freeform goodness

Really, how could I resist linking to a story about luminescent marmosets?

Really?!?

Follow the link above for a bonus cute-baby-marmoset picture.

:: Dave Walker 09:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/weird]
:: tags: weird

:: Comments (0)

I take this picture every year on this weekend. Truth be told, I think it’s more dramatic with the cheaper cameras, though. See (2005) , (2006) , (2007), and (2008).

Movement 2009 photos here, blog coverage here, and follow @moodmat on Twitter.

:: Dave Walker 08:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/photo]
:: tags: photo

:: Comments (2)

We need milk. I think I’ll walk. This is not the sidewalk I’ll be taking, though.

:: Dave Walker 09:38 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

I spent a few days in southern California (mostly in Orange County) a couple of weeks ago, and of course I took my camera. I was working at a site on the border of Irvine and Tustin, CA.

On my drive to the worksite every day, these two massive structures looming out of the morning fog kept grabbing my attention. I had no idea what they were, but they seemed wildly out of place among the office parks, shopping malls, and subdivisions. The day before I left, I finally remembered to ask my hosts about them, and found out that they were World War II-vintage airship hangars.

We finished up a little early that day so I went walking around with my camera. It’s actually a very serene place now, inhabited primarily by birds. There was a friendly nesting pair of red-tailed hawks who’d made one of the hangars their own private aerie. I’m anthromorphosizing and calling them friendly because they put on quite a show. I heard them long before I saw them — the distinctive “skee-eer” noise that a red-tailed hawk makes (which you’ve doubtlessly heard in hundreds of movies) is an attention getter (especially, I would imagine, if you’re a small mammal.) Anyway, for nearly a half hour I watched them dart, dive, fly along the top edge of the hangar, and even occasionally fly directly over me (at first to ascertain whether I was a threat, later just out of curiosity, I think.)

The following day I drove down to San Diego to visit another customer site. After I finished up for the day I decided to take the scenic route north to Orange County. It’s a very nice drive, if you have the time. I stopped at Cardiff State Beach after refueling the rental. It was a little chilly and overcast, but that didn’t stop the surfers, who played among the fairly dramatic swells off the coast. I can’t say I did very much frolicking (alas, I was wearing khakis and leather shoes) but I did take a few pictures.

One of my regrets is that I visit many interesting areas as part of my job, but I rarely have time to see anything beyond the inside of office parks and hotels. To the extent that I can, whenever I’m lucky enough to finish up early I like to get out and see things.

If you’ve installed Cooliris you can “quick-surf” all the photos embedded on this page, btw.

:: Dave Walker 05:31 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/travel]
:: tags: travel

:: Comments (0)

Some of these things I may have seen in cookbooks, some are things I heard over the years, and a lot of them are just kind of “common sensical” things I’ve figured out over the years.

• Best scrambled eggs
  • Beat the hell out of them. Really. Crack them in a bowl and go at them with a wire whisk for minutes.
  • Don’t add milk to them before cooking.
  • If you’re scrambling them with cheese, grate it to death. Use really, really small pieces and don’t overdo it.
  • Use a clean(ish) pan and clean(ish) oil/grease. If you’re using bacon or sausage grease, strain all of the crud out of it.
  • As soon as they’re done, turn off the heat then splash a little (don’t overdo it) milk over them, swirl them around with the spatula until the milk is absorbed, serve them immediately, the hotter the better.
• Omelettes
  • Use a good pan (duh), and clean oil
  • Pour the egg into a hot (but not too hot) pan. Swirl the pan around until the egg evenly coats the skillet.
  • You’ll be tempted to mess with it at this point. Don’t. Just let it sizzle until you start to worry that you’ve overdone it. Then add your fillings to one half of the omelette.
  • Use a decent spatula to flip the unoccupied half over the first.
  • Wait about 30 seconds.
  • Serve to plate
• Coffee
  • Use a french press. Trust me on this — drip coffee doesn’t come close. Don’t drink the last half centimeter or so. It’s full of grounds. Rinse your cup and get some more.
  • Use less sweetener.
• Link sausage
  • Add a half-centimeter of water to the skillet along w/ the links
  • A half-thimble of oil added to the water will keep the sausage skins from sticking to the skillet
  • Sprinkle light salt and black pepper over the links while cooking

:: Dave Walker 13:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/foodanddrink]
:: tags: foodanddrink

:: Comments (3)

I’d had a stressful workday plus an afternoon commute in one of the nastiest traffic environments the U.S.A. Thankfully the iPod knew exactly what was needed and served these up on the way back to my hotel.

1. For You (JDSY Mix) – Solvent
2. The Flowers She Sent – The Magnetic Fields
3. Breakfast In America – Supertramp
4. Melotronic (Peel Session) – Luke Vibert
5. Paper Planes – M.I.A.
6. Amazon – Underground Resistance
7. Ceremony – New Order
8. Chesh – the Black Dog
9. Seabird – Air Miami

:: Dave Walker 22:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Chris added location stuff to his blog and blamed me. :) His solution was a little more technically involved than mine— he used an actual framework, where I just parse a feed into its constituent atoms (pun intended.)

(Disclaimer: as Chris argues, and I fully agree, I’m not worried about the privacy implications of the service— my stored location is only updated when I choose it to be, and I completely control the update frequency and geo-resolution of the updates)

I signed up for Yahoo’s Fire Eagle long ago, back before I even had an idea of what it could be good for. I liked the architectural purity of putting location data in one place and permitting apps to use it, as long as I could opt-in / opt-out at will. Rather than updating several “silos” with location data, Fire Eagle provides a location store and a defined API for apps to fetch it. Fire Eagle looked like it would be fun to play around with, but I didn’t do anything at all with it for a few months:

1. I didn’t have a handy way to update my location,
2. Even if I did go through the trouble of doing so, there weren’t any turnkey ways to get the data back out and do anything useful fun with it.

A few months ago, that changed. I signed up with Brightkite during their closed beta. Brightkite is a social network that lets users leave 140-character updates, photos, etc. (sound familiar?) but with one killer extra feature— every update has a geographical component. Optionally, you can just use it to “check in” at locations. When you do so, your Brightkite location gets updated, and if you “connect the dots” so does your Fire Eagle store. They’ve got a very nice mobile site and an even better iPhone app.

A guy named Richard Metzler wrote a mashup-enabler called Eaglefeed that talks to the Fire Eagle service and provides location data in several easy to digest forms: namely, Atom, JSON, and GIF. I julienne the Atom feed with the feed parser and plop the peelings into the left sidebar of the blog along with a PNG version of the map graphic. Like almost everything else in the sidebars, I display the location info statically, refreshing it once an hour— since I generate my blog pages dynamically, making the sidebars static keeps page load times reasonable.

:: Dave Walker 17:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (1)

Driving down Jefferson in Ecorse and Wyandotte. Saw the ice floating down the river and liked the way the sun was hitting it. Pulled over in the parking lot of the Pier 500 bar and got a half-dozen shots before my battery died.

:: Dave Walker 22:32 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/photo]
:: tags: photo

:: Comments (2)

Anyone have one of those little Polaroid PoGos? I wouldn’t be expecting huge things from the quality, but a little photo printer that would literally fit in the side pocket of my camera bag does have appeal on its own.

I’d probably be using it via PictBridge, if that matters.

:: Dave Walker 21:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/gadgets]
:: tags: gadgets

:: Comments (0)

I’m changing the name to Squirrelform Goodness.

:: Dave Walker 18:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)