Michael A. O’Neill

Author: Michael

  • Blog: Day to Day in Iraq

    On The New York Times editorial page today, the Gray Lady touted a multi-author blog called Day to Day in Iraq. Simply put, the blog is written by regular Iraqis about daily life. Most of the authors are young men in their twenties. The entry that struck me the most was from Hassan Khuraffa about the daily life of his six-year-old sister.

    I was immediately reminded of stories about a family friend, Ramzi, who spent the first few years of his life in Beirut in the early 1980s, the worst years of Lebanon’s brutal "civil" war. [I put civil in quotes, since two of the major players, Israel and the PLO,  were external actors]. Those stories about Ramzi were the catalyst that sparked my interest in the Middle East.

    I also couldn’t help but realize that Nigel Parry’s plan in 1997 had finally come to fruition, just in Iraq, rather than Palestine. Nigel wanted to create the single source of raw, unfiltered news about day-to-day life in Palestine by equiping one Palestinian student in each major Palestinian city with a laptop, an internet connection, a camera and a slide/negative scanner [digital photography was in its infancy]. He modeled this web site on his own online journal, "A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" and a pilot project called "On the Ground in Ramallah" that he ran with several students to document the shooting war that erupted in the fall of 1996.

    The site never got off the ground, and when Nigel’s house was demolished in May 1998, he left Palestine and the project fell to the wayside.

  • Photos from Carnaval

    Demure_smile
    My photos from Carnaval came in this Friday, and I got my first glance at them Saturday night after dinner with Susan, Anya and Christine. (photo gallery)

    My favorite shot (click to enlarge) of the entire parade was of this woman to the right. Her warm smile, shy turn of her face, and the brilliant feathers of her costume were simply breathtaking.

    The lesson of Carnaval? Fill flash. The sun was bright, so I knew I didn’t need to worry about shutter speed and camera shake. It was early (9am), though, so I brought my flash in case the shadows from the buildings were deep. They weren’t, so after 30 minutes or so, I took my flash gun off and just started shooting.

    It was only around 11:00 am that my mistake finally registered. It wasn’t shadows from buildings I should have been worried about. It was shadows from noses, hats, eye sockets, feathers, you name it. So many of my pictures from Carnaval are marred by shadows and high contrasts. If I had left my flash on the entire time, those contrasty shadows would have been softened.

    Praising_sunGreen_bikini_1 Take, for example, this photo (click to enlarge) of the woman in the green bikini: most of her body is facing away from the sun. Makes the picture dull. Her abs are the only part of her body with full light, and they draw the eye. While she does have magnificent abs, that wasn’t my intended subject.

    In contrast, the second photo (click to enlarge) of a woman arms raised to the sun gets a full, brilliant glow of sunlight highlighting her skin. No bad contrasty spots.

  • The Gremlins give up the ghost

    All the emails Aimee tried to send earlier this week finally arrived at 10:59 am this morning. I’m working from home, so I didn’t even bother trying to be stealthy. I logged onto the Microsoft Recruiting system to accept the offer from my work computer while connected to Oracle’s network via VPN.

    Jay, my future boss, called me up this afternoon to check in. Much to my delight, he strongly suggested I take some time off before starting to work at Microsoft.

    All that remains is the background and professional references check. I’m ridiculously worried about this, actually.

    [BTW, if you’ve noticed this wasn’t visible the day it
    was posted, well, I didn’t want folks at work to figure it out before I
    was ready]

  • Gremlins in the Microsoft machine

    Four email addresses, and still no offer. Not sure what’s up with Microsoft’s system, but Aimee simply can’t seem to get the HR system to send me the offer letter. Oh, I know the particulars, but actually seeing the letter is so key. Not like I expect anything in the actual letter will kill the deal. But I want the letter.

    [BTW, if you’ve noticed this wasn’t visible the day it
    was posted, well, I didn’t want folks at work to figure it out before I
    was ready]

  • Last bits of Vegas: Ice Box Canyon with Dennis

    Icebox3_640x480
    It’s been ages since TheServerSide Java Symposium (TSSJS) in Las Vegas, but I have a last bit of photography to record.

    The final day of the conference, Dennis and I took a hike in Red Rock Canyon (photo gallery), specifically Ice Box Canyon. Yeah, we were supposed to be at TSSJS, but Java Jeopardy was over, and neither of us was up for much more tech babble.

    So we went to Red Rock, and spent a couple hours hiking through the high desert into a narrow canyon. Ice Box earned its name: The temperature must have dropped by 15 degrees in the hike up. It was almost too cold for my short sleeves. Dennis didn’t seem to notice, though. One of the advantages of not being a human twig, I guess.

    About halfway in, we heard water, and the remainder of the hike required criss-crossing the creek every forty or fifty feet. Every five or ten minutes, there was a new little waterfall which I had to stop at to take a picture.

    Of course, waterfalls require slow exposures–1/20th of a second will get you a bit of streaky water, but slower is better. The longer the aperture is open, though, the greater the camera shake, and I didn’t bring my tripod. So I tried to wedge my camera between pebbles to keep it steady. This took time, and Dennis started tossing rocks into the pools in front of my camera, partly out of boredom, but mainly, I think, because he thought it was quite clever and funny. Probably was–he couldn’t hide his chuckling–but I was not amused at the droplets of water landing on my cheap-ass camera. I’ve never had much of a sense of humor about my photography.

    Grinning_madly_480x640We kept wondering when we would hit the end of the canyon. The trail map said you’d hit a waterfall where you couldn’t go any further. We thought we hit that point twice. But each time, we found a way around the little waterfall by scrambling over the massive boulders. (We were also egged on by a couple ahead of us that was a good ten years’ older and hadn’t yet turned around).

    The end of the canyon was obvious. An almost sheer wall, probably 100+ feet high, with a narrow waterfall cascading down the rocks. There was nowhere else to go but back.

    The person in the picture is Dennis. If you know him, you won’t need to zoom in to identify that wild, mad, face-splitting grin of his.

  • One day you’ll wake up…

    Dennis said that one day, you’ll just wake up and realize you’re dealing with it better.

    I thought I’d hit that day months ago. I thought the eulogy I delivered had helped me grieve. When Mom and Chanel talked about dreams and memories of Dad, I felt I’d moved passed that.

    But all it took was a couple of glasses of wine and the death of a fictional character on a stupid TV show (albeit this was during an emotional 24 hours when I unexpectedly saw my once best friend, and after I received word about… well, driving to work). All it took was the blank dead eyes of some barely engaging spoiled brat on a TV show. No, not just the eyes, but the realization that a life had reached its end, no matter how badly you may hope the reverse.

    I’m not sure Dennis is right. I think it will always be there, just below the surface. On days when you desperately want to share, when you desperately need to talk to someone who’s no longer there, you’ll discover the grief is just as strong as it was the day it happened, and you’ll just bawl.

  • A verbal offer

    Aimee called me this afternoon and told me the Visual Studio group wanted to hire me. My blood pressure skyrocketed, my heart started racing, and I couldn’t breath. Thankfully, Aimee just wanted to schedule time to talk about offer details. I would’ve been useless to actually discuss what I wanted.

    [BTW, if you’ve noticed this wasn’t visible the day it was posted, well, I didn’t want folks at work to figure it out before I was ready]

  • Feedblitz

    Feedblitz_logo
    Another Web 2.0 experiment: Feedblitz. This blog widget should monitor my blog’s feed and, whenever I post something new, send an email of the new feed to subscribers. I’m checking it out, because I think my sister should create a Ramos-O’Neill blog featuring the adventures of Finn and Ellie, but she’d need a Wed 1.0 way to push blog entries to family members who aren’t that tech savvy.

    Actually, this entry is just to test how the thing works myself.

    02-JUN-06: Seems to work! You can sign up by scrolling down to the Feedblitz widget on the right hand side of my blog.

  • Experimenting with Wikipedia

    180pxwwwwikipediaorg_screenshot
    In writing my blog entries and my manuscript, wikipedia.org has proven an incredibly useful resource. So I decided I’d try to give back a little bit.

    But where could I contribute? Photography? No, I don’t know enough about optics. Scooters? Even though the Vespa entry has been flagged for poor quality, there’s just not enough two-stroke oil coursing through my veins to improve it.

    The Mid-East, perhaps? Hmmm. The editors of wikipedia have banned new registrants from modifying major entries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not surprising. Wiki technology allows anyone to make changes or modification, so anyone with an axe to grind can come in and distort as they please. Of course, enough people will be monitoring the entry, so the changes will be rolled back. But better to be proactive than reactive.

    As I was browsing, I noticed a request from an Arab wikipedia member that someone add a photo of Birzeit University’s Martyr’s Memorial. I have pictures of that! So I made some minor changes to the entry about Birzeit University and Birzeit village: I added a few pictures, and made a minor correction. Another user has already modified my modifications. Very exciting.

  • Carnaval

    My old friend, Erica, just came back from the Peace Corp. I haven’t seen her for a year… exactly. The last time she was here, it was for Carnaval: she had taken free drum lessons in years past, and had timed her trip home so she could perform with her class.

    I don’t know what excuse I had for missing it last year. Then again, I had a fairly active social life this time last year, so maybe that was it.

    But this year, I was out the door by 8:30 am with seven rolls of film and my wonderful new lens. Turns out I didn’t bring enough film. The costumes were breath-taking (and sometimes downright naughty). I couldn’t stop taking pictures. A few, I think, will turn out. I’ll share them in a week or two.