You're Gonna Need A Bigger Blog

Cherry Blossom Redux

2010-03-04T22:47:00.000-08:00

Hanging Cherry Blossom, March 1, 2010
Adobe Systems courtyard, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 220mm, f/8.0, 1/125s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6

A year ago I shot the cherry blossoms in the courtyard at work with a rented lens. I love that shot, so it was my intention to recapture the magic this Spring. Two things are different:

It's not Spring. Not by the calendar anyway. But thanks to the balmy winter out here on the Pacific coast the local flora thinks it is. These trees are actually some of the last in the area to bloom; most of the cherry blossoms in my neighborhood are already falling to the ground. It has been painstaking waiting for them to pop.
I got a new lens and it's not a rental. More on that... now.

My buddy Erik bought himself a big, big shiny new lens that replaced his old 70-300. He kindly sold the older lens to me at a steal. This lens gives a me a little more reach and a modicum of sharpness over the 18-200. It arrived last week, just in time for me to test it out on the cherry blossoms. I'm pleased with it, mostly, but the minimum focus distance of five feet has posed some challenges. I did try out both my Lensbaby and the nifty 50/1.8 on the blossoms, and I hope to post some of those shots to you soon; I like them a bit more than this one.

Might even have more blossoms to shoot, if they last through the weekend and I can find some more time to shoot them on Monday.

And just for kicks, here's an alternate rendition of the photo. Started with the Aged Photo preset in Lightroom and adjusted to taste. Although I'm not overly impressed with these results, I do need to try other looks like this more often.

Instead of Working

2010-01-25T17:23:00.001-08:00

Coffee Break Canal, January 25, 2010
Lake Washington Ship Canal, Seattle, Washington
Taken with Palm Pre
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6

I don't drink coffee. I do like to walk outside and take photos. And sometimes Chase Jarvis is right. But having Lightroom helps quite a bit.

Light in Multiples

2010-01-24T15:31:00.000-08:00

Night Light, January 23, 2010
Mukilteo Light Station, Mukilteo, Washington
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/16.0, 30s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6

My wife is a very kind woman with an incredible amount of patience for my hobbies. Last night I dragged her up to Mukilteo, a little port nestled between Puget Sound and Boeing's Everett factory. She thought I was merely on a beer run with the coincidental opportunity to take some photos, but it was actually the other way around. I was there for the photos, meaning my lovely wife felt a bit abandoned while I fiddled with the camera. Rather than hang out in the cold with me, she waited it out at the brewpub.

Admittedly, I wouldn't have even known that the lighthouse was there if I hadn't been investigating Diamond Knot's brewery and ale house on Google Maps. Street view is an amazing thing, though it was predictably out-of-date and failed to display the ongoing construction at the park. I was able to scramble over some rocks and invade the light station grounds. (I wasn't the only stray tourist inside the fence, either.)

This image is a composite on two different levels. First is that it was taken with multiple long exposures, combined in Photoshop. Second is that each of the shots required multiple bursts of light from my flash. In order to create the exposures, I had the shutter open on bulb and manually popped the flash multiple times from different locations. Must have looked odd, me starting the exposure at camera then running off to a different corner of the building to fumble with the flash controls through my gloves, eyes on my watch the entire time, finally running back to the camera to close the shutter. Honestly, I was hoping that just one of those exposures would have come out as a good photo, but the building isn't lit externally so flash from multiple angles was wholly necessary. I composited in Photoshop to balance the different exposures and eliminate shadows.

By the by, the beer at Diamond Knot was good. I recommend their Industrial IPA, if you can get your hands on it.

Thar She Blows

2010-01-19T22:00:00.000-08:00

Kaua'i Spout, July 1, 2009
Spouting Horn Park, Kaua'i, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/6.3, 1/500s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6

No grand tales on this one. Spouting Horn was only a short drive from our hotel on Kaua'i and provided a easy afternoon diversion. There was a little souvenir market lining the upper lawn, nothing but disused sugarcane fields up the slopes, and feral chickens everywhere. Pure Kaua'i.

Waking Up Early on the Feast of Stephen

2009-12-27T21:32:00.000-08:00

Dougan Creek Confluence, December 26, 2009
Dougan Creek Campground, Washington
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/22.0, 1/2s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.6

On Boxing Day (aka the Feast of St. Stephen), Erik and I got up early to look for photos at sunrise. We made a slight miscalculation in that the time given for sunrise is when the sun actually breaks the horizon, which is significantly after the best light. Regardless, we were down in the canyon and well hidden from direct light.

Dougan Falls is up the Washougal River from my parents' house. The campground is now closed, but it's a short, pretty drive up to the falls. Clambering around on the slime-covered rocks below the falls is treacherous even in warm weather, and the windy at-freezing temperatures we found on Saturday caused us to use much extra caution when moving our tripods along the icy river bank.

This scene is found downstream from Dougan Falls, where Dougan Creek meets the Washougal River. I abandoned Erik for a while and clambered through the brush, looking for a better angle up river towards the falls. To my surprise I found Dougan Creek. You never know what you're going to find on St. Stephen's Day. (No old men gathering firewood, though.)

Deck the Phones

2009-12-09T15:57:00.001-08:00

Here's a holiday treat for you folks. I took a few of my photos from winters past and cropped them into photos sized for use as a smart phone background image. The size is 320x480, the right size for my Palm Pre (and coincidentally the iPhone).

I'll dispense with the full image statistics this time. Suffice to say they were all taken with my D80 and processed with Lightroom. The first two were from December 2008, the last one is from December 2007. If memory serves, first and last were taken with the 50mm and the center one was the wide end of the 18-200mm.

I'm not wholly satisfied with the middle one; I think it's a bit too blue. I might fix that before I use it on my phone. Right now I've got the first one as the background on my Pre, and the ringtone is a cute little intro to "Jingle Bells" from a Mormon Tabernacle Choir album.

'Tis the season.

Spotlight on Green

2009-12-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

Posing Lizard, July 1, 2009
Kiahuna Plantation Resort, Po'ipu, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/500s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.5

Ah, Hawai'i. I'm not through with you yet. I still have many photos of you in my catalog left to develop and publish.

This little guy wasn't camera shy. We found him while walking around the gardens at our resort, Kiahuna Plantation. The wife's sharp eyes caught him first, nestled in the leaves of a bush. I'm sure he's some sort of common lizard that Hawaiian residents sick the cats onto, but for us he was quite charming.

She Wears a Striped Hat

2009-11-29T21:31:00.000-08:00

Street Corner in Paradise, October 16, 2009
Avalon, California
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/4.0, 1/1000s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.5

Last month when we were in California the wife, her mother and I took a boat out of San Pedro to Santa Catalina Island. We didn't feel the need to rent a cart or pay for a tour, so we stuck with our feet and prowled through the alleys and shops of tiny little Avalon.

The house on the hill also tickled my photographic senses the last time I was on Catalina, some 15 years ago. I remember taking a photo of it with the medium format camera that I had borrowed from the high school photo lab. I recall that one didn't turn out well. It seems my photographic skills have improved over the past decade and a half, which pleases me.

Hiding From the Rain

2009-11-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

Bikes for Boats, November 18, 2009
Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/8.0, 1/15s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, Camera Landscape Profile

The camera club at work was recently invigorated by the discovery of new members who had been surreptitiously running their own secret camera club. (OK, truth is that we simply didn't know about each other until chance eavesdropping in the kitchen brought us together.) We've started going on photo walks again, and there are even contests. This week's theme is "color"; that's a bit of a challenge in gray, rainy Seattle during the fall and winter months.

My submission to the contest is above. You can view submissions from all of the club on Flickr.

With the Soft Side of the Hand

2009-08-27T23:24:00.001-07:00

What Flash?, August 22, 2009
Seattle, Washington
Taken with Palm Pre
Unadjusted

I am so going to take crap for posting this photo.

This is the very first photo I took with my new Palm Pre. Since I wasn't aware that it had one, I had no chance to warn the wife that the flash was going to go off. Haven't played much with the phone's camera since then, though it seems more limited than the one on my old phone. Here's hoping Palm gets off their butts and makes some proper camera controls.

(Side bar: some of you probably wonder why I bought a Pre instead of an iPhone, especially now that the newest version of the Apple gadget has focus control. Suffice it to say that I had my reasons, and if you want to know more you know how to contact me.)

Speaking of my old phone, I just spent half the evening retrieving all the photos off it and arranging them nicely into my gallery. They are now available for your viewing pleasure. Farewell, little Samsung ACH-930, you were a decent handset.

Walk This

2009-07-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Elliott Bay Sunset, July 18, 2009
Seattle and Elliott Bay, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 @ f/5.6, 1/100s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, Camera Landscape Profile

Yes, it's been a while since I posted. After the Hawaii trip and a short jaunt down to Southern California I had some other business to attend to, and since then I've been settling back into routine.

One of the bits of business was the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photo Walk. A co-worker and I decided that since the Big A sponsors this event, as employees we should represent by leading one of the walks. So we did. Tina did all of the real work, I just helped by suggesting routes and then using my 6'2" frame to head up the camera parade while she brought up the back end.

It was quite fun, though I didn't take many photos. We started the walk at Kerry Park, the source for all postcards of Seattle. We looped through the neighborhood and stopped at the foot of the Queen Anne retail district. Those of us so inclined had pizza and beer and conversation, then hoofed it back over to Kerry Park to catch the sunset. The end result was this panorama.

Not my best work, no. But not bad for an impromptu, slightly drunk, hand-held pano.

Roadside Attraction

2009-07-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

Red Dirt Falls, July 5, 2009
Waimea Canyon Drive, Kaua'i, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/16.0, 1/4s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, ACR 4.4 Profile

Back at home now. We really didn't want to leave Kaua'i. Sure, we wanted to see our kitties (who have been terribly affectionate and purry), but whatever magic is in the Hawaiian islands seems to have taken hold of us. Yes, we discussed the practicality of moving to Kaua'i several times. No, I don't think we were serious. Yet.

This photo was an awesome opportunity that we caught on the drive up to Waimea Canyon. (Ignore any bunk you hear about Mark Twain's "Grand Canyon of the Pacific" quote. He never set foot on Kaua'i.) This slash of dark red cut through the otherwise brown and green roadside landscape. There weren't any signs or much room to park, but stopping the car was mandatory.

This shot was almost a blessing. A couple of days before we had driven to two different waterfalls on the island, only to be disappointed by low waterflow and poor sightlines. Despite dragging my tripod to them I didn't take a single photo. Now, here at this little natural wonder, I was glad that I had brought the tripod all the way from Seattle. To get the optimal shot I had to set up in soft soil on the side of a hill. It was slippery and difficult to get the perspective I wanted, and maintaining my body position was painful for my feet. But I got my Hawaiian waterfall shot, so I'm happy.

FYI - I processed this photo on the flight back home, cramped up in an economy seat with a 17" laptop. I don't recommend this as a regular work environment.

Pointy Things

2009-07-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

Cathedrals, July 2, 2009
Na Pali Coast State Park, Kaua'i, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/8.0, 1/160s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, Camera Landscape Profile

Here, as promised are pointy things. Enjoy.

More specifically, these are the Cathedrals formations on the Na Pali cliffs of Kaua'i. We saw them from a catamaran (not unlike the one in the lower right of the photo), which took us around the western side of the island for snorkeling, dinner, a sunset, and a hell of a lot of fun.

I had to whip this out quick, as tonight is our last night on the island and I really ought to be packing. Tomorrow we make the sad, sad trek back to our regular lives.

Fresh Fish Foto

2009-07-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

Bluespine Unicornfish, July 4, 2009
Po'ipu Beach Park, Po'ipu, Hawaii
Canon PowerShot SD700 IS
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4

E. None of the above.

Since only one of you (and I'm tickling her toes right now) responded to the last post's poll, the results will be postponed. Instead I bring you this tasty tidbit straight from the ocean.

Snorkeling is tons of fun. Especially when you have an inexpensive underwater camera case and lots of fish swimming around you. I even spied a humuhumunukunukuapua'a, but he was a bit camera shy. These unicornfish were plentiful, and tended to stay in one place long enough for me to get good shots.

Incidentally, Happy Fourth of July from our 50th State.

Island Life

2009-07-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

Island Life, June 30, 2009
Kiahuna Plantation Resort, Po'ipu, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/11.0, 1/80s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, Camera Landscape Profile

Ah, you can feel the warm, tropical breeze blowing around you, can't you? You can feel that, right? It's tickling my ankles right now.

Here the wife is kicking back with one of her favorite hobbies, but still playing model for me. Until my intervention she had been sitting about ten feet to the right, in a less photogenic spot. Such a sweet girl.

Two bits of trivia about this photo. One, notice the moon between the fronds of the palm tree. Two, the building in the background is not really tilted like that. When shooting at extremely wide angles, straight lines have a habit of distorting, and I have not yet invested in perspective correction software.

A few more days left in the islands, and lots more photos to share. What would you like to see next? Vote by leaving a comment for one of the following:

A. My brief encounter with a tropical insurance agent.
B. One more reason why I am NOT a professional photographer.
C. Yet another super-wide angle photo in which I let the sky dominate the image.
D. Pointy things.

Island Wife

2009-06-30T22:41:00.000-07:00

Island Wife, June 29, 2009
Koko Marina, Honolulu, Hawaii
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0 @ f/4.0, 1/250s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.4, Camera D2X Mode 2 Profile

The wife very generously puts up with my hobbies. With a smile, even.

The islands are beautiful. We completed our three-day sojourn on O'ahu, and have now retired to the beaches of Po'ipu for the remainder of our holiday.

For our last night in Honolulu the wife let me indulge in another of my hobbies: we went to Kona Brewing's Koko Marina Pub. I would have much rather gone to Kona's brewery, but alas, we were on the wrong island. The food was good and the beer was excellent (though a little less hoppy than my northwest palate is accustomed to), but the service sucked. Also, the cab ride was ridiculously expensive. Taxis cost $3.20 a mile in Honolulu; I'll let you work out the cost between Koko Marina and our hotel at Waikiki.

Today is a different day, a different island. I've already got my eye on the two breweries here on Kaua'i, and this time I've got a rental car. I've also got some good shots from this evening's sunset that I wanted to share, but it's late enough already. Maybe tomorrow I'll work them up for you.

Until then, aloha.

Soccer shots

2009-06-25T21:49:00.001-07:00

The wife and I are headed to Hawai'i for 10 days on Saturday. I'm looking forward to some time to relax, but I'm also excited about photo opportunities. Balance, Tim, balance.

I'll probably be posting from the islands, but until then here's a few shots from that soccer game. I whipped these out on the request of The Big A's HR department, which wants to use the soccer team in an internal promotion. It was at least a motivator to shiny up the photos. I just hope I'm not running afoul of the photographer's release I signed by posting them here; the sentence with the word "exclusive" was a little murky.

Sam Power 2, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/640s, ISO 1600
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera Vivid profile

Yes, you have seen this one before. I spent some more time tweaking the colors. I've tried to go for the desaturated/high-contrast/grany-athletic-shot look. In Lightroom I used the settings for this photo as the basis for the others (since they all had the same nasty noise problem), and that worked out pretty well. Then I touched up the skin on each of them with a little color and that really helped.

Into the Turn, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 1600
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera Vivid profile

Dish It Down, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 1600
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera Vivid profile

Patience On the Ball, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/500s, ISO 1600
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera Vivid profile

Jon On the Run, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/250s, ISO 3200
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Adobe Photoshop CS4, Camera Vivid profile

This photo required a bit more tweaking than the others. Our badass subject here, Jonathan, is an employee but the two guys in the background are not. HR requires model releases for the photos, which technically isn't a problem but is a pain to arrange. So Photoshop lent a hand with a bit of masking and blurring. Not my best work, but if you don't look to hard it works.

Breaking News

2009-06-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

Remember this post? It has bloomed:

The Boston Globe: Visitors to website Sporcle learn geography and other subjects - and have fun

Dreams do come true, kiddies.

Double Dose

2009-06-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

Sam Power, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/640s, ISO 1600
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera D2X Mode 2 profile

Another shot from last week's game. ISO is lower so the noise isn't as bad. Still bad, though. I went for the high contrast look here. Not bad, except his skin tones are starting to bleed red, and it's a bit tricky to clean it up with the noise. Good enough for now.

Two Bridge View, June 15, 2009
Aurora and Fremont Bridges, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Tokina 12-24mm (AT-X 124 II) f/4.0@ f/11.0, 1/25s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

There was a little extra cash burning a hole in my pocket, so I did what any good photographer does: I bought a new lens. Specifically, the Tokina AT-X 124 AF Pro DX II. This is the newer version of Tokina's 12-24 with the built-in focus motor and better coatings on the glass. I chose it over the competition because A) it was in my price range, and B) it goes up to 24mm, which the Sigma 10-20 does not. I find that I like that length quite a bit, and I even considered the Nikon 24mm prime as an alternative. But I also wanted to get the extreme wide end, so as a DX/APS-C format shooter, my choice was made.

This was taken on my first jaunt out with the lens, wandering along the canal side of my office. Not a spectacular photo, but decent. I'll need to work with the lens a bit more to figure out the sharpness and chromatic aberration behavior, but it's promising so far.

Baseline Shot

2009-06-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Brick House vs. Woo-Deux, June 8, 2009
Georgetown Playfield, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 1/250s, ISO 3200
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 and Adobe Photoshop CS4, ACR 4.4 profile

I haven't been playing soccer lately due to a badly sprained ankle. Last week I finally went to one of my team's soccer games, but I brought my camera instead of my cleats. My teammate Daniel is in the Harvard t-shirt, doin' his thing. Can't remember what exactly happened next, but no doubt Daniel hammered the ball to somewhere. (Ultimately we won, 2-1.) I've got a couple other exposures from this game that I like; might post those later in the week.

Exposure was a bit tricky; it was late and the sun had sunk behind the trees, so I had the ISO cranked all the way up. Ideally I'd be shooting wide open and with a faster shutter speed but I wanted to stay at the sharper apertures of this lens. Kinda pointless in the end since the noise blows out all the detail anyway. I tried the trick in Photoshop where you sharpen the Lightness channel in LAB mode, and that helped a little.

I tried this as black and white but I couldn't find a mix that made this look good. The contrast is just too low to make it interesting. Leaving the color in lets the image pop a little bit more.

Next week I hope to start playing again.

The Perfect Lens for Being Drunk

2009-06-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Space Needle After Half a Bottle of Wine, June 5, 2009
The Space Needle, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Lensbaby Composer @ f/2.8, 1/80s, ISO 800
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

For our fifth anniversary the wife and I dined at SkyCity, the revolving restaurant at the Space Needle. Absolutely the best views in Seattle, especially at sunset. The food was not as spectacular; it was good but be clear that the significant prices are justified (just barely) by the view, not the food quality. Savvy shoppers will sign up for the SkyCity e-mail list, which netted us a free entree and a bottle of wine. The wife doesn't drink wine (well; the wife doesn't drink wine well), so it was up to me to absorb the value of our freebie.

After tottering back down to ground level, while we waited for the valet to bring the car (yes folks, the wife drove) I broke out the camera with Lensbaby mounted. I teetered underneath the tower and pointed upwards. I'm pleased with the results.

The tweaking in Lightroom was pretty extensive. I debated whether or not to try to kill the color cast on the outer ring, but decided that the shot looked boring in black and white. Maybe I could play with the color balancing for the grayscale conversion and get interesting tones. I'd have to be careful, as the high ISO tends to cause noise to pop out easily. That is one benefit to using the Lensbaby: all the blurring tends to mitigate the noise.

Charred and Pointy

2009-06-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

Hot Tools, May 9, 2009
Art by Fire, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 50mm f/2.8 @ f/8, 1/125s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Adobe Standard profile

The wife has a new hobby, glass blowing. In fact, right now she's at her first formal class at Art by Fire. I took this shot a few weeks ago when she was doing a one-off class there during the monthly Ballard artwalk. I warmed up the image quite a bit by enhancing the white balance and adding a little bit of split toning. I thought about going black and white, which would let the split tone really come out, but I decided to leave the original colors in without desaturating.

I've slacked a little bit when it comes to the blog and processing my photos. Haven't been shooting much, either, which is usually what drives me to post new photos. Not that I don't have lots of old ones I can work on. I'll endeavor to be better about posting, and in any case I've got a big trip coming up at the end of the month that should generate a ton of images.

Photorturnity

2009-05-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

Sporcle Guys, May 14, 2009
Derek Pharr and Matthew Ramme, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 @ f/8, 1/200s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

Let me introduce you to Sporcle.com. It is awesome. You will lose much free time there.

Sporcle is the product of one of my soccer teammates and a couple of his buddies. Today I got an e-mail from Matt asking if I owned a "real camera". (No, Matt, my camera exists in a plane of existence between this one and the next, and you can only use it when you submit to the will of the spoon that does not bend.) The Boston Globe writing a story on the site and requested a photo to go with it. Matt wanted something better than a point-and-shoot snapshot, hence the call to me.

We found a shady spot around the corner from my house (since my currently sprained ankle limits my travel), I set up the ol' SB-800 flash on my tripod-cum-lightstand with the LumiQuest Softbox III, and we snapped away. A little tweaking in Lightroom and here you go. Not bad for a one-light shot, methinks. Though I would have preferred a taller stand to highlight the hair a little, and a second light or reflector to fill the shadows on the left side.

Although nothing is guaranteed, I'm pretty psyched to think that a photo of mine might be in print. Even if it is only in Boston. Thanks to Matt for remembering that I'm a photo geek, and thanks to David Hobby for his numerous tips on how to not suck at this sort of thing.

Follow the Tracks

2009-05-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

Sharp Tracks, April 25, 2009
Train Bridge, Vancouver, Washington
Nikon D80, Lensbaby Composer @ f/?, 1/500s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera D2X Mode 2 profile

This is the first shot with the Lensbaby that I really like. I think it looks better in a bigger view where you can get a closer look at the detail in the tracks and the view down the bridge, so please do click on the photo to see the larger version. It's not perfect; I'd like the interior of the Bridge to be sharper, but I'm still learning with the 'baby.

Plot: Twist

2009-04-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

I found this far too amusing:
http://www.postmodernbarney.com/2009/04/uncomfortable-plot-summaries/

Thanks to Mr. Neil for the link.

I didn't even read the whole list, it's much too long. But I couldn't help but create a few of my own. Hitchcock is sorely underrepresented on the list so I focused on some of his better known works:

Strangers on a Train: Gay man tries to help a tennis player marry his girlfriend.
Rear Window: Despondent cripple projects his fantasies onto neighbors.
North by Northwest: Businessman finds a new career while on vacation.
The Trouble With Harry: Town conspires to hide murder.
The Birds: Socialite is frightened by wildlife.
Psycho: Son grieving for his mother is harassed by out-of-towners.

This exercise is not unlike those re-cut movie trailers in which the meaning of the plot is twisted. (ex.: "The Shining") Here, an economy of words and simplification of just one element of the plot seem to do the trick.

Here's a couple of bonus synopses for you:

Young Frankenstein: Man falls in love with his surgeon's fiancée.
Jaws: New guy in town prevents collapse of the local industry.

Insert Parenting Pun Here

2009-04-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Baby Bridge Belly, April 22, 2009
Aurora Bridge, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Lensbaby Composer @ f/2.0, 1/320s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera D2X Mode 2 profile

For a moment, your indulgence in pun is required.

Last night, after 6 hours of gestating on Craigslist, I became the proud papa of a slightly used Lensbaby Composer.

Since most folks that read this blog aren't hip-deep in the photography swamp like myself, a little clarification may help. A Lensbaby is a special effect camera lens that allows the lens elements to be moved off-axis. This results in exaggerated streaking, blurring, or distortion around the area of focus (the "sweet spot"). Among other neat effects you can get the "toy train town" look, where real-world views appear to be miniaturized. (Here's a random example from Flickr.) There's a little bit of that look in the shot above, if you look directly at the in-focus cross beams. Keep in mind I've only had it for a day. Check out the Lensbaby gallery for an idea of what it can do in the right hands.

Lensbabies have been incredibly popular for the past few years. They can be just a toy, something fun to fiddle around with, or they can be used for serious photography. Until I learn to take advantage of its capabilities, my Lensbaby will remain in the toy category, but I'm looking forward to playing with it.

Oooo, also, today I received my tripod and head. The Gitzo GT2531 and Really Right Stuff BH-40. Cooler (and more expensive) than the Lensbaby, though much harder to see through. It's been just over one year that I've been saving for this support system; my anticipation and decision making process for it was obsessive. Now I can retire the cruddy old tripod I got in high school that has sand in the leg locks, is falling apart, and never came up to more than half my height anyway. The new tripod is 21st century carbon fiber, magnesium alloy, and anodized aluminum. Very neat and shiny, and an important tool in my photographic arsenal.

Two fat new photo toys in 24 hours. I better get out shooting. Let this be a lesson to you, kids: don't get into photography. It'll drain your bank account and ruin your life.

Photographic Goldmine

2009-04-18T00:04:00.001-07:00

White River Crevasse, April 17, 2009
White River Falls State Park, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 @ f/16.0, 20mm, 1/2s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

Decaying Powerhouse, April 17, 2009
White River Falls State Park, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 @ f/18.0, 18mm, 1/2s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Adobe Standard profile

Today was my last away from civilization and schedules, so I had limited options on where to end my photo safari. I picked White River Falls State Park off the map purely by name and location. At first the park doesn't look like much: some picnic tables on a grassy field and the White River beyond. But walk down the trail and, hoo boy! This place is a photographic gold mine. Besides the falls themselves there's the decrepit old powerhouse (from the decaying, graffiti-ed generators inside, that's my assumption) and the pipes, rusting metal, and other debris from a forgotten age. This is definitely worth a second visit, preferable early in the morning when the sun will be hitting the falls just right.

Evening Sun Two-Fer

2009-04-17T00:09:00.001-07:00

Crooked River Reflection, April 15, 2009
Smith Rock State Park, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 36mm, 1/200s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Adobe Standard profile

Inverted Sunset, April 16, 2009
Painted Hills Unit, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 @ f/8.0, 48mm, 1/15s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

You get a double-shot today because the Internet in my hotel room in Bend went on the fritz last night. After the long, late drive back to civilization this evening I relocated at 11 PM with a beer, Girl Scout cookies, and my computer setup (17" MacBook, hard drive, Wacom tablet, power brick, etc.) to the lobby of the hotel, where there's wi-fi. (Really? Just in the lobby? WTF, Bend Inn & Suites. This hotel is worth a post unto itself. And I opted to pay for the second night. Oy.)

I realize there's an disconcerting gap in saturation between these two photos. The Smith Rock one is kind of begging for it with those really satiny blues in the reflection in the Crooked River. (BTW, I don't think that particular rock is THE Smith Rock.) With the Painted Hills shot I'm trying to keep the colors realistic- the natural colors of the rock are amazing enough without enhancement.

Now that we know what makes these photos different, what do they have in common? They were both taken in late afternoon (or evening, depending on when you take your tea), a deliberate attempt to put myself in a photogenic location when the light was favorable. It worked to a degree; see exhibits A and B, above. These photos also were both taken with the handy but sharpness-challenged Nikkor 18-200 with a polarizer. The lens is OK at f/8 on the wide end (again, see exhibits A & B). The polarizer is bloody fantastic in these conditions, as long as you're pointing AWAY from the sun. Lessons learned.

Light (and) Rain

2009-04-14T23:44:00.000-07:00

Intermittent Rain, April 14, 2009
Silver Falls State Park, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 @ f/11.0, 0.6s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

After shooting at Silver Falls for a couple of hours I started the drive back to civilization. As Highway 214 broke above the crest of the park's valleys I could see brightness behind the trees, a warm light spreading across the evening sky. When I rounded the corner at the park gate I yanked the steering wheel over and parked at the overlook. The glowing Spring sun had lit up the intermittently drizzling clouds like a monoblock behind a softbox. Shadows of rain draped down as tendrils of their mother clouds, reaching deep into the foothills of the Cascades like the roots of a thirsty young plant.

I grumbled a little as I dragged out the tripod again.

The Bridge Behind You

2009-04-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

Bridge to Mo's, April 10, 2009
Mo's Restaurant, Lincoln City, Oregon
Nikon D80, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm, f/4.0, 1/160s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera D2X Mode 2 profile

I like this shot. It was a throw-away; as the wife and I walked to Mo's I turned around and thought that the bridge looked interesting so I snapped a single photo. Didn't worry about the settings on the camera, or the fact that I still had a neutral grad on the lens. (Though the GND was certainly helpful.) Regardless, it turned out beautifully. My tweaks in Lightroom were subtle but extensive. I'm loving the new localized corrections, they saved the sky from being blown out.

Tannenbaum Beach

2009-04-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

Sandy Christmas, April 11, 2009
Lincoln City, Oregon (Taft beach, near Spanish Head)
Nikon D80, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm, f/8.0, 1/400s, ISO 400
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, ACR 4.4 profile

Kind of hard to tell, this appears to be a Christmas tree buried in the sand. A small evergreen at the very least. Exposure to sun and waves is stripping off the bark and bleaching the underlying wood, as with any driftwood. It was a bit unusual to look at.

I'm not sure if there's a lot of appeal to this composition but when I saw the tree an image developed in my head. I didn't get the exact shot that I wanted because it was very windy and I didn't want to swap lenses. Despite that I've come pretty close to what I saw in my mind. Split toning and desaturation would probably smooth out the color imbalance that's bugging me.

Cherry Blossoms 2

2009-04-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossoms 2, April 9, 2009
Adobe Systems courtyard, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D70, Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 150mm, f/4.0, 1/2500s, ISO 200
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Adobe Standard profile

I grabbed this shot while testing the Nikkor 70-200 that I rented for a vacation in the next week. Even on the older D70 body I'm very impressed at the sharpness, color, and resolution of the lens. Wow.

I don't think I'm fully finished developing this photo, nor the prior cherry blossoms one. (Too much saturation there. I might try some of Angela Drury's tricks from Photoshop User mag on tweaking the camera calibration for subtler effects.) But I'm very happy to have gotten some snaps of the sakura this year. They've been very, very pretty in Seattle the past few weeks.

Cherry Blossoms

2009-03-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

Cherry Blossoms, March 29, 2009
Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle, Washington
Nikon D80, Nikkor 35mm f/2.0 @ f/11, 1/60s, ISO 100
Developed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3, Camera D2X Mode 2 profile

When he woke up, he was a TSA agent

2009-03-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

My knowledge of Kafka is limited to vague notions of a giant cockroach. Regardless, I love absurdism. I also love The Onion. Thus, the awesomeness that is this:

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Credit to Mr. Neil for the link.

It's all about the awesomeness

2009-03-13T14:34:00.001-07:00

This is the most awesome thing that the Internet has created to date:
Thru-you

Thanks to JoCo for the link. The awesomeness gets passed around and around and around.

Creeping towards sentience

2009-03-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to have your MP3 player talk to you? I know I haven't.

You know who you are

2009-03-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

Someone complained that I wasn't posting enough on this here blog.

So I will now inform you about Paul and Storm.

Paul and Storm are awesome. You can listen to all of their songs for free, but you should pay them if you like them and want to keep them and maybe play them outside of the rather awkward format of a web page. I know I did.

I first experienced Paul and Storm at a Jonathan Coulton concert a month ago. (JoCo is also awesome. You can also listen to his songs for free. You should also pay him money for his music if you enjoy it. I know I did.) I was previously aware of them but was not prepared for the sheer hilarity and enjoyment that is Paul and Storm. I am now a fan. I visit their web site regularly and vote in their faux-political elections. I listen to their podcast and sometimes I even pay attention to what they say. I frequently refer to things in a bad Randy Newman impersonation as "you my friend". The term "dejected arrrrrr" is in my lexicon. Overall, Paul and Storm have been a transformative experience in my life.

I encourage everyone to click on the copious links that I have so thoughtfully provided and enjoy the music of Paul and Storm. I know I did.

Why Queen is like pie.

2009-01-08T16:38:00.001-08:00

I bought a pair of greatest hits Queen CD's a few months ago. (Specifically this and this, which appeared to be the wisest way to go after reviewing the comments on Amazon.) I wasn't previously a Queen fan but wanted to capture a few tracks that I liked and see what else they had to offer. I'm pleased though not inclined (yet) to seek out their individual albums.

As I am somewhat of the obsessive-compulsive type, after sucking the albums into iTunes I ordered the songs by release date rather than the haphazard way they were stretched across the two discs. Thus the playlist experience gives me a solid two-hour journey from "Keep Yourself Alive" to "The Show Must Go On".

Consuming the entire playlist in one go (which I may do while working in my office) brings to mind eating a slice of a really good double-crusted pie. For the sake of simplicity, let's pick my favorite: marionberry. This simile is clearly caused by my own musical tastes, so I will try to explain without engaging in rock criticism.

Queen's earliest songs are like the top crust of the pie- the first thing you likely encounter if you cut a piece off the tip and fork it into your mouth. It's wonderful and delicous, but not truly great. In the grand scheme of rock 'n roll I am not a big classic rock fan, but I do enjoy inventive guitar riffs and clever lyrics (ex., "Keep Yourself Alive", "Killer Queen").

Having consumed the thin, upper layer of Queen's earliest releases, then you hit the filling: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "We Will Rock You", "Bicycle Race", etc. Queen at their height of talent and popularity, and I shouldn't have to explain why it's awesome. A few of their lesser hits are like off notes in the filling, like the marionberries didn't get enough sugar, but it's still crazy delicious.

Finally you get to the back crust of the pie. It's a little too thick and dry. This is about 1986 for Queen, when their taste for dreamy synthesizers began, which conflicts with my musical palate. It feels a little too much like a synth-driven 80's pop band with big hair, white jackets, and a keytar. Not that it's awful, it's still good pie, but I don't enjoy it as much as Queen's earlier work. I listen to it because I feel obligated to clean up my dessert plate. Occasionally, though, there is a dribble of filling that I can swirl the crusty bits in that makes it better (ex., "I Want It All").

Pie is yummy. So is Queen.

Gift. Receipts.

2008-12-22T18:17:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, folks! Here's a present for you- a brand new, shiny post.

The photo above is of the courtyard and tower at the Marin County Civic Center, one of the last buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The wife and I gave ourselves a self-guided tour of the building while we were in California in November for a wedding.

The other day I emptied out my wallet and found a few receipts from that trip. I thought some commentary would make an interesting journal:

11/06/2008 9:23 PM Blue Mermaid Chowder House & Bar
$62.39 (plus tip)
After flying in and arriving at our hotel, the wife and I trekked hungrily into the wilds of San Francisco. The walk was a bit longer on our empty stomachs than we liked, and we settled in at the Blue Mermaid near Fisherman's Wharf almost out of desperation. But not disappointment. Good food, great dessert, though a bit spendy.
11/07/2008 10:00 AM Department of Parking & Traffic Citation
$36.00
To make sightseeing easier (and a hair cheaper) we stopped in at what the Internet told me was a convenient place to buy a bus pass. I thought it would be like the Tri-met desk at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland (ie., a nice lady behind a counter), but it ended up more like a well-guarded DMV. In order to enter we passed a metal detector and an armed guard who asked us to state our business. Then we stood in one line to get a number, then we waited for our number to be called. All for a damn three-day transit pass. Sheesh.
11/08/2008 1:30 PM San Francisco Fish Company
$19.53
We went with my parents and a handful of aunts to the Saturday farmer's market at the Ferry Terminal building. Inside the beautifully renovated building are permanent stalls, including this fish monger where we got lunch. I had the oyster sandwich, the wife had fish and chips. Later I had mushroom-flavored ice cream. Yum.
11/09/2008 4:57 PM Blue Mermaid Chowder House & Bar
$7.32
Yep, back to the Blue Mermaid. We didn't actually get dessert on our first trip but were intrigued by the Chocolate and Irish Cream Bread Pudding on the menu. (On that first night we indulged in a Ghiradelli fudge sundae instead.) So after a long, hard day of sightseeing we found ourselves back at the Blue Mermaid and shared the pudding as a late afternoon snack. Absolutely delicious.
11/10/2008 1:24 PM Charles M. Schulz Museum
$16.00
On our last full day of the trip we drove up to Santa Rosa (stopped in San Rafael on the way to see the Marin Center) to visit the mecca of Peanuts and its creator. Schulz lived in Santa Rosa for most of his adult life and a tidy little package of buildings commemorates his tenure there: an ice rink, an indoor tennis court, baseball fields, a gift shop and gallery, and most recently the museum. No roller coasters, no teenagers sweating it out in a Snoopy suit, just an honest expression of the things Schulz enjoyed in his life. The museum itself was pleasant but not astounding. I did gain some insight as to why Schulz's pen lines tend to look jittery, like he was fighting Parkinson's disease. (He wasn't.) After examining a number of original Peanuts panels I could see that his pen lines were evenly jagged, as though he was moving the pen back and forth in a regular pattern as he drew. When the much larger original art was shrunk down to newspaper size the jagged strokes just look jittery.

That's a pretty concise review of our time in SF, but those are all the receipts that I found in my wallet. Took lots of photos though, so maybe I'll share more in the future.

HA!

2008-12-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

No, I haven't forgotten about el blog. As you can see, I've updated the template. More changes and new posts will be coming when I get around to them.

Hollywood In Your Pocket

2008-09-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

Back in July I participated in the Seattle leg of this year's 48 Hour Film Project. I mentioned it only briefly on the blog, just before the actual event. We finally got the link to our film, which can only be distributed online via the 48HFP site (our agreement with the project restricts our distribution options; no YouTube for us). Enjoy it in all its glory:

http://ww2.48.tv/bin/index.cfm/id/ae12d98f-09c4-4769-a533-a7a079ea31d9

Comments/questions welcome. If you want the full tale (at least from my perspective) of how the movie was made, feel free to ask next time we're in the same room. There's far too much to tell than can be squeezed into one little blog.

Monsters, the Lot of Us

2008-09-08T11:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true. The Kurkoski Boys eat children. But we cook them up gourmet-style first:

Cooking With Sarah

The non-fictional aspect of this is that my brother has started blogging about and posting photos of my niece and nephew. Much appreciated. That whole Pacific Ocean thing kind of gets in the way of casual family get-togethers.

Toe back in the blog-water

2008-09-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm going to test my foot in action for the first time since the injury. Well, not the first time, exactly; last night I took it to the gym and worked on the treadmill for a while. The foot survived but the rest of me is rather weary after experiencing strenuous exercise after a month's absence.

Also, it turns out my toe wasn't broken, just badly sprained. That's how it felt to me but the doc said "broken" at first so I followed his instructions. A couple of weeks later I got a voicemail from him, with news from the radiologist that the hairline fracture in the x-ray was likely a hairline artifact.

In any case the foot feels OK mostly, though I can still feel the pain when I flex it too far. Soccer tonight (the first game of the fall season) should be interesting.

So where have my bad toe and I been for the past month? Not far, really. Worked a lot recently. Attended the annual Kurkoski family campout at Ohanapecosh on Mt. Rainier. Took some photos. (Sorry, nothing online yet.) Played a lot of Burnout: Paradise on the 360.

Broken Again

2008-08-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, but I won't be playing soccer tonight or for the next few weeks. I suffered a broken bone in my right foot at last week's game. It happened on an innocent play: I blocked a shot with an outstretched leg and the attacker's foot hammered into the bottom of mine instead of the ball. I didn't feel anything significant on impact, but a few steps later I knew that something had gone amiss. A visit with the doctor and an x-ray confirms that there's a fracture in my second metatarsal. The doctor told me I'll be out 4-7 weeks. I don't have a cast but instead wear a stiff-soled booty that keeps my foot from flexing more than necessary.

I am both distressed and relieved by the injury. Soccer has become really intense this season. I've been subbing for a team in the over-30 division on Sundays, upping my activity to two games per week. I really enjoy the dynamics of the older age group, especially compared to the energetic 20-somethings that my Monday team is playing against. The games in that division have become far too competitive, and sometimes out of control (give or take the attention of the referee). All in all, I think it's a good time for me to take a break from the sport, especially as the warmest time of year settles on us.

Contiuing on the topic of the care and use of my feet, I invested in a device to shave back the callouses that have built up on my feet during all these soccer games. You can learn the manufacturer's name for the device from their web site, but I simply refer to it as the Flesh Shredder. (It is, in essence, a cheese grater for your foot.) But when you call it by this name, you must utter it as if you are singing the refrain of a heavy metal song. "FLESH shreddah!" The thing actually works pretty well, better than a pumice stone, but progress against my super-thick callouses is very slow and the thing's built-in bin for catching skin flakes doesn't work worth a damn. If you purchase your own Flesh Shredder, use it over a bucket unless you like dead skin powder sprinkled all over your rug like canned parmesan on moldy spaghetti. Flesh SHREDDER!

Little Witches with Beards

2008-07-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Adieu, mon ami rouge

2008-07-14T16:14:00.000-07:00

Today I shed a little tear, as my very first car passed to its new owners. After the wife and I moved to Seattle we came to the conclusion that two cars was one more than we needed. And although my faithful and trouble-free little Red is both more gas efficient and fully paid for, it was saddled with a wife-unfriendly manual transmission. Believe me, I tried to teach the wife to drive a stick. She and it just didn't get along.

So au revior, my friend. You gave me many good miles, and you will be going to a good new home. You've already met your slightly older and slightly smaller new brother. He's just as red and shiny as you and even has dents and dings in the same place. Please don't hold the fact that he's a hatchback against him. And don't mind the crumbs from the babies that will inhabit your new home soon. I'm sure it can't be worse than the food I dropped in you during the late night drives back to Bremerton from a soccer game, or bits of snacks that fell during road trips around the Pacific Northwest. Keep your new owners safe (and let the husband rock out a little every now and then with your awesome stereo). I'll miss you.

</sentimentality over inanimate objects>

Burnt out and ready to go

2008-07-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been obsessed with Burnout Paradise, and have been spending most of my free hours with controller in hand. On one hand I feel guilty for playing video games so much, on the other hand it feels good to enjoy something so much.

After playing the demo months ago, I was actually pretty indifferent to Paradise. What I enjoyed most out of the earlier games in the series was just smashing up cars for big points, and the open gameplay in Paradise appeared to have robbed the game of that joy. But after engaging in some online action and learning how the open city format bridges you between events, I began to get hooked. Now the pursuit of newer, better cars and a better record on my license has me enthralled.

Tonight I'm in forced retirement from the Xbox, though. I'm taking part in the 48 Hour Film Project, which makes its stop in Seattle this weekend.. One of my co-workers ponied up the cash for an entry and put together a crew. I volunteered to do the post (effects and titles) work. That's right, I'm a one-man ILM this weekend.

Since the game just started, we're hanging around in Tom's apartment, waiting for the writers to put the script in a decent enough state that we can start storyboarding and planning the next two days. What I hear from the writer's room is that we should be good to go soon. Even though I'm only the post guy, I want to be on set to prevent the crew from creating any problems, so it's gonna be a sleepless weekend.

But the wife made cupcakes, so I think everything will be OK.

There are smurfs in my camera shop

2008-06-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Being a camera snob ain't easy. For example, I bought a circular polarizer at Glazer's last weekend. I bought the cheap one but wasn't satisfied with it when I got home, so I'll be trading it in for the expensive B+W version. It costs $100 more but I know I won't think twice about it. In photography, confidence in your gear comes above all.

As long as I'm planning a trip to the camera store, I thought I would check their web site for some other accessories I'm interested in buying, only to discover:

A) They don't have an item I want, and
B) The store is infested by smurfs (click the image for a larger view).

You'd think that as a camera store they could come up with better example products in the helpful text. Maybe "lens and filter", or "tripod and head". I'm going to walk in there this week and ask them for a smurf, just to prove the point. (Yes, I realize that this was probably the result of a web designer who likes smurfs but doesn't know cameras. Appriopriate feedback to the user is important, though in the context of web design I'll leave this in the hands of my lovely and talented wife to discourse.)

Flip the switch

2008-06-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

No, I don't hate you. No, you didn't make me mad. No, no, no, it's not your fault at all. I haven't been writing because, well, let me explain.

First, I don't feel that writing a blog has a lot of value for me right now. Since I'm not standing on any particular soapbox, this blog has functioned mostly as a personal journal. That's well and good but I've become tired of writing about myself. I have considered shifting gears and using this or another blog to speak on topics more professional and less personal, but that's a new project with a different set of implications.

Second, the standard reason: I've been busy. Not wildly, where-did-my-free-time-go busy, just a shift in priorities that puts writing a journal at the bottom of my to-do list.

Those two very good reasons aside, I know that I occasionally get visitors here, so I'll give you a quick update on what's been occupying my time and why I even bothered to update this journal at all.

To start, I've got a new job. I'm still at Adobe, but after 12 years of experience in customer support I am now in the business of producing products instead of supporting them. I transferred to the After Effects Quality Engineering team. After Effects is an application that I know very very well, and I'm proud to be a member of a concentrated, highly regarded group that produces a widely used and highly regarded product. My role is more or less that of a software tester- as the software developers make changes to the code, I test the product to make sure it behaves correctly (doesn't give errors, or crash, pass gas, or talk on a cell phone in a movie theater). There's a few perks of being on a team like this, but I'll bore you with details some other day. It's a big change for me, and there are a lot of new things to learn. It's a good step for my career and frees me from the constraints in tech support that had been bothering me.

Actually, there's not much more to tell. The job is what has been keeping me busy lately. There have been some other activities- drove down to Portland a couple of times, my soccer team played in the division championship game, I bought some new camera accessories, petted the cats a lot, and struggled to keep my lemon tree alive after foolishly putting it outside the day before a massive Spring rainstorm. But I'm not gonna blab on all day about myself. Let's find something new to talk about.

In blatant violation of the rule

2008-04-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

One very long and very busy week later, I'm happily back at home and on my own couch. Vegas was fun and I can't wait until next year, but living out of one's suitcase can become weary. I'm glad to be home where I can skritch the cats, play soccer, and cook my own meals.

To recap, I was in Las Vegas to help man the booth my employer operates at the NAB Show, so it was mostly a working week for me. That being said, an all-expenses paid trip to Sin City is never short of adventure. The wife joined me on Thursday night to make it a proper vacation through the weekend.

There are many details to share, but in order to avoid my effusive writing style from chaining my wrists to the keyboard for the next week, I'll limit the tale to a Letterman-style Top 10 summary. Mr. Shaffer, the theme, if you please.

Top 10 experiences Tim had in Las Vegas:

Number 10: Stayed at a 5-star Hotel. The Big A treats us well. The Wynn is a classy place and actually quite understated by Las Vegas standards. After spending most of the week there it was disappointing to switch to the nice-but-aging Hilton timeshare at The Flamingo. I just couldn't justify the cost of The Wynn on my own budget.

Number 9: Rode the Las Vegas Monorail. Buried within me are bits of train geekery and Disney geekery. I got a little thrill by taking advantage of a public transportation system descended from the Disneyland Monorail and that's not on Disney property, birthed fifty years ago by Walt's passions for trains and futurism.

Number 8: Saw the Lions at the MGM Grand. We stumbled on the lion habitat while trying to find the exit. A pair of young lions were frolicking in the glass enclosure, barely older (but much larger) than our own kitties at home. They were biting and chasing each other and playing with their toy balls like any carefree kitten. When they tired, they laid down and got pets from the trainers. Very cute.

Number 7: Didn't pay for dinner most of the week. Granted, I was on an expense account so my meals were covered regardless. But every night until the wife and I were on our own, at least one co-worker was present and the senior staff member was responsible for the bill. I had some mighty fine meals this way.

Number 6: Pulled over by the LVPD while riding a motorcycle for the first time. A co-worker rode his bike down to Vegas and wanted to take me out to dinner at a Japanese place way off The Strip. He only had one helmet, which he gave to me, and I rode bitch while he took it slow. We got lost, teasing the odds of being seen by the coppers, and indeed we were pinched. We played dumb about helmet laws and got off with a warning and a suggestion that I find alternate means of transportation.

Number 5: Earned $100 for five minutes of work. On the first morning of the NAB Show a pair of desperate staffers from another company brought me a DVD that needed editing before the show opened. The video they were going to run at their booth contained an advertisement for a product they weren't offering. That's a rather simple job with the video tools that my own company makes, so I quickly had them fixed up. In gratitude they left me a $100 bill, which I politely refused, but they just left it on the desk and ran off. I didn't have much of a choice but to take it. I meant to go by their booth and at least say "Hi" and try to give it back, but I was so busy with my own booth that I didn't find the time.

Number 4: Broke a slot machine. Most Las Vegas casinos have a novelty-sized slot machine with giant reels. At the Golden Nugget, yard-long daquiris in hand, the wife and I waited in line to try our luck with the oversized one-armed-bandit. When my turn came up I landed a $10 prize on the third pull. I cashed out, expecting ten neat "clinks" into the coin bin. "Clink... clink...", and that was all. Error 3300. We had to wait for the service man to come around; the machine was simply out of coins. The wait, however, was enough to disappoint and disperse the remainder of the line.

Number 3: Discovered that Jean-Luc Picard is my descendant. Any good geek who journeys to Vegas must stop at the Hilton to partake in Star Trek: The Experience. We got tickets at half-price (thanks, Tix4Tonight!), but arrived kind of late. We did the Borg Invasion first (the "4D" flight simulator is lackluster, but there is a decent thrill in being chased by actors in Borg costumes), and then we lined up for the Klingon Encounter show at closing time. Since this older show isn't popular anymore the wife and I were the only ones in line. Despite the tiny audience the actors worked very hard to make the story come alive. I would have tipped them had they not all disappeared after their bits were done. Now, I have to spoil the plot a little bit for you to get the joke: In the ST:TNG era, a rogue Klingon captain tries to use time travel to kill Picard's ancestors and thus prevent his birth. He screws up and the audience, one of whom is supposedly said ancestor, is transported into the future and sci-fi adventure ensues. Follow the logic here- since the wife and I were the only two people in the audience, and we can reasonably assume that we don't divorce or have children outside of wedlock, the conclusion is that we're both Picard's ancestors. Jean-Luc Picard is our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson! Neat.

Number 2: Participated in a video podcast with Warp 11. In a very different kind of Star Trek experience, I hung out with Karl and Kiki from Warp 11 at Quark's, the ST-themed bar at the Hilton. Karl also works for the Big A (Kiki just has a nice A) at a different office; he was at the show and we met via a common co-worker. Karl and Kiki were being interviewed for a video podcast for a web site I didn't quite catch the name of. (Google wouldn't cough up the details.) Once I get the info from Karl, I'll post a link so you can watch me enter the scene and slurp Warp Core Breach out of Kiki's lap.

And finally, the number 1 experience that I had while in Las Vegas:

Number 1: I made Penn Jilette laugh. We saw Penn & Teller at the Rio, which I recommend highly. 90 minutes that just fly by. After the show P&T very graciously greeted the audience to sign autographs and take photos. Since Penn had released his long, black locks from his ponytail at the end of the show, I did the same for my pulled-back hair as I walked up to have my photo snapped. That elicited a chuckle from the big man, "Yes, yes, I know your hair is longer than mine!" Frankly, Penn is an easy audience, but it still feels good to have got the laugh.

Las Vegas, Day 2

2008-04-13T12:53:00.001-07:00

I meant to spend some time last night writing about the trip down, but I ran out of time. Last night was, er, an adventure. I'll relate it to you some other itme.

Right now I'm sitting in the Big A's booth at the NAB Show in the Las Vegas Convention Center. The photo shows that we're still in setup mode, but getting closed to being finished.
My feet are already starting to hurt, so I know it's going to be a long, hard week. I'm glad that the wife and I took the extra days to relax and have a bit of vacation after the show is over. I probably won't get to post again until after I get back, so until then, folks.

I'd rather not, thanks

2008-03-22T22:45:00.001-07:00

Working from home on the weekend sucks. 'Nuff said.

And

2008-03-17T22:35:00.001-07:00

The mother-in-law came to visit at the end of last week. It was an excuse to take a stroll around the Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday. I got a few photos, nothing spectacular. But a little time and fun spent in Lightroom can bring to life an otherwise blah photo. (Like the one above of the ampersand from "Love & Loss".)

Life rolls on otherwise. I got the OK to go to the NAB Show in Las Vegas next month. I'll be working the booth, of course, which means four long sole-punishing days of standing and answering questions. But free trip to Vegas, man. The wife plans to fly down at the end of the week and we'll stay a couple of extra days, maybe see Penn & Teller. It'll be good. I need a galdurn break from the routine.

More Photos, also Soup

2008-03-09T22:08:00.001-07:00

The Camera Club took yet another walk on Friday, this time to Gasworks Park on Lake Union. Photos from my camera (via Lightroom) on Flickr.

The wife and I have been working on replicating our holiest of holy culinary grails, the lentil soup from The Rheinlander. Working straight from their recipe book may seem like cheating, but it's not very well written and there's a modicum of technique required. That being said, I think we've got it pretty good. Tonight we did our second batch in a new, heavy bottomed stockpot that I bought for the purpose. It turned out well, a little better than the last, but we're still far from replicating the utter perfection that comes from Horst's kitchen.

To be honest, I spent too much on the damn stockpot. It's way too big (we could do a triple batch in it), and it's not even the model I wanted. It was the best match for what I thought I wanted. Almost immediate buyer's remorse when I took it out of the box. Not that it's a bad pot, it just could be better.

The wife correctly pointed out that once the idea of buying a new pot gripped me, it became a mania. Which is all too common an occurrence for me right now. The number of impassioned buying decisions I've made in the past six months are starting to outnumber my available fingers. I'm wondering why I've been so impatient lately- usually I'm fairly reasonable about these sort of things. Am I stressed out? (Probably.) Am I just becoming less patient with age? (Likely.) Whatever the cause, I need to remind myself to stop and breathe anytime I want to buy a new gadget. Life isn't getting better just because I have more stuff. (But the Logitech Harmony One is still pretty damn cool.)

Photographic update

2008-03-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

It's been predictably busy but slow lately. That is to say, I'm busy enough lately that the rest of my life seems to slow and uninteresting to write about.

One bit of news- my brother and his wife welcomed their second child last week. She's nameless right now. She was delivered 3 weeks premature, so there's been a long hospital stay; my brother should be taking mom and baby home right about now.

Digressing a bit- I've lost track of how many of my friends and family are pregnant right now. It's a bit ridiculous. It's also put a bit of pressure on me about the whole not-wanting-kids thing; the wife and I had a long discussion about it over dinner last night. I feel a bit weirded out about it, frankly, so I haven't been jumping for joy at the news about my new niece. (My mother, on the other hand, is ecstatic.)

My camera has been getting a lot of use, lately. The camera club at work has been doing more events, and Katie's container flowers and my lemon tree are in bloom now. I've been bad about posting photos (I hope to get some of the recent flower pics up), but I did update the links on the right. New Camera Club photos can be found at Flickr. I also created a new gallery on Picasa for photos from my cell phone. I've posted some of these before, but you might want to poke around there a little, as the phone camera is my go-to device for capturing life's little oddities.

Superfluous, but free

2008-02-18T11:39:00.000-08:00

Some interest was shown in which free HD-DVD's I ordered as a prize for buying into a format that died exactly one day after I bought the hardware. Choice of movies and music tends to show something about your personality, so I guess I'm saying something about myself by disclosing my choices. That being said, the selection was pretty limited and most of the movies were pretty crappy. Feel free to post your own theoretical choices in the comments. It's like voting; most of the time you don't actually like the available candidates, but you don't have any other options.

For those who aren't familiar with the scheme, the offer allowed me to choose five movies but limited the choices to one title from five categories of three movies each. The selection was as follows:

Category A: Aeon Flux; Babel; The Italian Job
Category B: The Hulk; Pitch Black; The Thing
Category C: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Swordfish; Full Metal Jacket.
Category D: Firewall; The Frighteners; U2: Rattle and Hum
Category E: Black Rain; Darkman; Troy

(Curious side note- With the exception of Category A, every category contains one film with a Danny Elfman score. Being a big Danny Elfman fan, you'd think that might guide my choices, but not so.)

I filled out the form and dropped it in the mailbox this weekend. Here's what I chose, and why:

Category A: Babel. I have no interest in Aeon Flux. The wife pushed hard for The Italian Job, which is the recent remake and not the Michael Caine original, and it supposedly pales in comparison. So I settled for the well-reveiwed Babel.
Category B: Pitch Black. The Hulk was the appealing choice to a geek-boy like me, but I read a comment about it recently that went something like "as long as I never have to watch that goddamn movie again". And I have to agree. It was pretty bad. So I asked the wife to choose between the other two films that I have nearly no opinion on, and she voted for Pitch Black.
Category C: Full Metal Jacket. People who think they know me are incredulous that I didn't choose Charlie. People who actually know me understand that while I think that Burton's adaptation of one of my favorite books has everything that the first film version didn't, I consider watching it to be equivalent to having the top of my skull removed and Burton sexually violating my delicate brain tissue. His inexcuasable and unnecessary changes to the story make me feel... impure. So I chose Kubrick's FMJ, though I hear the HD transfer is very poor.
Category D: The Frighteners. I actually like this film fairly well. It has flaws, but I like both MJF and Jackson. This is one of the Elfman films, too, which puts him on the scoreboard at 1 for 4.
Category E: Black Rain. This was the toughest choice. I've never seen more than 20-30 minutes of the movie, but it's got a rockin' Hans Zimmer score and I hear it's otherwise decent. Darkman was a viable choice, but despite a great Elfman score I remember being creeped out by it a little when I was younger. I had no particular desire to see Troy, so Eric Bana goes 0-2 in the ledger today.

Ultimately, I'll probably watch each of these discs once. Which is the problem with owning physical media, I've found. It's just not worth the money to build a huge library that just sits there. Pride of ownership gets you nowhere unless you're the type of person who is going to parade your DVD collection before the world. That being said, you'll rip my Hitchcock DVD's out of my cold dead hands.

To help solve this problem, the wife and I have at long last joined Netflix. I'm not really pleased at the extra expense because we don't rent a lot of movies these days. Between the DVR and our backlog of purchased titles (there's that problem again), we're never short on content. But there are a few things that we wanted to start exploring, like the new Doctor Who series, that are harder to get ahold of. And maybe it will give us some opportunites to explore new titles that we never would have gotten around to otherwise.

Friday night hacking

2008-02-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at a co-worker's desk right now, trying to get some files off of his machine. He went on vacation for the next week and a half but forgot to provide some critical files for a project that we're trying to push out onto the Big A's web site tonight.

So far my efforts to get into his user folder have been denied. But I've got a boot disk now and am hopeful.

Things are quiet otherwise. Work is busy; I'm behind on my reports, so I'll be working from home this weekend.

I took delivery of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player today. Mr. U. got it for me at a clearance price under $100. That used to be about half off, until they dropped the MSRP to $129.

Given that Warner and Netflix are jumping ship from HD-DVD, and support is shaky from Best Buy and even Toshiba, now wouldn't appear to be the best time to buy into this particular format. Hell, I'm a Blu-ray supporter when it comes down to it, though I don't really care for either format in the face of downloading my content.

But it was a good deal, and I've been looking for more HD content for my pretty new TV. This HD-DVD player should give me somewhat better upscaling quality for standard DVD's as well. Not that I have any complaints about how the Xbox 360 upsamples the discs right now; it looks pretty damn good on the ol' 1080p set as-is. Oh yeah, and in the box with the HD-DVD player is the Xbox media remote, so I don't have to use the damn controller (wireless though it is) anymore. That will make the wife happy, who hated hunting for buttons on it.

The upside of people abandoning the HD-DVD format is that I expect the discs will go on clearance soon, so I should be able to pick up some content for cheap. Also, I get five free crappy movies for buying the player. Woo hoo! Content!

Oh... I finally cracked my co-worker's machine. The boot disc gave me enough access to find and copy the files from his user account to mine. Phew. I hope you get sunburned in Mexico, retard! What a Mitchident this has been.

The busy, busy month of January

2008-02-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

I hope you don't mind a long post. January was a busy month, too busy for me to write about the events as they happened. I guess. Right now I'm resting my aches and pains from a rare Friday night soccer game, with Ingrid is lying on my chest and happily purring away. Not a bad time to write and reflect.

Let's tackle work-related stuff first.

At the beginning of the month I was fairly unhappy with my job. I don't feel that my team gets the attention or respect that it deserves from management in San Jose. Over the Christmas break I spent a lot of time brooding on the problems, and when I returned to work I was in the mood to take my destiny into my own hands. I applied for an open QE (Quality Engineering; ie., software tester) position on a tight-knit product development team. It's a very rare opportunity. I also told my manager about my dissatisfaction with my current position. Our team is small and highly specialized, so I felt a certain amount of guilt about leaving behind a big gap for them to fill in my absence. However, I knew that I couldn't let guilt hamper my career aspirations so I was ready to move on if the QE job was the right fit.

The truth is that I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted the QE job. I talked with the QE manager and other people on his team about the day-to-day work. It sounded really exciting to get to focus on just one product and to be involved in the product development process. But QE work can also be repetitive, performing the same tests over and over in small variations.

I had long conversations with my HR representative (who is also a former manager and friend), my manager, her manager, and even his manager. All of the managers were eager for me to stay, of course, but also emphasized that whtye wouldn't stand in the way of my career growth. That was personally gratifying, but the real benefit I got from those conversations was perspective about why our team is unpopular within the department right now. Knowing that opens the door to fixing the problems and making my job more satisfactory.

The net result is that I'm going to stay in my current position in Tech Support, with the caveats that I start making an effort to fix the problems and to get support from my managers to do so. The QE job would have been nice; it would have enlarged my skill set and job marketability and probably would have paid more. But I think my HR friend is right in that I would have been bored in that job. For all the problems I have in my current position, I'm not bored. There are always plenty of challenges.

I made the decision to stay on Thursday evening, which was also the night of a shindig the Big A threw for the company's 25th anniversary. It was a nice party on the soundstages of a big photo/video studio in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood. Lots of good food and beer, games, and schmoozing with co-workers. There were pats-on-the-back, toasts and retrospectives, and a healthy feeling of team spirit. At the end of the night as the last few drunken party-goers clung to conversation groups scattered throughout the stage, I relaxed onto an empty sofa and watched the slide show on the big screen overhead. I reflected on my decision to not to take the QE job and veer my career path in a new direction, but to instead stay where I was and try to make my current job better. I feel that I am terrifically lucky that my decision was between two positions at the same company, and that at no point did I consider leaving the Big A as an alternative. It truly is a great company to work for, even if we occasionally have to put up with some of the same corporate crap that many other folks wade through on a daily basis.

Onto health matters.

A couple of weeks ago I had a nasty sensation round my nether regions. My inclination was that it was a bladder infection. (Ladies, you now have my sympathy.) I made an appointment with the doctor for the next day. Things took a turn for the worse when I woke up in the middle of the night and felt a hard lump just to the right of my crotch. (Don't worry, this gets amusing soon.)

I'll skip past the details of two doctor's appointments. The hernia specialist I was sent to said that I didn't have a hernia (which would have required surgery and likely kept me off of soccer for a good long while). His diagnosis was cat scratch disease.

Yes, this is a variation of cat scratch fever. It's a bacteria that lives in feline saliva, and through a bite or scratch (transfer via the cat licking it's claws) the bacteria entered my bloodstream and has infected a lymph node near my man-parts. So I get to blame my cute little kitties for this one. Probably Ingrid, as she likes to attack my toes at night. There's no real treatment for it. Antibiotics can be used if there's pain, fever, or other negative side effects. Right now I feel fine, no pain, so we'll just wait a few weeks and see if the swelling subsides.

Of course, swollen lymph nodes are nothing to josh about. Both doctors brought up the fact that it could be cancer. My blood tests came back clear, however, so unless I start developing other symptoms we'll skip the biopsy.

Now onto the miscellaneous topics.

Saw Juno last weekend and enjoyed it a fair bit. A fine film that I'd recommend to anyone. Excellent writing and acting. I'll skip any other endorsements, as I do have a bone to pick with the story. I'll try not to ruin it too much for those of you that haven't seen it.

I feel that the end of the film was too optimistic. Every character (even Allison Janney's stepmother character) appears to get what they want. No one can blame a film for idealizing real life, but this verged on "and they all lived happily ever after". There was a huge opportunity for this film to show how the main characters had changed through their experiences. instead the story returns them almost to the state where they had started from. I felt a little dissatisified by that. Most good stories will conclude on some observation of morals, and this film appeared to lack any interest in that. Possibly it was an attempt not to be preachy over the subject matter (teen pregnancy), but I think there was more that could have been said.

Swinging back to work briefly, our photo club held a couple of events in January. Early in January we held a portrait photography demo. The leader of our little gang brought in his lighting kit and we all got our turn with the strobes. I was really amazed at how beautiful the photos were with proper lighting. I was responsible for broadcasting the demo to our San Jose and San Francisco offices via Connect, and that worked out really well. You can watch the recording, if you'd like.

Last week the photo club went out on a walk. It wasn't anything more than an opportunity to get out of the office and take photos. It was a lot of fun, and it reminded me why I bought myself a nice digital SLR: just to go out and enjoy the experience of photography. The group posted our shots from the photo walk on Flickr. I don't really like Flickr, I think the UI of the site is very clumsy; it's alwasy hard to find what I want on the site. Regardless, it's popular, so I'm going to have to get used to it.

Lemons in things, including Snow, Cake, and Custard

2008-01-14T22:14:00.001-08:00

Unexpectedly, it snowed in Seattle tonight. It was a light, icy type of snow but it was the white stuff nonetheless. We were just about to leave the house, and I was going outside to bring in the lemon tree. Had to shake quite a bit of icy dust from the leaves, which had me a bit panicked since the tag on the plant says "protect from frost". I put it in front of the heater for a few minutes, and it all melted away. It seems happy now.

It also appears to be growing some new fruit, which is probably a side effect of the two sunny days we had recently. That makes me happy. On Sunday I finally used up the three mature lemons that the tree had on it when I recieved it at Christmas. The juice and most of their skins went into a lemon custard cake, and it wasn't half-bad. I learned three things from the baking experience:

Don't use non-fat milk in custards. If you have to, mix a little cream in.
Meyer lemons have an orange tint when they're ripe. Yellow, even dark yellow, is under-ripe. Pick them too soon and they'll be sour, not the wonderful tart-sweet like the first one I picked.
Carmelized Meyer lemon skin is delicious.

Else-wise, not too much going on. At least, nothing I want to talk about at the moment. Maybe later.

Portal, Ankle, Crap, and Still Alive

2008-01-09T22:05:00.000-08:00

Finished Portal late last week. Such an enjoyable little game. I'm really not suprised that a community has grown up around the nuances of the game. Post-Portal, I've been running through the advanced maps and challenges. The advanced maps have been fun, even if I did have to grab a couple of hints from the Internet. (Goodbye, text-based walkthroughs. Hello YouTube!) The challenges are another matter. I might complete the least-portal challenges, but the least-steps and least-time ones are ridiculously difficult. I've probably put as much time as I did into the whole game trying to shave two steps off on one level(and I still haven't done so).

Like most folks that play Portal, I look forward to a sequel or continuition with more Portal gameplay. I think Valve could have at least built difficulty modes into the game, so as to extract more gameplay, but that always takes more time and effort.

Switching to a different type of game, the winter soccer season began on Monday, after an almost two-month hiatus from the last season. And wouldn't you know it, only a few minutes into the first half I rolled my right ankle. Slide, roll, pop, and I go down. Wasn't even a foul or anything, I just slipped on the wet turf. (I'm definitely going to buy some proper turf cleats now.) I was sure I'd twisted it good, but after sitting for about 20 minutes I was able to get back on it and warm up again, with only minor pain. Played the whole second half. But I probably shouldn't have.

The ankle is now nice and puffy, and somewhat bruised looking. Doesn't really hurt any more, though I did work from home yesterday so as to keep off it, and today I've been taking ibuprofen and icing it. I'm hoping it will return to normal by the weekend. If it doesn't, A) I'm not playing soccer next Monday, and B) I'll take the damn thing to the doctor.

One thing I've forgotten to mention previously is that I finally crapped on Christmas Eve. That is to say, I was able to order Random Crap (ie., a Bag of Crap) from Woot. It's a bit of an accomplishment, getting in there right at the buzzer. I even managed to get three, and the servers barely coughed. The package arrived a couple of days ago. Sad to say no good surprises, but you get what you pay for. They did include a flying monkey in the box, of which I already have two, so I think I'll give this one to a co-worker.

One last thing to mention- after finishing Portal, I couldn't get the end title song, Still Alive, out of my head. God bless Jonathan Coulton. So I popped over to Valve's site to buy the soundtrack on CD. (MP3's are nice, CD's are nicer.) Got it today, and am enjoying it now. The Coulton-vocal version of Still alive is about to come on. Bliss. Super vanilla crazy cake bliss.

Department of Photographic Promises Fulfillment

2008-01-02T23:57:00.001-08:00

In order to fulfill my bloggerly duties, here are the photos I've been promising.

First up, my new lemon tree. As you can see, the little thing is already growing lemons. It had three big yellow ones (I picked one today) and has little green lemonlets growing all over the place.

Second, shots from yesterday's trip to the zoo. Wild creatures they got there, I tell you what.

And last, a bonus photo. Here's nephew (and his dad) being inquisitive at the Seattle Aquarium, which is where we took him today.

Okay, you get an extra bonus photo, because he's so damn cute and I can't help myself. Nephew loves cars (all of which, believe it or not, are blue). Here he is watching the street scene in downtown Seattle.

A time-shifted new year

2008-01-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

Finally, blessedly, home. Had a very good time with my family over the holidays, but between a nasty head cold and a 2-year old waking up in the middle of the night in the room next to mine I didn't get a lot of sleep and the week dragged on. It felt like three weeks and it was such a relief to get home.

We drove back to Seattle yesterday with my brother and the aforementioned toddler. With the extra cargo I failed to fit all of our Christmas plunder into the car. I lost a vicious and long game of Car Tetris and finally had to abandon a couple of items, which my parents promised to bring later in the month. It was very depressing to lose the battle as I am usually very good at the game.

Very quiet New Year's Eve. Tried to watch the Space Needle fireworks from our neighborhood but they only sputtered due to a computer problem, and we went inside before the big ones went off. Fortunately we had the DVR on KING-HD's broadcast of the show, so we time-shifted and relived the turn of the clock from the warm confines of our living room.

Today we took my nephew out to the Woodland Park Zoo. It was cold but clear, so it was a fair afternoon aside from the romper's tantrums. I got some pretty good photos of the animal life (including nephew), but again I am too lazy to copy them down to the hard drive. I owe you folks a lot of photos.

For dinner tonight we cooked nabe, a traditional Japanese hot dish. For Christmas my brother brought us an induction cooktop and pot from Japan that is used for this sort of thing. Nabe is kind of a generic category of meal where you heat up a broth at the table and all diners add vegetables and/or meats to the pot. You may be familiar with sukiyaki or shabu shabu, variants on the form. It was pretty good, but I worry about future uses of the unit, as the instructions on the hot plate are only in Japanese. I'm hoping I can find a similar model marketed at English speakers, else I'll probably have to ask someone to translate for me.

A lemon tree, a lens, a nephew

2007-12-28T10:22:00.001-08:00

Christmas was, as can be expected, a festive affair. And as usual the morning was relaxed but the afternoon and evening were busy. No suprises, except for what was under the tree.

Speaking of trees, my favorite Christmas present (received) was a Meyer lemon tree from my parents. Wish I had a photo of it for you, but I got lazy. It's a cute little thing right now, only a couple of feet high, and it's already got three ripe lemons drooping the branches. I'm eager to pull one of them off and have a taste.

Also got a new lens for the camera- a 50mm ƒ1.8. Not a fancy lens, no, but it's bright and sharp. Already got a ton of a photos with it, like this one of my nephew hiding behind his grandma's shirt:

This has been one of the longest Christmas weeks ever. Many activities and family visits. Quite frankly, I'm glad it's going to be over soon, as I have a bit of a cold and prefer to suffer my miseries in the comfort of my own home. But it's been fun, and I still have almost a week before I have to return to work.

One last note- saw Tim Burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd yesterday. Really good film, and just as bloody as advertised. Burton has again surprised me again with the breadth of his cinematic capabilities. You could have once considered his style rather niche and gothic (and the subject matter of Todd doesn't dispel that), but between Big Fish and this musical he's shown his talents and taste to be quite sophisticated. I have no frame of reference against the Sondheim stage version or any of the previous literary incarnations, but that's probably a good thing. It's a delightful, and morose little tale.

Feline imagery and Christmas festivities

2007-12-23T20:25:00.000-08:00

New photos of the kitties are up. Scroll down to the close-ups and acrobatic leaps.

We're at my parents' house in Washougal for the holidays. Had a wonderful time at Admiral Dave and Tink's Christmas party last night. The wife and I took 2nd and 3rd place in the tournament, respectively, netting us a couple of extra grabs from the present bag.

We brought the kitties down with us on the drive last night. They only mewed for the first hour or so, then settled down and only spoke up when we turned around in our seats to check on them. Then we got a loud, "get me out of this box" meow. Poor things. They seem to be fairly happy now in the two rooms they get to roam at the house here. We're playing with them and giving attention (proof is in the photos; they appear to like their Christmas present, a fishing fly-like cat lure).

The Labors of a Wannabe Santa Claus

2007-12-19T22:45:00.001-08:00

Christmas activities have kept me busy lately. Pretty much closed out the Christmas shopping in the past week, almost entirely without stepping foot in a mall. (Technically, I never got into the mall. I used the exterior entrance to REI.) Kept the shopping local and at small boutiques this year. Mostly shops in the Ballard area, but also Pike Place Market downtown. It's quite satisfying to have done our gift-buying by walking up and down a neighborhood street instead of fighting for parking spots at the local consumerporium.

Right now I'm on a break from wrapping up some of the goodies we bought. Came down with a bit of a headache, so this Junior Santa is taking a break.

Our Christmas tree is standing proud and bright. I had to buy some more lights for it, and ended up with a few feet too much, but tucking them down along the trunk works well. I'm happy with the tree now that it's all decorated, but I won't be buying a Grand Fir again (at any price). The branches are stronger than a Douglas Fir, but they're very thick and dense, which made it much harder to string the lights and find space for ornaments.

Tomorrow night the wife and I are going to see The Nutcracker, as performed by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. I'm really only familiar with the music, and I think it's about time I learned the story and saw what the whole thing is about. I'm looking forward to it.

Only two more days left in the work year for me. The Big A shuts down the week between Christmas and New Year's. We're forced to burn some PTO for it, though the company is generous enough with it that everyone usually has enough to spare. We'll be heading down to Portland for the duration to enjoy holiday gatherings with family and friends. The wife is actually on vacation as of tomorrow, and I won't be back at work until the Fourth of January. My brother and his son are coming into town from Japan, and we're going to have them up here for a couple of days after the New Year. Should be fun.

It's less than a week until the big day now. I'm soaking in the music of the season, stuffed with cookies, and that old Christmas Magic is starting to gel. Tough times at work are threatening to drag me down, but once I'm loose on Friday, forget about it. I'll be in Christmas Bliss.

Merry Christmas, folks. Enjoy the season.

Disappointments of the Seasonal Lumberjack

2007-12-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

Busy, but uninteresting week. The thirtieth birthday passed by, relatively smoothly. The party was pleasant- people came, talked, and ate. It snowed, which was a first for a birthday in my memory. It stuck but melted by evening. Dad came up for the party, and in the evening we had dinner at Ivar's Salmon House. While we ate we watched the Lake Union Christmas Ships go by.

Birthday brought me Valve's Orange Box. Portal is great, and everything everyone says it is, both good (challenging, funny) and bad (short, bland environments). I played a couple of random-buddy rounds of Team Fortress 2. It feels very much like how I remember the original, and I'm looking forward to getting some friends together to have some good social rounds. Won't be quite the same as TF1 was at college, yelling down the halls at each other between rounds, but the headsets should make up for it.

Today we hunted down our tannenbaum. There are Christmas tree lots all up and down 15th Ave., but I heard that prices for a small tree were upward of $50. I was quite offended at such a high price (as I believe I also was last year), so I declared that we were going to go cut down our own tree, just like we did back in Oregon, where the prices are $10-$20 for u-cut. A quick Google Map search later, we were zipping down to the Trinity Tree Farm, chosen because their web site showed a cute gift shop.

Huge disappointment is all we got. While the farm is at the end of a gravel road and is nowhere near the bulk of urban development, it's still parts of the suburban cluster and not truly in the rural landscape. That is to say, the drive was neither very inspiring nor Christmasy (that being said, downtown Issaquah is quite cute).

Once there, we saw prices that were on par with our neighborhood tree lots- forty freaking dollars for a Douglas fir. Then, to add insult to injury, most of their fields are "closed", so we couldn't even get a Dougy. Our choice was between a $60 Grand fir and a $75 Fraser fir. Having driven 45 minutes to get out to the psuedo-country, I didn't want to go away without actually sawing down a tree. And since I had forgotten to write down directions to the second closest tree farm, we went the cheaper route- only to find the field almost entirely empty, populated by just a few scraggly, skinny trees, looking for all the world like the survivors of a bomb-devastated city wandering the remains of their home and wondering what to do next.

We did manage to find a decent-looking little tree among the remnants, so we severed it from it's roots and hauled it back to the car. Before leaving, we stopped in at the gift shop. The final disappointment of this place was the awful free "apple cider" they offered. It was lukewarm and tasteless.

I probably wouldn't be griping so much if the Christmas tree had been reasonably priced. I wonder... is the prevalence of cheap Christmas trees just an Oregon phenomenon? Was I spoiled by the environs of my youth? Washington has a healthy enough timber industry, too, why aren't trees just as cheap up here?

We brought our overpriced tree hom and I started stringing the lights, but the business of making dinner interrupted. I'm using the method I used last year, but this Grand fir has more sturdy branches than a Douglas and I'm worried that I'm going to run out of bulbs before I get to the top because I'm being too perfectionist about it. Later tonight I'm going to tear the work-in-progress off; I'll start over tomorrow with better expectations.

Thirty Eve

2007-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Now would be a good time to reflect on my twenties. What I did, what I regret not doing, what I can still do, etc. Probably should stay away from regrets for what I did; precious little ever comes of that.

But I probably won't. I'll just plow ahead through life, just like I always have. Which is probably why I'm afflicted, like most people are, by the feeling of "where the hell did my 20's go?"

And that's a little sad. I've been having some internal monologues lately about being a better person. I think that most people have something of a conscience about their personality like this. My guess is that most people in the US and other western countries probably have similar ideals of the perfect human being: kind, charitable, intelligent, good at making conversation, forward-thinking, empathetic, and all sorts of other desirable traits. The perfect human being doesn't exist, of course, but human nature is to try to better ourselves, to be more than we currently are. (This is closely related to our belief in God, but I'll save the religious connection for another day.) If I don't spend time to reflect on who I am, where I came from, and where I want to go, then I have deprived myself of the means to be a better person.

There is hope. Milestones like this are implicitly designed to let us pause and think on these sort of things. Maybe I'll change. Maybe I'll take that time. I don't have much confidence that I will, but you can never rule it out.

Unrelated news... The big stinky TV is set up in our living room. It's quite large, pretty, and a little dominating. But not too much so. I haven't done too much more than set up the A/V equipment, and I can tell there's a lot of configuration to go yet. Need to tweak the colors, specifically. That being said, the Xbox is very pretty on it and I'm quickly becoming addicted to HD broadcasts. It's soooooooo pretty.

Two gripes:

The TV has HDMI inputs, which carry both audio and video from the Xbox and DVR. One convenient cable. Yay. The TV also has optical audio out so I can hook it up to my receiver and get surround sound. Yay. The TV does NOT transmit surround sound audio signals from the HDMI inputs to the optical output. It just outputs them as stereo. Boo. I surmise that it's a limitation of how the audio pipeline is built within the TV- the TV itself only has stereo speakers, so the HDMI audio signal is probably being dismantled for speaker purposes before the TV even thinks about what goes to the output.
We have the big spiffy digital cable package from Comcast, which includes a number of HD channels. But NO Discovery Channel in HD. Yes, they have Discovery's HD Theater channel, but that's something entirely different. I want my Mythbusters in HD, dammit!

We're having a party tomorrow at the house. Combination of a very late housewarming, early Christmas party, and a 30th birthday party for yours truly. Kinda feel like I was bullied into it by the wife and my mother, but they're right- we've got a lot to celebrate this year. Drop by on Saturday afternoon if you're in town. (Hah... that's a good laugh. I know of exactly one person in Seattle who reads this, and I'm married to her.)

R:0 G:0 B:0 Friday

2007-11-23T22:04:00.001-08:00

95%ALCOHOLIC
Beer. Of all things, I guessed wrong on beer. History lesson learned: fermenting grains came before fermenting grapes.

Switching gears... Today is the day, the day my favorite season of the year begins. (The fact that hockey season overlaps it is merely a coincidence.) Since there's a good five-plus weeks of celebration available this year, I'm trying to build up slowly. Didn't even turn on the Christmas music today. I want to ease myself into the season so as not to burn out early.

We started by visiting the Black Friday sales at an hour much too early for humans to be awake. Didn't buy very much, but again, this experience was more about communing with some friends who were on the bargain hunt. It's the second year we've done it, and we enjoy it to a certain degree, but we probably won't do it again next year. If all goes to plan we'll stay in Seattle for Thanksgiving and finally get our day-after-in-pajamas back like it should be.

At the very least, getting up early gave me a chance to see the world before and at sunrise. On the drive from Washougal to Portland we were watched over by the moon, hung low in the west, huge and yellow. With the brown dusting of mare and mountains, it reminded me of a giant snickerdoodle cookie. Later, as we came out of Best Buy, we were greeted by the silhouette of Mt. Hood against a gloriously strong orange-fading-to-black sky. I had my camera with me, but with other people in tow it's hard to break and set up a proper photograph. I enjoyed the sights with only my eyes, and we moved on to the next sale.

We did accomplish one major act of rampant consumerism today- we bought a new TV. A nice, big, stinky, HD, LCD, pretty-as-you-please TV. We did get a good price on it, substantially less than what the Sony site shows. We went to Home Video Libary Electronics on the recommendation of a friend and purchased there. Got good service and they were eager to price match. Actually, I wasn't able to talk them down any further than their current sale price, but they did upgrade us from the XBR4 to the XBR5 model for free (the difference is mostly cosmetic). So now I have a nice little project for the weekend to set it up, and for the next couple of weeks I may be blathering here about configuring and tuning this beast. It's a learning experience folks, stay with me on this.

In a turkey coma, how are you?

2007-11-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

I'm now sitting on the downward slope of Thanksgiving, with waaaay too much food and wine in my belly. It makes me happy.

Okay, I'm not actually sitting, I'm sprawled out across the guest bed in my parents' house, waiting for A) the Woot to come on and B) the wife to finish with the shower. (Yes, we're shower-at-night people. A compromise of the night-owl vs. 9-to-5-workday problem.) In other words, I'm killing time.

Spent a good deal of time looking at big, stinky HDTV's lately, as I intend to finally get on the bandwagon and buy one. I've got the options narrowed down to a couple of different LCD models, and tomorrow when we observe the Black Friday madness (yes, observe; we're not in it for the bargains, just the comaraderie) I'll make some closer inspections. I don't want to beat this project to death with comparisons of different specifications or getting confused around the hundreds of different models on the market. I just want a damn TV that makes pretty pictures and is at least as functional as the $300 model that sits in my living room right now. For the amount of money these things cost, I should be able to at least get that. My biggest fear is that I might be overspending- by going for the highest rated models I might be buying more TV than I need. But then again, for these prices I want to future-proof myself, so maybe overbuying ain't such a bad thing.

Four days more

2007-11-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

My eyes are shut tight. Through the lids I can see flashes of light and color, gold and silver and red and green, beckoning me to open them and join the revelry. My mind is begging me to let go of my inhibitions and lift my lids, to indulge in the celebration.

I will not.

I will wait, a good and patient child staring at the packages under the tree with the pretty paper and shiny bows. I will wait. My eyes are closed.

You can tempt me, and my subconcious may let a little light through the crack. I will unexpectedly find myself singing a joyous tune, a dear friend missed in the past year. But once I have realized what's happened, I will stop singing. They who tempt me only want to take advantage of me and empty my pockets, and I won't give them the satisfaction of pulling me early into the party. Every year I look forward to this time, and every year they begin to tempt me sooner and sooner, desperate to fullfill their own desires. But not yet, not yet from me. My desire is to wait until the time is ripe, until the day comes. My eyes will stay shut and my tongue locked tight in my mouth. I am resolute on this.

The wait will be over soon. There will be cookies and music and laughter and everyone will be celebrating for a month. We will build it slowly over the next few weeks, not gorging but sampling, ingesting the season slowly until the coffers are full and fit to burst.

But first... first we must eat turkey and stuffing and potatoes and pie. On the next day, the day after we give thanks for another year of health and love and not one day before, that is day we can begin celebrating Christmas.

Four days more.

Dreaming in Color, Waking in Grey

2007-11-12T15:12:00.001-08:00

Life lately has been a little uneasy. Almost surreal. I think it's caused by a lack of sleep. In spite of being a night owl I try to keep a 9-5 work habit, and I'm having a hard time getting the two lifestyles to mesh well.

I've also been having intense dreams lately. Fully-fledged storyline type stuff. Maybe my brain is compensating for the WGA strike, dunno. I'll spare you the details (because I mostly can't remember them) save for this image: After deuling Timothy Dalton with black powder pistols, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker help me escape The Law on a flying boat.

Another emotional load that is unbalancing my psyche lately is work. I've been spending a lot of time in the lab- a large, humming room lined with computers, printers and various computing ephemera. The particular problem I'm working on has been frustrating and thus prolongs my time spent there. The lab is a dry and sterile place to spend your time, and after a while the dull background noise of the machinery and HVAC system tends to blunt your sensory input. A jolly holiday this is not.

The weather also hasn't been doing much for me, either. I tend to prefer this type of gray, wet weather (a mark of a native Oregonian), but in the past couple of years I've noticed how it does tend to dampen my attitude as much as it does my rain hat. It's also spoiled most good chances I've had for photography in the past week. I tried taking my camera to work all last week but only got out on that one day.

Sigh. At least I'll be 30 in a couple of weeks. I'm sure the imminent tick of the clock, reminding me that humans have expiration dates and inevitably triggering a reflection on past mistakes and lost opportunities, will cheer me up somehow.

That was a cheery post, wasn't it?

Autumnal Return of the Shutterbug

2007-11-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

Business as usual lately. Work has been tough, but we've been getting support from management, and I've had some satisfying successes lately. More finishing projects, less slacking. It feels good.

Lots of home furnishing business lately. We got our new kitchen cabinet installed, and the carpenter hung the IKEA cabinets in my office. I'm not sure if I really like how the office turned out- the furniture looks nice, but the top cabinet looms over my head, and they're large and dark and kind of oppressive. Also got the new loveseat that we ordered. The wife and I now have a proper place to cuddle while we watch TV.

We took a trip to the movie theater on Sunday to see Dan in Real Life. It's a pleasant, quirky little movie. The not-so-subtle theme is love, and all the variations humans experience it with each other. It wasn't schmaltzy at all, instead it was quite insightful as it played young love against lifetime love against lost love against love at first sight against brotherly love. The acting was great all around (I will admit to being a Carrell fan). I could have only wished for them to punch up the drama a little bit more; the whole thing was a little low-key.

I've been taking my camera to work with me this week. The Camera Club meetings that I'm going to at work are starting to insipire me. Also, I missed a ridiculously good shot on my way to work Friday morning, as the late sunrise breathed color into a heavy fog surrounding the bridges. I didn't manage to get out to use it today, but yesterday I took a few shots during my lunchtime consitutional. Enjoy.

Aquatic rodents as a model for modern life

2007-10-27T20:27:00.001-07:00

Been a busy beaver. Last weekend we jaunted down to Portland so the families could wish the wife a happy b-day. Lots of dining and driving about to visit with friends, and saw The Darjeeling Limited with sister-in-law and sister-in-law's-British-fiancé. Decent and funny movie, but I think Wes Anderson is getting a little too obsessed with family relationships. I'd like to see him try to relate to the audience more, to make his characters more sympathetic. I haven't felt that from him since Rushmore.

Work has been getting pretty grueling lately, and we're all living with the realization that there's too much for us to do. We need to offload some of the work to our Ottawa staff, but they're not prepared for it. I think they're going to have to put up with it, though. We've got too many people expecting too many things from us, and we can't babysit the stuff that's supposed to be the responsibility of the Ottawa team.

I decompressed a little by taking Thursday off. Put together some IKEA bits, then went downtown to sign up for a Washington State driver's license. Had lunch with the wife, got some goods at the Market for dinner, had some luck with the buses; it was a pretty good day.

Weather this week has been beautiful, especially last Monday and Tuesday. Wish I had the time to go out with my camera a little bit. Still, I'm happy to just get out and see the fall color. For the past few years I've been regretting that I've been too busy to stop and enjoy the changing of the seasons. With our new roots laid down in Seattle, I'm thankful for the stability that lets me do that once again, even if I don't have the time to photograph it. I'll enjoy what I see with my eyes for now, and try again to photograph it next year.

Down for the count

2007-10-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

I'll forewarn you that this post is a little icky and a little depressing. (Maybe it's a little bit of karma, balancing my last, joyous post. Don't know.)

I think I was watching The Power of 10, and one of the questions was "What percentage of Americans have seen a dead body, not at a funeral or morgue?" The answer given by the show escapes me, but I know at the time I would have answered the question "no". That changed today.

There's no savvy way to put this- my office sits underneath a bridge popular with suicide jumpers. In particular, I sit on the bridge side of the building. I don't have my own window to look out of, but it's only a few paces away. Several times a year the sirens draw me and my co-workers towards them. If you're particularly unlucky and happen to sit near the window (since when was a window office with a view of a lake a bad thing?), you might actually see the event happen.

Today, my co-worker with a window office was fortunate to miss the sight but heard the resulting sound of the latest suicide victim that took the step off the bridge where there is none. It helps to understand that the Aurora Bridge passes not only over Lake Union, but also our parking lot. Let me not make the point too sharp, but there is a distinct difference in survival rate between falling a long distance onto water and asphalt, and today's loss went with the sure thing.

Like the moth to flame, I took a look out the window. From my distance, some forty feet away and a story up, I couldn't tell you if the victim was man or woman. I would guess female. They were wearing a bright, baby blue fleece jacket and dark pants. They were curled up in the intersection of our parking lot, facing away from me. It looked like they had simply chosen a bad place to take a nap.

The police were already on the scene (I heard the sirens earlier, thought of the bridge, but dismissed the idea as pessimism). When I checked later to see if the traffic had cleared, the body was covered by a tarp. The results were clear.

I'm not sure why I'm sharing this with you. If you follow the link I provided above you'll get plenty of information on the efforts being made to make the bridge less accessible to those in need of assistance, and to direct them to the many resources designed to help them. I have no intention of beginning a discussion on the situation.

But having for the first time seen the sadly successful results of someone who couldn't bring themselves to seek the help they needed (or didn't get what they needed from that help), I feel things have changed somewhat. I like to be a fairly happy-go-lucky type of guy, and I feel I can handle the stress of most difficulties in life, even this one. It's a profound event, though, and it's one of those things that you can't go back from. It makes you think. I really don't know what to think, but it's sitting on my mind right now, and sometimes lettings these things out helps them integrate better into your personal spectra. That's all this is, I guess. No answers, just thoughts.

Beagle Tunes

2007-10-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

Another slow Monday afternoon at work. Sigh... This morning I was rockin' out, flinging e-mails, setting up meetings, and hammering on issues. Now I'm just blah, and looking for distractions. Like writing in my blog (gasp! self-referentialism!), or this gem.

The weekend was busy. I'll let the wife explain summarize the details for you. Suffice to say that a lot was accomplished, but I was again stumped on my photographic search for autumn color. Wrong place at wrong time, I suspect, though I know I let go of some good opportunities so we could be in Port Townsend in time to do some shopping. One of the lessons I'm taking away from my recent photographic sojourns and research is that serious landscape photography takes dedication- the willingness to give up sleep, food, and companionship in small doses in order to be in the right place at the right time. Add a little luck, some good equipment, and some practice with it, and you should be able to get the type of images that grace coffee book tables and calendars.

Changing gears...

My musical tastes shift with the seasons. Thanskgiving to Christmas is, of course, reserved for the likes of "Deck the Halls" and "O Tannenbaum". During the depths of winter I take solace in my vast collection of film scores- there's nothing like a peppy Johnny Williams bedroom comedy to lighten you up when the sun is bleak. In the spring I shift to folk, Paul Simon, Hank Mancini, and start poking at rock- basically anything singable. For the summer months I delve pretty deeply into my rock preferences, the likes of Oingo, Presidents, Billy Joel, Phil Collins- good road music for the warm traveling months.

Despite my wide-ranging tastes, during recent autumns and October most specifically, I've tended to reserve my ears for one artist. Like most other folks, my introduction to Vince Guaraldi was through his music for the Peanuts gang, and my association of Dr. Funk with golden leaves and chill air is most assuredly due to the perennial appearance of my favorite Peanuts special, "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown". "Linus and Lucy" rattled around in my head plenty as a kid, especially since my brother played it on the piano frequently, but it was Vince's other tunes that really made the flavor of the show for me. "The Great Pumpkin Waltz" ("What are you doing, Linus?") or the main theme simply speak "Halloween" to me. The deft interleaving of childhood innocence and worldly outlook in those tunes match the character of the Peanuts perspective as if they were created by the same mind; and as I grew older and could appreciate the subtler points of music, Guaraldi's tunes complemented my appreciation of not only Halloween but also the metaphor of Autumn. How can one contemplate the season when the landscape dies without also considering how much optimism and earnestness that we build during this time (school, elections, harvest, festivals, etc.), as though we are preparing to emotionally hibernate during the coming months of cold?

The music that Guaraldi composed for Peanuts is beloved enough that you'll find no shortage of recordings of the tunes, both by the man himself, covers, and tributes to the man. Of the last type, I can highly recommend the Marsalis's take on the topic, Joe Cool's Blues. That album was really my sustenance of Guaraldi for most of a decade, until I decided that I'd like to explore Vince's ouvre without being dragged back to "Linus and Lucy" at every turn. Guaraldi published precious few albums before his association with Charlie Brown began, at least on a relative scale to his genius, but I found in Jazz Impressions of a Black Orpheus the same joy of life coupled with contemplative mood that made the Peanuts music so emotionally fulfilling for me. It was confirmation that Guaraldi was a true jazz musician, a pianist who lived and breathed his work, not just some guy who wrote a couple of catchy soundtrack tunes.

Between a couple of Peanuts albums and a couple of Guaraldi's earlier gems, my ears felt fairly satisfied each Fall. Then last year I heard the live version of Peppermint Patty from The Charlie Brown Suite live album during a random mix on Pandora. That was the hook- the real catch that pulled me up from a casual fan to a real Guaraldi lover. I won't claim to be "into" jazz, and I don't have the musical vocabulary to explain why this one particular performance of one particular song grabbed me so completely, but it's a musical heaven to me. For those who are fellow fans of a particularly well-known Japanese delicacy, they'll understand what I mean when I say that the live Peppermint Patty is the sonic equivalent to slipping a fresh, fatty piece of salmon sushi, the deep orange flesh backed by moist and sweet rice, into my mouth. This music found my pleasure center and grabbed hold.

Now my Guaraldi collection is burgeoning and I realized that his section of my iTunes library is growing as fat as almost any other artist I have in there. What was once a mild, childhood reminiscense has grown into a full-blown fascination. I took delivery today of Vince Guaraldi and the Lost Cues from the Charlie Brown Television Specials (which sounds a little too much like an Indiana Jones title), and as usual found myself delighted, especially with the original version of "Little Birdie". (I had no idea his voice was on the track!) Most of the tracks are from the early seventies and feature quite a bit of keyboard and synthesizer, which cross-tickle another musical (and possibly dirty) pleasure of mine- the Moog organ. I find the whole thing quite delightful, and I am beginning to wonder if there will ever be a Guaraldi track that I don't like.

It's not a rare thing to find this much happiness in the work of great artists. Many find it in paintings, or classical music, or name your art form. But some don't find it at all. I may be lucky enough to have found several such artists that tickle my non-erotic joy zone, and right now I'm only gushing about one. But now is the time for me to indulge in this man's work, like the Fourth of July is for fireworks and Thanksgiving is for turkey and pumpkin pie. I hope you haven't minded my carving off a little of my exuberance to share with you. Do yourself a favor: go pick up an album that he performed on. Any of them (but especially those I've mentioned above) and enjoy.

Postscript: I'm still waiting for a CD release of my holy grail of Guaraldi music: the original tracks from the "Great Pumpkin" soundtrack. Son-of-a-legend David Guaraldi has promised a second "lost tracks" album. Can I dare to dream that he might fulfill my wish?

IKEA is Lego for adults

2007-10-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

My employment salvation is, if not complete, at least official. I accepted a verbal offer for the job on Friday, and the paperwork should be done this week. Hooray for me, I guess, but now I have to trash my fun to-do list that I was going to work on during unemployment.

Last week I started taking a Japanese class at a local community college. It's just an extension course- a good way for me to ease back into the concept of going to school again. I'm encountering some difficulty already- Japanese has a very different rhythm and way of emphasizing syllables than English, and unless you hear it aloud you won't get it properly, and replicating the pattern remains difficult. By the end of the first class I my tongue was so tied up that I'm suprised that anything other than gibberish came out of my mouth.

Over last weekend I spent a good deal of time assembling IKEA furniture. (In order to dual-purpose the wife's office as a guest bedroom, we bought her a smaller computer desk and a new filing cabinet. This opens up the room and makes it more hospitable for overnight guests.) I'll admit to a certain amount of disdain for user-assembled furniture, especially what you get from the average big box retailer. It is cheap and it looks cheap. But I also have a fondness for IKEA products. The style and aesthetics appeal to me in a way that washes away the disdain. Maybe they do a better job of hiding the bolts and seams. Maybe it's the IKEA shopping experience, including the low price point and higher perceived value. Could just be the Swedish in me.

Also, I find that I actually like putting together the furniture. It's a bit of a chore, yes, but the challenge and hands-on work that I don't get in my keyboard-jockey job is satisfying. The experience (if you've never had the pleasure) is highly reminiscent of another Scandavian do-it-yourself product: Lego. You get a box of assorted pieces that alone don't resemble your finished product, and an instruction booklet that contains no words but only numbered, staged steps that picture what the next piece to assemble is and where to put it. It's up to you to do the rest. The pieces aren't labeled and the instructions aren't always perfectly clear; sometimes the orthagonal view fails to provide detail from the opposite side that would be useful. But in the end, if you use your head and think about the purpose of the parts you're using, you'll end up with a good-looking finished product.

The only downside is that I spent so much time with the screwdriver yesterday that I started to develop blisters on the palm of my hand. I've got another load of IKEA to put together (shelving units for our library room/my office), which will have to wait until I heal.

One last note- we took a walk at the Ballard Locks on Saturday, in hopes that me and my camera might capture some fall color. No luck, though, most of the trees were still green. What little color that had popped was ruined by the late afternoon overcast sky. Maybe in the next couple of weeks things will get better. At least we got to visit Archie McPhee's while we were down there.

Career Movement in A Major

2007-09-29T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today was supposed to be my first day of unemployment but it looks like my ride on the A-Train will continue. I didn't want to talk about this too soon as the deal isn't done yet. It's pretty secure at this point, though, just some formalities to go through.

I tried several times to write the tale of how my employment salvation was birthed, but the story was too complex to make coherent in this format. You'd need to be inside the company to really understand. Suffice to say that I owe a lot of thanks to the co-workers who lobbied management for my reprieve, and the garden fresh new director of our department who appears to be smart enough (or naive enough) to listen to his underlings. A lot of thanks to also-almost-canned-co-worker FutureDirt, too, as it was him sidestepping what appeared at the time to be a dead end that led to me being offered a long-term opportunity. Also congratulations to FD, as by sidestepping he opened himself a path to a great new job doing QE work for the company. Of that, I am jealous. I tried to ride his coattails to the promised land without success. He was the one with the sympathetic contacts; I was but his shadow.

Overall, it was an emotional roller coaster sort of week. Although the news was always positive, it came slowly, and uncertainty was the word of the week. Even now, my continued employment is not 100% assured, but like I said, I'm comfortable enough now that the machine is engaged and won't falter.

Now, over the summer as I was sliding down the slippery slope to spending my days playing video games and watching the Price Is Right, I had a lot of time to consider my career opportunities. I'm not keen on staying in a customer facing role, ie. tech support and customer service, despite my long experience. I've reached the ceiling of this career, unless I want to move into management (I don't). That's not to say I'm going to let this job slip out of my hands, as employment is a good thing and especially since it appears I'll be getting a raise. At the sime time, I take this job somewhat reluctantly, as I'm not comfortable with our department's management team. They were the ones oblivious enough to the day-to-day needs of my team and our value to the company that they created the mess that nearly resulted in my unemployment, and I'm not confident that they won't make my life difficult in other ways.

Ultimately, I'd like to stay on the A-Train. The ride is far too comfortable. But I'd like to move to a different role. Maybe QE, maybe documentation, maybe training. There's a lot of seats on this train; the problem is that they don't become vacant very often. So the plan is to stay where I am for now but to keep my eyes open for a chance to move into a job that is more interesting and that will have more upward growth opportunities. In the meantime I'll also start looking into going back to school. There's an itch there that's yet to be satisfied and that could lead me to even better employment possibilities.

Here's what it all comes down to: I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

Nerdy Discharge

2007-09-20T22:53:00.000-07:00

The wife practically insisted that I post this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc&mode=related&search=

It's good for a chuckle or two. I feel somewhat guilty in liking in because despite my better nature I try not to be too nerdy, and this video is EXACTLY what you will see when you peer through a microscope into the swirling miasma of semen extracted from a Dungeons-and-Dragons-playin', chess-club-member, pocket-protector-wearin', Star-Trek-conventioneer, anime-watchin', Tomb-Raider-lovin', hardcore nerd boy.

Overexposure

2007-09-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Created a new photo gallery for my best shots from Ottawa. Enjoy. It's worth noting that I haven't spent any time to clean them up in Lightroom or Photoshop. I've got a whole stack of photos that could stand to have some work done. I'm kinda looking forward to some time during unemployment when I can do that.

A lot of the photos appear bit darker on the web than I'd like. There's multiple reasons for that- the fact that I'm crushing them down to the sRGB color space during export is the biggest, but I'm only doing that because most browsers wouldn't know a color profile if it came and hit them over the head. Trust me, the dark ones look better in their original format than they do in your browser window.

One of the photographic challenges I faced in Ottawa was that I only had an hour or so of daylight after work. Hence the number of night shots in this album. I used a lot of long exposures, and since I don't carry a tripod with me I had to improvise a bit when it came to stabilizing the camera. For the benefit of the photographically inclined, here's the recipe I used to create those long exposures without shaking the camera.

Upon discovery of an interesting scene, find a reasonably flat, horizontal (or near-horizontal) surface to put the camera on. For uneven surfaces, put down a bean bag. No flat surface available? Skip the shot and chalk up the disappointment to the perils of not schlepping around a tripod.
Set the camera to manual focus. In the dark, auto focus is more difficult. Also, most cameras re-focus every time you open the shutter, a time-wasting and error-prone process.
Set the camera to manual exposure. For long exposures, especially in the dark, it is unwise to trust the camera's light meter. I start with what the camera thinks is right, but only to gauge whether or not I need a longer or shorter shutter speed from there.
Disable Auto ISO and set the camera to ISO 100. Leaving the sensitivity on auto will allow the camera to push up to ISO 1600 in dark conditions, which results in a lot of noise. ISO 100 is clean and crisp. The only danger is that super-long exposures can cause light sources to halo, so if I want to cut that down I might step up to still-reasonably-noise-free ISO 400.
Enable the remote shutter trigger option on the camera.
Place the camera on the horizontal surface or bean bag and compose the shot. If the surface isn't entirely flat, I stick a handkerchief or folded paper underneath the camera until it's level. Often the lens needs to point up a little more- tuck something underneath the front of the lens to solve that.
Consider the safety of the camera. To get certain shots, I've had to place the camera on the edge of a bridge or cliff. It's often not practical to keep the camera strap around your neck, and you don't want to hold onto it for fear that you might accidentally tug on it during the exposure. I keep a couple of carabiners clipped to my camera bag, which I use to secure the camera strap to any convenient nearby railing, or in the worst case scenario, the strap of my bag or a belt loop on my pants.
Pick an aperture and match the shutter speed according to what the camera thinks is right. For night shots, a small aperture is likely best. It will also give you greater depth of field in case you have a focus issue.
Focus the shot. Remember that larger depth of field gives you focus in front and behind the focus point. Use the depth of field preview button on the camera to verify focus if necessary.
Use the remote to take a test shot.
Evaluate the test shot in the LCD. Spot-check focus. Sometimes sharpness is a problem on a bridge or other structure that can be vibrating from wind or traffic. Be careful not to move the camera while pressing the buttons- I usually apply a little downward pressure to keep the camera from slipping.
Adjust shutter speed (and/or aperture) then take another shot. Repeat until you're satisified with the exposure. Keep in mind that lights or bright spots will easily become overexposed; you may want to take a separate exposure just for the highlights, which you can composite later with the shadow exposure in Photoshop.

It's a bit involved, but I'm happy with the results I'm getting. It takes me between 10-30 minutes to set up a shot and create exposures until I'm satisfied. (Keep in mind that each exposure can be 30 seconds or more.)

In the recipe above, I mentioned a few ingredients that are a little unusual for photography. I consider them indespensible in a photographer's long exposure kit:

A bean bag or bean bag tripod. I own a Red Pod, but forgot to take it with me to Ottawa. It doesn't fit my digital SLR with it's big, fat lens very well anyway. I'd like to get the Silver Pod, which is a new item that I discovered today. Looks perfect for my needs.
One or two handkerchiefs or bandanas. Something large and of a reasonably heavy fabric, so that it can be folded many times or rolled up thick. These will supplement the bean bag.
Two or three carabiners. Besides securing the camera strap so as to prevent complete disaster, you can use them to hang extra equipment, hats, jackets, whatever off your camera bag. You don't have to get the expensive rock-climbing kind, the type you get as cheap souvenir keychains are fine.
A remote shutter release. In the old days, this was just a cable release that plugged into the shutter button. Digital cameras require electronic solutions. I use the Nikon ML-L3 for my D80. The downside of it is that the IR sensor is on the front of the camera, so I need to be in a position to point the remote at the sensor (usually not a problem). The Nikon MC-DC1 is wired and doesn't suffer from that particular malady. If you're really ambitious you can tether your camera to a laptop and, with the appropriate software from your camera manufacturer, control the camera with the computer.

Oh, and it always helps to have lots of pockets for storing the lens cap, remote case, and other miscellaneous bits and bobs.

Also- be careful, should you have to change memory cards in the middle of a shoot. Not only could you bump the camera during the procedure, you have to avoid the risk of dropping a card or case off the same long cliff that the carabiners are protecting your camera from. I've also feared that the wind would whip away my handkerchief, but no problems yet.

Facts + Oids = Factoids

2007-09-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

Rideau Falls, Ottawa, Ontario.

Factoids from my travels today:

I walked approximately 6.5 miles this evening.
I drank Guinness for the first time.
I paid total 21.00 $Canadian for taxi rides, including an average tip of 20%.
Tim Horton's is not the Canadian McDonald's. This is the Canadian McDonald's. Tim Horton's is more like a Winchell's crossed with a Quiznos.
I know enough about color management to fake my way through it, but I don't know enough to teach it effectively.

Even the wasps are nice in Ottawa

2007-09-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm way past my bed time here, but I wanted to check in and drop a couple of photos. I spent most of the evening wandering around downtown Ottawa. It's a pleasant little town, and remarkably easy going for a national capital. You could literally walk off the street and hug the parliament building if you wanted to. The American embassy, by contrast, has concrete barriers intruding into the street, exuding all the paranoia and fear that has earned us our international reputation.

Oh, and quick note to self- had a great beer last night. Sleeman Honey Brown Ale. A smooth mix of dark and crisp. Duly noted.

The photo above is, quite clearly, the Adobe office in Ottawa. They don't occupy the whole buildings, maybe only half of the tower.

This is the Parliament building, the seat of government in Canada. Most of the government buildings in Ottawa look like churches. Really big ostenatious churches. Maybe it's to imply that all Canadians are in the congregation of representative democracy. Dunno.

These locks of the Rideau Canal mark its end at the Ottawa River. Read about the canal on Wikipedia, because I had the page open to check the spelling and it was easy to copy and paste.

Finally, get freaked out by this giant spider, which sits in front of the National Gallery of Canada. (It's really creepy. There are actually white egg-shaped things visible in the belly.) It appears to be menacing the Notre Dame Basilica across the street, but what exactly grudge this oversized arachnid holds against Canadian catholics, I do not know.

Flying the Canadian Skies

2007-09-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

So here I sit in a hotel room in Ottawa. I'm three hours out of whack, but that's okay since I only got four hours of sleep last night. Wish I had some photos for you, but the inside of airports haven't been inspiring me much lately. (That being said, the Toronto and Ottawa airports are very nice.)

The travel business got off to a rather bad start this morning. I think I tipped the cab driver about $25 on a $40 fare, because the next time I checked my wallet I was short a twenty. Must've grabbed the wrong bill by mistake. Then the bagel sandwich I had for breakfast was fully mediocre. Remember the good old days when airlines would give you food on long flights? Sigh.

Once I landed in Toronto, things rolled further downhill. Having cleared customs, I showed my completed form to the gatekeeper. He pointed me away from where the other happy travelers were going and into that pit of doom held in the bowels of every international airport: immigration. I stood in line, surrounded by people from much more distant countries than the US, many of whom gripped birth certificates and other thick stacks of paperwork. The line moved slowly and I quickly began to doubt that I would make it through in time to make my connecting flight to Ottawa.

Then I got lucky. Above the din I heard another traveler respond to the uniformed line jockey's query of his origin with "Seattle". I looked up and saw my fellow American getting stamped and set free into the wilds of the airport. I optimistically shifted my passport and customs form to my right hand, so that the signature navy blue color and eagle crest would be clearly visible to the agent. Sure enough, he made his way down the line to me and asked where I was from, and soon I too was set loose. Returning to the exit where I had been diverted, the officer who had tried to trap me in the immigration room again tried to send me to the pit, but after a closer look at my new stamps he admitted me through. I think I saw a look of disappointment on his face, the prick. (Actually, I think the prick was the customs guy, who should have given me the damned stamp to begin with.)

I made my plane, with barely enough time to buy and wolf down half of a tortilla wrap sandwich with soggy lettuce. Dear god, airport food is disappointing. I was hoping that I could hit a Tim Horton's and figure out exactly what it is that they advertise during NHL games on the Ceeb. Alas. Although the airport did indeed have a Horton's, I'll have to hit one later while I'm in Canada.

Anywho, I slept through most of the flight to Ottawa, which was short. I should probably scrounge up some dinner soon, as it's closing in on 8 PM out here, plus it's a Sunday. The hotel restaurant will probably be open, but I thought I might see what downtown Ottawa has to offer. Particularly if there's brew involved.

Code Tweaks for Old Friends

2007-09-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

I made a couple of changes to the local blog environment that I'd like to direct your attention to.

On the right side, there's a new box that links to my photo galleries on the Google/Picasa server. Flickr has always frustrated me from a usability standpoint, and while Picasa seems a little clunky, it's clean and I can get stuff done. Besides, I'm a Google fanboy. I hope to get more galleries up there in the future.

Also on the right side in the newly renamed Blogroll (sounds like some sort of eastern European breakfast sweet) section, I've added links for a couple of old friends that are new again:

ErikU - I've known Erik literally since he was in diapers, but that's not saying much since I was probably barely out of training pants myself at the time. For most of my life he was a brother-of-a-friend, and therefore a target for ridicule (which he returned to me liberally during our teen years). Since we're all grown up now I've realized that he is that most important of acquaintances, An Interesting Person. He's a fine web monkey, a good photographer, and one of the few people who can talk hockey with me sensibly.
Sloop - Sloop and I met in high school, and we spent a time working together at the old camera repair shop on Sandy Boulevard during college. Over the last half-dozen years I'd lost track of him, and it was quite cool that he found me online and struck up the conversation. Of all the people from my past that could have appeared out of the haze of the Internet, Sloop is by far the least creepy.

Someday I'm hoping to do a full site revamp to the blog, with fancy colors and everything. Maybe when I'm unemployed next month.

The true meaning of Labor Day

2007-09-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago a publisher of technical books went fishing for somebody to tech review a Photoshop Elements book they have in the works. This is something I do on a semi-regular basis for Adobe's in-house publications, and I figured by volunteering for this gig I could make some connections and goodwill for after my ride on the A-train ends. They want a quick turnaround, and given the size of the tome (300 pages) I figured I better apply some of the meaning in labor to Labor Day weekend. So today I started reading through the book and adding my comments.

This thing is an f'ing mess. It's not the worst technical book I've read, but it makes a healthy bid for a medal. The author, who I'm sure has never done this before (the community of one-time tech book authors is humongous) is trying to keep the tone congenial and slyly humorous. The whole thing just falls flat, though. He keeps forgetting the first lesson of writing technical tutorials: give the reader clear and direct instructions. I've also got quibbles on how he's tossing around technical terms, especially how he keeps putting menu items in single quotes. I worked on this thing for maybe four hours tonight, and I'm only 20 pages in. It's going to be a long week.

Hit the theater and saw Superbad yesterday. Laughed pretty hard, though in the end I felt that the movie was kind of vacuous and forgettable. I've looked pretty hard for, and found, meaning in Apatow and Rogen's previous works. Superbad had it's own lessons to learn, and the characters went through some decent arcs, but I didn't feel that it had the lasting parable that I look for in a good story. Could just be that I didn't identify that well with the characters. I wasn't involved with alcohol or slutty girls in high school. (Maybe I'm retrospectively jealous of the experiences of the characters... ah, well, at least I don't have a disease.)

Oh, got some new kitten photos for you (click link, then proceed forward for new photos). More of kittens in action! Enjoy.

Still Sick , Goddammit

2007-08-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

This bloody cold won't leave me alone. The sore throat has dissipated, but my sinuses occasionally act up and I've been suffering from an awful cough. Barely got any sleep sometimes this week. I bought a Nyquil/Dayquil combo pack, but neither of them have helped any little bit. I want my money back.

Today the cough has been a lot better. Friday it was pretty awful, and we went to see the Young Frankenstein musical. I snuck in a bottle of water to suck on lubricate my throat, but since laughing makes me cough even worse, it really didn't help any. The musical is awesome, by the way. All the right touches from the beloved movie, yet the actors have made the characters their own. (Which I was grateful for; I didn't pay for good seats to watch someone do a bad Marty Feldman impression.) In my opinion, it was funnier than The Producers, though Brooks' previous musical foray seemed somewhat more appropriate for the theatre.

With all the down time due to the cold, I've at least had the opportunity to play video games. I finally finished Half-Life 2 on the 1G Xbox. Such a pretty, pretty game, and it fit my skill level so well- just enough of a challenge to keep me interested without (usually) getting me frustrated. I was especially glad that the final stage wasn't a ridiculously difficult to beat boss, like the first Half-Life game. Probably the best aspect of the gameplay is that despite cementing the story into the action (ie., no "cutscenes" per se, just scenes of dialog viewed via the first person perspective), there was never any misconception about what your next step was supposed to be. Even to the point of the game providing you with ample supply of the correct weapon for the given enemy. There was never any chance that you would fail at a challenge because you ran out of ammo. The story was always moving forward, and other games don't always get that flow so smooth. I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands of The Orange Box so I can not only replay HL2 on my 360 but continue the story with the episodes and dig into Team Fortress 2 (we played the original TF to death in college... 10 years ago).

Kittentacular

2007-08-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

Stuck home sick again... stupid sore throat (and the kittens) kept me up during the night. I'm feeling better now, though. I dispensed with the pretense of "working" from home and the stress reduction seems to have helped.

On the upside, the extra time today allowed me to finally deliver as promised: more photos of kittens!

Sore Between Head and Shoulders

2007-08-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

Been dragged down the past few days by a sore throat. Stayed home from work for a couple of days, though I kept the e-mail running. The difference between those days and a regular day at the office was only in that I didn't feel guilty about taking a nap after lunch. Actually, I got a lot done around the house, and with all the stress that's going on at the office right now it felt good to just get away for a while.

The sickness is now in day four or five, and it's getting bloody annoying, especially as how it appeared to have moved to my sinuses (a sure sign that it was looking for a way out). But it seems only have done so to stake a claim there before descending back into my throat, leaving all of the space above my shoulders in a generally miserable state.

Saw Stardust on Saturday. The movie was fantastic and you should go see it- right now. We saw it at the Majestic Bay theater, the closest movie house to our own domicile. It's a lovely little place. A bit odd in that the building is narrow and the theaters are perched on two of three stories. It's a little like the Hollywood Theater in that regard; they differ in that the Bay is new construction on the site of a historic theater, it's not a glorious old cinema that's been hacked into pieces like that Portland landmark is.

The kitties are doing well. I have some new photos, but have neglected to pull them off the camera. Next entry I will hopefully have them out. They're both growing and I'm always surprised at how heavy they are when I pick them up. It was only a few weeks ago that they were both as light as a feather. We're working their litter kicking problem right now- we've graduated from the litter-box-in-a-cardboard-box method to a full-blown, plastic molded, overpriced covered litter box. It hasn't solved the situation entirely, and Cotten seems to get confused about how to get out once he's in, but it's a definite improvement. I think we'll be getting one or two more to replace the other boxes in the house.

Oh, and the kitties have taken to fighting with each other quite frequently (and are doing so as I type). Ingrid now has a little scratch on her nose from the battles. I'm sure it's play fighting; actually, Cotten spends a lot of the time just licking Ingrid's head. But I'm wondering if they're doing it so often because they're getting bored, or if maybe it's their burgeoning hormones. We only break up the fights if they start making a lot of noise, either crying or banging against the environs as they tussle around.

Oh, I should make note that last weekend Katie and I dashed down to Portland for the wedding I mentioned in the last entry. It was beautiful- held out in Sandy at a house overlooking the Sandy River gorge with Mt. Hood in the background. Afterwards we had some time back at the Admiral's house with friends, including the bride and groom. A fun time was had by all.

One last item- for the first time since I've been playing, my soccer team has held on to the lead in our division. We're 7-1-0 and two games off the end of the season, more than enough to guarantee us a spot in the championship game. The bad news is that the second place team (6-1-1), who is locked in to the championship match with us, whipped us 6-1 last time the teams met (though I wasn't there due to my injury). In fact, they've been raiding most teams with high goal differentials like that. I think they must have just one or two amazing players (at least for our level), because mid-season that sort of broke down for them and the scores became less impressive. We're getting our second regular-season match with them tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how it comes down, especially since we'll be out a couple of our key players. Since we're both going to the division championship, losing won't mean much, but it would still be nice to say we finished in first place. I've got some ideas about tactics we might use tomorrow, if I play at all. This damnable sore throat may squash my quest for glory. Then again, maybe I shouldn't stress so much about soccer. It's only a game, and I need to get less wound up about it. (Mantra: I do this for fun and exercise. Winning is gravy.)

Work, Kick, Play

2007-08-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

A short update because it's been a while. And because I can.

`````` < Ingrid says "Hi" by way of stepping on the keyboard.

Life has been motoring along. I'm now into the second half of my reprieve from unemployment. Been tussling with the new chain of command in Ottawa a little bit. Surprise, surprise, folks don't know what they're doing out there. (Yet.) And my trip out there has been pushed out again. It looks like they may have finally hired some folks, but they don't start for a couple of weeks yet.

Started playing soccer again last week. It feels so very good to be back on the field. My injury is suffering a little bit, but I'm stretching a lot before, during, and after. The post-game pain is now quite limited, so I think I've got a big improvement. I'm not up to full speed on the field yet, but it's good to be back at all.

Speaking of soccer, I picked up Mario Strikers Charged last week. I've only played it a little bit but gave it a good poke tonight. It's fairly fun, though I haven't gotten used to all the moves yet. Should be a good multi-player game.

Will be making our monthly sojourn down to Portland this weekend for the nuptials of the Realistic Substitute and the AK-Dynamo. Should be a blast. I got a co-worker friend to agree to check in on the kitties once or twice while we're out.

Finally, had another co-worker friend over this week, he brought Gloom with him. Excellent little game. Definitely could do with more than three people.

The Land of Mario

2007-07-31T21:34:00.001-07:00

Katie and I went to the Land of Mario today. That is to say we went to the campus of Nintendo of America to take care of our sick Wii. The campus itself is unimpressive, just a bland business park in Redmond. While the architecture wasn't anything to write about, the decor of the lobby of the customer service department was rather cute. This statue of Mario greets you, and there's a similar one of Pikachu near the counter. There's a glass case with examples of Nintendo's products going all the way back to the 1890's when they began producing playing cards and games, through the birth of their electronic products with Game & Watch and Color TV Game, past their consumer boom with NES and Robby the Robot, and finally up to the present with a Wii and a DS Lite. A timeline gives you the highlights of the company's history. And of course, there's demos stations aplenty.

There are things to buy, though it's not really a game store. There were lots of accessories- Wii controllers and DS cases- but I didn't see any games or systems. The bulk of the merchandise was things like t-shirts, blankets, plush characters, lanyards, and other miscellaneous. A lot of the last type seemed to be former giveaways or trade show tchotchkes- Katie bought a small pin of a Wiimote that proclaimed it was from E3 '06.

The customer service aspect of our visit was delightful. We explained the problem to the nice lady at the counter (the Wii was shutting down after 30-60 minutes of play, possibly due to apparant overheating), and she simply took it to the back room. Twenty minutes later, she came out with a new (or at least different) Wii. Rather than attempt to fix ours, they just did a straight swap. The extra time was necessary so that the data could be transferred between the Wiis. She explained the disadvantages of this method thoroughly, so that we understood what to expect:

Although our save game data was transferred, we had to re-download the games we bought from the Wii Shop Channel.
Our Miis are no longer editable. In order to prevent someone from editing your Mii when he/she wanders over to a friend's Wii, the Mii is tied to your own Wii's console ID number. Since we swapped consoles, we lost that number. This is the most disconcerting part to me- if I want to make changes I'll have to create a new Mii, and I worry that I'll lose data I have associated with him in some games.
We'll need to provide new friend codes to our friends with Wiis.
The MAC address of the new Wii is of course different, so I had to change the address stored in our router's address filter.

The situation could have surely been worse, and I think Nintendo did a fabulous job at customer service.

On a not-positive note, today was the last day for a handful of my co-workers. Would have been for me too, had I not received an extension. Most of them seem okay with their fate, though only one of them has any plans or a new job. I wish them luck.

Feline Freedom

2007-07-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

We set the kitties free from their upstairs first home/prison today. I remain a little apprehensive that they will stay out trouble when we're not watching them, but they were getting grumpy being cooped up in the bathroom.

We also dropped an obscene amount of money on kitty creature comforts today. Partly to make sure they have a place to poo while they're out and about in the house. Partly because we can't help it- kitties are cute and kitties who are playing are cuter. As I type, Cotten is dashing crazily across the living room floor, pouncing on one of his toys.

And as playful as Cotten remains, Ingrid continues to be the cuddle-bug of the two. The montage above captures her antics while I computed. She's taken to licking parts of my face, which is delightful, though earlier today she bit the hairs of my beard and induced a little pain. Towards the end Cotten wanted to get in on the action, but Ingrid didn't want to share my attention with him.

Carpe Cattus

2007-07-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to Ingrid and Cotten.

The wife and I have wanted to adopt cats for a very long time. I first promised her that we could do so after we bought our last house, but the ensuing chaos of getting married, getting laid off, and my assumption of employment in Seattle made life too chaotic to try to foster a couple of kitties in the house. Now that we've planted roots in Seattle, we feel that life is stable enough that we can devote some attention to raising and caring for feline companions. Either that or we were overcome by kitten lust.

The plan was always to adopt two cats so that they would have company while we were away at work. We also wanted kittens, as opposed to grown cats, for, you know, the cute factor. Before committing, though, I wanted to check out a couple of the local shelters. We visited the PAWS Cat City adoption center on Saturday; the staff were very nice and we met some cute black and white kittens, but they were a bit listless. The PAWS people told us to come back on Tuesday, which apparently in addition to being the release day for CD's and video games is also the release day for new kittens.

On Sunday we visited the Seattle Animal Shelter. As was bound to happen, we got hooked. Although selection at the shelter wasn't much better than PAWS, their kittens were much cuter. Ingrid and Cotten were from the same litter and it was requested that they be adopted together. With such beautiful coats and after a little time playing with them, we had no choice. We signed up immediately. They're a bit older and not really the tiny kittens we had imagined getting, but when a cat starts tugging on your heartstrings those sort of consumer choices go straight out the window.

We didn't get the cats until Tuesday as there was a bit of a snafu with the schedule for getting them spayed and neutered. Once home they were a bit loopy from the drugs, though Cotten was eager to play. (Cotten is a male, by the by.) They improved significantly on Wednesday, and we had them pouncing and playing around in the computer room.

For now we have them locked away in the upstairs guest bathroom. We're still figuring out things like feeding schedules and litter box maintenance, but so far there's only been one accident and a little bit of scratching damage to the doorframe.

The kitties both have distinct, and quite frankly polar opposite, kitty personalities. Ingrid here is very much a lap kitty. She loves attention and likes nothing more than to be petted and held. She does get a little frisky if you toss a toy at her, but she loses interest quicker than her brother, and is apt to curl up for a catnap then. She is a bit more stealthy and sneaky than Cotten: when we open the bathroom door it's usually Ingrid that tries to escape first. I've also seen her make sneak attacks on her brother when he's not paying attention.

Cotten, as you can see, is the playful type. He's very active- running around, pouncing on toys (and his disinterested sister), and very good at getting into trouble. He doesn't seem quite as smart as Ingrid, which makes them a satisfyingly matched pair. He's also a bit of a pig at feeding time- the first time we fed them wet food he chomped through the whole bowl before Ingrid even had a second look.

Neither of the cats are very talkative, though they will mew viciously when we close them back up in the room after a good kitty play session. I feel bad for them, they both crave attention; but we only have so much time in the day for them and they need to learn to entertain themselves.

It's been a joy having them with us, and I'm looking forward to them getting a bit more settled in so we don't have to leave them trapped in the bathroom all the time. I'm also anxious to move beyond the no-dust litter we're using right now. It isn't very effective, but it's important to keep their surgery incisions free of debris.

I had a bit of fun with them this morning taking these photos. Here they have a little bath on the toilet. "What, it's a bathroom isn't it?" Expect many many many more kitten photos in the future.

Bonus points to you if you can tell me the genesis for Ingrid and Cotten's names. If you know my habits and preferences, it won't be hard.

Got me a ticket for the next station down the line

2007-07-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

Good news, of a sort. I don't want to jinx this before the paperwork is signed, but my exit from the work force has been delayed. The great re-organization that is pushing me out of my comfy cubicle has hit a snag. Everyone involved, except the executives, saw this coming. In short, they haven't been able to hire people with the right skills fast enough, so to soak up the workload they've given myself and at least one of my co-workers two more months of employment.

This does mean that my trip to Ottawa to train our replacements, which was scheduled for next week, is being pushed back. Because we don't have any replacements yet. That will mean some schedule wrangling, as our social calendar for August weekends is already pretty full. In fact, just this morning, before I got the news, I bought tickets for the wife and myself to go see Young Frankenstein. Can always move that date, I suppose.

Express Train to Unemploymentville

2007-07-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

No significant life events this week. The employment train keeps steaming along, heading towards my last day with Adobe at full speed. Only two and a half weeks left, now. I'll be spending the second week in Ottawa, training my replacements. It's a dirty job, but hey, free trip. And it leaves a good impression of me with those that are staying, should I have the opportunity to come back.

On the topic of opportunities, there's not much to say. Internal transfer options have dried up, though there may be something interesting in about a month- too late, though far from being little. Externally, there's a support position at Omni Group, a Mac software publisher. It's a very small company and in the city limits. It looks like I'd be a good fit for the job, and they have fantastic benefits. There's some significant negatives- it appears to be an entry level position, so pay probably won't be that great. I also talked with a friend who recently left the company and she says they're a bit disorganized. I'm going to submit an application anyway. I'm sure I can score an interview, then gauge their culture and try to get a bead on the pay scale.

This weekend may be a bit tough to get a resume worked out, though. The house is still a disaster zone- my computer remains in pieces, and I really want to get the garage cleaned up enough to fit a car before I go to Ottawa. There's more IKEA furniture to put together. At least I got the network situation mostly resolved. The electricians didn't put plugs on the ends of the network cables coming to the junction box from the different ports in the house, so I had to do that myself. Once everything was wired, I realized that A) I needed a router for the junction box, not the switch that I bought, and B) the connection to the kitchen isn't working. Don't know if it's the cable or the port (god, I hope it's the port- restringing the cable will be apain). We don't intend to use the kitchen port, but I'm gonna put it on the warranty fix list.

Herculean Laundry Installation

2007-07-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

I couldn't guess whether or not you've had the displeasure of installing laundry machinery in your own home. I've done it twice for myself and helped several friends, and I haven't found it a pleasant experience. All of my previous struggles combined, however, don't come close to matching the beastly battle that I waged this week on the difficulties of keeping my household's clothing clean and smelling of spring mountain air. So I will tell you about it.

Although we didn't realize it, we started out backed into a corner on this one. Our lovely, fancy new house features only a closet for a laundry room. That means our laundry options were limited to a stacking washer and dryer pair, or hauling it all off to the local coin-op every week. The GE pair that the builders were offering to sell us at an outrageous margin have received terrible reviews online, so we did a bit of shopping and bought a highly rated LG set from Home Depot. We got them in Wild Cherry Red. They're cute.

We set delivery for the day after we took possession of the house. That was last Tuesday, the day the gathering storm began letting loose its anger. The wife had agreed to bus up to the house to meet the delivery van, but she hadn't even left her office downtown by the time I received the 15-minute warning call from the driver. Being automobile enabled, I sped up to the house.

The washer came inside and was installed with a minimum of wall banging. The dryer did not get to come inside. Instead of matching the pretty red coat of the washer, it was boring, bland white. It took a while for us to trace it down, but the mistake was made by the girl at the service desk at Home Depot- she had taken the neatly computer printed order and mangled it to mismatch the units. So the dryer went back, and Katie spent the better part of a work day chasing down Home Depot employees on the phone to get the situation straightened out.

Still, this wasn't so bad. It was only a snafu. We rescheduled delivery for yesterday (Thursday). I was just leaving for work when I got the call from the delivery guys, and they arrived within a few minutes. I took the driver/foreman upstairs to show him where the dryer would go. "Oh no," he said in his Central American accented but perfectly understandable English, "we can not stack them. It's not on the order. Let me call the office."

This was actually a near miss. The office said they couldn't, but the foreman was nice enough that he had the guys do it anyway. The completed the installion, both the washer and the dryer successfully powered on, so I was happy and went to work. After a day in the electron mines, the wife and I spent a hard evening cleaning up the old apartment before turning in the keys. When we got back, we peered in on our new toys only to discover that the vent from the dryer was torn.

Now, in retrospect, maybe lint gathering on my laundry closet floor wouldn't have been such a bad thing. But being a conscientious type of guy, I decided I ought to fix it. That first involved moving two 125+ pound appliances piggy backing each other out of a closet that's barely wide enough to fit them. The dance to do that was an awkward and muscle-straining one, and it took my partner at least 15 minutes to teach me the right steps. When the song had ended, I realized that the entire assembly blocked the hallway, effectively trapping the wife in her computer room. I ruminated on this for a while, well aware that she had a bathroom and therefore a supply of fresh water, and I could keep her a prisoner by supplying her with the occasional morsel of food. I don't think that would have pleased her much, though.

The next step was to slip through the small gap left between the ejected appliances and the doorjam and adjust the laundry vent. This is really the worst part of any laundry installation. We've done amazing things with technology over the past hundred years, including the invention of the automatic laundry tumble dryer. There's absolutely no reason why the mechanism of a laundry vent should remain a futile exercise in fitting a tube over two other tubes of different sizes, during which time the simple act of trying to fit the tubes together deforms them beyond their capability of compatibility.

Let me cut through the first few stages of cursing, sweating, jumping up and down, beating the walls, and other general unpleasantness. My hands were coated in metal dust, and shards of discarded metal strewn across the ground, but the assembly was complete and we were ready to push the washer and dryer back in their homes. I think we got it about a whole inch before not only the vent fell off, but the power cord for the dryer also popped out of it's home and dangled down to the floor, like a sexually disappointed elephant.

This generated a rather prolonged episode of rage on my part. I don't think I've mentioned yet that it was well past midnight by now. After weeping on the stairs for a few moments, I put myself back together, squeezed back into the laundry closet from hell, and began working again, swearing under my breath that I would find the man (or woman) responsible for inventing such an asinine conduit for loose clothing fibers and do positively reprehensible things to them, likely disabling their ability to earn a living.

Success was to be only illusive, and somewhere in the one o'clock hour I let go the chase and headed for bed. But not before stomping the living crap out of what was left of the metal vent and depositing it in the recycling bin.

This left us with the appliances blocking half the hallway, so I was intent on taking quick action. I contemplated taking the day off work, but already hip deep in a backlog of documentation, I nixed that concept quickly. Both the wife and I did some research on different options (her being more successful than me; you try finding instructions on the obscure topic of mechanisms for installing dryer lint ventilation ducts), and after work today we hit up the local outlets of the major home improvement stores for parts that were more advanced than a tube of crumpled aluminum foil.

Cutting the rest of this bloated tale short, it does have a happy ending. The improved duct was not the easiest thing to install, but it wasn't awful. Getting the whole assembly of stacked washer and dryer back into the closet was a bit of a chore. Turns out the dance of pushing into the closet is a fair bit different than the dance of pulling out of the closet. Now the wife is well into the first official load of laundry, and I can hear it humming away almost directly above my head.

In conclusion, I'm tired and achy and thirsty. But I can now wash my goddamned boxer shorts without having to put up with the wackos at the laundromat.

Chaos Unfurled

2007-07-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'm home. That is to say, my own home, not an overpriced, undermanaged apartment. The move this weekend went fairly swiftly, thanks to the help of some very nice movers. (Totally worth the cost, let me tell you.)

It's been exhausting, but it feels good, and it feels like home. It's a bit messy right now, but that's to be expected.

(Sorry about the blurry. Web cam photo.)

I should really be working right now. But I'm just so... blah. Haven't been sleeping well as the wife has been plagued by a bad cough and sore throat, poor baby.

This made me laugh. Probably not comprehensible unless you're at least a Gaiman fan and probably is more understandable if you read his journal on a regular basis.

Domicile Transaction Completed

2007-06-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

It is at long last finished. I am, for the second and likely not the last time in my life, a homeowner. (It is therefore somewhat ironic that I'm writing this from the living room of my apartment, but that's a story for another time.) We signed the papers on Thursday and today we took the keys.

I've been really impressed by the way our builder, Noland Homes, has handled the whole package. There were a few snafus, but Noland has been responsive and helpful. Score 95 out of 100. They also had a very nice welcome home package ready for us with champagne, chocolate, and a bright red toolbox with a smattering of tools that we found immediately useful to help prepare for the delivery of our washer and dryer tomorrow.

Our real estate agent also had a very nice package for use- a sheaf of gift certificates to local shops and restaurants. It was really above and beyond, which is the way she's been throughout the entire process. We can't recommend her enough, so if you're in the Seattle market buying or selling a house, please give Cammie a call.

We'll be having an open house soon to show off the new place. I know there are some of you who don't have plans to be in Seattle anytime soon, so I took a few photos so you can peep at our new digs. Rather than bloat up the blog with all the JPEG-ness, I've created a photo album in Picasa. If you want, take a quick look at the floor plans for the house first so you have an idea of what the layout of the house is like.

Taking Solace In Tacos

2007-06-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a bit manic right now. It's a little shocking to come back from vacation to wage battle on multiple fronts simultaneously.

A holiday was much needed and well spent, however poorly timed that it was among the employment and housing flux. When I bought my fancy new camera last winter, in lieu of a discount it came with a pair of tickets for the Victoria Clipper. During our honeymoon cruise, the wife and I made only a brief landfall in Victoria, so we decided that using the free tickets to make a more thorough explanation of the city would be a good way to celebrate our third anniversary. Some scheduling snafus pushed us back from the actual anniversary weekend, but it was close enough. We had a grand time in the city, though there was much walking that left my legs sore, a little sun that left my skin a shade redder than normal, and a lot of excellent food that piled on about five pounds around my middle. Many photos were taken, I'll share some in a future post.

After a mostly relaxing five days on Vancouver Island we arrived home late last night, but had to get up early this morning. Then the battles begun.

The first battle was a physical therapy appointment. I was already achy from the trip, so the routine was an unusual bit of punishment. I was hoping that I would get a positive prognosis for my return to soccer. The conclusion was indeterminate. I'm not going to fret, since my Monday dance card is full next week, but I'm looking forward to getting back on the field as soon as possible.

Second up this morning was the builder's walkthrough of our townhouse. This was the final "here are all the defects that you need to fix" run. The place looks in good shape, quite beautiful with the paint and other details. There has been some issues with the paint, though, and we'll likely have to cough up some more cash for a second coat in some of the rooms.

The third front was work. Meeting after meeting, barely any free time to grab lunch before a phone interview for a job I'm not really qualified for and don't really want but the manager is desperate so I'll do it so I can get my name out there and maybe get a job that I like. Oy. It seemed like everyone wanted a piece of Tim today, and to compound the frustration I missed a call on Friday about the one job I am most interested in.

By the time I got home, I was wiped. But I had to face down the ants that have invaded our kitchen. And then the realization that having been gone all weekend, we needed to go to the grocery store. It's probably not surprising, then, that I cracked and went out for tacos rather than investigate something healthy that might mitigate the fine Victorian cuisine that I packed around my midsection over the weekend. Pfah, I'll take that hit for now. Tacos are yummy.

Looking forward, we'll be signing the closing papers for the townhouse this week. Yippee. We get the keys on Monday, and then the fun really begins. Appliances, utilities, packing, moving, etc. I can see myself collapsing with exhaustion already.

To Survive is To Work

2007-06-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone for the kind words you've sent through the comments, e-mail, or otherwise. They are appreciated.

The last week has been tough. I've been depressed, distracted, and my productivity has sunk to new lows. It's only in the past couple of days that I've started to get myself back on track. The performance plan that they've got me on stipulates that I have certain goals to meet for the next two months, but they aren't awfully stringent. There's lots of opportunity for ruminating, rumor-mongering, and general slacking.

What sucks most about being laid off is that I really like the people I work with, and they're practically the only people I know in Seattle. So being forcibly removed from the company feels a little like I've been disowned.

Meanwhile, I'm in earnest pursuit of internal job opportunities. After a long, tortuous process I finally completed submitted a resumé for the training position. I'll have an interview on Monday with the manager, and a phone interview on Tuesday with her manager. Meanwhile, I'm putting on the "any job at Adobe is better than a job anywhere else" hat, and I've gone through three informal interviews for a QE job on the InDesign team. Now, I know nearly nothing about InDesign, but for some reason I keep getting called back. There are much better qualified people for this job than me, really there are. Yet they keep calling me back... how strange. Parts of me think that I can do the job, other parts think it's a bad idea to put myself in that situation. Lordy, I hope I get the training position so I don't have to worry about it.

Life is otherwise motoring along fine. Saw Pirates 3 at the Cinerama on Monday. Great theater, except for the seats. The movie was a mess.

The wife and I had our third anniversary on Tuesday. Schedule snafus and a lack of planning on my part aside, we had a nice dinner at home on Wednesday to celebrate. Next week we'll have more time to celebrate, when we go to Victoria for a much-needed long weekend.

The Xbox 360 has become a time sink for both myself and the wife. Both of us are becoming addicted to Catan, and I've cornered our local market on Hexic gems. I can't explain why, but achievements are addicting.

Last but not least, we're starting to get into the final details for the house. Closing date is June 25th, less than three weeks away now. We've got movers lined up, a washer and dryer on order, and just about everything squared away. Next week we have the inspection, and the following week a walk-through with the builder.

The last piece of the puzzle is for me to make sure I'll be earning money to pay for this outrageously expensive house.

Precipice

2007-05-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

I'm the type of person who likes variety, who says "I'll try anything once" enough for it to be a cliché but not enough to regret it, who appreciates change for the sake of change.

Before yesterday I'd never been laid off before, but I don't think I like it.

The short version of this is that my job is moving to Ottawa without me. The long version is that my department (what the company refers to as a "business unit") has been restructuring for months. One of the biggest and last pieces was to take us, the entry-level positions, and mix us around a bit. A handful of my teammates will be spared the knife, but the rest of us were axed so that more people could be had doing more work for less money in a different city. The only satisfaction that I get is that my replacement(s) will be focused on the part of my job I hated most: dealing with customers.

The big A is not rid of me quite yet, though. Among those of us leaving, a few were given two month "transitional" periods, at the end of which we earn a fat bonus. Less fortunate folks than myself get less time and less money.

Everyone is being encouraged to find another job within the company, but there are few jobs to go around. At the moment I'm taking a break from resumé development for the best avaiable slot. I'm optimistic about the position (I started talking to that manager a week before I knew how badly I needed the job); it's a training position- training my replacements, among other people. But the stiff competition has me very nervous.

All in all, it sucks. Yesterday was a very bad day, though most people took it well. We could smell it coming, quite frankly. We just didn't know when. Some folks are taking the attitude that the reorganization is a mistake, but I have to be honest and say that it's a good plan. Our department had become stale and needed change. I just wish they hadn't decided to change me out for a canuck. They're abandoning a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in the people that are being let go, but they know that. It was a move calculated to consolidate resources, save money, and stroke certain egos.

So here I find myself, on the edge of unemployment. If my bid on this job is successful, well, not much will change. If it's not successful... I can kiss this fancy laptop goodbye for starters. And there will probably be some ridiculous commute involved for my next job. Lord, how I hate job searching; I hate having to sell myself.

Pfah. Life is giving me lemons, and I'm not much in the mood for lemonade.

Over the mountains

2007-05-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

Delinquency, thy face is mine.

I'm watching the opening of the Stanley Cup finals on CBC right now. Since the first game in taking place in Anaheim, they marched out Schwarzenegger to drop the puck. It's very bizarre- he's bigger than the centers, even with their pads on.

Last weekend (week +2 days ago) we went to Portland and Corvallis for a wedding. While we were in Oregon I agreed to help Dad shoot a first communion mass at our old neighborhood church. Mostly it was capturing the pre-pre-teen kids accepting the mid-mass snack, but I also grabbed a few journalistic- style shots. The whole thing was an interesting experience, as I'd never photographed an event before. I didn't want to disrupt the ceremonies, but to get some of the more interesting photos I had to insert myself into the action. The priest never gave me any dirty looks, so I guess he's either sympathetic to the problems of a photographer or was just plain imperturbable.

Yesterday we made a combined Memorial Day visit and cookie run to Cle Elum, Washington. Cle Elum is a small town nestled against the east flanks of the Cascades where they spill out into the Yakima River Valley, and I spent a lot of time there on vacation with my family as a young'un. My great aunt Rose lived there practically her whole life- after her father died in a coal mining accident, her mother moved Rose and her sister Jenny (my grandmother) to the town from a smaller hamlet in the hills. I have extremely fond memories of my time in Cle Elum, mostly of Aunt Rose herself (called "Auntie" Rose most often, so as to distinguish her from my cousins' maternal Aunt Rose) but also of the hot, dry summers in a quaint, quiet old town in Central Washington.

I have especially treasured memories of the cookies from the Cle Elum Bakery, a century-old institution located only a block from the house my great-grandmother raised her daughters in. (The same house where I spent summer nights sleeping in a cot on the covered porch and summer mornings dialing through cable TV before my parents were awake.) Rose and Jenny both worked at the bakery when they were teenagers, and Aunt Rose always had a box of their fabulous cookies ready for us when we visited, or bundled along in the mail when she sent Christmas packages. Since Aunt Rose passed away several years ago, and also for the previous years when her health was in decline, the taste of the treats from Cle Elum have been a rare pleasure. I have long dreamed of the delectable baked goods produced by that little brick building, most specifically their fruit bars- a thin, flat confection made of cookie dough mixed with mashed dates.

With that loving description of a little slice of my childhood, you should be fully expecting my next statement: Our very first stop when we got into town was the bakery, where I proudly asked for a double dozen of fruit bars. We also picked up some other cookies (no torcettis, sadly) and a little mug that I'll use for tea at work. The cookies are just as good as I remember, and I've stashed a few in the freezer for future cookie bliss.

We stopped by the old house next. The new owners have added a curious new second-story porch and stairs. It's otherwise still the same: gray cement blocks, corrugated sheet metal roof, and peeling white on the window sills.

Our duties in Cle Elum were completed at Laurel Hill Memorial Cemetery. It was an unusually colorful place this weekend; most of the plots were decked out in silk flowers and/or American flags for the holiday. We visited Aunt Rose's grave, next to that of her mother and father, and left some flowers and good thoughts for them.

One thing I had never done in Cle Elum was to cross the river and visit "the suburbs", the independent town of South Cle Elum. (To give you a comparison, Cle Elum's population has to sweat to break 2000, South Cle Elum barely breaks 500.) We found a fabulous old railroad depot that had been restored and had a delicious little lunch inside.

We rounded out the day with a little sightseeing: a drive up the Cle Elum River through the little towns of Roslyn and Ronald, and up to Cle Elum Lake. Along the way back I kept my camera busy taking photos of the picturesque sights in the towns. There's a lot of character in the aging buildings in these old mining towns, and I'd like to go back sometime on a dedicated photo safari. And to get more cookies, of course.

The one thing that really impressed me on this trip was how well the region appears to be doing, economically spekaing. There's lots of new construction, both houses and businesses. Tourism and vacation homes seem to be a big driver, which is probably the only option considering that the coal and lumber economies that the area has historically depended on are long gone. Yet the character of these little towns doesn't seem to have changed in the quarter century that I've been visiting them. The area is growing at it's own pace, which is a relief. I'd hate to see the region overrun with uncontrolled growth. Given the relative middle-of-nowhereness of these towns, I doubt that will ever be a likely possibility.

Cle Elum, by the way, is an abstraction of the local Indian word for "swift water". Which is certainly an apt description this Spring, as the melting snow pack have swollen the local rivers and lakes. Cle Elum Lake, below, is as full as the dam can hold it, making one of the roads at the campground sub-aquatic.