Shorpy, one of my favorite websites, has posted a handful of photos over the years of the FBI - or its predecessor, the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation. At some point, obviously, the interior of government buildings became important national secrets which couldn’t be photographed and shown to mere mortals, but way back when, reason and common sense prevailed, I guess.

Anyway, for a glimpse into the inside of the Bureau, way back when, check out their filing cabinets, their work areas, their office spaces, their index system, and their most famous employee, hard at work.

Incidentally, I believe this photo may be a fairly rare look at what would one day become the “physical index” of the Bureau’s “Central Records System”. Without giving the game away, would anyone like to confirm (or deny) that?

It’s been a while since I heard about a photographer being “detained” or otherwise “having their rights violated” for engaging in a little innocent photography, so it’s easy to suppose that conditions have improved from the hyper-paranoid days right after 9/11, when merely carrying a camera in public was enough to get you a 75% discount on a one-way flight to Guantanamo Bay.

Uncle Sam, however, apparently feels differently about this recent complacency towards photographers; Homeland Security recently issued a reminder, warning everyone that while “questionable photography is among the more frequently reported activities” and “suspicious activity reporting such as dubious photography provides valuable information for analysis and further investigation”, it seems that “only a small number of reported suspicious activities actually receive further investigation.”
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Social conditioning is a funny thing; as (non-sociopathic) humans, we’re generally reluctant to engage in behaviour that in years past would have been called “being difficult”, and today would be called something involving lots of four-letter words. (”Being a copulating posterior orifice”, for instance.) The thing is, this reluctance doesn’t just come into play where such behaviour would be atypical - “going primate-feces” in a coffee shop, for instance - but also materializes as a reluctance to use tools provided for that very purpose - calling a customer-service line with a complaint, for example, or filing a “dispute” with a service like PayPal.

The problem is, while mechanisms like these exist to be used, and are often extremely effective at what they do, they still carry a degree of emotional baggage about them that produces irrationality in some.
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Nixie tubes are pretty spiffy, though their uses are somewhat limited; that, I suppose, had always kept me from playing around with them… until now. (If you don’t know what a Nixie is, Wikipedia has all the answers to your questions about these spiffy vintage electronic displays.) Since everyone seems to like looking at these things, I thought I’d whip up two very short videos of a Nixie in action. Here’s the smallest, cheapest, arguably most common Soviet indicator tube, the IN-17:
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Some time ago, I was at a meeting that should never have existed. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the importance of “face time”, but face-to-face meetings should be about discussion, and collaboration, and this meeting had none of that. Worse yet, the entire point of the meeting could be summed up in one slightly long sentence: “The Final Policy Statement on such-and-such, which you were previously instructed to adopt and comply with by the end of the month, will not be issued on time, therefore we are remaining with the existing Interim Policy until further notice, and the assigned transition deadlines have been postponed indefinitely.” It should have been a memo, not a meeting, but there we were…
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