Santa brought my nephew Colby a little digital video camera. Colby loves it, because the screen flips around and he can watch himself on camera. Shortly after this shot, he took the camera and spent the next few minutes saying random things into the camera, watching how his mouth moved and his face reacted. It was just great.
I like the genuine joy on his face here as he sees himself in the viewfinder.
Lucky for us, Santa came this year! As an added bonus, he didn't leave coal for anybody. This was Maddy's first Christmas, which means she ate a lot of wrapping paper and didn't really have any idea what was going on around her. But she did dress up for an alternate shot and left a plate of cookies for the big guy. From this aftermath picture, we can conclude: |
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Christmas - it's the most expensive time of the year!
I actually had a nice shot for expensive taken last weekend - a 180 degree panorama of north Michigan Ave near Saks and Tiffany's. Alas, I couldn't get it stitched into any satisfactory way with the amount of time I had.
So, instead, I present this pretty picture of my Mom's tree in Newfoundland. There's nothing inherently expensive about this, but it sure was expensive getting here to take it. I've flown business class from Chicago to Europe for less money than coach to St. John's, NL. That ain't right.
Merry Christmas, all!
Okay, I can't compete with the gerber baby, so I'll just go with my passion. Well, one of my passions, anyway. So... let's talk beer.
Beer has bubbles, typically as a result of the fermentation process. Yeast eats the sugars present in the wort, and produce two byproducts as a result: alcohol and carbon dioxide. Many beers typically add more CO2 after fermentation as part of the packaging process, because we have become accustomed to fizzy beer. However, not all beers have this type of carbonation.
Guinness Draught doesn't. Instead, it gets its bubbles from good old nitrogen. One of the properties of the nitrogen bubbles is that they're smaller and more plentiful. It's an attempt to simulate the creamy texture of a real cask conditioned stout. A beer that's been pulled up by a beer engine from a non-pressurized cask is going to come up with a foamy head and not much carbonation in the body. The cans use a nitrogen widget, but when you've got a keg system like this, you need a tank of Nitrogen (technically 75% N, 25% CO2). Each produces the same result.
It's a nice effect, and creates a nice mouth feel for the beer. It also creates this hypnotic bubbly effect after the pour, often called the Guinness cascade effect. Studies have been done as to why the bubbles seem to rush down the sides of the glass. It's because they *are* rushing down the side of the glass, while the center of the beer has a hidden column of bubbles rising to the surface.
There. Science!
Now, pardon me, I have to finish drinking the two subjects who volunteered for my photo shoot. (Remember, folks, a pint of Guinness is only 125 calories. And it's good for your heart.
Had a little trouble this week. Been a busy week. Had the flu. Had a storm. Worked on “the basement project”. By the time Ryan's cat and the Gerber baby were posted, I still did not have a picture.
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I had to make a trip to Walgreens for various sundries. “Bazooka Joe” was on that list. OK. I have not blown a bubble in a while. I usually chew sugar free gum. I had some problems. The entire photo shot is more interesting than the two “acceptable” bubbles I formed. If you knew I had four pieces of Bazooka in my mouth, you would not call this one acceptable.
I pulled Gerber Baby out of storage for this shot again, mostly to make sure I'd get the most votes. I'm somewhat disappointed in this particular picture - I was hoping to get a frame filled with bubbles - but it has the best "happy expression" of the batch. Maddy learned about bubbles at the local library childrens' story time and was quite pleased to learn that they can exist in our house too.
I was hoping for a snow picture for "Peace", but nature did not cooperate. So, I bring you a rare contemplative and peaceful moment in our kitties' lives.
Well, that's a lie. Their entire existence is pretty much being lazy and peaceful, but this rare bit is because Sprite and Pixel are curled up together. Some time ago, Sprite decided he was afraid of Pixel and started to run away from her. Yes, that's right. Our 15 point cat is afraid of our 5 pound cat.
However, since the kittens came along, I think Sprite is more willing to hang out with Pixel than he had been of late. So here, admire the two old kitties, chillin' in the bedroom, enjoying a peaceful truce. You'll not the absence of the young kitties, because it's pretty much impossible to get a kitten to sit still for a long exposure shot like this. And a picture of two blurs doesn't quite seem peaceful to me.
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Passed this on the drive home Saturday night.
It must hace just happened, as there were no emergency vehicles. There was no accident that I could see, just this Jeep on fire. People were pulled over, it was eerily silent. And very hot. And smelly. I had my window down as we passed so I could snap this, but I had no desire to stick around since there was nothing I could do, and I was afraid of a possible explosion.
The only camera I had near me was my iPhone, hence the craptacularness, but it beats nothing this week, which is what I'd post otherwise.
Oh, also, I had my camera in the wrong mode, so this is a still from a video since that's what I accidentally took. Oops.
There was on "oops" down the street from our house on Monday of this week. When I was heading off to the lab in the morning, I looked over at the curb down on the corner and thought "Weird, there's a lot of water going into that drain." When I came back that evening, the street was closed and there was a giant hole full of muddy water in the intersection. Lis said the water had been off since sometime that morning, and it stayed that way until about 9:00 that evening. These two guys spent that whole time trying to figure out how to fix the oops.
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I'm a sysadmin. Kludges are a big part of my life. What is a kludge but another form of jerry-rigging?
So I've got this 20" iMac that outlived its usefulness as my desktop computer. I thought it would be a good idea if I mounted it in front of my treadmill so I can watch TV while walking. The problem, of course, is that the 20" iMac (or, at least, my generation of it) had no VESA mount options. Enter the jerry-rigging! I found this product online that made use of the cable pass-thru in the iMac's stand to attach a VESA mount! It's a pair of rings that sandwich the mount and the hole in the stand. When screwed tight, It forms a very solid mount. Attaching it to the Peerless monitor stand I bought was trivial, and voila! I now have a 20" iMac mounted perfectly above the treadmill. The base of the stand even makes a nice keyboard tray when I'm not using the keyboard.
Shot with a blue flash, because I'm still trying to get the hang of lighting.
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Like Craig, I'm a computer babysitter. My jerry-rigged computer is a little bit bigger than his though - at one time it was the third fastest in the world, but it looks like it slipped down to eight place last week. What we see above is just a little part of it, but it is the most crazily rigged part of all.
Out here in the Chicago suburbs, vacant lots are oddly common - there are a lot of small houses that are being bought, torn down, and replaced with houses that just barely fit on their lots. There's even one a block or two away that just became a "vacant" lot (really, a construction zone) a couple of weeks ago that I thought about taking a picture of.
Like Cory, I was looking to capture the literal essence of time flying. Mine was less esoteric, and largely involved attempts to catch a nice photo of my pocketwatch flying through the air.
This proved too complex and likely to break my watch, so I went another direction, and tried to simulate the experience. This is the pocketwatch I got in Greenwich, England. It's a nice little pocketwatch, and I wind it every morning. This watch has flown with me everywhere I've gone since getting it.
Though now, looking at it in extreme closeup, I'm wondering why it appears to say "Royal Greenwich Obserbatory" at the bottom, but I'm hoping this is just a trick of the fancy-schmancy script they wrote it in.
Several hundred exposures probably resulted in 2 photos where everyone is looking at the camera. I ran out of daylight before getting what I was looking for.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was in Baltimore last week at a conference. Since I knew I would be on an airplane again on Friday, I spent the whole week trying to figure out how to set up an amazing picture that showed what time it was on the plane while it was flying. It turns out that's not so easy. In the end I said "Eh, fugit" and gave up.
There are many approaches to carving a pumpkin. Some involve taking a pattern on paper, laying it atop the pumpkin, and poking holes through it. Then, you pull the paper off and connect the dots.
That's not what I did. I carved the pumpkin in the upper left freehand after attempting to draw a face on it with a Sharpie that doesn't like to draw on moist pumpkin skin.
Another pumpkin carver attempted the connect-the-dots approach, but this gourd did not make it through the procedure.
In any case, I didn't use gummy candy, and that should count for something. :)
I thought I was being creative and original. Looks like Mike was, too.
I flew out last night to Baltimore to spend the next week at LISA, and I carefully waited until the flight to take this week's picture. I love the little service maps that show up in the back of in-flight magazines. I'm cheap, so normally I only see a map with a few dots connected by a few lines, but last night I flew on United and got to look at oodles of dots connected by even more lines.
Back in 1926 they built this fine building for St. Joseph School here in Downers Grove. The building now has various new additions and renovations, but they were nice enough to keep all of the ornateness of the doors on the original wing.
We've got a new building at work, it's got a lot of doors, and almost all of them look like this.
Seven floors of doors, all made of wood.
They slide and they glide, and close pretty good.
There, a poem. For my doors.
A pedant would say that an acronym requires that the abbreviated combination of letters be pronounced as a word. SCUBA. RADAR. FUBAR. U.N.C.L.E. And so on. I am not that pedantic, as I feel common usage has changed the meaning of the word to include things like IRS, WKRP, and TLA. Luckily, my submission works either way.
I work at a place that goes by the unfortunate three letter moniker of "ANL". Unfortunate, because even if you don't pronounce it like a word, you're still pretty much saying "anal".
This amuses me to no end.
That's the type of guy I am.
A former division of this ANL place was the Pulsed Neutron Source. PNS.
The ANL PNS.
Again, this amuses me to no end. Yes, I know. This is why I don't have children.
In an attempt to make the name less embarrassing, they called it the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source. This leads people who think like I do to go down one of two roads.
1) The Intense PNS.
2) The iPNS. New from Apple.
Regardless, I'm giggling all the way down either road.
I'm not sure what a sweating cylinder has to do with intense pulsed neutrons, but this is the logo found on a ruler that was some shwag from the now defunct division.
The ANL iPNS ruler. For measuring... something.
I'm sorry.
