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My friend and coworker was taken from us this morning by an extremely aggressive cancer. We are all shocked and saddened by the suddenness of his death at the young age of 42.

I sat next to and worked with Juwei for four years. He was kind, proud, reliable, and a damn good SysAdmin. He had worked hard over the last four years to obtain citizenship for himself his family, and now it sounds like his wife and two kids may have no choice but to return to China. Very sad.

I will miss you Juwei.

The thing I like most about the image on the left is that the two people in it are Kelly’s parents. I was completely unaware of that when I took the shot. The other shot is a vertical panorama. Three images were stitched together to create it.

…all the pieces come together.

I first noticed the fabulous fat typeface used on the Golden Gate Bridge when my daughter Kerry visited last year. I instantly loved it. I took this picture with the thought that I might use the typeface in a future design. Well, it turns out that I don’t need to go through all the trouble of painstakingly recreating each character, because it’s already been done! Allow me to introduce you to Chuck! You’ll find this many other gorgeous fonts at the Parkinson Type Design web site. Be sure to peruse his impressive collection of Typographic logos. Marvel at the power and the beauty of type!

(By the way, ANY of these splendid typefaces would make a superb gift for that very special dude or dudette in your life. :-)

One of our favorite neighbors celebrated the big four-oh this evening with 60 or so of his closest friends and family members.

Thanks for the great party, Ray, and thanks to your mother for the wonderful food!

How often does this happen to you? You shoot 100 photos at an important event and discover that the very best shot of the day is useless for one reason or another. It’s way out of focus or 2 stops overexposed or - as in this case - something totally unexpected has happened. Something like… a light leak? What the…?

Certainly not caused by the camera, this leak must have occurred when I pulled the film OUT of the camera. Unbelievable! Fortunately I had taken two shots of this scene, and with the help of PhotoShop, was able to create a perfect image from an otherwise unusable one.

Geeky stuff follows…

The original image with both layers is 986,342,974 bytes in size - just shy of one gigabyte. Manipulating an image this size - dust-spotting, color-correcting, and merging the new forground over the old - took about four hours on my lowly 2.4 gigahertz machine with one gigabyte of RAM. Just saving the image took about 10 minutes. On the plus side, PhotoShop 7.0 performed flawlessly, and my friends now have an image that they can print at least 4 feet wide with amazing clarity. On the down side, I think it may be time to upgrade my hardware. I have my eye on a G5 with a 30″ monitor, but who am I kidding? It’ll never happen. Wait, I know! I’ll add it to my wish-list… :-)

We celebrated three birthdays this week - thedude’s 49th, and Frank and Dorothy’s 70th - at one of our favorite getaways, St. Orres in Gualala, California. We stayed in three different cabins during our trip, including the spectacular new “Black Chantrelle” cabin - Jim’s new favorite. The weather was perfect, and we were the only guests at the hotel. Ahhh… Tranquility.

Of course, we wouldn’t drive this far without stopping at a winery or two, so we visited the beautiful Navarro Winery and tasted their teriffic wines. Naturally, the girls forced us to visit Mendocino to satisfy their need to buy something completely useless, but we all had a great time anyway.

One the most distinctive features of the Thule area is Mount Dundas. Once a year all of the residents of Thule climb the 900 foot mountain to participate in a golf game. The object of the game - to get a ball somewhere near the “holes” - marked with a red flag. Lucky golfers were able to get one of their quota of 3 ball within ten feet of the flag - the area marked off in yellow paint. Most players watched as their balls bounced off the top of the mountain never to be seen again.

Each visitor to Erik’s cabin was offered the privilege of signing his one-of-a-kind guestbook. As you can probably gather from what you see here, I was one of the few Americans ever to visit this place. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of the page that I wrote in his guestbook, so I can’t share (or remember) what I wrote. :-(

Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any cooler, two of Erik’s Eskimo friends dropped by for a visit. Erik expected them to show up at around noon, but instead arrived by dogsled somewhere around midnight. Evidently, Eskimos have little need for clocks - especially in the long night of winter.

I don’t know the spelling of the names of these two people, but his name was pronounced Cah-go, and hers was Ta-beet-ah. I think they were about 28 years old. He had been educated in Copenhagen but had decided to move back to Greenland after completing school. He spoke Danish and Inuit, she spoke only Inuit, Erik spoke English and Danish, and I speak only English. This meant that anything we shared was translated repeatedly from English to Danish to Inuit and back again. It was really cool to hear my words spoken in Inuit.

The two of them were quiet, introspective, and in no hurry to do much of anything. I asked them what they were going to do tomorrow. They looked at each other for a few seconds and then back at me and shrugged. They had no plans whatsoever. They seemed not even to make much of the concept of today and tomorrow. I asked them where they came from. They pointed into the blackness on the other side of the frozen Baffin Bay. I could not see a thing in that direction, so, I asked them how many people lived in their village. They talked among themselves for several seconds and held up seven fingers.

Erik eventually broke out his Walkman and we took turns listening to Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell CD. As if this wasn’t fabulous - and hilarious - enough, the hash under glass helped make things even more surreal. (Disclaimer: I never inhaled - and even if I had I’m sure I would not have enjoyed it.) ;-)

Finally we’re inside Erik’s cabin! The fisheye lens makes the place look much larger than it really is - a mere 8 feet by 16 feet. The cabin was just tall enough in the middle for me to stand up.

I shot this shortly after we arrived and fired up the stove - the top of which was by now red hot. We drank strong coffee and bourbon while waited for two of Erik’s Eskimo friends to arrive from some unknown place. There wasn’t a lot to do, and we spent a lot of time in complete silence, but it never felt awkward. (Those who know me well might be amazed to know that at one point we sat accross the table from each other without speaking for 20 minutes!) This place was at once the quietest, darkest, coldest and most remote place I’d ever visited. I feel incredibly lucky to have been here. It was amazing.

Here’s another shot I’m quite proud of. Again I attached the camera to my tripod, pointed it back towards Thule and opened the shutter. I ran back inside the cabin to stay warm during the 45 minute exposure. In the distance you can just make out the unique profile of Mt. Dundas.