the brandensite
hello and welcome to my website
I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
the brandensite is a vanity project where I collect all of things I've put onto the internet in a big, fat glorification of myself. I've maintained this monument to arrogance in one form or another since I was thirteen years old in 1995. This is my social media.
Lawrence Expressway (Pinhole, April 2021)
I love photography. I love learning about photography and making my own photos. I share my new photos on Flickr almost every day, and I have a photo portfolio website. I will talk about photography at the slightest provocation. This website is one such provocation. Beware all ye who dare:
If prints be what you crave, I will mail you a photo I've made.
Observation (2020)
As a kid I played action and strategy video games. But since becoming an old curmudgeon I've lost my patience for those. I've now grown fascinated with exploration and storytelling games, surprised to find there a fantastic wealth of hidden universes and subtle gameplay:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, mind.in.a.box, Project Pitchfork, The Decemberists, Röyksopp, Moby, Rotersand, The National, unitcode:machine, and Ladytron.
I obsess over an extensive, curated, eclectic and growing library of music which is meaningful to me. I put the library metadata online (not the music) and it consists of 17,103 tracks from 2,092 albums from 863 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 483,803 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
In English, the days of the week are named after Germanic gods. All, that is, except Saturday, which is instead named after the Roman diety Saturn. How did the big guy pull off such a feat?
running commentary
Dylan Andersen Photography 2024 May 1
Dylan is a Southern California portrait and lifestyle photographer & videographer, based in Orange County. Him and I also have met up a few times to chat and take photos together.
Footage from the world in 1896 2024 Apr 29
This YouTube channel has posted a video taking old Lumiere Brothers footage shot in cities around the world 1896 to 1900 and colorized it, upscaled it, and converted it to 60fps. This seventeen minute trip into the past feels like viewing the world through a time machine, seeing common people doing everyday things in a way not usually available to us beyond a few decades back.
Where do used clothes ultimately end up? 2024 Apr 28
When you've worn a clothing a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times and it's starting to get too worn for you to think it's decent, you send it away to a clothing recycler. What they do they do with it? Turns out, a lot of it despite attempts at innovating repurposing ends up dumped in the desert in Chile and set on fire. This lengthy article goes into how and why, and what people are doing about it. You can see this spot for yourself on the Google Maps.
Suburbs 2024 Apr 26
Hayden Clay is a photographer and visual artist who creates magical surreal imagery. "Suburbs" is his newest project.
The Man Who Killed Google Search 2024 Apr 23
I've spent a lot of time complaining about Google in the past few years, specifically because Google used to be so good and lately it's been so bad and getting worse. And in this blog I've found a kindred spirit. This man hates what Google is becoming, and with a passion.
The Canon Digital Rebel 2024 Apr 21
I've linked the Sep 4, 2003 review of the first affordable dSLR – the Canon Digital Rebel. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford one such camera right at the cusp of my entering the workforce a year after it was released, and it is a camera I still have to this day. Of course I do not use it much anymore, but it still works. And to prove such, I went out and shot some photos with it. What's remarkable is how strongly the image quality holds up. The major problem it turns out with using this 20-year-old digital camera is that the interface itself is clumsy. Click on to read more musings attached to the images direct.
1939 General Motors Futurliner 2024 Apr 20
In the 1930s GM set out to show Americans what the future looked like, and they did so in a traveling roadshow called Parade of Progress and captained by one of only twelve custom-built art deco megacoaches: The Futurliner. The linked article has a busload of info, and The Drive also has a piece about what they're like behind the wheel.
Table of irregular verbs 2024 Apr 13
I love verbs which reach their various tenses through irregular means. They're great.
Massive corruption conviction in Vietnam worth ~9% of GDP 2024 Apr 12
Truong My Lan has been convicted of embezzling some impossibly huge percentage of Vietnam's gross domestic product alongside 85 other prominent bankers and government officials. What is clearly internal party politics boiling over as economic news, things are shaking up in the country in a way that's easy for an outsider like myself to miss the nuance of. But as each place on Earth struggles with adapting old strongman practices into modern power structures, it's interesting to see what's the Vietnamese version.
The Past and Future of Flickr 2024 Apr 11
Linked is an interview by This Week in Photo's Frederick Van Johnson of SmugMug/Flickr COO Ben MacAskill which is surprisingly frank and transparent, talking about the challenges that Flickr has had in the past, why SmugMug of all company's are their latest (and probably last) acquirer, some of the technical feats the team pulled off in freeing Flickr from Verizon (including datacenter specifics), and a glimpse at the fascinating factoid that SmugMug was the very first Amazon Web Services customer (back before it was even called AWS). I'm not just linking to any random Flickr videos, this one's actually good.
older!