Upscaling the potato…
40 minute read
August 30, 2025, 12:19 PM
Recently, Adobe introduced a beta version of Photoshop that contains an upscaling feature that uses generative AI. The promotional graphics for it were pretty flashy, showing that you could upscale an image to make it much crisper:
Image: Adobe
Continue reading…Categories: Artificial intelligence, Photography
Exploring San Francisco…
4 minute read
August 14, 2025, 11:38 PM
Back at the end of May, I went out to San Francisco for a few days as something of a birthday trip. I had not been anywhere in California since 1991 when we did a family trip to the San Diego and Los Angeles areas, and I had never been to the Bay Area before. All in all, I had a fun time. I’m going to do a full photo set about the trip, but that’s probably not going to come out for quite some time, so in the meantime, I figured that I would show you a few of the highlights beyond the one photo feature and splash photo that I’ve run so far.
The view for most of the flight out from DC to San Francisco. There was also a decent amount of turbulence on this flight, which necessitated the interruption of beverage service at one point.
Categories: Travel
Working with a snake and a moron…
23 minute read
August 6, 2025, 10:10 AM
I was recently talking with a colleague about various things, and it conjured up the memory of some things that happened in 2009, back when I worked at Food & Water Watch. It reminded me of how messed up the situation was, and how it ultimately reshaped my position in the organization by coming to its logical conclusion, though it reached that conclusion in the wrong way. This is all water under the bridge now, seeing as none of the parties involved work there anymore, and my old boss, Lane Brooks, is now deceased. I share it as something of a cautionary tale, because this same situation has probably happened to others, and no doubt will occur again in other places.
When I started at Food & Water Watch back in 2007, I was hired as the office manager, which was something of a jack-of-all-trades role for a small organization. Whatever needed to be done, I generally did it. One day, might have been on a ladder removing a ceiling tile to deal with a facilities issue. Another day, I might have been doing IT work. Then after that, I might have been working in the fundraising database. In short, I was the guy that did everything that wasn’t part of a dedicated specialist role.
The IT segment was a fairly large part of my role early on, and while wearing that hat, I provided desktop support for users, maintained organizational email lists, managed the email system, administered the office phone system, maintained all of the various office equipment, and also maintained all of the internal directories for the organizaton. I also served as the primary liaison between the organization and vendors, coordinating efforts with them on various things. I suspect that the desktop support role is why I got the job, because I knew my way around a computer well enough, and also had some (very little) amount of Mac experience, mostly from fooling around on the demo computers at the Apple store at Pentagon City Mall. At the time, Food & Water Watch was an all-Mac office, which I found out later was a very shortsighted decision that they made very early on in order to avoid having to hire a dedicated tech support person. I was never much of a “Mac person”, then as now, but I made do well enough. Anything beyond the desktop was contracted out to a small one-man company that maintained our server and website infrastructure.
Categories: Work