Here it is! The second part of the random photo bin from this year’s trip to the south of Spain. The first part can be seen here. The second week we were in town was the annual festival, El Ramo, that is responsible for more than doubling the town’s population. Many organized events took place. We even saw a sign advertising a “Nocturnal Photography Marathon”. I had brought my tripod and expensive camera and could definitely win that, but there was no date on the poster. We asked when it was and the woman at the town hall reception, who seemed rather clueless, looked through her papers for a bit and told us it was on Saturday, and that I had to sign up at 7 PM and then turn in photos by 12 PM the next day. I was pretty excited. So on Saturday at 7 PM, I went down to the town hall and found a bunch of children in line to sign up for a running “marathon” around the perimeter town. When I asked about the photography “marathon”, I was told, rather condescendingly, that, “No, that was two weeks ago. This is a real running marathon today.” Pretty disappointing. At least it happened before we got there, so it’s not like I missed the opportunity to participate.
(more…)

I’m back!!!! We got home yesterday after an 8-hour car trip with only one stop for a 5.20€ combo meal at Burger King. That’s $7.63 at the current exchange rage. Both fries and drink were small (or “medium” as the fast food places call small these days). Oh, right! That’s why we don’t ever eat fast food in Spain! At least you could substitute beer for your soda in the combo meal. Europe scores a point.

Upon arriving home exhausted, you can imagine our delight to find that the main circuit breaker for our house had flipped off and all the food in the fridge and freezer was spoiled. We had done a pretty good job of leaving them empty, but still. So we got to clean out the fridge and freezer when we arrived. Fun! Our circuit breaker has been flipping lately for no reason at all. Normally I’m at home and can fix it before my UPS gets out two beeps, but it’s a pretty bad problem for long trips.

I have divided my photos into some organized themed sets, but there is a big pile of miscellaneous that will have to be given in a couple miscellaneous posts. So here we go with the random photos from Extremadura 2008!
(more…)

Here goes my first post by iPhone. I’m lying in bed and it’s too hot to sleep and I need something to take my mind off my skin. Last night, the first night here, I had trouble sleeping because my feet were itching. I got up at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00. But there’s little to do. What there is to do is stargaze. At 3:00, I finally got out my camera and tripod and entertained myself for a bit. From 3:00 to 4:00, I took a one hour exposure looking towards Polaris, which resulted in my coolest star trails shot so far. It has some noise in the form of red dots that must be lens dust or something. Speaking of red dots…
(more…)

It’s that time of the year again. Time to head south to Extremadura to fry sweat bask in the un-air-conditioned summer heat for two weeks. This year, I hope to take advantage of the very minimal light pollution and cloud cover in the rural area where we will be staying and take some nighttime sky photographs with my new camera, tripod, and shutter timer. Not to mention the annual Persieds Meteor Shower that keeps us agape at the night sky every year.
(more…)

Today, I was buying some airline tickets to give as a wedding gift to some friends who are getting married next month so they can come visit us after their honeymoon. My choices of airline were RyanAir or easyJet, the two main budget airlines in Europe. After recovering from the seizure and cleaning up the vomit induced by RyanAir’s homepage, I went to easyJet.com. They’ve cleaned up their interface and added more gradients (which I’m a sucker for) since I visited them last.
(more…)

We bought a new blender recently. Being myself, I bought the most expensive model that didn’t come with extra vacuum packing gadgetry thrown in. This, combined with some extra leftover bread from a few days ago, was enough to push Marga into buying some peeled tomatos and a cucumber to make gazpacho. She’s never made gazpacho before, but she’s seen and helped her mother do it countless times. So we gave it a try.
(more…)

In the bathroom where I shower, we have a glass shower stall. After about a week of use, it gets little dots over it and must be cleaned. These are calcium deposits from the water that remain when the droplets dry.

When I was a kid, I always thought it strange that my grandparents had a squeegee in their shower stall. When I was visiting, I used to dry the glass in their shower stall after my showers, not because they asked me to, but because it was fun to pass the rubber squeegee over the glass and watch the water all run down to the bottom. It never occurred to me to ask why they had a squeegee in there. It just seemed fun to me.

About a year ago, it hit me that my grandparents’ squeegee was a solution to calcium deposits dirtying the glass. But it took me a year to remember this revelation when I was anywhere other than using or cleaning the shower. Finally we bought a squeegee for the shower!
(more…)

Yesterday, as I was walking along a street watching my iPhone in amazement as the little blue dot representing my location moved ever so slightly towards the intersection I was approaching, four clothing stores were marked with flags after entering the word “clothing” into the map search. And, with my mind raised on hours of video games, I got to thinking…what if the other dots weren’t locations, but were other people, also moving around the map.

Here’s my idea for an awesome iPhone app. There should be just a simple app that lets you play games in which the other players are carrying their iPhones and everyone can see everyone on the map. In this simple framework, a wide variety of games can be constructed. The simplest and first to come to mind is Capture The Flag. Imagine with me…
(more…)

Last December, I participated in an international blogosphere Sandwich Party, put on by two lovely hostesses, Elsa and Jane, in which all the participants made and ate a sandwich and photo-blogged the process. This concept may seem very strange, but I am absolutely certain that this kind of thing will become more and more prevalent in the coming decade: strangers from around the globe banding together via the internet to participate in a creative project.

Well, the second Sandwich Party is this weekend, and I have prepared and consumed my entry. My regular readers won’t be surprised by what they find at the bottom of this post, but perhaps some of the other Sandwich Partiers that happen by will.
(more…)

The other day, someone found my blog from google.bg. Rather than think, “Oh, that’s Bulgarian Google. I know someone who is moving to Bulgaria,” the first thought that I had was, “Hey, lowercase ‘bg’ has a rotational ambigram equivalent!” For those of you that are not typeface junkies and haven’t read Angels and Demons, an ambigram is a word that, when written down, has some symmetry. It can be mirror symmetry, like “MOM”, where the left side is the mirror image of the right, or “BOID”, where the top is the mirror image of the bottom. Or it can be rotational, where the word reads the same way if you rotate it 180º. What follows is all about rotational ambigrams.

So I challenged myself to figure out what the rotational ambigram of “bg” was without rotating a piece of paper. I’m rather disappointed to say that, although my brain had immediately recognized that there was one, I went though several guesses involving “p” and “d” before figuring it out. The answer, is, of course, “6q”. And it still took me another hour to realize that “bg” is just a slight variation on the most famous numerical rotational ambigram of all.
(more…)