Sarah Davies » crappy cameraphone photos

Thanks NTEN!

Sarah Davies — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:25:49 +0000

I signed up for a new experiment this summer at NTEN called office hours. Basically, I agree to spend an hour in a chat room once a week to answer whatever technology questions folks can throw at me. Right now it’s only open to NTEN members, but I think they may be opening it up to the general public soon.

This morning I got a little package from the fantastic Holly Ross. It’s a crappy picture, but the package had a super nice card, a bunch of NTEN swag, and chocolate (breakfast of champions). Thanks NTEN!!

Cemeteries

Sarah Davies — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:01:07 +0000

We went on a cemetery tour at dusk yesterday with the incredible NOLA native, tour guide, and Voodoo priestess Bloody Mary. The picture above was taken at the Masonic cemetery, where there is a stairway to a rooftop where you can look down on the whole thing. It was dark, so that picture is autoleveled and grayscaled to show some definition. We sang to the spirits. Gave them candy and whiskey (although it was Scottish whiskey on St. Patrick’s Day, I hope we didn’t piss anybody off!) I think this quote from Mark Twain about summed it up:

“Our cities of the Dead look just like our cities of the living- long narrow houses, housing multi-generations of the same family with above ground basements .”

We also went to Holt Cemetery (warning – PDF). It’s an underground burial cemetery, mostly used by people who can’t afford expensive burial. There are handmade headstones, graves built with railroad ties, pvc piping, old chairs that were taken apart and repurposed. Some of the graves over a hundred years old. Lots of flowers, lots of decorations. It is obviously visited regularly. There’s no regular maintenance, so it’s overrun with weeds and plants, and since it’s underground burial, if you look hard, you can find a few bones popping up out of the ground. Fortunately, it’s on high ground, so the storm didn’t flood it too badly.

There are way more dead people here than living.

French Market

Sarah Davies — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:27:19 +0000

That’s me in the French Market. That blue above my head is actually my hair. Interesting mix of handmade arts and crafts and cheap imported electronics. I have ethical issues with cheap imported clothing or furniture or toys because I know there are ways to produce those items that exploit environmental and human resources less. However, I know that electronics are only made in sweatshop factories in Asia. Cellphone chargers probably cost about 50 cents a piece (in labor and parts), most chargers from the same brand all come from the same factory, so I think things like the French market are great for that. It looked like there were a lot of first generation immigrants who had their family ship over boxes of electronics from Asia, and sold the electronics at the market, undercutting the local electronics shops (not hard to do with your average markup being around 2000%). The impact of the production is the same either way. So in that case, I think it’s actually more ethical to buy at the market and put money into the pockets of immigrants than to buy at electronics shops. I’m curious why we don’t see this in Seattle at all. We have a huge first generation Asian immigrant population. Are there laws against it in Seattle? Am I just not going to the right markets?

OLPC’s XO Laptop has arrived

Sarah Davies — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:19:04 +0000

The newest addition to our family:

My new XO laptop finally arrived today! I haven’t played with it much yet, but I set it up on a table at ACLU and people here keep walking up and composing songs or drawing pictures or making videos. It really speaks to what an incredibly useful and usable tool this is.

Now to take it home and let the 6-year-old at it; hopefully she’ll be willing to do a video review for you, dear readers. Stay tuned!

Awesome graffitti on the bus this morning

Sarah Davies — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:52:28 +0000

That would be a robot toaster bunny enjoying last week’s snow. Thanks for beautifying Seattle, toast!