The lovely and talented Claire Danes! Pictured here at our event yesterday celebrating the national expansion of DonorsChoose.org!

Also present, the former Senator with the highest heightegrity (integrity x height), Bill Bradley:

The whole set is here. You can also see Zac Efron delivering school supplies from DonorsChoose.org in LA.

I'm waaay behind on my flickr uploading. Here's an advertising poster for Dell with culturejam on it. The ad series is supposed to promote their different color notebooks (A Vegan Didn't Choose Green", "A Democrat Chose Red," etc.) here's the "Republican who chose Blue":

Before

After

I mean, really. He makes $29 million a year. Does he really need a discount?

In honor of the Fourth of July (and Kerim's birthday!), here's a bunch of fireworks photos I took last Saturday. Full set is here.

More pictures of the winners of the NYC P.S. Art competition here

Some pictures from a trip to MOMA, including works from Dan Perjovschi and Richard Serra. More here.

Full set here.

I don't know what the 35mm film was doing on the ground next to the sandbox in the park, but I liked the results:

Full set here.

Saw this on the subway, Herald Square station. The full sign said something like "HAVE NO FEAR [something] IS HERE" but I don't remember what was supposed to make me lose my fear. A small set of digital subway signage is up.

From a Recent NYC Pictures set.

From a set taken out the train window en route from Boston to NYC.

Crossing the frozen Charles River. Set here.

So I saw this subway poster for the School for Visual Arts:

And someone had written the same thing that I thought:

Some photos from a trip Paul and I took to the Brooklyn Museum in February. I sprang for Flickr Pro so now you can download full-strength pix for desktop goodness. Lots more here.

More of my recent pictures on Flickr

More from this set on Flickr

My sister and brother-in-law got us a new camera for Christmas, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1K. Our old camera was second-hand when I bought it and was starting to go. I really love this new camera. It's got a Leica lens, baby! And it takes pretty decent video, which is nice when der kinder get up to something cute and I don't have to run and find the video camera. (Recommended by Cool Tools.)

Most of all, I love walking around with a camera in my pocket. Because I start seeing more, framing shots in my head even if won't take them. I have found that the more depressed I feel, the less I look. I'll look at advertisements when I'm low, and people's faces when I'm not.

I usually don't like taking pictures of people, but this guy kept talking to me about the poinsettias perched on the dumpster while I snapped away:

After putting this on Flickr, I wryly smiled on seeing the ".gne" extension in the URL, referring as it does to Game Neverending, a game / MOO / social space that was started by Ludicorp which then went on to build Flickr. I spent far too much time playing around in GNE, swapping pieces of paper for gold nuggets, exploring strange places, combining things in silly ways. GNE, as its name implied, was an "infinite game," as put forth by James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games: "An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game."

This interview with Stewart Butterfield waaaay back in 2003 is kind of interesting. Most amusing part:

MS: If Ludicorp were forced at gunpoint to make an action shooter for the Xbox-or-something, and money were no object, what would you make?

SB: After a long discussion around the office we settled on three concepts - all of which should be available sometime in 2009.

* Paleolithica! - A "shooter" (slings, spears, rocks) of Cro-magnon vs Neanderthal, set in and around the Pyrenees, Catalonia, Basque Country and the Langedouc. Advance your combat skills by developing new linguistic practices to co-ordinate with your fellow fighters. (You could also get into hand-to-hand combat and rip out each others' throats! Quest for Clans of Cave Bear Fires!!)

* Library Bookbomber! - Set in the Library of Babel, you play Borges the nearly-blind Librarian battling a non-denumerable infinity of foreign-speaking janitors while hopping from low-ceilinged hexagonal room to low-ceilinged hexagonal room. Drop books on them, throw books at them: do anything you can do prevent them from kicking you out and bringing on the cataclysmic "closing time".

* Nanoswarm! - If the budget really allowed for exploration, custom hardware would be the way to go! Imagine some kind of consumer productization of a local positioning system [like a spatially tracked ring or stylus] that gave the players gestural expression. Then, the game could involve gesturally shaping the behavior of billowing swarms of nanobots dancing in the air between combatants.

But first, we will finish GNE.

Too bad we'll never see the Borges game, or GNE for that matter. But hey! Re-read the Nanoswarm bit, it looks like... Butterfield invented the Wii!

Hopefully, more pictures to come. The photo album here needs more stuff.

A while back I mentioned John's Background Switcher, a nifty little freeware Windows app that will change the wallpaper on your desktop at any interval you define. I've uploaded some of the the wallpaper files I use to Flickr. None of these are original but they're all free, grabbed from various sources. I suppose if you Google the titles you could find them? Anyway I've reached my Flickr limit for the month but I'll upload some more to this set later. Enjoy!

Alice Lake in the Sawtooth Mountain Range, Idaho.

I suddenly remembered why I love living in Idaho.

'Nuff said. Just thought I'd share a few shots of the view from my tent this past weekend.

For ten Ishpoints...

New York City Transit Museum. Click for full-size photo.

Alex Joseph writes:

I've always loved masks, and when I found this one at a party store during the convention, I thought it might be put to a satirical use. I scared a few friends with it, and put it away. One night, I experienced a very powerful dream in which Dick Cheney was walking through the forest, reaching out for something. I became obsessed with re-creating this image, and I began to see how Dick Cheney belonged to what Freud called the 'manifest content' of the dream--the surface layer, which only masks the true, latent content. As for what the latent content is here, I couldn't say, but it feels deeply, weirdly personal.

Click on pictures for full-sized versions. All pictures were taken by Kurt Conklin, except for cheney.alt.route which was taken by Darleen Lev, and fall under this site's Creative Commons License.

Taken at Columbia Business School, graduation 2004.

Transit Museum, 2004