the
year i was born, in a catalog for an exhibition of his art in
stockholm, sweeden,
andy warhol famously wrote, and has been misquoted ever since:
In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
well, andy's future is
now -- i dare you to contradict that - he's dead, i'm not -- and, so, today, unto me was delivered my fifteen minutes, when i, or rather, my photographs, had the honor of being
featured on the front page of MyOpera.
as an internet whore (
a.k.a. a
webmaster) i am grateful for anyone or anything that drives visitors my way, especially if we can barter: a broken link report for an operational link; a comment or inquiry that leads to a response that leads to a
new webpage,
sub-site, or
concrete action; the give and take of the web that makes it simultaneously humankind's greatest collaborative effort and cause for optomism, as well as the world's largest vanity press and red-light district...
perhaps i expressed it more coherently on april 19, 2007 --
patriot's day, one of
my most holy of holidays -- when i spent over four hours,
looking at my surroundings through other people's eyes... it gave me a better
gestalt mind's eye view of my surroundings, as i tend only to concentrate upon -- and hence, remember -- that with which i come into constant, consistent or regular contact,.. but i became so impressed at the acuity of my fellow
operators, that i neglected to finish writing, and, hence, posting about the experience, until today...
MyOpera offered me an opportunity to do -- and took away my excuse
not to do -- something i've wanted to do ever since i first heard of digital cameras -- mount pictures, taken by myself and others, on the web, and ask for descriptions; actually 2 descriptions: a single sentence descriptor, as one would expect to find in
ALT text) and an unbounded text-entry field for as full a description as the viewer deemed appropriate...
i have created an album named
Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?, but have yet to populate it with images... i intend to collect the most iconic pictures of human and natural events that the majority of us take for granted, myself included, until 1989; a topic upon which i ruminated in a
comment on a comment (and some of whose text is alarmingly similar to that which preceded this aside)
in any event, i am
extremely grateful to all who have visited, and to all who may visit in the future, especially to those who took time to post comments that gave me a much greater cognizance of my surroundings than i have had in quite a long time... all too often, out of sight, out of mind, is not just a cliché -- it's part of life that i simply took for granted until it faded from view, and, which seems much less important, albeit annoying, in that if i don't come into contact with something on a regular basis, it may as well not exist... i am especially thankful to
chaals, for getting me to join MyOpera, and for sowing the seeds for others to water; the entire MyOpera team, for being so reactive and proactive to usability and accessibility concerns; to
DanteSoft, whose analytic and descriptive powers
amaze me;
SmithW, who not only commented on, described and refined previous descriptions, he
joined the
MyOpera community; to
Espen, for writing about what i'm up to; and, as always, to
Helen Shapiro, for the eels...
My Opera
