I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.

Jesus bleedin’ nuts! I’ve got reader-submitted questions coming out of my ears. I’ve had to backlog a few, so don’t worry, I’ll get to you. This next question is right up my alley.

Clutch wrote:
Q:

Here’s a question that may actually be within your realm of experience; I have a bunch of images I’d like to resize, smaller, for uploading. Is there an easy way to do this to many images at once, say, in photoshop? Or perhaps another, preferably free application I could get my grubby little hands on? Thank you, oh wise and gratuitous davebgimp!

A: Easy as your mom! I’m going to answer this a bit backwards by first addressing the issue of software. Yes, you can do this in PhotoShop or the slightly neutered and cheaper PhotoShop Elements. PhotoShop’s a great program. I use it daily at work, but it costs an ass-load so most people end up pimping out Grandma to buy it or they steal it. Personally, I think that for most users, especially those who are working primarily in an RGB (red, green and blue) color space — web publishing for example, it’s not necessary.

Another option is to take the free route. There’s a few more steps involved but it costs several hundred dollars less… actually it costs nothing. There’s an Open Source, free image editing alternative called GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s available cross platform, so is accessible to anyone. I use it at home on Linux and having used PhotoShop professionally and otherwise for the past six or so years, I find it meets and exceeds all my home-use needs. Experienced PhotoShop users making the switch might get a bit annoyed at first, as I did, at the learning curve involved. I chalk it up to the fact of using one program exclusively for so long and getting used to the tricks and shortcuts and then trying out a new application with different tools, names and ways to get things done. But once I got past this (it was a quick transition), I found myself impressed and not missing much. If you’re new to either program, I highly doubt you will share this temporary and arguably unnecessary frustration.

The GIMP does have limitations in it’s lack of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black - a color space normally used with professional printing and presses) support and a rather huge learning curve if you want to install some plug-ins and know nothing about compiling from source code. Unless, you’re designing for print on a professional scale, you won’t be missing the CMYK support though. I have heard that there’s a CMYK plug-in available, but as of the latest version, the color space is not natively supported. No biggie for me or you other average home users. As far as having to compile programs for GIMP plug-ins, if you’re using Linux, you either know how to do this, or could stand to learn for your own good.

You should at least check out the GIMP. Since it’s free, you don’t have the problem of shelling out for a program that updated with a new version almost yearly (which means more $$$ or more pirating if you want to keep up with the latest). GIMP will always be free of charge and there’s plenty of documentation, tutorials and communities to help you get the hang of it, or you can always ask daveb.

Now, on to the first half of your question. I’ll explain how to do batch resizing with both PhotoShop and the the no-cost method. Let’s start with PhotoShop.

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Every once and a while, I come across a website where some bumblefuck idiot tries to stop visitors from right-clicking on their page, usually in a sad little attempt to prevent people from downloading their images. They copy and paste the little Javascript trick to disable right-clicking and sleep peacefully, under the impression that their dearest little JPEGS are safe and secure.

Anyone with half a brain cell should know that if you’re going to insist on controlling your content and being a greedy little fuck, putting your crap on a website is not the way to go. By viewing a web page , your computer is requesting and downloading the files that create the page to it’s hard drive and then displaying them in your browser. If you put an image in a web page, anyone who views it has already downloaded it. Disabling the right-click is not only pointless and retarded, it’s really fucking annoying and a bit insulting. Who the fuck tells you what you can or cannot right-click on? Screw that!

If someone’s decided to go all control freaky and disable right-clicking, they should know that it takes me all of a few seconds to open my browser cache to get at it. Easy shit.

So fuck this anti-right-clicking shit. It pisses me off. I rarely make a habit of using images from other websites and if I do, it’s a site that has an explicit Creative Commons license encouraging me to do so. So why be such a hater? Loosen that sphincter! Your shitty Photoshop Elements pixel vomit is hardly worth stealing anyway.

It’s possible that at this point, dearest reader, that you may be picking up on the fact that this stupid little practice seriously irritates me. Okay, okay, I admit it. It makes me want stab things and fling poop like an irate Rhesus monkey. So is daveb the type of punk-ass bitch to take this no right-clicking shit by bending over, grabbing his ankles and reciting the Lord’s Prayer? Fuck no, people of the world! You can disable that shit permanently and he’s going to show you how. This wild man we call daveb rules!

First off, this tutorial assumes you are using Firefox 1.5. If you’re not using it, you should be, so switch. Do it. Do it now. It’s the dog’s fucking balls, daveb swears. Got it? Cool.

Disabling right-click blocking with Firefox

1. Open Firefox (duh)
2. Get all up in your options/preferences. It varies by OS. For Linux, it’s Edit>Preferences. OSX is Firefox>Preferences. Windows hides it in Tools>options.
3. From there, get your ass into the section named “Content” and find the little checkbox named “enable Javascript” and click the “Advanced” button that’s next to it. This will pop up a new little options window.
4. In this window, you will see a checkbox named “Disable or replace context menus“. Uncheck that shit!

That’s it!