morrowlife

Here’s another in my famous fireplace series. You can almost feel the heat, huh? There’s an interesting phenomenon going on with my digital camera in low-light situations – I get a lot of bad pixels. There’s always a big green one right in the middle of everything, and then several other blue and purple ones, depending on how dark the picture is. It’s nothing The Gimp can’t clean up, though. I blow the picture up to 200%, use the eyedropper near the bad spot, and then use the fuzzy airbrush to touch up.

I absolutely HAVE to go to bed earlier tonight. So, bye.

As promised yesterday, here’s Aunt Sandy and the sea lion (or seal or dolphin or mollusk or something in the ocean or a river or somewhere). It was taken at the Detroit zoo last summer. They have an arctic exhibit with a pretty cool underwater tube you walk through.

Number One and I went to our friend Ross’s sixteenth birthday party at the Extreme Sports Center (can’t find a link, sadly – maybe a reader can find it for me) tonight. It was a lot of fun and the place is very cool. It has two indoor soccer fields, one of which was reserved for us to play touch football. We had fun, although I’m in quite a lot of muscle pain today. I don’t do much running around these days. Maybe I should start. Maybe not.

To the bedmobile! See you on Monday.

As promised yesterday, here’s a picture of reader number three on his wedding day a little more than a year ago. Delightful, no?

They went home this morning. We got a call a little bit ago to tell us they arrived safely. I’m still sad to have them gone. I’m also so sleepy I can hardly keep my eyes open. Spent the whole day that way. I’m going to bed in a few minutes, that’s for sure.

I took a little time this evening to try to organize my scouting stuff – I’ve been feeling like it’s spread pretty much all over the house and I can’t ever find anything when I need it. Hopefully, that will improve with tonight’s little bit of organization.

I’ve been studying C++ and generally enjoying the textbook, but I don’t think I have any applications inside me waiting to come out right now. I’m also looking into how to create Dashboard widgets now. Maybe a brilliant idea along that line will come to me.

I listened to a podcast today about a service called Pandora. It’s a website that creates a streaming “radio station” based on your preferences. You enter an artist or a song you like, and it picks others it thinks you will like too. It’s based on a quite advanced algorithm that takes into account about 400 variables for each song. I played with it a little bit after I got home from work tonight and must say it pretty much works as advertised. The user interface is slick too. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Tomorrow’s picture: Aunt Sandy and the sea lion. See you then.

Here’s another in my famous Window series. This one isn’t quite as dramatic as the workshop picture so well known to my readers, but I think it gives a nice effect. Let me know your humble opinion.

Had a nice Christmas holiday. So much so, in fact, that I’m dreading going back to work tomorrow. Oh well, at least my next holiday is coming right up at the end of May. Sigh.

Merry Christmas week! We’re in the Virginia mountains this week, so there won’t be the normal number of posts.

Here’s a seventeenth century blacksmith’s shop from Northern Ireland we visited this morning. At the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia, they have farmhouses, barns, and shops from seventeenth century Germany, England, and Ireland, as well as a mid-nineteenth century farm from Virginia. The intent is to show the conditions people left behind in Europe when they came to America, and what they had to look forward to here. It was a fascinating visit. The best part was that you’re welcome to look around nearly everywhere, pick things up, and generally act like you belong there. We walked up and down the stairs, rubbed our hands in front of the fireplaces, and got a real good look at the place and feel for how it really might have been.

On a sad note, we didn’t find an interesting vacation home to buy yesterday. Everything was either too expensive or (much more frequently) too disgusting. No loss, though, other than a little time. We’ll either look here again some other time or try somewhere else. No hurry. In the meantime, we need to fix up the travel trailer a little bit for the next few years’ vacations.

By the way, today’s pictures were taken today by Reader Number Two. Thanks, Mark! I have to show just one more:

I love that picture. Have a great rest of the week.