Crime Scene Clean-up
Crime Scene Clean-up
Most obscure earworm
Dec. 15th, 2008 01:01 pm
You have? I love it.
Moby Dick? Never read it."
Miscellaneous recent photography
Dec. 9th, 2008 10:01 pm
Gaaaaaaaaah
The filename is a low-frequency manga onomatopoeia indicating "the sound of an empty office" or "a large room with no soul about."
Sunset at Westlake Center
Unfortunately, the best photograph of the evening didn't come out. I was on the bus heading home, and as we got onto the Viaduct, a woman was sitting with her back to the sunset. It was deeper, redder, and even prettier than above. I wanted to capture the image, but my camera isn't fast enough to do that on a bouncing bus. Which is a bit of a shame because she was ignoring all this beauty going on behind her while she read Sunset magazine.
Miscellaneous photography
Nov. 1st, 2008 11:27 am
Why Grammar Matters
Yes, I know, I've made this mistake myself in stories, but never in something quite so small, or so important.
Death's Head Pretzels
Why Grammar Matters II
Consilience UML Chart
This chart is very shorthandy: in many cases it's a matter of my knowing what I meant. The boxes with circles in the upper right hand corner are controllers; the ones with squares are views. There's some confusion on the chart as to whether or not there are controllers that are view generators; the one labeled "doc builder" appears to be, but there's no corresponding view generating controller, I don't think, for Lists of Lists. There are also weaknesses in WAE that I've never gotten around to addressing, which is that it was first cooked up in 2003 and has almost no sense of ajax or component-driven view management, and has a whole bunch of notation for frames that can't really be ported over to ajax.
And still there is hope.
Pure Vanity.
Nov. 1st, 2008 10:48 am
Secret Agent Elf
I think I was trying to capture the graffiti, but it didn't come out clearly.
Christine Gregoire. Photo by Omaha.
( A brief aside on Dino Rossi. )
Shay Schual-Berke (WA District 33 Pos 1) was an easy subject for the camera. Tina Orwall, Shay's successor, photographs pretty well except when she knows there's a camera on her, then she tries too hard. Dave Upthegrove (WA District 33 Pos 2) photographs great. A bad pic of Dave is almost certainly due to a lazy photographer. Karen Keiser (WA District 33 Senate) is another who photographs easily. (And hey, she's still using my photography and art! Right on.)
I know these are very shallow considerations on which to judge a candidate, but for the past six months it's been my task to photograph these people, and I know when I get a block of Gregoire I'm going to spend at least an hour looking for the one I'm going to use for an article.
Two recent photographs...
Aug. 19th, 2008 08:14 am
Trash fire
I went into the store and said to the first person I saw with an identification badge, "Excuse me, do you know that there's a fire in your trashcan?"
"Oh my god! There is?" The woman ran to the door, looked out, and said, "Oh my god!" again. She ran to the back, pulled out another woman to look at it, then said to me, "Do you know how to use a fire extinguisher? We're all women in here. We don't know how."
After recovering from that non-sequitor, I told her, "It's not a grease fire, it's a paper fire, it's very small and contained. Just pour a pitcher of cold water on it and put it out."
"Really?"
"Yes, really." I watched her run to the back. I went out to snap the photo, she came back out with one of those plastic pitchers you usually find filled with beer and she put the fire out. But, grief, "I'm a woman so I can't handle a fire extinguisher?" That's the stupidest thing I've heard yet, and I'm reading the political blogs!
( And this might be offensive and the text NSFW. )
The creepy Koi.
Aug. 2nd, 2008 04:57 pmI'd forgotten I'd taken this. If you're ever at Wild Waves, like we were last week, go to the lake's edge and watch the fish. They are about this creepy (15 second video):
Folklife Fountain!
May. 25th, 2008 01:00 pm
In the absence of any formal plan, I've been doing random exercises from Jim Krause's excellent textbook, Design Basics, and in an exercise on composition he recommends finding magazine photos of landscapes with horizon lines and, with black sheets of paper, cropping the top and bottom of the photograph at various heights to change where the horizon line is with respect to the eye.
Being both lazy and geeky, I instead went to Flickr and found a half-dozen photos tagged with the word "landscape." My main criteria was that I wanted ones where the horizon line was dead center of the photograph. I then called up the photographs in GIMP and cropped them the easy way: by reducing the vertical window and enabling the scroll bar.
Out of six photos, five were improved by a radical crop in one direction or another. The one that did not improve was a street scene where the building blocked a lot of the sky, but even that benefited from a slight crop in one direction or another, moving the horizon line away from the mid-line. The general rule that the center of a photograph is the most boring place to put anything held true even for the gorgeous landscape photos some people put up on flickr.
Being both lazy and geeky, I instead went to Flickr and found a half-dozen photos tagged with the word "landscape." My main criteria was that I wanted ones where the horizon line was dead center of the photograph. I then called up the photographs in GIMP and cropped them the easy way: by reducing the vertical window and enabling the scroll bar.
Out of six photos, five were improved by a radical crop in one direction or another. The one that did not improve was a street scene where the building blocked a lot of the sky, but even that benefited from a slight crop in one direction or another, moving the horizon line away from the mid-line. The general rule that the center of a photograph is the most boring place to put anything held true even for the gorgeous landscape photos some people put up on flickr.
Photography, March, Week 2
Mar. 30th, 2008 08:54 pmMy trip to Quinalt, very ugly monster SUVs, and the eerie symmetry of a wind-damaged tree-farm.
( Cut 'cuz it can get big. )
( Cut 'cuz it can get big. )
Street scene: Police and Suspect
Mar. 29th, 2008 11:22 am
Cops and Allegedly Very Drunk Woman
I was standing at the intersection of 3rd Ave and Bell, waiting for the bus that takes me home from downtown Seattle. It's not the nicest of neighborhoods; there's a divy Irish bar across the street and one block up is a rehab center that attracts sellers looking for those ready to fall off the wagon and buyers looking for the sellers.
A bus pulled up. It wasn't mine so I didn't pay much attention to it and went back to fiddling with my ipod. That is, until two bicycle cops came flying by, stopped at the bus and got on. Interested, I pulled out my camera.
They were talking to a little middle-aged woman sitting in the front section. I couldn't hear the conversation, but then the cops had her stand and, taking her by the arm, escorted her off the bus. As she was walking down the bus's steps I heard one of the cops say, "Whew. You have had a few, haven't you?"
The story came out in drips and drabs as I listened to them. The cops were loud, but the woman almost never said a word, she just leaned against the chain-link fence of the dog park. Allegedly she had walked out of a bar, I don't know which one, without paying her tab. The woman in the green coat was making the complaint, loudly. The cops were talking about having the grey-haired woman either pay up or be arrested for theft. While I was there another bike cop showed up, then a cop car. I never did hear the end of the saga because my own bus showed up. When I left they were still trying to get an answer out of her.
Photography, March, Week 1
Mar. 28th, 2008 09:05 pmGreat photos the first week: Kouryou-chan in costume for her play, the end of Liberal Facism (please!), vandalism, animal protestors and the cops who must love them, and one giant pink slug.
( Cut to avoid offending delicate sensibilities. )
( Cut to avoid offending delicate sensibilities. )
Elf at Work, 2002
They're re-shooting the company directory today, so I decided to make sure that this image was preserved for all time. Just, because, y'know... it's kinda sick. Ye gods, the mullet. The Mullet!
Color. Flesh. Woah.
Feb. 6th, 2008 08:32 amI love photography, good design, great costuming, and all that stuff that is usually the province of men much queerer than I am. I also keep my eyes open for anything that could be transplanted, without much modification, into a far future.
Even with all that, I'm unprepared for what went down in Brazil Sunday night. The photos from Carnival 2008 are just mind-boggling. Three photographers I can point you to are: Just the mosaics of thumbnails are an overwhelming riot of primary colors. So pretty!
Even with all that, I'm unprepared for what went down in Brazil Sunday night. The photos from Carnival 2008 are just mind-boggling. Three photographers I can point you to are: Just the mosaics of thumbnails are an overwhelming riot of primary colors. So pretty!
Feb 4: Adult toystore windowfront
But recently they upgraded their mannequins, and apparently the new ones are as anatomically absurd as the cyborgs that appear in the movies they sell.
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