I won.

I went back to the car, and while I was putting away the camera someone came over and said “can I help you?” I said “no thank you,” pulled my bottle of water out of the car, then stood there and drank it. I figured he thought I might be rummaging through the car trying to steal something, and that would put him at ease.

He walked away (pretending to do something around the corner, I think), then when he came back past me I said “thanks for looking out for the car.” He smiled at me and went back inside.

When Shaun got back, he informed me that there had been a minor panic. “There’s a guy outside taking pictures!!!” While the guy was outside “helping” me, Shaun told them I was with him, and that I take pictures every day. I had mentioned that morning how nice Timp looked.

When the guy got back inside, the person behind the counter pointed at Shaun and said “he fessed up… that guy’s with him.”

People are really scared of cameras! I suspect if I’d had a pocket camera instead of a big black beast, they wouldn’t have freaked out… but if I’d been up to no good, that’s just what I would’ve used!

Anyway… if you want to rob the fedex office, this photo is for you.

My instructions for this photo were "go stand by that fence." (No, he’s not actually beating her with a bottle of water in a sock, but that was the effect he was going for.)

Mum’s the word (because I can’t spell chrysanthemum).

Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!

I’d allow them to run ahead to the next corner while I went at my own speed and took pictures. They got bored while waiting at this corner. This is just a candid photo.

This is my youngest daughter. It looks like she’s completely shocked by something in the sky, but really she’s pointing at a stop sign that she sounded out, saying "STOP!"

You can’t google dead trees.

I googled for the phrase “can’t google dead trees” and found no exact matches. That means I’ll have created the first google-indexed occurrence of that phrase. Awesome. I win.

Since I work on Microsoft’s enterprise search solution (and Microsoft is somewhere below number 3 on the list of Google fans), I considered the more hand-that-feeds-me-friendly “you can’t search dead trees” but that doesn’t have quite the same meaning, and it doesn’t have the appeal of the replacement word starting with the same letter as the word it replaced. “You can’t Live Search dead trees” just made me laugh, and inspired another similar phrase that the branding guys might want to think about:

You can’t verb Live Search.

This post probably doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of Microsoft. Any similarity to view or opinion reflection is purely coincidental. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Update: Less than fifteen minutes after posting this, my google search found it.

It’s not very carefully edited.

Once upon a time in high school, I had a really cool computer science teacher named Clarence Whetten.

Our computer lab consisted of a Unix system with 4 Meg of RAM and about 30 dumb terminals. As I understand it, Mr. Whetten approached a local company (ICON, where I later worked as an intern briefly) and convinced them to donate the system.

At the same time, people in the nearest high school were using Apple ][ computers and having a much less interesting (in my opinion) experience.

Because we were all using the same computer, we could interact with other users in very cool (and not always desirable) ways. A mischevious user could write to other users’ terminals. As I learned, a mischevious user who was not currently enrolled in a computer science class could lose his account that way. A single student could hog more than her share of CPU or RAM, and other users would check the process list and say “hey, cut that out!”

Among other things, the environment emphasized the importance of writing efficient code.

A little while after school ended (with a reasonable time buffer to allow students to stay after and get a little extra work done), a scheduled “cron” job would turn on public access to games.

When a student demonstrated trustworthiness and skill (or something), Clarence could be convinced to grant “root” access, allowing that user to perform administrative tasks (and occasional mischief such as turning on games when they weren’t supposed to be on). Eventually, I became one of those privileged users.

One day a fellow student was pestering me to turn on games, and I finally got sick of it, so I decided to play a trick on him. I called him over, typed a command to REMOVE games, then took the terminal offline, pressed enter, then put the terminal back online, quickly erased the command, and hit enter again.

He freaked out. I thought it was pretty funny, but after he told everyone in the room, I had to I reveal my trick. One of the other students quickly double-checked and said “no, they really are gone!” I checked too, and sure enough… they were! Apparently I had blown the trick somehow. CRAP!

I did not earn popularity points that day, but I probably learned a valuable lesson. I wonder what it was.

I wasn’t actually the one who ended up recompiling and reinstalling the games. That was a friend of mine. From time to time, he reminds me about the time I removed all the games. He did it recently, so I thought I’d write the story.

After drawing Snoopy, I realized there was an opportunity for more, so I unfolded it:

My favorite part was making Snoopy say “Dude.”

So, here it is… his first nature documentary. Hopefully there will be more in the future.