Archive for 'photos' Category
2009.11.03
Halloween Pictures
I wanted to thank everyone for coming to this year’s Halloween Party! It was great fun and I can’t wait to do it again next year. In the meantime I’ve put up some pictures. Here they are!
No Comments | Catergorized: food-drink friends geek photos san francisco2009.10.29
Meeting Steven Erikson
I’m not a fanboy. I don’t go stalking celebrities or significant people. I don’t goto events or conventions to brush shoulders with the famous or infamous. It’s just not in my nature. I might think about it sometimes, but I have too much pride.
But I had to say I just met Steven Erikson last night and it was pretty cool to talk to an author I respect. Even if I felt a bit like a fanboy. It happened thus…
The mind and crew of Borderlands Books is opening up a cafe soon and I’ve been excited about it since first hearing about it; even more so now that I live in the neighborhood. I’ve been needing a good cafe to spend time in since my days in Prague and this just seems perfect. They won’t be opening yet (alas!) but yesterday night, in conjunction with this year’s World Fantasy Convention, they opened in order to host a bevy of authors, including Steven Erikson.
For those that do not know, and I admit I didn’t know until about six weeks ago myself, Steven Erikson is the author of a series of fantasy books set around an empire called Malazan. The world was built over a very long period of time with his friend Cameron Esslemont, who also writes books that take place there. (As an aside, I will read his books eventually and will then become a fanboy of his, but not until then). The books are pretty vast in scope, covering a myriad of characters, plot lines, situations and emotions. Honestly, in the five minutes I’m writing this I’m not going to be able to come up with a quick and easy review and that’s not my point. Let’s just say it’s the best fantasy I’ve read in many, many years. For that matter it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a while.
Blah blah blah. I went to the table with Mr. Erikson and Mr. Esslemont and talked with them a bit, asked some questions, got an autograph and moved on in order not to feel like too much of a fanboy. But I was. The only question I forgot to ask but wanted to was if there was, somewhere, a complete map of the world they created. I like maps…
RMCA took a few pictures, bless her, and here’s my two favorites.
Someday, it is my sincere hope to have written something on the scale and scope of the Malazan books and have someone appreciate them the way I appreciate Mr. Erikson and Mr. Esslemont’s work.
3 Comments | Catergorized: books geek photos san francisco2009.10.19
Flooding at Work
Today’s hot news at work was the flood. Yes, I live in San Francisco. We’re known for our earthquakes but not so much for flooding. Ironically it wasn’t even supposed to rain today, so I had ridden my motorcycle. Anyway, rain it did to the point where the storm drains basically EXPLODED. Take a look at this video. If you look carefully in the background you’ll see a brick building; that’s where I work.
The video was shot from where I get my morning coffee almost every day. As a result of that geyser in the middle of the road we got this, which was shot by Courtney from the front of our building. This was after the water receded a bit! The water was coming in all of our doors and even a few places, like a wall window, we never expected it. Courtney also took this picture, which looks out on the intersection of Bay and Powell.
As a result of the water damage and the unsanitary water itself (not to mention the stench) the offices are closed tomorrow. Yay…?
What a day to spend my Mom’s birthday!
No Comments | Catergorized: life photos san francisco work2009.08.14
Poor Dead Seal
I’ve had this past week off and have been trying to fill the days with something more interesting than sitting on my butt dorking around on the computer. To that end I rode the motorcycle down to my old workplace to visit friends there on Tuesday and on Wednesday I took the curvy smooth Coastal Highway up to Bolinas. It was a great ride made much better by the fact that the roads were mostly clear of traffic.
I haven’t been up to Bolinas in a long time. I didn’t have my surf stuff with me (hard to strap a nine foot surf board to a motorcycle) I really wanted to get in. Maybe this weekend. Instead I took a walk along the beach and was going to go sit on what I thought was a log and watch the surfers. It wasn’t a log, though. I have no idea what killed the poor seal as aside from the seaweed conspicuously around its neck (but loose) there was no obvious cause.
Still, what a great day. The only thing that could have made it better is if I weren’t out alone. It’s hard to have time off and not be able to spend it with RMCA.
2009.07.30
Car Arsons
Recently in San Francisco there has been a rash of car arsons. I knew about this, vaguely, but didn’t realize one was right around the corner from where I work.
There wasn’t much left by the time I got there. Just some broken glass and burned debris. Some of the leaves in the tree above were charred, too. I’m guessing this wasn’t the worst one.
But walking around the neighborhood I saw these flags. Dude! Take your flags down! Some people have no respect for the flag.
2009.07.28
iPhoto and Facebook
I’ve been really enjoying iPhoto 09 until just the other day. RMCA and I have tons of photos from our trip to Catalonia and I thought I would upload them from iPhoto into Facebook for easy, lazy sharing. I’ve done this before with the previous version of iPhoto and an plugin from the folks at Facebook and it worked brilliantly. The new version, however, I’m not terribly impressed with.
For one it assumes that you’ve labeled everyone using the built-in Faces feature. I hadn’t. iPhoto uses these Faces labels to create your tags in Facebook. This is supremely irritating as some of the people I do not want tagged are there. Also irritating was the fact that I couldn’t add details. Perhaps I could do this using each picture’s information section, but the beauty of the plugin from before was that you could add all the relevant information.
Finally, in my list of albums there are now Facebook albums. I’m afraid to delete these now because I don’t know if iPhoto will try to delete them from Facebook. I don’t want them there, though. I’ll have to experiment with it.
Personally I won’t be using iPhoto’s built in Facebook uploader again. It’s easy, true, but too easy and without enough overt control.
PS: I’ll be uploading more pictures to this site soon, too.
2 Comments | Catergorized: apple grrr photos2009.07.11
Barcelona Days Two, Three and Four
It’s been a little busy the past several days. RMCA has been at her conference and I’ve been wandering around the city by day. Normally I would post at night but we’ve been out in the evenings, too. I think with all the walking, at the end of this trip my legs will either be stronger than they have been in years or they will fall off…
This is going to be a fast post because I’m meeting RMCA’s parents in about 15 minutes. Let’s get to the pictures!
We went and had a lovely dinner at Los Caracoles (The Snails), which was founded in 1835. Great food and really nice people working there. Very highly recommended!
I tried to have a Gaudi day but the rain was pissing down. I made it to Sagrada Familia, but the towers were closed. Despite all the rain I took a few pictures.
I loved the iron doors of Sagrada Familia and took a lot of pictures of them. Here’s a few.
Gaudi loved to work with iron decorations and I have to admit some of it was pretty amazing in its detail.
Despite the rain I wandered down to La Boqueria, which is a huge indoor market with tons of fresh food. We just don’t have permanent establishments like this in America, which is a shame.
More Gaudi iron work on the outside of Palau Güell. I want some of this for my door and house (when/if I can ever afford such!).
Details in the old part of the city. I think modern life has lost something precious with these small details.
I took a break and had some ivi negre/i (red wine) and wrote in this little cafe off the Plaça del Rei.
More details… A random stone along a wall.
Another Gaudi building up in an area called Grácia, which is an almost completely untouristed area and pretty amazing. I want to go back up there.
RMCA and I out last night. The night brings out even more beauty in Barcelona…
That’s all for now. More when I have time!
2 Comments | Catergorized: catalonia photos2009.07.08
Barcelona Day One
Well, we are here in lovely Barcelona. The trip, though long, was largely uneventful. Security in San Francisco was easy; security at Frankfurt was less so (though much more polite). I kind of wonder what they would have thought it I’d shown up in Germany with the pocket knife I found for sale at SFO. Isn’t that sort of a weird security breach, that you can buy a knife at an airport and board the plane with it because you’ve already passed all the security checks?
Last night was kind of rough. After all that traveling we didn’t want to sleep until the local bedtime. Besides, we were hungry. So we went up to a place in the El Poblenou neighborhood and ate awesome tapas and drank local red wine. The octopus was very nice…
Incidentally, this was taken at almost midnight. On a Tuesday night. Yep, these folks have the right idea! But today was my first “real” day here. After seeing RMCA off to her conference I loaded up and walked from the hotel at the very bottom of Avinguda Diagonal, up to Carrer de Llull and along that entire street to the La Ribera and Cuitat Vella neighborhoods. I stopped myself just short of heading over to the very famous La Rambla so I have something to do tomorrow.
As you can see, the older part of Barcelona has old, narrow medieval streets.
A lot of the buildings are suffering graffiti. I saw quite a few people working to paint over spots on their buildings or businesses because most of it is crap tagging. Some if it is quite good as art, though, like this one…
Each corner has the street name, much like in every other European country I’ve visited. Unfortunately they are usually impossible to read here unless you get right up next to them. I was looking at this street sign because it looked a bit different and noticed that there was an old stone marking, too. Pretty cool, neh?
Like most European countries, Barcelona has a dearth of old churches. This one is the Eglésia de Santa Maria del Mar. I visited this one in specific thinking of my Navy brother.
There’s also old Roman ruins in town. This is a wall the Romans built in the 4th century. Though it is shored up with modern brick it’s amazing to look at the old stone that remains and think of all that’s happened since it was was erected. Incidentally, Barcelona was founded by the Romans at least 300 years BC.
Before heading back to the hotel I stopped by the Parc de la Ciutadella. I’d walked past it on my way to the old part of town and figured I would check it out. There were tons of kids on school excursions, all wearing the same color t-shirts (and sometimes hats). One group was getting Catalan pronunciation lessons from their teacher; I should have joined them!
Now I’m back at the hotel and writing all of this. The thing is that it’s only 7:30PM here, so there’s a whole evening to go before the day is over. I just wanted to update the blog and share a bit.
2 Comments | Catergorized: catalonia life photos2009.05.27
Photo Manipulation; Tilt and Tile
I’ve got two interesting online apps that Banana Boy sent my way about photo manipulation. One is to change your pictures into fancy (but fake) tilt-shift images. Called TiltShift Generator, it has an online and downloadable version (downloadable version requires Adobe Air to be installed). Here’s an example I made. The first is unmodified and the second is, obviously, modified.
The second online app is called Repper and will create patterns out of a selection of an image. Some of the possibilities are pretty amazing for designers. I had some trouble uploading the image above but eventually created the images below. On the left is the image you download. When you make it a repeat you get the image on the right.
Nice stuff. I’m particularly happy to be experimenting with the tilt shift app!
No Comments | Catergorized: photos san francisco technology2008.09.07
Skydiving in Lodi
At long last I can cross another item off my bucket list… Skydiving. On Saturday 17 of us went to The Parachute Center in Lodi, CA and 15 of us jumped. It was quite exhilarating and a lot of fun. For myself, I found free falling rather peaceful and vast once I got over the initial rush, and the chute ride down reminded me so much of why I wanted to be a pilot when I was young. Definitely something I want to do again.
Part of the crew of first jumpers: Jonny, Jerome, me and JP.
Jonny wants to save the world!
Here I am tumbling. Love this shot!
