John Labovitz

life

Raised in Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC, I later spent a decade in the San Francisco Bay area, both in the city and rural Sonoma County. I moved to Seattle in 1995, and watched that city grow for seven years. I now live in Silverton, Oregon, in the foothills of the Cascades.

Currently:: At home in Silverton, OR
Weather:: Clear, 52°F, from the north
Email:: johnl@johnlabovitz.com
AIM:: jslabovitz (offline)
Skype:: jslabovitz (offline)
Twitter:: jslabovitz

art

Photography integrates my diverse interests in architecture, culture, history, travel, nature, technology, design, and sense of place. I continue to explore these themes in my ongoing international travels, as well as around my home.

See more of my photographs at Flickr Photostream

travel

I have always loved to travel, and as I get older, I find I want to travel more, and more deeply. Along with frequent short travels around the US to visit friends and family, I am starting to experiment with longer yet slower journeys to other parts of the world.

Upcoming trips:

The dance of the swallows

Sunday, 29 June from Istanbul, Turkey » The swallows appear again, just at dusk outside my window, launching a spectacle of aerobatics as they swoop around the roofs of the apartment buildings. They trilling madly, swirling in little ballets of two or three, then break up into solos, diving and chortling all the way. Within minutes, the show is over, and they’ve moved on to other venues. » read more

Exploring unknown neighborhoods

Monday, 23 June from Istanbul, Turkey » Lost in Istanbul. Not exactly — I just don’t know where I am. I’ve gotten off the bus somewhat randomly, thinking I’m where I was trying to go, but finding I am not. » read more

Sleeping city

Monday, 23 June from Istanbul, Turkey » As if the city has decided to take a rest from its metropolitan identity, this Sunday night is calm and mellow. The sun’s heat has finally been blown away by the evening wind. » read more

tech

I have been programming and using computers for a very long time. From my first computer in 1978 (a COSMAC VIPER I assembled from a kit), I’ve experienced a great deal of what used to be called the ‘microcomputer revolution.’ I was also fortunate to be involved in the pioneering days of the early Internet of the 1980s, though the explosion of the Web in the 1990s, and into the boom and bust.

These days, I am primarily interested in desktop and mobile technology, as well as the general impacts of technology on our culture as a whole. I’m especially fascinated by the impact of digital technology in artistic fields like photography and music.

See my professional profile at LinkedIn

How Flickr could make the world a better place for copyright

Friday, 11 July » Flickr has come under fire recently for not enforcing licensing terms on images accessed through their application programmer’s interface (API) and syndication feeds.Comply with any requirements or restrictions imposed on usage of the photos by their respective owners. Remember, Flickr doesn’t own the images — Flickr users do. Although the Flickr APIs can be used to provide you with access to Flickr user photos, neither Flickr’s provision of the Flickr APIs to you nor your use of the Flickr APIs override the photo owners’ requirements and restrictions, which may include “all rights reserved” notices (attached to each photo by default when uploaded to Flickr), Creative Commons licenses or other terms and conditions that may be agreed upon between you and the owners. In ALL cases, you are solely responsible for making use of Flickr photos in compliance with the photo owners’ requirements or restrictions. If you use Flickr photos for a commercial purpose, the photos must be marked with a Creative Commons license that allows for such use, unless otherwise agreed upon between you and the owner. You can read more about this here: www.creativecommons.org or www.flickr.com/creativecommons. » read more

On semantic HTML

Saturday, 14 June » Reposted from a discussion on pdxruby.How does one resolve the Absolute Good of semantic HTML against the need for a CSS layout framework?Compare doing layout in semantic HTML and CSS to doing layout in Adobe InDesign for instance. I assert that the requirements addressed by the two approaches are roughly equivalent and yet you hardly have to be a high priest to do layouts in InDesign. You just lay things out. Sheesh. » read more

Evolution of the homepage

Saturday, 24 May » Once upon a time, when the web was new (and was called by its full moniker, the World Wide Web), people had homepages. Like little artist studios open to the street, homepages were personal playgrounds made public, space both private and personal. In the days before search engines, we’d visit someone’s homepage because they’d invited us, or someone else had invited us. Discovered not by centralized indexing and retrieval, but instead by wandering and word of mouth, homepages were often magical little rooms, filled with strange objects and stranger stories. » read more

discoveries

The sphere of information is full of inspiring or interesting bits, waiting to be discovered. Here are a few of my discoveries.

“Perhaps the answer lies in greening the cities — not in a vertical direction — but on the horizontal? This is pretty much what Cuba did when the flow of Soviet oil dried up and large-scale mechanised agriculture became impossible. Under the US trade embargo the people faced starvation. The result was a proliferation of small-scale organic farms that basically kept the nation fed.” — The Guardian: ‘Farming: vertically challenged?’

“No one I know has clicked on a fucking ad in years while rushing through a website.” — Amen: A Night With Bill Gates’ New Big Hairy Vision (Brian Lam)

“The <hr> element now represents a paragraph-level thematic break.” — The web evolves by rewriting its own history: HTML 5’s differences from HTML 4