DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Chronicle is running “Carroll Classics” during Jon Carroll’s extended vacation. Today’s column, originally printed in January 1992, is one of those that seems to have been yanked directly out of my brain, albeit with clearer prose and fewer icky fat cells. The essay expresses a thought I never realized I’d had until I read it.

It’s mostly about marriage, but it’s also about everyday life: the spaces between the stuff you remember.

He called it Love’s arrow, time’s arrow.

I remember, as a younger person, looking at older couples sitting at restaurants not saying anything to each other. I can remember thinking it looked like some existential hell.

Heh, it’s about youth, too.

Yesterday’s image of a dirty solar panel was enhanced for dramatic effect. In the original shot, the “wash me” message was scarcely visible.

Photoshop provided the vehicle to my salvation. I’ve been using the program for more than 10 years, and except for those times I discover I’ve just blown an hour on a correction, I really enjoy using it. I’ve created a new debris.com channel for Photoshop trickery, to show off some of the things I’ve learned, and populated it with some past articles. There are more to come.

The challenge with the “wash me” image was to radically increase the contrast between the dusty surface of the solar panel and the ever-so-slightly darker surface where I’d wiped a message into the grit. But a simple application of Curves — normally enough to gain contrast — was insufficient.

After fifteen minutes of fiddling in Lab mode, I came up with a workable solution. I’d realized I needed to find the image channel with the highest existing contrast. There are 10 channels to every image (RGB, CMYK, Lab), so I checked them all. Cyan was the best.

I copied the cyan channel and pasted it back into the document as a new (grayscale) layer, twice. An aggressive curve correction to each brought out the contrast: one was optimized to show off the left third of the image, and the other for the middle. There was no saving the right third; the ‘H’ in ‘WASH’ is basically invisible in every channel.

These two correction layers were multiplied together, then applied to the background layer using Pin Light mode. A gradient mask was applied to the right two-thirds of the layer accentuating the left third of the image, so as not to blow out the extreme right side. I adjusted the opacity sliders to balance the blend of images, and followed up with a global curve correction to bring the colors back to reality.

Did I know what I was doing? Not really. I knew I wanted to increase the contrast between two points that had not much space between them. I knew that “there are 10 channels to every image” from the color-correction bible. The rest I made up.

The result makes it look like we’d had a dust storm, which is not the case. But this was the image I saw in my mind when I snapped the picture.

Sun Power has done extensive research and has consistently seen that clean panels produce 8% more than thase panels that have accumulated dust from the atmosphere. For this reason, we suggest that you wash down your panels at the beginning of the summer. This is as simple as hosing them down with plain water.

Ours were indeed covered with grime. Simply hosing them off didn’t do the job, either; I made a pass with a clean scrub brush to knock off the grit.

It was a gorgeous day for a hike at Bodega Bay Head. The water was intensely blue. It reminded me of Crater Lake.

Looking down to the beach, we saw a seal that seemed to have misjudged the tide. I wasn’t sure how to react — call for a rescue, or let nature take its course?

The subtitle is “A Silicon Valley Novel,” but I think of it as more of a dot-com novel. I know there were zero-dollar start-up companies staffed with engineers dreaming up all kinds of hardware and software miracles in Silicon Valley for 40 years before Netscape planted the seed that sprouted into dot-com mania, and the subsequent “dot-bomb” fallout… but it still feels like a dot-com story, maybe because it was published in 1997, a time when Silicon Valley was the cradle of the World Wide Web.

Po Bronson went on, after this book, to become a sort of biographer of real dot-com people, in The Nudist on the Late Shift. This is an interesting transition, to first write compelling fiction about a particular time and place and people, and then write nonfiction about the same time and place and people, and make it just as compelling.

The characters in The First $20 Million are imaginative, smart, and devious. Bronson comes up with some wild plot twists as he chronicles the practical jokes, the scheming, and the revenge among the players. It’s incredibly satisfying to read the conclusion to something, near the end of the book, that was set up in the first chapter. Bronson resists the temptation to drop any hints along the way, so the payoff is as sweet for the reader as it might have been for the characters in the story.

Unlike most fiction writers, Bronson gets the technical details right. He succeeds in spite of the challenge provided by his own setting: he follows four engineers on a quest to build a $300 computer. He describes the invention of a virtual machine — in Bronson’s terms, a software “hypnotizer;” think Java or even Virtual PC. Despite these additional opportunities to fail, Bronson’s prose remains clear and believable. One could imagine this story, with all its petty jealousies and paybacks, actually happening.

I have enjoyed reading this book several times over the years. I recommend it to everyone in the industry, or, really, anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. If you have a technical background you’ll like it even more.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)