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Friday Slide Show: Ghosts Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

30 October 2015

We rode the T through the tunnel and along the Embarcadero Thursday morning on our way to TEDx San Francisco to hear Vincent Laforet talk about Air, his new book of aerial photographs. That would be the vertical version: tunnel to helicopter.

Charon. Detail from Peter Hudson's 2011 kinetic sculpture.

But we rode the T around the ballpark and down Third St. to 20th St. where we jumped off and took the long walk around the curve to Building 12 on Pier 70. We were cutting it close but we couldn't help but stop to take a photo or two on the way.

This side of Dogpatch is in transition. Many of the industrial buildings have been abandoned. And for a while now. Some, like the one we spent the day in, have been repurposed as event venues. Urban barns by any measure.

What attracted us to the old buildings, though, wasn't the decay. It was the signs of both the life that had been lived with the life that could not be snuffed out.

Ghosts, in short.

Only later, during the first break at TEDx, did we discover some fantastic sculptures, a few of which had been built during the week for Ghost Ship Halloween VIII: Annihilation.

What attracted us to the old buildings, though, wasn't the decay. It was the signs of both the life that had been lived with the life that could not be snuffed out.

Maybe this should be two slide shows but we found the transition from decommissioned factory to event venue studded with art to be a compelling theme. And not, we quickly have to add, the theme of annihilation.

Our post processing was Halloweenish this time. We launched Lightroom 6.2.1 in Yosemite only to have it balk on the Import process, which has not happened to us before. We'd select a source and get the beach ball with the fans coming on.

Console reported Lightroom was trying to use more than 50 percent of the CPU. Yet we found it unresponsive. We'd click to rate an image and nothing would happen. We'd try to create a Collection and after typing one letter, nothing else would display until we clicked Cancel.

We would Quit and relaunch, finding the previous operation had completed (or nearly so). But this approach would have taken all morning.

What had changed since last week?

Nothing. We were just trying to add 64 more images to our current catalog.

We went to Plan B, following the Adobe's instructions to revert to a previous version of Lightroom. After uninstalling v6.2.1, we grabbed v6.1 and the v6.1.1 patch. After reinstalling, we were back to the devils we knew.

When Adobe moved to the Creative Cloud subscription model, the company abandoned the public betas that were one of the chief reasons Lightroom so quickly surpassed Aperture, which Apple had designed with the aid of a few professional photographers.

Features that got a real workout in Adobe's pretty sound public betas were reworked into more useful tools before release. And bugs had a hard time evading scrutiny, too.

Public betas haven't helped Apple very much, though. We're still not going to install El Capitan despite v10.11.1's recent release. We found out we'd have to give up our Wacom Intuos, for one thing.

In no small way, the state of software development today resembles the ghosts we encountered on Pier 70. Some development among overwhelming signs of neglect.

But the features we need and the new ones we want will, like Pier 70, keep attracting us, whether tricks or treats.


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