thedude.com

More pictures from this inspirational event here.

We don’t see many squirrels in our concrete jungle, so we were pleasantly surprised to spot this little fellow out our second floor window.

Embedded streaming video!

 
I found an inexpensive MOV to FLV converter which produces pretty decent results. The files are much smaller that the source Quicktime files, and still have much of the quality - even at large sizes. This means I can now stream video like this time-lapse of my commute to work directly from thedude.com. New possibilities!

It would be very cool if all of you got your very own Gravatar. Then, when you leave a comment on thedude.com or any other site that supports Gravatars, we’ll all get to see your smiling face! Or your cat’s face or your bird’s butt or anything else that says something about who you are. Here’s mine. Get yours!

When I shot this, I accidentally had the lens open to f1.4. The resulting haziness and shallow depth of focus looks pretty cool. I’m going to have to use this effect again!

The gang enjoys free beer on Friday at the Linden Street Brewery. I’d say you should check it out, but it’s already become too popular.

UPDATE: I just checked the web site, and it seems this will be the last free Friday for a while. Sorry you missed it!

Behold some of the most amazing images ever seen by humankind - Martian Skies.

There was a small fire early this morning in our building’s new restaurant. It looks like a bucket of kitchen rags smoldered for hours before creating just enough heat to cause a sprinkler head to blow in the kitchen area of our favorite eatery.

The fire and smoke caused far less damage than the deluge of water from the sprinkler head. The restaurant will be closed for a few days while they replace a water-damaged wall.

I was extremely sleepy at 5:30 this morning when I took these, which probably explains why I didn’t shoot more of them.

I saw Eloisa this afternoon, and she seemed to be in pretty good spirits. We look forward to seeing MoNO open again soon!

I set up a WordPress blog for a friend last night and touted it’s ability to post via e-mail. After I said this, I realized that I had never even tried this feature myself, so here’s my first attempt!

I was looking at my server logs the other day, and noticed that the top search phrases that led people to my site are “Greenland” and “Diego Garcia”. As far as I can tell, this is because images from this site come in near the top of the list when doing a Google Image Search for these terms. There’s even an image of (a somewhat younger) thedude himself near the top spot. Ha!

Google image search for “Greenland”, “Diego Garcia”.

By the way, for some inexplicable reason, the number three search phrase is “chuckie”.

Scientific American published an article claiming that Blogging is Good for You! It seems that working on a blog “activates a cluster of neurological pathways”. Whoa - so that’s how I got hooked. Of course, it is possible to take this blogging thing to extremes. Not to worry. I’ll never work that hard at it.