oedipus' online complexes

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...