Solaris 8 and Whitebox Linux, i.e., on a seperate hard drive. I wanted to be able to boot all three. After blowing away all three, I finally came to the conclusion that some operating systems like to own the whole box all the time! And of course the OS’s must be installed in a very special sequence. So now my old x86 box has fresh installs of Solaris 10 and Whitebox Linux.

Solaris 10 comes with Java 1.5 SDK. “OK, that’s nice,” I thought. So I went to java.sun.com and snagged Beans 4.0. Well, gee whiz, the InstallShield installer doesn’t want to work! I tried one thing and then another, and finally I grabbed the installation package which bundles Java and Beans, specified a different tmp directory, and then everything worked! Oh, the pain, the horror! Now, back to actually learning the language.