Cubicles Aren't So Bad

I work in a cubicle environment. It's nice for co-location of work groups (although I spend a lot of time on the phone working with other sites or partners), but the distractions can sometimes be frustrating when you're trying to focus.

But then I see a photo like the one here, found on the Shorpy Photoblog, and it reminds me that life in a cubicle isn't so bad after all. Go here to see the post and the description. The Shorpy site posts old, mostly B&W photos that illustrate what life was like in years gone by. There are some interesting photos -- made all that much more amazing when you think of the photography equipment used in days gone by. Check it out!

Shorpy Photoblog

I stumbled across a nice photo blog the other day. The site is "Shorpy -- The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog". Here is the site's description of the blog:

Shorpy.com is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating. We’re starting with a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by Lewis Wickes Hine as part of a decade-long field survey for the National Child Labor Committee. One of his subjects, a young coal miner named Shorpy Higginbotham, is the site’s namesake.

The photos do give a glimpse into life back then -- and how the country has changed since then. Not all the photos are 100 years old. The site has recently posted a series of photos from the 1940s. In fact, I was surprised to see this photo. I was in this building a few years ago while visiting a company we were working with. The building was remodeled into an office space, but the architects preserved the interior brick work and beams. It was a wonderful restoration.

Making of America Collection

Thanks to Make Magazine, I found Cornell University's portion of the Making of America collection. The MOA collection is a digital library of items from the mid to late 1800s. The images provided are scanned from the actual 19th century items. In addition, they have performed optical character recognition to aid searching. The collection is a joint project between Cornell and the University of Michigan, with each library focusing on different types of publications. The Cornell collection is journal based. They have a lot of early Scientific American issues which are interesting to look at. The illustrations, such as the plane at right from 1855, are amazing. Click on the image to go to the source page.