Recently in General Category

If you look really closely, you will notice a subtle difference between this photo and the one I posted a couple of weeks ago. Yup, you guessed it. Choco actually rolled over onto his other side. Amazing, huh?

Here are a few more pictures of the proud parents and the new baby. Congratulations, again!

It was a very busy weekend, lots of driving up in L.A., but managed to get quite a few things done and make some long overdue visits to friends. I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Ian and Elizabeth and seeing their new little baby boy. I will put up a post later with some photos, but right now I'm swamped with work. I thought I'd throw out a little teaser, this is also one of my favorite photos from the trip up.

It wasn't more than three months ago that I was saying my final goodbyes to my mother. I still think about her every day. The pain has lessened, somewhat. The difficult part for me is, as a friend of mine put it, the whole finality of it...that she can't see what a beautiful day it is today, or watch her favorite TV show (Law & Order), or go visit my nephews and niece. That we'll never hear her play piano again...that I'll never get to be her tech support person any more...so many things I am going to miss for a very long time.

Life goes on...and the amazing thing is that as we lose loved ones, new life is brought into our world, too. I want to congratulate Elizabeth and Ian, who are the proud new parents of a beautiful baby boy...William Isaac Lucas Douglas, born on October 3rd. I haven't been able to make it up there to see them yet, and I'm sure mom and dad are going to want some alone time for a while, but I hope to have some pictures soon. Until then, well, here's a picture of one of my cats, doing what he does best.

My mother passed away early this morning. She had been in the hospital for the past month with kidney problems and pneumonia. After an initial few days in the ICU, she had shown signs of improvement. Sadly, about a week ago she started developing problems again and things deteriorated from there.

To say this has been devastating is a huge understatement. Although she was 74 years old, she seemed to be in fine health and was always running around all over the place. She was well known for just dropping in at people's houses with little or no notice, it was just part of her charm. I guess I sort of expected her to be around forever.

There are so many things I learned from her. She was an incredible woman. I can't imagine what it must have been like raising two boys mostly on her own. But I can't recall ever hearing a single complaint from her. I can't even say I ever heard her say anything mean or derogatory about anyone or anything. She lived modestly and didn't seem to care about material possessions or social status. Despite being from a part of the world that is still very sexist, I think she was a great role model for modern women. She was very independent and self-sufficient, and did anything she wanted to whenever she wanted to. Yet, at the same time, she was one of the most giving people I know.

The pain that I feel in realizing that I can't just drive up to go see her any more, that I'll never hear her voice again, is almost unbearable.

If anyone is interested, services will be held at the following location:

Forest Lawn Memorial Park
21300 E. Via Verde St.
Covina, CA 91724
(800) 204-3131

The viewing will be on Tuesday evening (7/15), and the interment will be Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. the following day. Flowers may be sent to Nivea Ibarra at the above address.

We just got back from Italy at 2:00 a.m. this morning, a 28-hour day of planes, automobiles and sitting in airports. We're both pretty beat and are trying to get over the jet lag. I will be posting a lengthy blog entry about the trip with lots of photos. It should be up within a day or two.

The big day is almost here, I'm getting really excited about this trip. We're landing in Venice on the morning of the 18th, we'll be there for 3 days, then we head to Lerici for 6 days, then finally to Florence for 4 days. Aside from Venice and Florence, other cities we plan to hit include Pisa, Lucca and Siena. And, as Lerici is so close to Cinque Terre, we will definitely spend one, maybe two, full days in that area.

In order to help us navigate our way around Italy, I picked up a TomTom 130S. BTW, Costco has this unit on sale right now for $179.

I used it around town and was quite pleased with how it performed. The only issue is that the standard configuration didn't have enough room for the US/Canada map and the Italy map, so I had to remove the US/Canada map for now. As you can see, the unit is very small and easy to carry around. It comes with a mount that you can attach to your windshield. Or, remove the mount attachment and it fits nicely in your pocket, great for walking around town. But, the really cool thing is that Google Maps lets you push waypoints directly down to your device.

Makes it a piece of cake to plan your entire route and add all your POIs along the way. FYI, I'll be uploading photos as often as I can considering I'll be spending most of my time out and about. But, if you're interested, here is a link to the Picasa album to which I will be posting my pictures.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jorge.velazquez/Italy2008

So, I go out to my truck this afternoon. If you live in southern California, then you know it has been raining for most of the day today. I get to my truck and notice the windows are halfway down. For those that don't know, I drive a Nissan Titan. Pretty damn nice truck, too. I love it. So, anyway, I'm like, WTF? I know I didn't roll the windows down, it has been pretty cold and, if anything, I've been using the heater. Now the inside of my truck is pretty wet and I'm more than a little annoyed. Turns out, there is a "feature" with the remote keylock which allows you to open the windows remotely by pressing and holding the unlock key. Yeah, I wonder who the genius was that thought that was a good thing to do. The unlock key must have gotten pressed somehow (I always have my keys in my pocket) and I was completely unaware. Now I get to sit in a rain-soaked seat while I drive around. Nice. I became aware of this "feature" by searching the web looking for possible reasons my windows seemed to roll themselves down. Interestingly, there are lots of other owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and it always seems to happen when it's raining or snowing. :)

Well, I haven't posted a blog entry in, like, forever. I guess I just sort of lost steam, too much going on to really sit down and post anything useful or interesting. Although, I did want to put up a picture or two, blog entries just seem to be so much more interesting with photos. I've been shooting a lot of kid events lately, since so many of my friends have kids that are getting to the age where they are starting to play sports and have other activities going on. You can see most of my work on my Picasa site. I am particularly proud of this picture:

That is the oldest son of one of my good friends. He is 13 and has been playing water polo this year, and is quite good at it. I rented a 300mm lens from George's Camera on 30th and University, specifically for this game, and was quite pleased with the photos. Here is another:

Well, expect to see more photos up. I'm going to try to post a little more often, and am also going to try to always include a photo or two.

There's no way I'm going to make it three weeks without opening this.

The 10-day camping trip is going about as well as possible, so far. I drove out to Zion on Wednesday and camped at the Watchman campgrounds for two nights. I took the shuttle to Court of the Patriarchs, came back to the canyon junction and walked the Pa'Rus trail back to camp. Thursday was pretty busy, I decided to hike to Hidden Canyon, one of the hikes on the "strenuous" list. It was a lot of fun, but definitely wore me out. Friday was travel day, I packed up and left Zion in the morning and got to Bryce Canyon around 11 a.m. Bryce is just amazing, the first time I saw it I think I just stood there with my jaw wide open until a fly went in my mouth. I started out with a hike down the northern side of it. Today, my 2nd day here, I went to Bryce Amphitheater, and stood there with my mouth open again. Really amazing stuff. Anyway, this is a brief update, I will post a very long article once I'm back home in about a week or so with lots of details. In the meantime, enjoy some of the photos I have taken. Higher resolution photos can be found here.

I got laid off again last week. Man, I'm a loser. Anyway, I plan to take a little time off and do some camping. I haven't nailed down a date yet, but I will probably head out around the 2nd week of October. The tentative plan is to go up to Utah, with stays at Zion, Bryce and Arches national parks, and then head up to Colorado and visit Great Sand Dunes National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and maybe Colorado Springs. My national parks pass is good until the end of the year, so I plan to get as much use out of it as I can. I'm just going to throw all my camping shit into my truck and head out. I'll have all my camera gear and I intend to do lots of shooting. I will either be blogging my trip on this blog, or I may do it all though Picasa, I haven't decided yet. I'm probably leaning more towards using Picasa, since my photos will all be geocoded and it'll be fun to track my progress through the southwest as I visit the different spots.

I'm getting excited about it, the trip is sounding like a hell of a lot of fun. I'm basically going to keep going until I decide I want to come home. That could be three days or it could be three weeks, I don't know. It's going to be all primitive camping. I'll post more details as I get some dates and other trip specifics nailed down. Oh, and I've got room in my truck for one or two more people. :)

There is nothing more beautiful than the laughter or smile of a child. I had the great pleasure of finally getting to meet Asheráh, the little girl that my friend Larry and his wife Sonia adopted. I spent a few hours with them last weekend. As we were getting ready to head out for a late lunch, Sonia brought out the car seat for Asheráh. Immediately upon seeing this, she let out a shriek of delight, a moment I was fortunate enough to capture right as it happened.

Congratulations, Larry and Sonia, you have a wonderful little girl and I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Wanted to give a shout out to my friend Jeremy from back in my EverQuest days, who just launched a fantasy book review site. I'm looking forward to reading his reviews and recommendations, as long as I've known him he's been an avid fantasy reader.

Congrats on the new site.

Thought I'd plug Party Politics since I just did a shoot for them this past Thursday night. They had a couple of very interesting speakers: Ruben Martinez, author of "Crossing Over", and Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Robert Harvey. The topic was the immigration bill currently before Congress, as well as other immigration issues, in general. A very interesting discussion.

The pictures are actually pretty bad, I totally blew it and accidentally left my camera on ISO 1600 (ugh) when I was playing around with it the night before. But, at least they don't look so bad when you see them in smaller size. You can find them in the photo gallery.

Update: The follow up meeting was 6/21...much better photos.

If you're a regular on the I Can Has Cheezburger? site, you're going to love this.

That woman is seriously funny.

Just a reminder that the Star Wars Celebration IV starts tomorrow at the L.A. Convention Center and runs through the following Monday. Friday is the 30th anniversary of the release of the original film. Also, the post office will be unveiling some new stamps based on the movie series, you can pre-order them here. All in all, should be a pretty geeky weekend.

Targeted advertising on the web can often provide some pretty interesting links. Today, I was cleaning out my Gmail spam folder and got a link to this. I don't know why I thought that was funny. It's sort of making me hungry, too.

I'm back to hosting my site on the box in my garage. Why do you care? Well, you don't. But things are going to run a bit slower, especially if I have a lot of images up on my posts, which seems to be the case lately. I was pretty happy with my web host, but ultimately I did not have enough control over the box. For example, I had to pretty much kill my weather podcast feed since they were missing a lot of the Perl libraries as well as the text-to-speech engine I needed. So I'll lose quite a bit of speed by hosting it at home but I now have complete control over the box it runs on, so I might revive some projects I had abandoned, and will probably try to get my weather podcast up and running again soon.

Went camping this last weekend in Baja...Guadalupe Canyon, to be exact. The trip was a lot of fun, went with a bunch of co-workers, we're all pretty stressed out these days so it was nice to get away for a weekend. The camp has a mineral water hot tub at each site, of which I took full advantage. Did some hiking, some grilling, some drinking. All in all, it was a great weekend and I had a blast. This was the first time going with this particular group of people and we all got along really well and I think everyone enjoyed the trip. I meant to use this trip as the subject for my first custom Google map but, as luck would have it, my GPS receiver died that weekend so I was unable to geocode any of my photos. Speaking of photos...here's a group shot that my friend Andy took right before we left on Sunday.

It's about a 3-hour drive if you follow the directions through Tecate. Once you get off the highway 2 toll road in Baja you'll be on a dirt road for about 27 miles. Along the way, you'll see the fate of what could be called "less fortunate" campers.

We all arrived at roughly the same time, fairly late on Friday afternoon, so as soon as we set up camp we ate and then jumped in the hot tub and relaxed. Saturday morning a couple of us went hiking to try to find the waterfalls. As you probably guessed, not a lot of water feeding the waterfalls at this time of year, but it was still a fun hike.

That was one of the smaller waterfalls a bit higher up the canyon. On the way back down we stopped at the larger waterfall. This required some tricky maneuvering down the canyon, nothing too crazy.

And we finally arrived at the large waterfall. I would estimate this waterfall to be about 25-30 feet high at this point. I had to wade in knee-to-waist deep water to be able to make this photo. Normally, I would have shot a much longer exposure to get the water effect that I usually like but, alas, I didn't bring my tripod and, even if had, I wouldn't have carried it out on the hike. As you can see again, not a lot of water feeding the falls right now.

We ended up doing the same hike again in the afternoon since the rest of the guys were not able to make the morning hike. That time we spent a lot more time enjoying the cool water and just relaxing.

Some guy decided to dress up his chihuahua in his favorite team's jersey and take it out hiking with him.

Later in the day the wind started kicking up. Quite a bit, in fact, to the point where I had to find a way to anchor my tent. I would guess we were getting gusts up to 40 mph shooting down through the canyon. The weird thing was that right after the gust would pass, it would be perfectly calm. So calm, in fact, you could clearly hear the next gust coming down the canyon through the palm trees about 20 seconds before it would actually hit. Pretty weird experience. Unfortunately, no one really slept much that night. For some reason, I had this fear that the structure under which we were camping would collapse on top of me since the gusts were so strong, so I didn't sleep well at all since a gust would come through every 30-45 seconds.

Sunday morning we broke camp and hit the road. On the way out we all went through the dry lake bed instead of the dirt road which I took on the way in. This allowed us to travel a bit faster than we would have been able to otherwise. Well, at least until we ran into some nasty sand clouds kicked up by wind. It got so bad in some spots that you couldn't see more than 20 feet in front of your vehicle and speeds slowed down to about 10-15 mph. This is a shot from the cab of my pickup looking at Andy's Jeep, which I was following fairly closely at this point.

Anyway, a great weekend. I would recommend that spot, the only minor issue we had was that the locals, who are responsible for taking care of the camp, can get a bit combative. They started yelling at us because they thought one of our vehicles had run over one of the PVC pipes running water to our camp and broken it. After a few minutes of me explaining to the guy that it wasn't anyone in our group, and that the water level on our tub was several inches low indicating it hadn't been receiving water in a few days, they finally apologized and went about fixing the pipe. Take a Spanish-speaker with you, if possible.

...if you were to come back in your next life as an animal, which animal you would like to be?

If you've been following the whole Stephen Colbert/Wikipedia/truthiness thing, you'll be interested to know that "truthiness" was voted word of the year for 2006, according to an online survey by Merriam-Webster. An article I read recently states that experts generally rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts. I thought that was rather interesting. Although I use Wikipedia quite often these days, I never feel as comfortable with the information there as I would from, say, a book on the same subject. I think part of that is because it's so much easier for someone to edit a Wikipedia page than it is to publish a book. You're putting a lot of faith in the public, in general, and specifically in the moderators. But, for the most part, the information seems to be very accurate. At least, for the subjects in which I consider myself knowledgeable, which aren't many.

Went out to the Anza-Borrego desert Friday night. Camped in Fish Creek Wash on Friday night, then got up early Saturday and did some off-roading with my buddy Andy in his Titan. The trip was really fun, here are a few photos.

This is a shot of our camp site, there is a primitive campground in the Fish Creek Wash.

This photo was taken early in the day from the Wind Caves looking southwest (satellite photo of the area is here).

From there, we followed the Fish Creek Wash to Sandstone Canyon. The canyon is fairly narrow, just enough for one vehicle to pass for most of it. Here's a shot of it, there isn't anything in this photo to give you a size perspective, but this particular part of the canyon is maybe about 15 feet across and about 30 feet high.

We made pretty good progess through the canyon, but eventually reached a part that was just too narrow for the Titan.

After that, we headed back to camp, then drove around looking for some trails to hike. Didn't find much, so we headed out to the Ocotillo Wells OHV area and did some off-roading. Finished up as the day was ending, so it was time to relax a bit before heading home.

My friend Simon sent me some stuff I thought I'd share. First, a little Rumsfeld humor:

And, with Vista right around the corner, it's good to know that MS spent over two years and reviewed over 2,000 submissions for a very critical part of their new OS...the startup sound.

That is all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled web surfing.

If you haven't seen Weird Al's White & Nerdy video yet, you really should see it. It's a flippin' riot. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw it. Well, until I got about halfway through it, and then I went, "oh, fuck, that's me." Anyway, it's pretty good. It's also Weird Al's first top 10 song and album (Straight Outta Lynwood). The parody is of Chamillionaire's Ridin' (Dirty).

Apparently, I have a house in Paris. I wonder if they'd mind if I just moved into it.

Thanks for the pic, Simon.

Man, I love that guy. More proof that politicians should just stay out of technology issues.

Thanks to Ian for the link.

*edit*

The video has been removed from YouTube. :(

I think they're just waiting for me to die so they can fight over the big pieces.

I wanted to plug Etsy, since I am doing a little bit of work for them these days. The technical lead there is a friend of mine, Haim. Etsy is a pretty cool site with some amazing flash work. It's basically eBay for arts & crafts products. You can purchase hand-made products or commission items to be made per your request. Wired has a short review on the site. Twit.tv did an interview recently with two of the founders.

Is anyone as annoyed as I am when a game you really want to watch and have set your TiVo up to record goes into overtime? Yeah, that really sucks. Anyway, if anyone knows where I can get a copy of the Argentina vs. Germany video from today's game it its entirety, please let me know. Preferably in HD. Looks like it's going to penalty kicks. I should have stayed home today.

I'm sure some of you remember the "naked guy" from Berkeley who sort of made of name for himself by walking around campus naked. Well, he died. He was in custody since the beginning of the year on charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon. Far as I know, this guy seemed to be naked most of the time...not sure I want to know what this "deadly weapon" was. Then, there is this carpenter who works naked so he can keep his clothes clean. He's already been caught 3 times working naked. Not sure what makes him that it's acceptable, you'd think he'd get the hint by now.

If it weren't for the humor factor I would have stopped reading the news long time ago.

Actually, it has been one of those *months*. You know, where no matter how hard you work and how many hours you put in, at the end of the day your task list is longer than when you started? Yeah...I need a vacation.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to the PDC last year. If you were able to go, then you undoubtedly recall the video of Bill Gates with Napoleon Dynamite. It's pretty flippin' hilarious (assuming you've seen the movie). Sadly, the only copy I have been able to find is one that was apparently video-recorded by an attendee, so the quality is very poor. But if you want to check it out, here it is.

*Edit: 1/26*

Thanks to my buddy Leo for this link. The sound is much better, although the video is handheld.

...well, you know the rest. Looks like I actually have a couple of friends (don't laugh yet, I'm mid-sentence) that read my site and have been bugging me for an update. Unfortunately, I don't have much to offer at this point. But I guess something is better than nothing, and since the last posted comment caused MT to rebuild my blog, it also had the side effect of wiping out all front page entries since I haven't written anything in, oh, about a month. Well, I do have some funny stuff, at least, courtesy of my friend, Haim. This first one will only make sense to a geek, but hey, I figure if you're reading this you probably are one. (IP masked for obvious reasons)

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - - [28/Nov/2005:19:44:29 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 37251 "http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113268410649404315-CmlEYCMNLKztOfB8PWMfA0IiiXA_20061128.html?mod=blogs" "IBrowse/2.3 (AmigaOS V51)"

Yeah, pretty funny stuff, I know. If you don't know how to read a web server log file, I'll tell you that the last item in that log entry contains the browser and OS of the client making the request. Still not funny? Okay, maybe you'll like this next one. This link requires a moderate warning if you are the ultra-sensitive type. But I thought it was funny as hell.

Phallic Logo Awards

Ah, well. There ya go. Part of the reason I haven't been writing much is because I have met the most amazing person who has been consuming all of my free time. I rarely post stuff about my personal life here, but I'll just say that I'm having a great time and she is a big part of that.

Anyway, nothing else too geeky to report. I do have a couple of good reads that I'd recommend. If you haven't kept up on the Sony/BMG debacle, my friend Jason has a good post on it. Also, my buddy Ian has an interesting podcast sharing idea he is working on.

More stuff later.

Here's a photo from the wedding. This weekend I'll be cleaning up some of the photos so I may add one or two later, but for now this will have to do.

I discovered what a pain in the ass it is to shoot weddings. I don't think I'd want to do it as a living, or even as a part-time gig. Changing light conditions, things jumping into the frame, people blinking, etc. Add to that the inherent problems of shooting candids. Not to mention problems with high contrast when shooting in midday light, and then switching over to a very dimly-lit reception. I'm used to nature photography, where everthing is slow and methodical, the camera is in full manual mode, etc. Anyway, I still managed to get a handful of decent photos. Nice thing is that these days nearly everyone has a decent digital camera, so there was no shortage of photos.

Ian and Elizabeth...congratulations, again.

First, I want to give a huge congratulations to Ian and Elizabeth, who just got married last Saturday. I'll have some pictures up soon from the wedding. Thanks for letting me be a part of your day, and hope to see you guys soon. Next, I want to wish my friend Jason and crew good luck when they go to Japan in a little over a week. Jason will be blogging the trip on his new site, so keep an eye on his site for updates and photos. Finally, I've upgraded to MT 3.2 which has more tools for dealing with spammers, so I've enabled comments again, for now.

My buddy Ian points out that my entry on dating a geek (which is really just a link) is the 8th link listed on a Google search of "date a geek". Don't ask me how that happened. Here is another good read, through one of links on the first page of hits.

The cable company never ceases to amaze me with their incompetence. I recently decided to switch back to cable TV from DirecTV, so I scheduled an appointment for setting that up. I have been receiving Time Warner Roadrunner internet service for over two years now, so all they needed to do was add cable. The guy came out and set that up but, of course, 30 minutes after he left, my internet connection went dead. So I call their tech support only to be told they have to send someone out again, but can't get anyone out to my place until a week later. I repeatedly told their tech support person what my symptoms were (power light blinking on the cable modem) and told them I was able to talk to their DNS server, but I was getting a bogus IP. He reiterated that they would need to send someone out. I hang up and call back about 5 hours later, again explaining my symptoms. The new tech support guy says the same thing as the last guy.

So, guess what happens when the guy finally comes out the following week? Yup, you guessed it. He takes one look at the modem, calls back to the office, and bingo, everything works again. He then says something to the effect of "yeah, when I see the power light blinking then it just needs to be reset". To which I reply, "yeah, I told the tech support guy that the light was blinking several times over, you guys need to get on the same page, it could have saved you a trip out here and saved me a week without internet access".

Think they'll do something about it? Me neither.

/rant off

My friend, Tom, sent me this and I just had to share it.

1. Before (or during) your next meeting, seminar or conference call,
prepare yourself by drawing a square. Most find that 5"x5" is a good size.
Divide the card into columns, five across and five down. That will give you
25 one-inch blocks.

2. Write one of the following words/phrases in each block:

• result-driven
• at the end of the day
• out of the loop
• 24/7
• infrastructure
• core competencies
• revisit
• bottom line
• best practice
• strategic fit
• fast track
• think outside the box
• win-win
• proactive
• value-added
• benchmark
• 110%
• client focus(ed)
• paradigm
• game plan
• leverage
• moving forward
• bling
• on-task
• off-line

3. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases.

4. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically or diagonally, stand up and shout, "BULLSHIT!"

Testimonials from satisfied "Bullshit Bingo" players:

"I had been in the meeting for only five minutes when I won." -Paul D., Seattle

"My attention span at meetings has improved dramatically." -David D., Portland

"The atmosphere was tense in the last process meeting as 14 of us waited for the fifth box." -Ben G., Salem

"The speaker was stunned as eight of us screamed 'BULLSHIT!' for the third time in two hours." - Alice G., Chicago

So, if blogging from your mobile device is called moblogging, and posting photos on your blog is called photoblogging, if you posted pictures you took from your mobile phone directly to your blog, could you call it mophoblogging?

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but...15 reasons why you should date a geek. And they're all true. Yup.

Okay, so you've already seen the trailer that came out a few weeks ago during The OC. Now you can see the updated trailer, complete with captions! I laughed so hard I hurt myself. My favorite part is C-3PO. And, yeah, I've got my tickets already. Don't you?

If you want a good laugh, check out this product information page at Amazon. First, read the system features (pay special attention to the OS, hard drive size and processor), and then read the reviews. You might want to hurry, they'll probably fix it soon.

All the changes got pushed through, finally, so I'm running out of my box at home. Things will be a little slower, but I'm sure my 4 readers won't mind. :) Actually, I'm getting over 100 hits per day on my weather podcast, so I want to make sure I keep those people happy, whoever they are. Let me know if I broke anything along the way.

I'll be hosting my own site in a couple of days, once the DNS changes propogate. While Linux hosting is relatively cheap, hosting my own box will, of course, give me a lot more control over my site and allow me to do much more with it. I'm sure there will be some bumps along the way.

I finally got around to downloading and posting the pictures from the last day of my trip. I got back on Thursday morning. I had a great time in NYC, I'd go back there in a heartbeat. I'd also like to recommend jetBlue, they're adding new destinations all the time and the fares are really hard to beat. Plus, you can watch DirecTV on your own little TV built into the chair back. The airfare was about $270 roundtrip, including taxes and TSA fees.

I started out my final day in NY by taking the Staten Island ferry. My friend Haim had recommended this ferry for a couple of reasons: 1) it's free, and 2) it gives you a good view of the skyline. And since you can no longer climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, this seemed like a good choice. The ferry takes about 20 minutes to get to Staten Island and I was able to immediately jump on the return ferry, so the total roundtrip was under an hour. As mentioned earlier, it did give me a good view of the skyline and of the Statue of Liberty. The skyline image is also my new banner, for now.

From there, I took a walk downtown...after the mandatory hot dog purchase from a street vendor, of course. I finally located Broadway street and headed north, and soon came across Wall St.

This is the NW corner of the New York Stock Exchange which, I am told, no longer accepts visitors and is pretty well guarded.

I headed west to see the former site of the World Trade Center. Construction is in progress to build the World Trade Center Memorial. Here is a banner with an artist's rendition of what that will look like. More info here.

And here is what it looks like today, facing east.

Next, I hopped on the subway and headed toward north Manhattan. I took the A train, which is an expressway that runs the length of the island, and beyond. It took almost an hour to get to north Manhattan from downtown. I got off at 190th street and headed into Fort Tryon Park, where The Cloisters are located. This area is a set of buildings modeled in the medieval style of the Middle Ages, complete with sculptures, tapestries and paintings from that time. Unfortunately, I got there 45 minutes before closing, so rather than try to rush through the interior of the buildings I chose to walk around the outside. They are really quite remarkable to look at, although they are surrounded by many trees so it was difficult to get a good photograph. This is about the best I could do.

Here is another shot, a little closer up.

I jumped on the subway and headed back down to Central Park West. I was able to get back to the American Museum of Natural History with an hour left before closing, so I took advantage of the fact that they were letting people in for free at that time of day and checked out the space exhibit area, which I had missed the day before.

That was pretty much the end of my trip, I really enjoyed my time there and look forward to going back sometime in the not-too-distant future.

If you know me, then you know I love to eat. And after yesterday's steak at Smith & Wollensky, I knew I was going to have a hard time trying to match that. Well, I came pretty damn close. The Memphis Pork Ribs at Virgil's Real BBQ on 44th St. were absolutely phenomenal. New Yorkers also love to eat, apparently. I think I'd fit right in.

Let's see, what else did I do today...I started out by heading downtown. First, I took the Staten Island ferry and got a few shots of the downtown skyline and of the Statue of Liberty (will share those later). Next, I walked around downtown, visiting Wall Street, the NY Stock Exchange, Ground Zero and St. Paul's Chapel. Then I hopped on the subway all the way to the opposite end of Manhattan to see The Cloisters, at the recommendation of my friend, Haim. Finally, I stopped back at the American Museum of Natural History to visit the space exhibit.

Well, that's it for now. I've got some more pictures that I'll post tomorrow. Gotta get up early for the flight home. I'm going to miss NY.

Today was museum day. I first headed over to the American Museum of Natural History. I didn't get to spend too much time there because I was meeting a friend for lunch at Carnegie's Deli on 7th and 55th, but I am going to try to stop there again tomorrow.

After lunch I headed over to the subway station to get to the Guggenheim Museum. This being my first time on the NY subway system, I was bound to make a mistake. And sure enough, I did. I got off one exit too early and couldn't find the connecting train, so I ended up walking about 30 blocks to get to the museum. Tiring, but worth the walk. They are currently showing a very interesting exhibit of art from the Aztec Empire.

From there I took the subway back to my hotel. This time, something weird happened. When the train stopped, all the people that were waiting proceeded to board. Then we were all told to get off, and that the train was making no more stops. We all got off, and they backed the train up and it was gone. A few minutes later the next one showed up. Of course, by this time the number of people waiting to board had doubled, so it got crowded pretty quickly. Remember when you were a kid and someone had the bright idea of seeing how many people you could cram into a VW bug? You get the idea.

After a short nap, I headed out for dinner. Now, my boss Steve has been telling me about Smith and Wollensky so I had made a dinner reservation there for tonight. I have to say, all the rumors I have heard about this place are true. Quite possibly the best steak I have ever had.

Now, despite the reputation of this city, I had a hard time finding a Starbucks open after 10:00 p.m. You pretty much have to be mid-town Manhattan to see anything open late, so I had to walk about a half mile to get to 7th Avenue, which is where I am now. This one is open 'til 1 a.m., although I'm sure there must be a 24-hour one around here somewhere.

Well, that's it for today. More tomomorrow.

Went for a walk after dinner in the Times Square area. The temperature was a brisk 30 degrees. Being a Monday night, it was actually pretty quiet.

Here is a shot I took earlier in the day at Central Park.

I saw the oddest thing today, perhaps someone can explain it to me. Along 3rd street, between 49th and 48th, there were three city vehicles parked on the side of the road with their engines running. One was a crane, the 2nd was a mini-van, and the third vehicle was some sort of utility truck. And all the occupants of those three vehicles were asleep. Now, I don't mean nodding-off sleep, or leaning-off-to-the-side sleep...these guys were all knocked-out, mouth-gaping-open, slumped-over-to-the-side asleep. It was hilarious. I couldn't quite figure out why they were all sitting in their vehicles with the engines running when it looked like they had been asleep for hours. I was going to take pictures of it but I was worried I'd wake them up.

Well, 2 a.m. here and I'm tired. Tomorrow is museum day.

Landed in JFK at 6:00 a.m. I can never sleep on planes, so I was tired as hell but, since my friend Gus had meetings this afternoon, we headed out on foot after checking in to the hotel. I saw quite a few things today...Rockefeller Center, St. Peter's Cathedral, Bryant Park, Times Square, Central Park, 5th Avenue. Got back to the hotel around noon and I slept for a couple hours. After that, I walked a block or so to the Starbucks on 48th and 3rd, which is where I am writing this.

Enjoying myself so far. Tonight I think I'll just wander around a bit and check out the night activity. Tomorrow my plan is to hit the American Museum of Natural History as well as the Guggenheim Museum and possibly the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ground Zero later.

It's pretty cold but the weather is sunny and clear. Temperatures are in the mid 20's to mid 30's. And whoever said New Yorkers are rude? In my brief experiences with them I have found them to be very friendly. In fact, some guy just left the Starbucks and on his way out he says to me, "Have a good one."

I'll post again tomorrow, hopefully with some pictures.

I'm off to New York City for a few days. This will be my first time in NY and I also have the added pleasure of hanging out for part of the trip with one of my oldest friends, Gus. I'll be blogging my trip.

The death toll is now over 125,000. I've been looking around for good information. Probably the best link I have right now is one from Scoble. I'll update this entry with more info and links as I find good ones. Post if you have links to information or donation sites. You can also donate to the American Red Cross through Amazon.

*edit*

Ran across this story on BoingBoing.

Jerry Orbach, probably best known as Detective Lennie Briscoe on TV's Law & Order, passed away late Tuesday at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where he was being treated for prostate cancer. He was 69. Fans of L&O will remember that earlier this year he was replaced by Dennis Farina, who has done an admirable job, but I think we're all still trying to figure out where he got all his money.

Orbach was on L&O for 12 seasons as the wise-cracking detective, but he was also well-known for his work on the big screen and on Broadway. L&O really made him a household name, however. Of the star-studded cast that has come through that show, he was my favorite, by far.

Jerry, you'll be missed.

My long-time friend Gus and his wife Linda have three wonderful kids. This year, Linda asked me to help her with an idea she had for holiday cards. The card folds into four panels with a holiday message in the first panel and a picture of each of the kids in the remaining panels. I spent a couple hours taking pictures of the kids and a couple hours in Photoshop putting it all together. I was pretty happy with the final result so I thought I'd share it here, with her permission. Click on the image to see a larger version.

From looking at my web stats, it seems that most of my hits are through my RSS feeds. I converted them to full-text, which is a good idea in general since many people read them offline, but also will eliminate the need to click through to see the full entry. Of course, I tend to post a lot of pictures, so I'll try to be considerate and keep the image size small, or create an extended entry for image-heavy articles.

Also, I'd recommend you use my RSS 1.0 feed over the others, since my blog software automatically puts the body text into a nicely formatted CDATA section and preserves all the links and other HTML.

Mary and I went up to Santa Barbara this past weekend. Saturday was spent visiting some of the wineries in the Los Olivos area just north of Solvang. Mary calls Solvang "where Disney barfed", and I have to say I can't really disagree. But the winery areas are just gorgeous, there are lots of rolling hills and the weekend weather was perfect. I took some pictures but I shot mostly film, so I'll have to put them up later when I get them back from the lab. Sunday we spent down around State St. and the beach area. The locals had set up a war memorial right next to the pier. There were hundreds of crosses set up in the sand as a tribute to the men and women who have lost their lives so far. Here are some of the locals putting name tags on the crosses and setting up the area.

The weekend was very relaxing and Santa Barbara is a beautiful town, this was the first time I had been there. On the way back I took several sunset photos which I hope to post soon. I've also been playing around with night photography lately, mostly by necessity since it is way after dark by the time I get home. I've been reading Night Photography by Andrew Sanderson in order to get some ideas and improve my technique. One thing I have noticed is that most people tend to use black and white film for night photography. There is some logic to this, as you can get various color casts depending on the type of lighting, type of film, etc. Here is a shot I took of an oil pump with my digital camera, and converted to black & white. The exposure is 30 seconds long, taken about a half hour after sunset. The pump is illuminated by a single orange sodium light.

stu

I finally got some time to sit down and scan some of the slides from the trip to Maui. I'm going to make this post an extended entry, meaning the bulk of it will be accessible from the link below. I did this in order to reduce the size of the main page, since I plan to put many pictures up. That way no one has to unwillingly suffer through a huge download. So, if you're interested in getting the whole story, just click on the link, but be aware that it may take a while to get all the images, and the text is pretty long.

...well, you know the rest. I'm turning comments off so I don't have a week's worth of spam comments to delete when I get back. See you guys later.

Kept putting it off hoping to find a wireless spot so I could upload from my PPC. I will upload some pics and give a summary of the trip when I get the fog cleared from my head. I do have to say that Munich is now one of my favorite cities in the world...

The word is getting out, all the cool kids are using Firefox. Check out what has happened in the last 72 hours since the preview release of version 1.0. Like many others, I came for the popup blocker, and stayed for the tabbed windows. But you might like it because it is more secure or more standards-compliant.

Since nobody really wants to read about jorge's cats, pictures of bugs and .net - I am here to make a few guest entries related to my trip to Germany and Italy over the next few weeks. We leave on Thursday so look for something this weekend.

Andy

My good friend Andy and his wife are traveling to Europe over the next three weeks, so I added him as an author so he will have a place to update us on his trip. Hopefully he'll be able to find plenty of WiFi hotspots.

Enjoy your trip, hope to see some posts.

I should add...I've got a full Unlimited Personal Edition license for Movable Type 3.0, which gives me unlimited authors and unlimited weblogs for family and friends. So if you'd like to have your own blog hosted on this domain, let me know.

Like it? Hate it? Discuss. Regardless of what you think about the title....a light sabre duel while surfing on lava?!?!? Give me a fucking break. Are we still trying to appeal to the teenybopper crowd? I can hear the comments as they leave the theater...."Did you see that mean backside roundhouse cutback into a lipper that Anakin pulled? That was sick." "I hear ya, bra, but what about Obi-Wan's floater? That rocked."

You've been asking, so here it is. A recent picture of the refrigerator. It's looking a lot better these days, I'm getting a little help keeping it stocked. :)

Rudy in particular should appreciate the bottom shelf. Hmmm, looks like that milk in the door is turning kinda green, guess I should get rid of that.

Well, I'm back on a Linux host. You might call it indecisiveness. I call it laziness. I started out pretty well, cranking out all my hand-written blogging code in just a few days. But it's tough to duplicate the functionality and features that I can get for free from Movable Type, features like TrackBack and support for Atom. Besides, I don't really have the time to be working on it very much.

A few things to mention...first, I'll be retiring the CD Peep Show game. It had reached a fairly dormant state over the last month or so, I think only two or three people had logged in during that time. Also, I just got the blog software up and running so I have yet to tweak the layout and colors, but just be aware that the site will take on a different look over the next couple of days.

In 8 days I'll be driving up to Zion National Park in Utah for 2 days, 3 nights. I'll be taking lots of pictures, I recently purchased a couple more lenses so I have a very good basic setup right now - a 24mm 2.8 wide angle, a 35-70mm 2.8 zoom, and an 80-200mm 2.8 telephoto zoom. The 35-70 zoom is replacing my 28-80mm 3.5-5.6 zoom. If you know of anyone interested in this lens, I am selling it along with a 56mm polarizing filter. It's a Nikon F-mount lens. Otherwise, I plan to put it on eBay for about $40. The filter alone cost me $32, the lens originally cost me about $120, as I recall.