Woodpress

We went to Lagoon (an amusement park) on Thursday. Here’s my favorite picture from the day:

Other photos from the day (and from at least one other trip) are in my Lagoon photoset on Flickr.

On Saturday I got to spend three hours at my parents’ house, visiting them with my son. Their 44th wedding anniversary was Friday.

At one point during our visit, we were outside and it started raining, so we stood on the covered porch. I took pictures. Here’s one of my son:

Here’s another. A water droplet that made its way through the roof fell between us as I was taking the picture.

My mom likes cats, but since the cat we had when I was a child finally died, she hasn’t kept one as a pet. Instead, she feeds strays and lets them hang around outside the house. She says the neighborhood kids named this one “Star Wars”:

My parents:

While I was taking pictures of my parents, it was of course vital that my nine year old son do bunny ears.

And here’s a picture of my dad:

Also, I got a digital SLR camera recently.

A while ago I used the quote, “you can’t grep dead trees” (meaning you can’t use a computer to search a paper book). Since I enjoy trying to use plain English rather than jargon, it occurred to me that there’s a pleasingly similar but more modern and mainstream way to express the idea:

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.

A few months ago I mentioned that the office where I work was having trouble with KWIK Vending Service. A couple months ago they said they were going to drop us as a customer. Apparently they were sick of people from our office calling the “call for service” number KWIK had posted on the machines, trying to get KWIK Vending Service to… provide vending service. So, “KWIK Vending Service” actually seems to provide slow/poor vending service, and the sticker that says “call for service” really means “if you call for service, we’ll threaten to drop your account.”

I’ve been occasionally taking pictures of the main drink vending machine and posting them to a Flickr photo set dedicated to KWIK Vending Service’s slow vending service.

If anyone from KWIK stumbles across this, it might behoove them to explain the business reasons for providing such poor service. Is it actually MORE profitable? I find that hard to believe, given how many drinks we WOULD buy if our machines were stocked. How expensive is a trip out here? Am I failing to see some hidden costs?

On today’s walk, I got a couple pictures of birds.

This rooster was in a coop. I think it was trying to stare me down.

My wife says this is a baby robin. It didn’t seem scared of me. I was just walking casually along, and noticed that it had allowed me to get just a few feet away, so I slowly got my camera out of my pocket and gradually approached, snapping photos. When I took this one, I was holding the camera just a couple inches away from it.

Friday I took a walk with my camera again, and took some pictures. Here are a few of my favorites.

Yesterday at lunch I took a walk. It resulted in photos somehow. This is my favorite, which I’m currently using as a wallpaper.

I took some photos in the front yard Saturday. I’m biased, but I think they’re worth clicking through to view at higher resolution.