I posted some panoramas of the Golden Gate Bridge in the summer, but I never got around to posting these as well.
Me at the Golden Gate Bridge
Patti and I at the Golden Gate Bridge
Nov 212009
Sam
Nov 212009
Midsummer, Patti and I visited the San Francisco Bay area. We had a great time. I’ve been a bit delinquent in posting photos, but better late than never.
We drove up US 1 from Monterey to San Francisco and caught the sunset.
The next day, we drove up to Muir Woods, a national park just over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Parts of the woods were filled with spiders; others had no wildlife whatsoever.
As we walked through the woods, we heard a knocking sound. After searching around, Patti saw this woodpecker. When we got back to the entry of the park, we used the books there to identify it as a Hairy Woodpecker.
Muir Woods is a vacation spot for ladybugs. These two were having a grand old time.
There was a sign less than five feed away stating, “Don’t feed the chipmunks.”
I used my Google phone as a GPS to map our trip with the MyTracks application. I forgot to start the app when we started our hike, we really started where the track ends.
View Muir Woods in a larger map
Nov 212009
A while back, I found a neat description of AES: Moserware: A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
Oct 082009
Last month I took a trip on the Clipper City. It was a beautiful day.
My friend Peter helped work the ship lines. In addition to being fun, it also earned him a free drink.
For the anniversary of Henry Hudson coming into New York Harbor, many replica ships were sailing around the harbor.
Oct 082009
It’s a little out of date, but there were some amazing photos taken when the Space Shuttle repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. The Sacremento Bee compiled some of great photos of the repair mission, but I think the photos by Thierry Legault of Atlantis moving in front of the sun were the best.
Oct 082009
My vacation to California took me to Monterey, where my friends Barbara and Raj got married. Monterey is beautiful and the weather was nice and cool. There are wild animals throughout the bay.
Cormorants, sea lions, and sea otters
The day after the wedding, everyone was invited to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Black Sea Nettle
Decorator crab
Sea anemone
Warty sea cucumber
The Aquarium also hosts shorebirds that are being rehabilitated.
There was a special exhibit of seahorses
What aquarium would be complete without penguins?
Oct 082009
A couple of weeks ago I went to San Francisco for vacation. I posted a few photos from my cell phone, but I also took my hefty, large camera. Well, not so hefty and not so large, but small enough to fit in my pocket.
We start out our vacation by walking over to Fisherman’s Wharf. Sea lions are all around the wharf, but a ton of them congregate at Pier 39. They are a lot of fun to watch, but they smell quite bad.
You can see Alcatraz from Fisherman’s Wharf. We saw neither Sean Connery nor Nicholas Cage.
After seeing the Sea Lions, my friend Patti and I walked up a long staircase to Coit Tower. Patti held the tower up.
We were visiting San Francisco to see my friends Barbara and Raj get married. It was a fun wedding in Monterey, California. Congratulations Barbara and Raj!
[More photos to come later….]
Oct 082009
I’m a huge fan of Richard Feynman; as a kid, his auto-biographies were inspirational. If you haven’t read them, I recommend picking them up: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. If you haven’t heard of Richard Feynman before, you can read a nice vignette about him by W. Daniel Hillis titled Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine.
Oct 072009
Earlier this summer I went up to Rhode Island for a weekend.
My friend Patti drove us up to Charlestown, Rhode Island. She was coming from Pennsylvania, and we met for lunch in Beacon, NY at a restaurant called Homespun Foods. We ate a few sandwiches and picked up some food for later.
There had been a couple of large storms a few days earlier, and the normally calm shores had waves of well over six feet.
The shorebirds and gulls didn’t seem to mind. Whenever a large swell hit the tidal pools they dashed away.
The snails also seemed very happy.
Seaweed makes a great wig.
Charlestown has a large briny bay with fish and cormorants.
Oct 062009
In the past couple of days, Condé Nast has announced that they are closing four magazines, including the 68-year old Gourmet. I’ve written about the number of ad pages in a newspaper section before, and Condé’s latest actions remind me of Time Inc. (In fact, the parallels are a bit creepy: both Time Inc. and Condé Nast used the same consulting firm, McKinsey, to determine how to cut their budget.) There have been many reports of lower profits in publishing divisions this year.
These closures remind me of a couple of pieces I’ve read on the web recently, including an essay by Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and a piece on Slate regarding Warren Buffet’s views on newspapers. I think the quote at the end of the Buffet story is right on the money:
Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.
I think the same could be said for many news magazines as well.
I have a lot of friends who work in or with the magazine industry. But I think that it would be unwise to believe that industry will be anything but a boutique industry ten years from now.