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Sara Cammeresi

Stay away from the Minnesota Historical Society —

Last weekend, Sara, myself, and a few of our right honourable friends motored to the Kelley Farm, a possession of the Minnesota Historical Society. (I am not going to link to either of those.) The Kelley Farm is a living history place that seeks to recreate the conditions of a farm in the 1860s. I brought my 11x14 camera along with me in the hope of making some photographs. After driving through torrential rain to emerge into sunshine, we each paid the $7 entrance fee and then proceeded to peruse the site. Unfortunately, the place was a bit busier than I should have liked.

During the course of setting up my camera for my second photograph, I was approached by a man associated with the Society. He asked me what I was doing (as if that weren't obvious from the 20-pound camera on the tripod in front of me) and then informed me that the entire contents of the Farm were copyrighted, that I could use my photographs only for personal use, and would I please check in at the desk when I left. I shooed him away with several short agreements.

Unfortunately, I was caught rather off guard because what I should have done, in spite of his utter confusion regarding editorial versus commercial use and copyright versus permission to use, was thank him for informing me of the Society's policy regarding photography because based on that information, I now knew that I neither needed to purchase a membership in the Society nor spend any more of my money ever again at any of the Society's other sites.

It should go without saying that I walked past the front desk when I left without saying anything to anyone.

Thus, I must condemn the Minnesota Historical Society to the status of being unworthy of the money of any photographer whatever, and I recommend that all other photographers stay away from their sites.

posted by Sid at 21.41 / 153     [ Comments: 0 ]

Converting Shiira bookmarks to Safari —

Shiira crashes whenever I click on a link to a PDF, and it often displays directly-linked graphics incorrectly for some strange reason, so I engaged my reality distortion field and decided to give Safari a spin since it's the magical, Apple-blessed web browser. This meant I had to write a new Ruby script to convert my Shiira bookmarks into Netscape format so I could import them into Safari, so I did.

(Boy, this means that now I have tried and discarded Shiira, Firefox, Opera, OmniWeb, and Camino. I am such a browser whore.)

I made a tarball of my bookmark conversion stuff to ease distribution to anyone who might want it. If you do, download bmconv-0.1.tar.gz. The names of the scripts should be self-explanatory, and if you run them, they'll tell you how to run them and where to find the bookmark files that they convert. There are scripts to convert Opera to Netscape and Shiira to Netscape.

Ruby code sure looks pretty.

posted by Sid at 22.40 / 194     [ Comments: 0 ]