my dad

I've been neglecting my blogspot.com blog for some reason. Signing into it is a pain. Opendiary is easier, more user-friendly. I do think my domain name - davidivus.blogspot.com - is fairly good, though. I was surprised it was still free. You don't have to register it like you would a typical dot-com URL, 'cause it's hosted by Google.

I was briefly interested in Tiki-wiki - the whole wiki concept. I still think it's pretty cool, but it's complicated, and I don't really have the patience to learn how to navigate all that shit. There're a lot of concepts that you have to learn to create a user-interactive page, and I'm not sure where the page would go. But it's a great idea, the whole wikipedia thing about users being able to edit stuff on the site. I guess I just don't have a topic worthy of doing it for. Like if I was running some site on a particular thing, like budgies or something, or a news blog, maybe it'd work.

Anyway.

Unimportant, really. Just dabbling into the internet world out there. A big world. It is fascinating. Tons of possibility. I really admire the visionaries who founded start-ups and who anticipated things before everyone else. Definitely some smart people. Like Bill Gates, etc. There were a few people, only a few, who really saw computers' and the Internet's potential early on, and they've been able to profit from it, immensely in some cases. Pretty kick-ass.

I've always been proud of my dad along these lines, too. He had been doing research on traditional photography since the early '70s, and loved the darkroom and being a photographer. But when the digital age came along - and it rushed in quick - he was able to make that transition.

He adjusted his business, accordingly, to be a consulting company. Instead of focusing on traditional photographic processes, he learned that he could apply the same issues of permanance, in photography, to the printing of digital photos. Digital photography began to be taken seriously and used by fine-art printing presses and galleries, and thus a market developed for expertise in this new field. The permanence of the pigments and inks and dyes these presses were using became an issue. So my dad made likewise adjustments is his focus at his company, Wilhelm Imaging Research. I remember when popular-use digital cameras first came out - those under $1000, that is - and my dad got one. Somewhat surprisingly, he was very willing to accept the notion that photography was undergoing a revolution of sorts, and that a new order had arisen in tandem with the rise of computers and the Internet. Darkrooms were to be a thing of the past. My dad was born during WWII, so he wasn't young when this was happening, in the early to mid-90s. Others had a hard time adjusting, because it truly was a revolution.

Photography had gone fundamentally unchanged since the turn of the century, 1900, or earlier. But Wilhelm Imaging Research successfully shifted its focus right along with the changes in the industry, and became the leader in consulting on the permance and archival issues of digital "output", as he called it, i.e., digital printing, and the various technologies that were rapidly being deployed.

-d.g.w.