The American tradition of grilling outside with a group of friends and neighbors is one that I miss the most when traveling abroad. After three years of finding myself in another country for every single US holiday that is celebrated around a barbecue, I’m thrilled to be on American soil this labor day with a BBQ invitation hand.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t enjoying some remarkable open flame cooking this time last year. It just wasn’t in a backyard. I’ve reposted the adventure below.

Happy labor day.

–Sep 2007

It will probably never happen again in my lifetime. Lunch cooked for me by the private chef of the ex president of France, Francois Mitterand. Her name is Daniel Delpeuch and she is a feisty, no bullshit woman who was able to conjure up a brilliant lunch using 100 year old cast iron pot royale and a log fueled fire in her fire place.

That’s our lunch simmering away just below her right hand. Ever loyal to her position to the presidential office, she would not divulge any details that went on behind closed doors. Even the President’s favorite dish was a protected secret. However, Miss Delpeuch, did give us her opinion on many other things culinary. I doubt I’ll ever buy truffle oil again.

Lunch was simple, extraordinary and very presidential.

E at cellophane66 found a 40s era picture of the Yee Mee Loo bar in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The accompanying words make the great picture an epic post.

In past years New Orleans has served as a second home to me. I’ve just been text messaging with friends and they are preparing to evacuate as hurricane Gustav looms off shore. Please keep a good thought for the people of New Orleans and pray that Gustav loses power before making landfall.

A long while back I was having a discussion with a fellow photographer about these annoying things called cameras that got in the way of our picture taking. The statement sounds absurd, but bare with me a minute. My friend and I had put in enough time shooting that we had crossed the creative bridge to find ourselves much more concerned with the concept and story of image than the way the image was captured.

I’m waiting for the onslaught from the tech heads who are going to argue that part of executing an image is in the tools a photographer uses, and yes there is some truth to that. But when a camera operates so flawlessly that it feels more like an appendage than a device, your work reflects the freedom you feel.

Similarly, after writing steadily for almost three years for fun and profit, I’ve had the same creative bridge crossing with a piece of software. It seems preposterous to speak about software in this way I know. But writing, like any creative pursuit in which there is an anticipating audience and a paycheck waiting, is a psychotic endeavor in which the process is much more enjoyable as a memory. When you cease to notice the tools, it’s a much nicer way to work.

Such is the case with Nisus Writer Pro. It took me a about an hour to learn and customize it to my liking. Since then I’ve totally forgotten that I put any effort into setting it up at all. It wasn’t until I wrote my fifteenth article with Nisus that I noticed that I never notice the software. It has never crashed, it’s features are easy to find and it saves files in the RTF format so I have yet to have a compatibility problem with any of my magazine editors.

Now before you go off half cocked that this is some sort of shill for Nisus Writer Pro, it is. I was so damned pleased with how good this word processor is, I was inspired to send them a thank you email. They were very kind, and responded by sending a gorgeous call girl and a kilo of cocaine to my office. Okay I’m kidding about the call girl.

I went through a phase of purchasing licenses for almost every writing software available. It is bizarre how much of a learning curve there is to the electronic equivalent of putting pen to paper. I just can’t imagine Hemingway dividing his writing surface into three panes. It would leave little room for his cocktail.

Nisus is as simple or powerful as you need it to be with a leaning curve that makes sharpening a pencil seem complicated. Not that I have a pencil sharpener or anything.

Apparently I’m in good company in my passion for Nisus’ word processor. I read somewhere that Michael Chabon gave Nisus a mention in the acknowledgments of his latest book. Since I’m not nearly as famous as that dude, I decided to write a little more than a mention. It’s a brilliant product, developed and maintained by good people who have been around with their company since the genesis of MACs.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to check out Newscorp’s (FOX) and NBC’s joint venture HULU, I recommend it. It is a wonderfully well thought out and elegant execution of what web TV should be.

I was hardly concerned that my current work deadline was going to keep me from the TV and my Olympics obsession. I was sure that NBC was going to make a killing in additional advertising revenue by utilizing HULU or NBCOlympics.com with Olympic broadcasts affording me access to Beijing from my office computer. Not so.

What NBC did do is offer DVDs of the Olympics that could be purchased online at the end of each event day. My guess is that they assumed that potential customers would lock themselves in some sort solitary confinement to avoid exposure to any news sources that inconveniently report Olympic highlights until the DVD arrived.

I’m not disappointed, I ‘m pissed. How could a network that gets online video so right, get the most prestigious event in their broadcast calendar, so wrong. It’s sort of like owning a Lear Jet and driving it on the freeway.

Apparently I’m not the only one who noticed. From a Wall Street Journal article today.

NBC’s decision to limit the amount of Olympics footage on its Web site has ticked off sports fans. But that decision could also dog the network in another way: NBCOlympics.com will generate just $5.75 million in video-ad revenue from the Games, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer Inc.

At a time when video ads are starting to catch on, analysts say NBC had an opportunity to make a lot more money had it offered more online content during the Games. CBS Sports, by contrast, streamed all of the NCAA’s March Madness basketball-tournament games live earlier this year and made $23 million in ad revenue, the CBS Corp. network says. (The basketball tournament lasted three weeks, while the Olympics runs over two weeks.)

I suppose it could be worse, I could be a NBC stock holder.

No, my absence from posting has not been a thinly veiled ploy to give myself lots of air time on my own blog. But just in case you missed the video of me scroll down. Enough about me. I want to talk to you about sheep.

The primary reason for my blog absence was a genuine fear to open my computer on my maiden voyage to the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Black Hat is a computer hackers conference. And ding dong network security neophytes like myself are easy prey to being hacked. Which is kind of the idea. Learning from experiencing.

Along with nefarious hackers, the benevolent hackers that run Black Hat sniff the wi-fi and wired networks to search for anyone who has unwittingly compromised their own computer security by sending a login and password in the clear. This can happen when logging into an email, facebook or any other online account. The plain as day transmission is captured and placed on the wall of sheep. It is a way of publicly embarrassing you into smarter security practices. If your name ends up on the wall of sheep, there are a room full of seasoned hackers available to teach you how to secure your network practices and your computer.

The social scene at Black Hat is antithetical to what I’m used to in Hollywood. No-one talks about what they do. Conversely, as I found out, asking people what they do is a brilliant way to get a fish eye look and to lose 30 points from your credit rating.

Black Hat attracts hackers of all levels and genres. At any time you could be chatting with a notorious computer criminal or a patriotic counter terrorism expert. No one ever knows. And it is that adherence and respect for anonymity that makes Black Hat so amazing. Everyone there is talking and sharing information.

I lost count of the different languages I heard. And I’m still trying to absorb all the information I was exposed to. But thanks to many of the folks there who regard no question as stupid I learned and incredible amount that has already benefitted me and my company. I also made some brilliant new friends. Although I couldn’t tell you what any of them do.