Random Wednesday Dog Blogging

"Oh, God. She has her camera out again. Remind me why it was that I wanted her to visit?"

"Wait! Does she have something in her hand? Does she? Does she? Is it hamburger?"

"No."

Behind the Necklace

Thursday night, I made this necklace and I'm very happy with how it turned out. It looks even better while it's being worn by its new owner.

This made me realize that I need to get some fabric to use for the background of such photos. In this case I used a skirt that I didn't iron or put much effort into flattening. Fortunately, it will be very easy to find something suitable at my parents', since there is an excess of fabric there. I really like the neutral titanium background provided by a Macbook pro, but there's this annoying abstract fruit logo that detracts from it.

Back when I was selling my jewelry and when I created the images on my website, I had to either take photographs and scan them in or put the jewelry in the scanner itself. Everything is so much easier now that I can use my digital camera.

From the Photo Archives

As I've mentioned numerous times, I've been going through my family's photographs. I've been doing a lot of sorting, a little of actually putting photos in album pages and a lot of looking. There are thousands of photographs to go through, because I may be the first person in my family to put serious effort or at least time into this. I've been very pleased with the archival materials I've ordered, mostly from Light Impressions.

Most of the photographs I've been concentrating on are from the early 1900s, but yesterday I found and cleaned up a picture from 1976. By cleaned up, I mean there was something strange on it, but luckily it was finished in such a way that I could safely rub it off with a slightly damp paper towel.

This is one of the rare photographs, particularly before the advent of the digital camera and twenty shots could economically be taken at one time, in which I do not look in the slightest bit inebriated. In fact, given the amount of perkiness in that expression, I suspect the photographer was holding a cup of coffee to get my attention. I'm pretty sure that's how I look when someone hands me a latte now.

Looking Through Different Lenses

I've discovered an interesting pastime. While I was in Boston, I went to the New England Aquarium, which I'd last visited about ten years ago. I attempted to take several pictures, all of which I've uploaded to flickr, good and bad. Ok, they are mostly bad, because it's dark inside, fish move fast and I hadn't even played with changing the ISO setting yet. The point is that not only can one compare one's photography and feel as if everyone in the world is more talented and has a more expensive and heavier camera, but one can also see what different experiences other people have had in exactly the same setting. The latter is what is fascinating.

You can take a look at my New England Aquarium photos. Then take a look at the beautiful ones other people have taken.

The next time you go to a public place that allows photography, whether you take your own or not, try searching on that location in flickr and see what others have seen there.

Blu Seafood and the Mussel Thief

I've lamented in the past about the quality of the camera on the Treo 700p as compared to the Treo 650. Well, complaining is silly in this case, because I've finally played with my Canon SD500 camera enough to figure out how to get semi-great food shots in a restaurant setting, without flash. All I need is the macro setting and ISO 200.

I hadn't read any reviews of Blu Seafood and Bar, which opened on 9th Street about a week and a half ago, so I had to try it out. The decor is much brighter and cleaner looking than the recently departed Grasshopper was. The service was very friendly and excellent. I decided to order the fried calamari appetizer and a salad.

First we tried their bread, which was delicious. This was actually our second serving.

The calamari was good. It wasn't the best I've ever eaten, but it was pretty good. It was served with lemon mayo, but I liked it better plain. I'm actually quite fond of Rockfish's calamari, which is surprising given that it's a chain. I would be interested to know where local readers prefer to get calamari around here.

This was a great salad and it was much larger than it looks. It had tomatoes, shredded cucumbers, feta, onions, salad greens, small pieces of pita and a lemon-mint vinaigrette. I'm actually not a big fan of salads, but I enjoyed this tremendously and would happily order it again.

In fact, I would probably just order the salad. Since I erred on the side of ordering too much, I didn't have room for dessert. They had chocolate fondue for two, for $12. I love chocolate fondue.

Here's a picture of my father's order of paella. I was getting carried away taking high-resolution food photos and I thought the presentation was particularly nice. He would have preferred that it had more shrimp and fewer bivalves, but I would have liked it as-is and managed to steal a mussel.

Adsense Riches and picasa2flickr

If any of you have wondered, yes, I am getting rich off my Google Adsense ads. Since I put the first ones up last October I've earned $1028.

I've been uploading lots of photos to flickr. I've been thrilled with the new picasa2flickr plugin for flickr. The only problem I've seen so far is that it doesn't seem to transfer when the photo was actually taken. That's a major flaw, but it's still much more convenient than any other flickr uploader I've seen, so I think I'll live with it and correct the dates later. Maybe I'm naive to think that I'll actually will have time to do that, but we'll see. It's a little more likely since I want photos in sets to appear in the correct order.

What? You think I forgot a decimal point up there?

In the middle, perhaps? I won't be actually getting a check from Google for quite a while. That's ok. I'm entertained by seeing what ads come up based on my writing and that's the real reason I put them up.

Update: The missing time and date info may just be because the pictures I've been uploading have been from an old camera. The info I have in picasa itself is likely just the timestamp of the file and that alone may not be enough flickr.

Red Bellied Food Snob and the Queen

I've finally started working on copying over photos from floppies, which I took with my old Sony Mavica. It's a 1.1 megapixel camera and is comparatively gigantic, but it has a great lens, with 8X optical zoom. So, I'm finding some great, albeit comparatively low resolution images. The last time I tried copying any of these, I was getting lots of bad sector errors, but I haven't run into too many problems so far using an IBM floppy reader. Most of the ones I've been copying are from January of 2000, when we had the big snow, which was approximately 30 inches in Hillsborough. I took so many pictures of birds, that it's almost ridiculous. Here's a beautiful example of what was probably one of the relatives of my adoring fan, the obnoxious head-banging red bellied woodpecker:

Last night, after guitar practice, we went to Tripps. Regular readers will know that I am a food snob. I fail to understand why people go to chain restaurants, although, as JJ did point out, they have good parking. To be fair, my meal, salmon with lobster cream sauce with broccoli, cauliflower and mashed potatoes, was good. They weren't generous with the sauce, which is both good and bad, depending on whether one is feeling health conscious. The entree, with a glass of fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, cost $21 and change. For that price, I hope to have something that's better than "good". As always, the company was the important thing, so I definitely had a great time.

The night before last, I saw The Queen. I hadn't realized how much it focused on Diana's death. It was interesting watching a movie that was about a time and subject that I recall so well. It brought back memories of second semester calculus, since that's what I was taking at the time and our instructor was from Britain. Helen Mirren, who I'd watched previously in Prime Suspect episodes, did an excellent job portraying Queen Elizabeth, but I have to wonder whether the whole royal family is really as unpleasant as they seemed in the movie. It's been about twenty years since I read a biography of Elizabeth and her sister, so I don't remember much, but it seemed almost as if both the book and the movie were about two completely different people.

Now I'm craving grapefruit juice.

Oops. Never Again.

I am currently annoyed with myself for making a stupid mistake. Last Wednesday, I decided to try taking a picture of my soft shell crabs at ACME Food & Beverage Co. using the lowest resolution, to see if by any chance it took better pictures in low light. It didn't. I knew there wasn't much of a chance that it would make a difference, but I thought I would give it a try anyway. Unfortunately, I forgot to switch it back and I've taken many pictures since then. My only consolation is that these don't take long to upload, but it's still sad.


This frog was peeking next to my front door the night I changed the setting.



This cute little bird kept me company while I was eating lunch (the leftover soft shell crabs) last Thursday.


I took some nice spring campus shots on the way back to the office after lunch that day.


On Saturday, this squirrel was acting bizarrely by hanging off the side of the deck for minutes at a time while kind of vibrating.


Sunday was graduation. I only attended the Computer Science Department's ceremony, as usual. This is actually a shot from my Treo, because it was more interesting than what I took with my camera.


Finally, is a photo of verbena bonariensis, which I took when I got home from work today. This is when I noticed that I could take over 1500 more pictures before running out of memory. Oops.

Rationalization

The last couple of nights, I've been fortunate to be able to watch an almost full moon rise from my windows in the great room, while I've been typing away at the computer. I often like to think about how many thousands of people are looking up at the moon at the same time. No one else, however, gets to look at the moon through the branches of the oak trees surrounding my house. It sounds like a good way to rationalize getting a small tripod, don't you think?

Raw Fish Fixes Everything

Yesterday, I decided to enjoy the nice weather and microwaved the leftover pepper, eggplant and goat cheese pizza in the Great Hall microwave and then sit outside in the sun on the Bryan Center Walkway Plaza Thing. I'd never used that particular microwave before, but it seemed incredibly powerful. I think I could have just waved the plate in front of it from five feet away and it would have gotten plenty warm enough. The pizza was really good, even after its transformation. I also got a "Passion Paradise" mango and guava Keva Juice smoothie to drink. That's the second one I've had of that flavor and it's just about perfect.

Last night I went to my parents' to visit with FIFO again. While eating tuna salad for dinner, we watched a live webcast with a panel of liberal bloggers, including Atrios, on blogging and elections, filmed at the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York. I could easily see why they are such prolific bloggers.

Today, after getting back from my semi-weekly meeting at the American Tobacco Campus, I went with LA to the Loop, on campus, so I could see if they had a goat cheese and sausage pizza similar to the one at their Chapel Hill location. Similar is a word that is open to interpretation. Both pizzas were round, certainly. You really couldn't taste the goat cheese. The one I ate in Chapel Hill was great. The one I ate today was just so so. Fortunately, I think the experience has cured my potential desire to eat pizza for a fifth day in a row. I actually felt sick as my stomach afterwards. I think these goat cheese cravings are because I miss the goat cheese dip that RR used to make when we were in college. I need to get the recipe from her again.

I took this photo using my Treo 650 from my van, as I was leaving work.


This evening I met CL, JL, PS, TH and SY for dinner at Champa. We had a great time, as usual. Since I wasn't feeling that well, I decided to have sushi instead of my usual pad thai. Raw fish fixes everything. I had a Tanzania Roll, which was yellowtail, cucumber and scallions. I also had a Crazy Roll, which had eel, asparagus, salmon skin and a few other things. Both were good. I also traded a couple of pieces with the rolls that CL ordered and they were good, too.

Oh yes, I forgot that I actually have leftovers from today's pizza in the work fridge. I probably will will be eating pizza for a fifth day in a row after all. This may actually be a first.

Branching Out

I know some of you have been wondering about my woodpecker friend. Well, he's been banging on my great room windows more or less every day since I last mentioned him. This weekend he started to branch out. He started banging his beak on my bedroom windows. It's not the best way to wake up, but it could be worse. Of course, I think the best way to wake up is to be licked in the face by a large dog, but I'm guessing that many of my dear readers would not agree with me. The woodpecker even followed me and started tapping on the little window above my sink in my bathroom. I don't know why it took him his long to determine that my house has more than one side.

I have now converted my mom into being a flickr user. I spent a large portion of yesterday afternoon playing functional tech support. Hopefully, I had a 100% customer satisfaction rating for the day. Of course my deciding to upgrade her account to pro for an early Christmas present might have helped with that a bit. Some of her photos are really rather wonderful.

I went to the California Pizza Kitchen with DS last night. I'd never been there before and I was impressed. I had a pear and gorgonzola pizza, which was excellent. I ate the leftovers for lunch today and they were great, too. We saw the Borat movie afterwards. Is nice. It was very funny, but not quite as funny as I had expected.

The excitement for today was the CIT Multimedia Monday session on PRS "clickers", which were originated for Physics classes. They basically are electronic devices that allow users to anonymously enter in multiple choice, numeric or very short answers to questions. I actually used them when I took a Physics course ten years ago, but they mostly use RF now instead of infrared. Like most of our MM sessions, it was fun and interesting. At the end we did a survey and found that most CIT employees prefer dark chocolate.

My parents and I went to the Flying Fish again and ate virtually the same thing (fried oysters) as last time. It was just as good.

The Familiy Reunion Begins

The morning after we arrived in Arkansas (Bastille Day), my dad and I had breakfast at the hotel with my dad's cousin, UB, and her husband, RB. The Embassy Suites definitely had the best breakfasts of any of the hotels where we stayed. It was a full complimentary breakfast buffet and you could pretty much get anything you wanted. I fondly remembered some of the Tivoli quarterly company breakfasts that we had at the one in Cary when I first started working for IBM. I hadn't seen UB and RB in 14 years, so it was great to spend time with them that morning and throughout the reunion.

Once my uncle, WR, his wife, BR, and my two cousins, NR and MR, arrived, we all had lunch at the hotel. I actually don't remember what I ate. Imagine that!

My dad's cousin, HR, and his wife, SH, arrived late that afternoon. The hotel had cheap ($1) drinks at the bar every evening, so we all took advantage of that. I got them to make a nice fruit juice and soda water concoction. UB's daughter, BO, and her husband, MS, arrived. Finally, UB's son, CO, his wife, JO, and their kids, ACO and ARO arrived. I'm sure the initials are confusing, but hopefully it will be useful for the next few posts.

Next we had dinner at the hotel. Each meal took several hours, because the service was extremely slow, but we were in no hurry. After days of traveling, it was nice to take a break from driving and chat.

After dinner, almost everyone went up to our suite. We got to show off all the luxury and hang out in our dining room. We all looked at the photocopies of the old photographs that I had been sorting and people marked their initials next photos if they wanted copies. I've been working on scanning them and I need to spend more time on it. HR and SH brought wine, so we all had a grand time.

Take a look at the faucet on the whirlpool. I would imagine that it would take forever to fill a whirlpool tub of the size that was in our suite without a fancy faucet, such as this one, but I still thought it was cool.

Flickr, Flowers and Food

I know I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to say this, but I really love flickr. I first started really liking it when I added a flickr feed of photos tagged "weimaraner" to my Google personalized homepage, inspired by the default feed on Netvibes. There are so many zany photos and seeing one of them, particularly this one, really brightens my day. I've finally started adding my own photos to my flickr site. I still think smugmug is cool and technically lets you upload more, but I like the interface and community on flickr more.

In early June, most of CIT went to the Refectory for lunch to celebrate the arrival of two new employees, AN and HC. I had quiche lorraine and a side salad. It was delicious. They had the gorgeous flower arrangement above, displayed near the entrance, which I just had to photograph.

Later that week, almost all of CIT went to lunch at George's Garage for a farewell party for MG. As you can see in the photos on flickr, we showered him with some excellent parting gifts, including a pound of butter. MG believed that butter could be eaten as a main course and we teased him about this on a regular basis.

That Friday, I went over to JJ and JA's for guitar practice and afterwards we went to El Corral. I tried their pork carnitas, which were flavorful and moist. I had sopa pillas for dessert and they were better than what I tried at Casa Ibarra many years ago. Their corn flake based Mexican fried ice cream is probably a better choice, though.

Here are a couple of other photos that I took in my garden that week.

Two Very Different Baby Pictures

I've really been diving into organizing my photos recently, or more accurately, the entire family's photos. I've been scanning some of the old ones, with my new HP 7410.
I think this was taken when I was about four years old. It's not the highest resolution scanner, but I'm pretty happy with it.

The evening after my first scanning adventure, my parents and I went to ACME Food & Beverage Co. The owner, Kevin Callaghan, sends out e-mail to their mailing list about every week or so. That week, he said that the first soft shell crabs were in. We had to go. Below is actually a picture that was close to the way that they served them, but a few weeks later. I eagerly started my first serving before remembering that I wanted to take a photograph. As you can see, it came with a roasted red pepper sauce, rice and greens. The first version had delicious sugar snap peas.
For dessert my dad and I shared a strawberry rhubarb tart, which was excellent.

The next morning, after a traditionally traumatic, but lovely, haircut, I played Long Black Veil on the guitar for my mom. ...while singing. Scary.

A little before noon that day, I took a very nice shot of some of the trees in my yard.


I tried out the copying functionality on my HP 7410 and I was very happy with that, too.

The next day was the free lunch for Duke Staff Appreciation Week. We ate our barbecue, coleslaw and fried chicken at the teak furniture on the patio near the library. I thought the food was pretty good. People swarmed towards the quad from all directions. The coleslaw was pretty good and similar to Bullock's, although somewhat hotter. I believe I overheard that the catering was done by Abrams.

That afternoon I cut the cord on NT's baby spider plants. Office plant propagation is way too much fun, especially without windows. Thank goodness for the full spectrum lighting! Here's one of the babies.

Belated Tale of an Alarming Day

I should really just post what I'm thinking at the time rather composing full chapters or volumes.For example, I wrote this about ten days ago and then saved the draft. I should have just posted it.

I took this cool photo of the moon over Duke Chapel just before I went inside to work one morning.



I was vanless for almost two weeks while my van was in the body shop. This was fairly traumatic for me. I had to remember what I used to do before I could drive. I had to get rides to and from places. The horror. That is way more complicated.

It was way more complicated when NC and I were going to take my dad's car from the library over to the the American Tobaco Campus for a meeting. It was particularly complicated when we discovered that his car had a car alarm. Let me state, for the record, that it does. Neither of my parents nor I knew that the car has an alarm. It's very loud. My dad ran over from his building and figured out how to shut it off for us. We tried to recreate the problem in my garage that night and it seems as if you repeat the convoluted steps that we did that it goes off about 25% of the time. Note that it seems a lot louder in an enclosed space. In any case, that was a fairly hilarious (but loud) portion of the day.

Roofers working on 2/1.

FIFO looks out at the snow on 1/27.

New house in the snow on 1/25.

Window in my bedroom that was so big and heavy.

Almost Forgot Today

While trying to watch Alias and label photos on Ofoto, I almost forgot that I hadn't posted anything here today. This morning, I added comments from Haloscan in case anyone has any anything to add to my posts.

Almost nothing eventful happened today. My van likely won't be ready until tomorrow (Monday) evening, so I spent another day at home. I finished uploading pictures, paid some bills, had a couple of good phone calls and watched a Duke basketball game on TV. One of the calls was with my builder and we started thinking about the possibilities for the tiles in the shower. It's nice to know that there's yet another spot to put a little creativity.

Excuse me, but my mother is getting a little too excited about correctly predicting something in Alias.