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Category Archives: Gallery
Picture Yourself
The (Ch|K)ristine’s have a very cool new site called Picture Yourself which is a photo site which features pictures where the subject is also the photographer. I think this is a very fun idea, and I look forward to seeing the site grow. Go check it out and submit any photos you might have. I’ve sent one in already.
Feeling Better
The cold is starting to subside, and things are clearing up. I’ve only missed one day of classes and I’m looking forward to going back tomorrow. I went by Fry’s today to pick up some wireless networking equipment for a client (setting up wireless networks is a gas!) and took the oppurtunity to pick up some of those blue LED fans that they sell there. Not only do they look pretty darn cool, but they seem to work better and ‘fan’ more than my old ones. However with a grand total of five fans running in my tower now, it sounds like a plane is taking off when I bot up. I’ll take some pictures soon! I still have some picture catching up to do though.
Gallery: 9-15-2002
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Kel’s Birthday Photos
Surprise!
Tonight myself and about 30 other local jazz musicians presented Kelly Dean with his belated 40th birthday present, an iPod. He’s really wanted one of these for the longest time and the look on his face when he got it was amazing. Things were put together relatively hastily, starting when he left for a 5 day cruise on Saturday with an idea. Got in touch with Dana Rogers and she was a huge help in contacting so many people, in fact the majority of the musicians who donated she called. Kel had a gig tonight with Erin Wright at The River Café on Montrose, which turned into a birthday celebration, culminating with the presentation of the iPod, which had been hidden inside a Vaio box :). Pictures will go up tomorrow morning. I’d like to thank the following people, a veritable who’s who list of Houston jazz:
Gallery: 9-13-2002
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Gallery: 9-12-2002
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Google Image Hits
98% of the last 200 hits on swcdesign.com have been from images.google.com; I don’t often get hits from there so I decided to investigate what was causing such a ruckus and huge spike in traffic. Well it turns out a picture I made last year right around this time is on the tenth page of results for searches on “911” in Google images. On the tenth page and it hundreds of people a day have been following the link. I think it speaks a little to people’s thoughts at the moment, I know that personally I rarely go past the second page of results, especially on Google.
More importantly, it’s a somber reminder of the fast approaching anniversary of a date that at least in my mind I’ve been avoiding. Yesterday a lady told me a story about her brother who signed a lease that morning on an office in the WTC and was on his way to look at it when the first plane hit. Her other brother was forced to jump in the river when the towers collapsed. Both were okay. Every time someone mentions the event it seems I hear a new story almost too incredible for belief, but you know they’re mostly true. Still the incredible stories of survival only seem to whet my taste for real answers to the events.
Three hundred and sixty-four days later, what have we done? We’ve bombed the hell out of a third world country, caught a few underlings, spent $80 billion, took away more than a few personal liberties, and we’re now at the brink of war with an oil superpower. Very smart thing to do during a recession. I admit that I’ve always supported the Bush administration. Bush himself isn’t the most competent guy but he handled an emergency relatively well, and he surrounds himself with some of the best and brightest in the country (with the notable exception of John Ashcroft and John Poindexter). Now you have talk of Colin Powell not coming back for a second term, of course assuming that the administration makes it that far. The backlash has been brewing for weeks; people want results. Eighty billion dollars and they can’t even produce a body? The news media is pouncing in its traditional fashion, and there has been a rash of meta-news and meta-meta-news, and the world doesn’t need any more of that here. I won’t be posting Wednesday, but what I’m going to keep in my mind is that the terrorists were trying to destroy something much larger than the twin towers last year, and it’s up to everyone on a personal level to make sure they don’t succeed.
How Big?
I know at some point you’ve wondered just how big this site really is. Or not. But if you want to know how much space all those dang pictures take up check out the new feature on the Zeitgeist. All the stats on that page are live!
Gallery: 9-10-2002
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Gallery: 9-9-2002
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Macro
Through Kymberlie I found a very cool photo contest at photojunkie that I’ve decided to enter. The theme of the contest is “Macro,” which is one of my favorite features on my camera. I have a ton of macro shots, so thinking of what to do was a challenge. The first thought that came to my mind was a face, and I had a particular model in mind but she isn’t available this Sunday, so I dove into the photolog to find one that suits. Kudos to Bridget. Without further ado, here it is:
Take a second look at the horizon :), we’re actually on the big swinging rides at Kemah.
Size Matters
Earlier today I was browsing last month’s server logs and noticed something remarkable: 11,465 hits from Googlebot in August. I was flattered, but how could this be? I didn’t even get a PageRank till about a week ago, so what was the lovely Googlebot doing all that time? Anyway I started to think about it and in terms of sheer quantity of pages, this site is massive. It is entirely possible that those hits could have been just a standard site crawl. Just running the numbers in my head, there are about 9500 pages under the Photolog (~3050 images, 3 pages each, albums), a couple of hundred JazzQuotes, a couple of pages under Toys, and then all of the actual blog content, and you could easily have over ten thousand pages on this site. Of course I never think of it that way because it’s all dynamic. Wait till I start putting the site stats up, it’s very interesting. Whew!
PhotoMatt Zeitgeist
A small preview of things to come. Deep down inside, every site wants to have a little Google in them. Right now I just have metadata about the posts themselves but I’m working on generating some interesting statistics on the site’s visitors, which we seem to be getting quite a few of.
PalmTalk
We filmed the first episode of PalmTalk today! It was different in some ways from what I was expecting, espescially in terms of how things flowed, but I was very impressed with some of the things they were able to do technologically with the cameras and effects. The guest, Lorraine Young, was really charismatic and had a great product to demo. All in all, I would say it was, well, a first episode. Ever seen any of the early episodes of Friends? There are definitely some things that are going to change before next week, and things are only going to change for the better, so I’m excited. I’m also curious to see how the whole thing turns out after all of the post-editing stuff they do. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday. The main dowside is I think I left my laptop AC adapter there, or at least I hope I did, because I can’t find it. Right now my laptop is hibernating until I get it back.
After the taping I had a very nice dinner with Sarah at one of my favorite chinese restruants, Ming’s on Montrose. After that I headed down to Kaveh Kanes, a great coffee shop downtown on Prarie with free WiFi internet access. Tonight was the monthly meeting (first Friday of the month) for people who listen to the radio show Technology Bytes, which is on Wednesday nights. I’ve heard it several times before and it’s a fun show to listen to. The people who were there were very interesting and we talked for a very long time from topics ranging from Apache 2 to Amiga to Minix to BeOS. I must admit that I was there partly by accident–I thought it was a HWUG meeting. I really enjoyed it though and afterwards I ended up going to House of Pies around 1 to continue the discussion with two unix/freebsd sysadmins I met there. It’s strange how much you can find you have in common with someone in such a short period of time. Also it was nice to meet the people who actually do the show, and you can tell they’re really technically competent and nice to talk to. Oh, and got another ‘tech support’ consulting job today, fixing a paper jam! What will I do next?
Gallery: 9-6-2002
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Cloud Pictures
When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.
Gallery: 9-4-2002
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Average Day
9-3-2002–Since this is the first day I’m back at school and have my camera I wanted to walk through the routine I’ve started to build up. Unfortunately since I was running a little late I didn’t really get an oppurtunity to take any pictures of my Human Situation discussion class, which is by far my favorite (and smallest) class. I did manage to capture the four ravenous but cute squirrels that say hello between classes. Then we move on to my huge math class, and finally to the parking lot with cars as far as the eye can see.