Archive for 'photos' Category
2008.06.18
Susan Ann Nerad
This morning my Mom passed away from her cancer and cancer related illness. I’m in shock. It will hit me soon. All of you, call your Moms and tell her you love her.
2008.03.18
“Stranger” Visiting
Doug and Erin at Vesuvio’sThis past weekend Erin McCain, a friend from college, came to visit me here in San Francisco. I hadn’t seen her in almost sixteen years now and had really just had sporadic contact after years of silence in the past couple years. When she said she wanted to get out of Ohio for a bit I told her she should come out here, so she did!
Having moved around so much in my life, my memory is a bit sporadic and definitely contextual. Seeing Erin brought back a lot of memories but also showed me how many gaps there were from back then. For instance I have no real recollection of her boyfriend in college. You’d think that would have been important! Sorry, Erin, I guess he never made much of an impression on me…
Anyways, I played tour guide around the City. We stopped in Berkeley so she could sample Betty’s Oceanview Diner’s espresso filled chocolate “twinkies”. We rode my motorcycle to the Japanese Tea Gardens, out to Ocean Beach, walked around the Haight and Fisherman’s Wharf. Got completely sauced at Ireland’s 32 with Mookee (and learned that one of the previous owners that we liked killed himself, which came as a shock). Walked from where I work near Pier 39 all the way to the Metreon by way of North Beach, China Town and Union Square and took the Hyde Street cable car back to Ghirardelli Square. It’s amazing how much of this City you can see in just a couple days, and yet barely scratch the surface!
It was great to see her and I realize that I really like having guests in town!
3 Comments | Catergorized: food-drink friends motorcycle photos san francisco2008.02.11
Consumer Darwinism
Working in IT I get to see a lot of strange things on and around peoples desks when I go to help them. What follows isn’t the strangest or funniest thing (by a long shot!) but it did make me roll my eyes just a little bit. See if you can guess why.
What you’re seeing is a bottle of Trader Joe’s vitamins. It’s cranberry concentrate, which I’ve been assured contains tons of vitamin C. What gets me is the brand tag line, “For the Survival of the Fittest.” This is the most ironic thing I’ve seen in quite a while. If you were -evolutionarily speaking, of course- “the fittest” person and most worthy of passing your genes on to improve the species then you wouldn’t need vitamins. You would need vitamins if you were not genetically superior, though. The fittest don’t need help (unless they want it). The less fittest need help (unless they want to die out).
This is yet another fine example of marketers doing what they do best… Creating an image that distorts reality. For truth in advertising the tag line should read, “For the Survival of the Not-Quite-Fittest.”
3 Comments | Catergorized: food-drink grrr photos work2008.02.09
No More Poloroid Pikchas!
Sad -yet not unexpected- news: Poloroid will be closing its instant film processing plants soon and Poloroid pictures will soon be used to gauge how old we really are. Before the age of digital photography and its instant gratification, Poloroids were the coolest thing going. I remember my Mom taking pictures at birthday parties. We’d pose for the camera and Mom would take the picture, then we’d run over and watch as our grinning faces slowly appeared on the distinctive picture.
I never had a Poloroid camera myself, but we had one growing up (my Mom still has and uses it) and I’ve been to parties where a Poloroid was passed around liberally. They were/are a lot of fun to play with and there’s something very satisfying (almost magical) as you watch the chemicals mix and form the picture right in front of your eyes.
If you have a Poloroid camera and want to use it going forward, it’s time to start hoarding all the film you can afford! For the rest of us we can enjoy the nostalgia of their TV ads and the pictures we have from our childhood.
1 Comment | Catergorized: geek photos technology2008.01.22
Mosaic Screensaver in Mac OS 10.5
Unbeknownst to me, Mac OS 10.5* has a screensaver that builds mosaics from existing photos. It actually does quite a good job of it! It will require you to have plenty of pictures in you iPhoto library or some folder to build good images, though. You can see here where to set it in your screensaver preferences. Click the third icon and let the system build out the image database. My machine is old so the first image is slow to load, but once it starts it’s really quite mesmerizing.
My only gripe is that I’ve set mine to use only my “High Rated” photo album. It does for the image to be mosaicked, but it used every picture from my photo library to build the elemental pictures in the mosaic. If you have images you’d rather not share with the public this could be a nuisance. Otherwise, give it a go and be amazed.
Seeing this screensaver, though, made me wonder why iPhoto doesn’t have a built in method of creating mosaics. Obviously the software exists already. Maybe a future update of iPhoto? The US Patent Office has recently published a new mosaic related patent from Apple, so this must be in the pipeline.
In the meantime if you’re interested in creating your own personal mosaic images on your Mac I recommend MacOSaiX. It’s quite versatile and has some interesting features; not only can you use images on your computer for the mosaic tiles, but you can query to sites like Flickr and Google Images for source material. Pretty cool.
* Yes, I refuse to call it by its cat name…
No Comments | Catergorized: apple geek photos2008.01.04
Storm Damage
During lunch today I took a walk and took a few pictures of the damage from the storm. While this wave seems to be over for now there’s supposed to be another front coming in tonight. While I do love storms and horrible weather in general, I don’t like the damage so much. I empathize too much. I guess they’ll call this the Great Pacific Storm of 2008. I kind of wonder if this is just the first of many to come.
The first picture shows a car completely smashed by an uprooted tree. Two of the tires popped. When I took the picture a little girl came up and said, “Cool!” The second picture show two immense branches that came off a tree and buried two cars and a truck. It was taken in front of the pool I swim at (that I need to start doing again).
2007.11.05
Halloween Pictures
I’ve finally chosen a few pictures from the Halloween party Jon E and I threw the other week. You can find them here. Most of the pictures are all VIZ people and I wish I’d gotten a few more pictures from/with the two other main groups that were there (neighbors and friends all!) but you’ll still get a good idea of what a blast we had.
No Comments | Catergorized: food-drink friends life photos san francisco2007.10.29
Party Wrapup
Me and SebastianFirst of all, a huge Thank You to everyone who came to the party on Saturday! I hope you had as much fun as I did. I hope you had the luxury of recovering on Sunday because I did not; Jon E and I cleaned! It took us all day but that’s because we took our time and we had almost no energy. The last group wandered out at about 3AM and those of us crashing here finally got to bed around 4AM!
A number of people asked about the music, provided by KT (disguised as an OSU fan last night). They are called mashups. What are mashups? Basically take elements from two (or more) songs, preferably of different genres, and lay those elements over each other to create a new and often very “original” song. Wikipedia has much more information, including a detailed history. Many of the songs are from San Francisco’s own Bootie. You can download two great collections here and here.
I’ll be posting pictures when I get the chance though I will try to be discrete and not post certain pictures. You know who you are! Meanwhile the picture up there is of me and “Sebastian” who was the gayest non-homosexual ever to grace one of our Halloween parties. PS: for those of you who drank Becherovka with me, we finished the bottle… How are you feeling? :)
2 Comments | Catergorized: food-drink friends life photos2007.10.22
iPhoto 08 Gripes
Old Family PoloroidI got iPhoto 08 a few weeks ago along with the rest of the iLife package. I was initially not impressed with the automatic splitting of my photo library into “events” because my collection is haphazard, non-contiguous and completely out of order by dates. It took a lot of wrangling to get its default breakdown into some semblance of order. I have to say I still don’t like the whole thing, though at least going forward it will be easier.
My main gripe now, though, is with the Smart Albums. Smart Albums are essentially live searches of your photos based on certain criteria. I use them primarily to synch specific photos to my iPod and iPhone since I don’t want to copy the entire library over. This past weekend I scanned some really old photos of my family and thought it would be great to have a Smart Album of just my highest rated pictures of my family.
All of my pictures are tagged with keywords with people’s names so you would think I could create a Smart Album with the criteria
Rating is greater than three stars AND
Keyword is Mom OR Dad OR Chris OR Heather OR (etc)
This is not the case, though. The Smart Album function cannot handle simple Boolean strings. I have the options of either matching all or any options. This limits me to all AND or all OR.
To me this seems rather retarded. How has Apple missed such a simple and potentially useful tool? Or do they have it and I’m just missing something? Hopefully they include this in future updates because it seems, to me anyways, that it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.
4 Comments | Catergorized: apple grrr photos2007.06.28
Pictures from Paris, Prague and Liberec
I’m back from my trip to Europe. I’m very tired but, despite this, I posted a few pictures so you can see some of what I’ve seen. I haven’t added any details to the pictures yet, but I will… Especially if I can get used to typing on an American keyboard again (I got used to typing on the French keyboard layout and it’s very different in subtle ways).
Gallery One: Paris, Prague and Liberec. These are the pictures I took in Paris, as well as the pictures from Prague and Liberec that had familar people in them.
Gallery Two: Pictures of Prague. The pictures here are just of the city of Prague. I love this place!
No Comments | Catergorized: food-drink friends life memories paris photos prague work
