Daniel Greene

Author: Daniel Greene

  • But wait– there’s more! Ads cover even more of buildings.

    I posted a photo of this T-Mobile ad wrap on the Bank of America building the other day. Today, there’s even more to it– in fact it covers two sides of the building now. It looks like there’s a piece missing on the right side of the south wall of the building, so maybe I’ll see it completed tomorrow or even later today. It is interesting to me to see where advertising is headed. What is an exciting curosity might be an ugly invasion of public space if all the buildings downtown were wrapped. And I saw on The Science Channel that the buildings of the future might actually be covered with LCDs as ever-changing "skins." We’re already seeing more and more of our city’s billboards going LCD, so the idea of whole buildings wrapped in LCDs is not too farfetched. I just don’t know that I like the idea of it.

    P.S. I sent this to my blog-via-Flickr e-mail address earlier this morning, but for some reason it didn’t show up on either Flickr or my blog. Odd!

  • Am I a winner… or a loser?

    A recurring theme in my life has been that I feel like a loser. Then again, sometimes I feel like a winner. In order to get a grasp on this, and come clean about feeling like a loser, I am determined to sit down and write it out.

    In some of my early childhood memories, I remember being cursed with a sort of social awkwardness that made me feel like a loser, or perhaps more correctly, I did things that people responded to by saying things that I interpreted as, “what a loser!”

    There is no Mrs. Coffee

    There was the first day of kindergarten, when I thought one of our teachers had identified herself as Mrs. Coffee. I don’t know remember what I wanted to ask her, but I remember raising my hand and saying, “Mrs. Coffee!” over and over again and getting no response, until finally a girl sitting near me glared at me with her precocious little five-year-old venom and said, “There is no ‘Mrs. Coffee.’” I felt like an idiot not only for mishearing the teacher’s name, but for sticking my neck out by raising my hand and calling it repeatedly.

    You lost the game for us!

    There was that time… (more…)

  • Twitter: Too much about too little

    I’ve tried to like Twitter. Really, I have. And I haven’t given up on it entirely. But it just seems like too much about too little. My long-suffering not-as-technophilic-as-I-am husband took a look at the Twitter home page on my desktop the other day and said it looked like the stupidest bunch of nonsense he’d ever seen. And I can’t entirely disagree with him! It isn’t that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Twitter; it’s just that I don’t like the current implementation of it. In this review of my two week’s time on Twitter so far, I’ll tell you what I didn’t like about my experience in Twitterville and what I would like to get out of it in the future.

    For starters, I was disappointed to find that hardly anyone I know or care about following is actually on Twitter at this time. This experience was in sharp contrast to my entrée into the Facebook world, which was like showing up at a party where you expect to see the one person who invited you and instead you end up seeing almost everyone you’ve ever known. The lack of friends I know on Twitter was the first disappointment. Then there’s the fact that some of my friends who have Twitter accounts don’t even check them regularly enough to have update them or reciprocate my follow by following me.

    Then there are the people on Twitter that I did know and have enjoyed “socializing” with on Flickr. It was like a bubbly drink going flat. It’s fun to look at people’s photos on Flickr, comment on them, and have them comment on mine. There’s a lot of mutual admiration and wittiness that goes on in Flickr comments. But now, on Twitter, suddenly I’m hearing about their every cappuccino and reading @replies like, “@janedoe I know, right?” and “@simone Mais oui!” These tweets mean absolutely nothing to me and are of no entertainment value whatsoever.

    Then there’s the redundancy of the Twitter home page. It simply lists the most recent tweets (140 character updates sent from mobile phones or Internet devices either mobile or stationary) posted by people you follow in chronological order. This means that if some little bird you know (I won’t name names) is chirping like a bird in heat about every little thing — mostly @replies that make no sense to anyone but the @recipient — then what you get is a Twitter homepage full of a slew of meaningless tweets from one very chirpy friend. Now, does that mean there’s anything wrong with the way your friend is using Twitter? Well, yes and no. Yes, because I think it would make much more sense if they limited these private replies to “direct messages” (Twitter’s form of private 1:1 messages from one Twitter user to another). I mean why bore everyone on Twitter with short answers to questions they haven’t heard? “@barbie I’m like, so totally sure!” But no, it’s not all their fault; it’s also the fault of the Twitter UI. I mean, imagine if you logged onto Flickr and it was only a slew of images posted by all of your contacts in chronological order? I know with some people’s photostreams (you know the ones who upload every image they shoot, even if they all look the same?), my Flickr experience would be awful if that’s what I saw when I logged in. Why doesn’t Twitter do a little bit more to help its members organize their Twitter experience? It would be nice if, for example, your Twitter homepage could be configured to show only the most recent tweet from each of your contacts, allowing you to click on a control to view more if you’re interested.

    I have some other ideas that I think would make Twitter more useful. (more…)

  • Radames & Aïda in Act III of Aïda

    Drew Slatton & Marie-Adele McArthur in a scene from Act III of Aïda.

    I am in the male chorus of Phoenix Opera’s production of Aïda at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. I got permission to take photos of the show during Act III, which I’m not in, and it was thrilling to capture dramatic moments in this grand opera. Another photographer turned to me while I was snapping photos and he had a smile on his face that showed me he was on a photographer’s high– it was that look that one person gives another when he’s so bubbling over with happiness he has to turn to his fellow man and say, “isn’t it great?” Turns out the photographer is Howard Paley, the Executive Director of Phoenix Opera. I told him how I would put these photos on Flickr and send him a link to them. I only had enough time to get six hours of sleep and put up a few photos for now, but I look forward to putting up more later this afternoon.

    P.S. Back home from work now, I must add that what is astonishing in the chemistry you see here is that Drew Slatton, our new Radames, flew in just before this final dress rehearsal to replace an ailing tenor. He has played Radames several times, and he was able to jump in at the last minute to Save Our Ship. The nimbleness of Phoenix Opera, Drew Slatton, Marie-Adele MacArthur, and all the performers who adjusted to him goes to show the amazing talent and dedication of the opera world!

    Production credits: lighting design by Paul Black, costume design and production direction by David Castellano, artistic direction by Gail Dubinbaum, musical direction by John Massaro and stage direction by Albert Sherman. More info at phoenixopera.org

  • Metro Morning Reflections



    Metro Morning Reflections
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    The stations on the Valley Metro Light Rail alignment offer endless opportunities for reflection and photography. This morning, I got this photograph by stabilizing my G1 cameraphone against one of the I beams that suspend the sails, lights, text displays, PA speakers, security cameras, etc. And what I got was the beautiful reflections in the high gloss paint on the I beam!