Woodpress

I recently took a picture of one of my mother’s cats.

Last night I spent a few hours experimenting and touching it up, and came up with a version that I really like.

Detail:

Today I got an 8×10 print from Costco, and I think it turned out really nice.

In You can’t verb Live Search I criticized the name “Live Search”. Microsoft has announced its new search portal… or “Decision Engine”, Bing.

Yeah, you can verb Bing. Kind of. People can say “bing it!” instead of “google it!” (and it only sounds SLIGHTLY profane)… but what’s the past tense of bing? Binged? That might work in speech, but not in writing. Written, it’s past tense for binge, which has strong negative connotations (the present participle is similarly troubled). Will people be comfortable blogging/chatting about how they “binged” for something?

When I mentioned Bing to my wife, she almost immediately came up with bung as a past tense verb. Ack! I am NOT Cornholio!

It’s only a name though. The name Bing definitely seems like an improvement over Live Search, and it IS very easy to type. I’m interested in seeing how people like the way it actually works.

A few days ago my oldest daughter noticed a tiny grasshopper (about half a centimeter long, at most) crawling on a window inside our house. She thought I might like to take a picture of it, so she came and told me about it. Here’s the best of my attempts:

This is what I saw when I walked out the front door this morning:

After years of online activity, I have a reasonable sample of data that says I go quiet every winter (from about December to February). Fortunately, the sun is coming back, and I am feeling increasingly communicative.

I recently stumbled across a program called MyPaint for my Nokia Internet Tablet (a handheld device similar to a PDA). It’s a little slow on the low-power 400 MHz mobile processor, but it’s usable for low-detail doodling… and I really like the idea behind MyPaint (which is available for at least Windows and Linux–possibly other platforms). Here are a couple drawings I made while experimenting with it:

A few weeks ago, my manager mentioned to me that he’d won “photo of the month” on a web site back in the mid 1990’s for a picture he took of hoarfrost. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to find the photo. :(

I wasn’t familiar with hoarfrost, so he explained to me that it was a somewhat unusual form of frost that occurs during prolonged fog. The next morning, I coincidentally had a chance to take some pictures of hoarfrost. Here is my favorite of them:

We had a tree removed yesterday, by the skilled and and friendly Dave “E” Tree. Here’s a long-exposure picture of my kids climbing on the wood. (We’re keeping the wood–my wife wants a fire pit where the tree used to be.)

We had the stump removed today. Unfortunately, during stump removal the Utopia fiber line to our house was cut. As far as I know, there wasn’t really any way to avoid it–we didn’t know (or didn’t remember) it was running under the ground by the tree, and neither did the tree guy. Still, he is planning to pay for the repair work (which is fortunately going to be pretty inexpensive if the Utopia guys were correct).

The Utopia repair guys were here a few hours after the line was cut, but didn’t have enough conduit to fix it, so they’ll be back tomorrow. That’s pretty quick turnaround!

Recently I learned that Verizon Wireless had re-priced their Internet plans to be very reasonable, so I’m using my mobile phone for Internet right now.

Update: We’re back online. Total downtime was a little over 31 hours. Good job, Utopia!

Today on the way to work, we stopped at the fedex office so Shaun (my ride) could drop off a package. While he went in and took care of that, I got out of the car and took some pictures of Timpanogos (including this one).

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 youngest child just turned 6. She had a Princess-themed birthday party. I took this picture just before the party: