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, 95°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:

Waiting for the train

Friday, 19 December 2008 » This afternoon I arrived at the train station in Vila Real de Santo António assuming a short wait. Instead I found the online schedule had been wrong, and I had just missed my train, and would wait another hour and a half for the next one to Tavira. » read more

Waking up in mystery

Thursday, 4 December 2008 » I wake to a warm morning and a thick head from last night’s wine. Pigeons careen overhead like geese. The flock of peacocks scrabble down the cliff of the canyon outside my little studio. Cars and trucks buzz from the nearby highway that winds over the bridge into Mértola. The air seems more flexible, breathable; it’s a welcome change from the last few frigid nights. » read more

Out of the dark Northwest

Monday, 24 November 2008 » We lift off on a rare gorgeous November day. Above bands of shadowy conifers and glittery rivers rise the snowcoated mountains: Baker, Adams, Saint Helens. » 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

Why I don’t program for the iPhone

Friday, 23 January » Drifting off to sleep the other night, I realized that what turns me off about developing for the iPhone isn’t the overcrowded market, or the hardware with its limited resources, or even the multitude of fart apps. What turns me off is that the iPhone is a brilliant platform, but an awful ecosystem. Programming the iPhone means, simply and solely, writing an ‘app.’ And an ‘app,’ that modern, pithy term for ‘application,’ as currently defined, means a narrow, vertically-oriented, resource-constrained program: an ivory tower. My ivory tower could be beautiful, comfortable, functional, even life-changing: but it is still an ivory tower, and one that is torn down in full whenever the iPhone user decides they want to run another application. Another ivory tower is built; it, too, eventually falls. » read more

An unexpected sense of place?

Sunday, 27 July 2008 » In Great To See You. Just Not Around Here (full article), Jan Chipchase outlines the darker, edge effects of location-aware technology. In summary, the advertisement of location destroys anonymity – not just one’s own, but others’ as well. » read more

How Flickr could make the world a better place for copyright

Friday, 11 July 2008 » 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

discoveries

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

Floating Gold: The Romance of Ambergris » “Now of all the things presented for the inspection of that faithful servant of the public, the museum curator, the most romantic, and the least likely to be true, is ambergris. I say inspection, because identification is preconceived in the mind of the finder. His treasure, stumbled upon along the sea beach, recognized with the sudden surmise that dawns like knowledge from a previous incarnation, is encountered where ambergris belongs; it looks, and feels, and smells as ambergris should and, since it bears no resemblance to anything familiar, it follows that riches are already within his grasp.” » read more

BART swings » “Somebody decided to make the world just a little bit more interesting, and three red swings appeared on the BART Public Transit System in San Francisco for the public to enjoy.” » read more

Scotch Modern » “Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1870, Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, thus presenting an ironic critique of the way in which mechanical imagery beguiles us with the trite veracity of simulacra.” » read more