Eclipse

One of Lee Friedlander's famous sayings is "Photography is a generous medium" by which he means you might be shooting a dog or a car or whatever and then, later, you see in the background all sorts of cool things that make the picture even better.

That's the case here. The original idea had something to do with shooting a solar eclipse but since at my location it would only be a partial solar eclipse--obscured locally by fog, as it turns out--I thought I would shoot a livestream instead.

And so I did.

But watching the video I noted all the stuff lying about my desk--and much of it had been eclipsed (sometimes long eclipsed), in the other meaning of the word. There's the point-and-shoot camera in the back, on the edge of being eclipsed by the iPhone but there are also digital video tapes (and a digital tape video camera) stacked there straight out of 1996, along with a CD-ROM. Look a little closer and there are not one but two HP 48G calculators and an HP 12C, old-fashioned programmable devices, and a fountain pen.

The hard disk array is hopefully soon to be eclipsed by more affordable solid-state drives (I've been hoping for this to be true for ten years or more) and, of course, there are two books on the left--one Michel De Montaigne's *Essays* and the other *The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing*--and whether the ideas contained therein are eclipsed is a matter of opinion.