Prof. Boerner's Explorations

Snow leopard has not eaten you favorite OS-X 10.5 apps… Some of your favorite applications in OS-X 10.5 may be missing from the new ‘snow leopard’ OS. But are they really gone? Not necessarily; they may be in a different location. This article helps find them for you. It may lower your blood pressure…

Snow Leopard: What’s gone where by Macworld.com: Yahoo! Tech
Source: tech.yahoo.com

When you first take a look around OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you might think Apple has done away with some of OS X 10.5’s applications and utilities. What, for instance, happened to the Exposé application? It used to be in the Applications folder. Is it really gone?

Fear not: Exposé and some other seemingly-missing programs are still around—they’ve just found new homes in Snow Leopard. Here’s a guide to what’s gone where.

Home Schooling or Kindergarten, that is the question… Many parents are asking themselves this question again as the public school are about to begin are bringing this subject to the ‘decisive’ moment. This is an interesting story about the response of the 5 year old who changed her mom’s mind. Have you tried home schooling? Share your experience…

Homeschooling v Kindergarten: I was ready to teach, my daughter had different ideas. – Parenting on Shine
Source: shine.yahoo.com

Next month, I will drop my firstborn child off at the door of a kindergarten classroom for the first time. After I wave goodbye and bike home alone, we’ll each begin secret lives: I’ll spend my mornings writing stuff for grown-ups, while she makes friends, solves puzzles and gets in trouble in ways I’ll never know.

This is not how I planned it. I intended to homeschool my kids.

Alert: Sony introduces new digital SLR cameras… These new cameras have some interesting new features and may be worth looking at if you don’t already have an investment in lenses for a current SLR of another brand (Nikon or Canon). Take a look and let us know what you think…

Inside Sony’s New SLRs – Gearlog
Source: www.gearlog.com

Sony’s new SLRs have some special sauce inside. 

They execute Live View mode (when you use the LCD screen as a viewfinder, just like shooting on a compact point and shoot) differently than most cameras. On most SLRs that offer Live View shooting, auto-focus slows down significantly.  But not on Sony’s SLRs

n general, SLR camera auto-focusing systems are much faster than those on point-and-shoot cameras. That’s because they have a separate smaller sensor that is dedicated to performing auto-focus.  (See the “optical viewfinder” image, left).

New Photo Archive at the Huntington Library… Maynard Parker, a noted photographer of architecture and gardens from the mid-20th century, has been given to the Huntington museum. Hope this info will let your study another gifted photographer. Enjoy them…

Maynard Parker Collection
Source: huntington.org

The Huntington’s Curator of Photographs, Jennifer A. Watts, discusses the magnificent use of lighting, furnishings, and space in Maynard Parker’s mid-century architectural photography, accessible online for the first time. play now >

Collection Overview

The Maynard L. Parker collection consists of approximately 58,000 negatives, transparencies, and photographs as well as office records and business correspondence related to a wide range of American architects, publishers, and designers…

Rest In Peace, Senator… You will be missed. Final ceremonies were held today at Arlington National Cemetery for the late Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, elder statesman in the Senate. He was the champion of those who were poor, oppressed and without any other voice; this despite of the high status and wealth of the Kennedy family. Let us all say a prayer for his soul…

Kennedy hearse stops at Senate before Arlington – Yahoo! News
Source: news.yahoo.com

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest alongside slain brothers John and Robert on hallowed ground at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday evening, celebrated for “the dream he kept alive” across the decades since their deaths.

Crowds lined the streets of two cities on a day that marked the end of a political era — outside Kennedy’s funeral in rainy Boston, and later in the day in humid, late-summer Washington. With flags over the Capitol flying at half-staff in his memory, his hearse stopped outside the Senate where he served for 47 years.

by Gerald Boerner

“It’s the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
— Walker Evans, Photographer

Bonus: Photographer’s Thought for the Day… “Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
— Walker Evans, Photographer

Bonus: Photographer’s Thought for the Day… “Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
— Walker Evans, Photographer

Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’ work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern states.

In the summer of 1936, while still working for the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans’ photographs and Agee’s text detailing the duo’s stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals’ book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee’s prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans’ photographs of sharecroppers.

Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.

Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture).

In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art staged a further exhibition of his work entitled simply Walker Evans. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.

In 1994, The Estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of approximately 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress which were produced for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evan’s RA / FSA works are in the public domain.

“The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.” 
— Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men : Three Tenant Families by James Agee, Walker Evans

[Biographical information is from the Wikipedia article on Walker Evans that can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans ]

by Gerald Boerner

John F. Kennedy

35th President of the United States

As we think about the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy, we should also remember the life and contributions of his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, who died by an assassin’s bullet in 1963. 

“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”
— John F. Kennedy

Bonus: Thought for the Day… “A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.”
— John F. Kennedy

Bonus: Thought for the Day… “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.”
— John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.

On January 2, 1960, Kennedy officially declared his intent to run for President of the United States. In the Democratic primary election, he faced challenges from Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Kennedy defeated Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia and Morse in Maryland and Oregon, although Morse’s candidacy is often forgotten by historians. He also defeated token opposition (often write-in candidates) in New Hampshire, Indiana and Nebraska. In West Virginia, Kennedy visited a coal mine and talked to mine workers to win their support; most people in that conservative, mostly Protestant state were deeply suspicious of Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism. His victory in West Virginia cemented his credentials as a candidate with broad popular appeal. At the Democratic Convention, he gave the well-known "New Frontier" speech, which represented the changes America and the rest of the world would be going through.

John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President at noon on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural address he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." He also asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." In closing, he expanded on his desire for greater internationalism: "Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.."

The Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 14, 1962, when American U-2 CIA spy planes took photographs of a Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile site under construction in Cuba. The photos were shown to Kennedy on October 16, 1962. The United States would soon be posed with a serious nuclear threat. Kennedy faced a dilemma: if the U.S. attacked the sites, it might lead to nuclear war with the U.S.S.R., but if the U.S. did nothing, it would endure the threat of nuclear weapons being launched from close range. Because the weapons were in such proximity, the U.S. might have been unable to retaliate if they were launched pre-emptively. Another consideration was that the U.S. would appear to the world as weak in its own hemisphere.

The extent of Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam remained classified until the release of The Pentagon Papers in 1971. In Southeast Asia, Kennedy followed Eisenhower’s lead by using limited military action as early as 1961 to fight the Communist forces led by Ho Chi Minh. Proclaiming a fight against the spread of Communism, Kennedy enacted policies providing political, economic, and military support for the unstable French-installed South Vietnamese government, which included sending 16,000 military advisors and U.S. Special Forces to the area. Kennedy also authorized the use of free-fire zones, napalm, defoliants, and jet planes. U.S. involvement in the area escalated until Lyndon Johnson, his successor, directly deployed regular U.S. forces for fighting the Vietnam War.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963, while on a political trip to Texas. He was shot once in the back and was killed with a final shot to the head. He was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. Only 46, President Kennedy died younger than any U.S. president to date.

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”
— John F. Kennedy

[Biographical information is from the Wikipedia article on John F. Kennedy that can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_f_kennedy ]