I’m sure most everyone’s had a job where this image would have been helpful–be it for a nurse, programmer, social worker, waiter, youth worker, insurance agent, pipefitter, teacher, sales associate, senior legal associate, HTML developer, historian, speech therapist, accountant, seminary student, counselor, engineer, mother, or father.
Here’s a look (thanks to “GUIdebook”:http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/index) at the state-of-the-art OSes back when I made my switch to Macs (approx. 1992):
* “System 7″:http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/macos/macos70/macos70/desktop
* “Windows 3.1″:http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/windows/win31/win31/desktop
Dad brought a loner “Powerbook 180″:http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook/stats/mac_powerbook180.html home about the time they were drawing up the blueprints for their current New Pal residence. This was before corporations started standardizing on Windows, but most of the laptops he’d brought home before that had been PCs running DOS.
I thought the whole Mac thing was pretty silly, and it was apparently only used by graphic designers and other wusses who couldn’t handle the coolness of DOS. But I was bored, so I started playing around with it. It had a drawing program called “MacPaint”:http://home.pmt.org/~drose/images/aw/ss-mac/macpaint19.gif (MacDraw?) so I set about reproducing the front elevation drawing of the house. Elevation drawings in blueprints are the drawings that show what the building will look like from a particular side, so I was basically drawing what the house would look like from the front.
It turned out good enough that Mom and Dad used it to get a better idea of what certain color schemes and other decor changes would look like. I wish I still had a copy of that drawing; I had stumbled across something I loved doing. After that experience, I was hooked–both on Macs and on graphic design, and I haven’t looked back.
We alway laugh when the entertainment industry (TV and movies mostly) whip out the “enhance” and “zoom” magic on digital images. Typically the setting is some sort of forensic or investigative use (CSI is a big offender)–you know the scene. The investigator asks the geek running the computer to zoom in on a particular portion of the image. That portion either magically focuses, or the investigator will ask the geek to “enhance” the image. Somehow you end up with a crystal clear look at the killer’s face or some crucial piece of evidence.
Except it *doesn’t work that way*! Not in real life. Or at least that what I thought…
Now I’ve found the software that everyone must be using, and it’s called (appropriately enough) “Focus Magic”:http://www.focusmagic.com/index.htm . While this software probably represents cutting edge in enhancing the focus of an image, it’s still not the crytal clear images you see in the movies. Still it’s interesting to see how smart software has gotten at filling in the missing info required to create a sharper image.
Wired’s “Photographer Seeks Resolution”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66498,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 article covers Graham Flint’s “Gigapxl Project”:http://www.gigapxl.org/, an undertaking by Flint (a physicist by training) to captures scenes across the country with his homemade 4 gigapixel camera. The quality of these images is simply incredible:
* “San Diego Night”:http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery-SanDiegoNight.htm
* “Half Dome”:http://www.gigapxl.org/gallery-HDGP.htm
I’ve named my team the Kelly Train. It’s taken a great deal of time to come up with such a lame name, but there it is. Lately at work I’ve had not one but two interns/nursing students with me. Last week I even had three. I’m flattered that they let me teach others, I guess what I’m doing at work isn’t as lame as it seems. I’ve got a great new graduate with me now, Tracy aka ONEITA. She just passed her boards and I think I am going to go make her a stethescope cover all her own in a moment. I just hope the train continues until I stop procrastinating and go to graduate school.
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