I'm not sure what compels me make these postcards from an apocalyptic alternate land of struggle and magic, but make them I must. All for you, the home viewer. I imagine Cynne traveling on her many journeys, and thinking -- say, I bet the folks would really enjoy the scenery that underscores our impending struggle between good and evil.
She's more considerate than I am, in many ways. Odd and crazy... but true.
Like Gandalf, my Paladin is an angel.
Here, by the way, is what I needed a working copy of Photoshop for:
My various alts don't really have a chance to hang out together much, you see.
We had some time on Monday before our flight out of the Twin Cities, so we went to an ur-greasy spoon that runs out of an old railroad car: Mickey's Diner. I didn't quite grasp that if you wanted veggies on your burger, you had to order it wussy "California Style," but it was still quite delicious.
Then we attempted to go the Minnehaha Falls, but they turn out to be a popular destination on Labor Day, and there was no parking to be found. So, with terror held in our hearts, we approached something that was -- in fact -- no moon, but rather the Mall (all-all-all) of America (erica-erica-erica).
Fun fact: From the outside it doesn't look so big. What makes it terrifying is the density inside -- four levels and lots of replication. The core is taken up with, no joke, an amusement park:
...but we didn't come for that. We came for the Lego Store, which is both a hoot AND a holler, which I'm sure you'll all be delighted to learn.
I've got the rest of the pictures up on Flickr in a set for your enjoyment, as well.
Carrie and I spent the Labor Day weekend up in the Minneapolis/St Paul area, to attend the wedding of Florence and Marty. Florence is an old friend of ours from our Carnegie Mellon days (are we old enough to have old friends? The answer, apparently, is yes). We met Marty for the first time this weekend, and it was wonderful to see how how well they were matched for each other.
I was incredibly charmed by the children attending, especially this young stinker:
Carrie generally ran around being awesome and making things go, but she also engaged in some craftiness, making the table runner for the head table:
Some detail:
One small bit of trivia: the bride & groom met playing boardgames, and the groom is a big boardgame geek. So he designed a game as part of the party favors for the guests to take home:
Carrie & I drove up to Multnomah Falls today with my mom. It was very cold out, but also very pretty.
Update: the ivoted tag.
Brother Chris and I went down to the Congress Avenue Bridge to see the bats.
After that, we took some arty shots of downtown lights on long exposures.
We concluded by rocking, and not bothering knocking.
PhotographyBLOG has an interesting post on a technology demo from Microsoft called Photosynth, which stitches together photos into a 3D panorama that you can navigate in. There's some cool -- but still pie in the sky -- thoughts about the massive indexing you might do to navigate the entire world of photos in this way, using your own snapshots as entry points into exploration. The promotional video is at least 50% fluff (you can skip most of the first half), but has some interesting nuggets.
We just got back from an overlapping work trip -- Carrie was in San Jose for BlogHer (as was Skye), and I was in Cupertino catching up on some long overdue meetings. Then we both kicked around for the weekend in sunny CA and met up with folks, including Nigel (who was also in town on work!) and large chunks of my family who drove down from Sacramento and met us in Oakland.
Before finally heading for the airport, we did sneak off to see the ocean, at bee-yoo-tiful Half Moon Bay. I finally indulged myself and picked up a Canon SD700 IS ELPH for the occasion; I love my SLR, but it's bulky enough that I don't want to take it for casual photography. So, after two years of pining, we decided it counted as a birthday present :). It's ideal for casual photography -- I couldn't be happier.
Another entry in the "character poster" series.
For some reason, ever since Daggerfall, I've always had a character named Felicia. In WoW, this turned out to be especially apropo, since the word "fel" refers to warlock-y things in the Warcraft mythos. Not that I realized this until a year later, of course. Sharp as a tack!
Some boxes of type seen in an antique shop:
OK, Flickr might do as a photo sharing platform.
I finally got Photon to correctly upload my pictures, only to discover that
(a) it wants to do a separate post per picture, and
(b) the default MT stylesheet wants to clip my pictures horizontally, and I'm too stupid about stylesheets to get it to work right at the moment.
So pictures may return later when I feel like fighting with MT some more. So this is the one thing Radio does better out of the box so far. Wheee.
