Seals at Chatham

They silently bobbed up and down the beach after us, heads pointed in our direction.

Some interesting shell commands

zipinfo
sips
curl 

-- these are pretty useful for folks who make a living pushing image files around (especially to and from remote servers).

And as I get more comfortable with the shell, I find I totally avoid using Spotlight or command-F and go right to

find

instead. I feel like it's faster, maybe partly because of that insane find-as-you-type behavior in Spotlight. Also, if I'm trying to page through a couple of gigs of stuff on the server, it's nice not to bog down the Finder while the search goes on. Of course, I don't actually live in the Finder much; jumping into the shell wouldn't be nearly as convenient if I weren't using Path Finder instead. The drop down Terminal pane is killer.

Hazel

This is a pretty innovative Mac OS X utility for robotic filing which I've been using since the early 2.0 betas; it's great. I had already given up trying to get everything off my desktop by finding just the right cubbyhole for it. Instead I had started a chronological dump bin system for anything but obviously project-related files. There's a large middle ground of miscellaneous "Might want this later" attachments and ephemera which 120 GB+ hard drives seduce one into keeping around... but one can get pretty distracted with all that interesting junk on one's desktop. Now I'm letting Hazel clean it up for me.

prospect park

Stigs and Marcie had their first birthday party in Prospect Park, and we happened to be passing through....

to do list

Seen on a WW2 sub at a submarine museum at Pearl Harbor. The diving officer would stand at his station and call back (through some kind of pipe) to each post to verify verbally that each hatch was closed, etc. This metal indicator panel was just a physical checklist for the officer to go through before issuing the order to dive.

Don't you hate it when you get ready to dive and there's just one thing you forgot to check? Kind of like thinking, hmm, did I turn off the iron?

I would improve the survivability of the device by making it so that you couldn't see the words "Rigged for diving" and"Rigged for surface" simultaneously. You'd only see the phrase which was true, like a big if-then statement.

Jack

die geist von frankfurt west bahnhof

Photoshop CS2 is so nifty. Still finding new menu items like "Lens Correction..."

frankfurt west bahnhof

23 hours in Brussels

Checked in to the hotel at around 10 PM and found that it was in a fairly anonymous outlying suburb, near the client but far from any restaurant. The bartender advised me not to go outside, for though the night looked cold and empty, gangs of North Africans roamed the neighborhood looking to mug anyone who didn't speak French or Flemish. Must be some kind of rougher version of the Académie française. So all I had for dinner was two Leffes from the bar and a bag of peanuts from the hotel room fridge.

the mercure

Building in back is the hotel.

Mouse on Mars

Saw them at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. These are the only pictures on this blog with no adjustments in Photoshop.

Rucola mit Parmaschinken am Elba

Took me a while to figure out that this tart leaf was the same thing as arugula. This place just off Hamburger Allee put it on the pizza after the bake, along with thin panes of parmesan. At left, Carolina has her Parmaschinken raw.

Frankfurt Hochstraße

Through Günter's car window.

Frankfurt -- outside the Mercure apartments

Victor Hugo a habite cette maison

Browsing for chocolate in Brussels feels like going to the jewelry district. And neither chocolate nor diamonds can be found in the Belgian earth.

Stuttgart park

Walking around the morning after the Mouse on Mars concert.

Concrete Volcanoes in Stuttgart

I called Henry from this park and he surfed over to maps.google.com to try to identify what these things are: art, or some kind of Morlockian forced-air cooling system. Ideas?

Die Lusthaus Ruine

Found this abandoned temple of the Eloi in a park in Stuttgart. Becoming a fan of the Tilt-Shift effect. They really added a lot of digital photography tools in Photoshop CS 2. I guess that's kind of obvious.

Gutenberg Statue

Interesting that they did not rebuild the top of the statue. Downtown Frankfurt.

Frankfurt Fog

This was the view from my hotel balcony while jetlagged. Converted a lamp to a tripod for this shot.