February 2008 Archives

Continuing my efforts to catch-up on posting the absurd amount of photos I've taken in the past two months. A ferry pulling into the Colman Terminal downtown, as viewed from Seacrest Park on February 2.

Check out the entire set by clicking on the picture.

The gallery from the Washington Park Arboretum trek is now posted. Take a gander (or a heron) at it here. This Great Blue Heron was fishing in the marshes between MOHAI and the 520 bridge, just out-of-sight of most hikers who didn't take a careful look into the weeds.

(Also, in case you missed the update to yesterday's kiteboarding post, that gallery is also posted and can be found here.)

As usual, it's spring teaser time here in mid-February, when the sun comes out for days on end and everyone breaks out of their winter cocoons to stretch like hungry flowers yearning for energy.

I took a trek to the Arboretum and Golden Gardens Park today and took over 300 photos, but now I'm burned out so the gallery for the Arboretum will go up later (see update below for the Kitesurfer gallery.)  For now, though, here's a teaser of a kite surfer who was getting some huge air down at Golden Gardens near sunset...

Golden Gardens Park, February 23, 2008 (click image to enlarge -- but be forewarned it's 1280px wide and 660kb!)

UPDATE, Feb 24 @ noon:  The first gallery (Kitesurfers at Golden Gardens) is now posted to Flickr.

Relayed to me regarding a conversation overheard at SeaTac this evening...

"who is barack obama?" a lady asks her husband while they're both reading a newspaper. umm yes.

One can only hope they've been stranded on Snoqualmie Ridge, buried under 425 inches of snow and without electricity or communications for the past six months.

Despite scary-sounding weather forecasts, the skies parted and provided us with a beautiful show last night for a total lunar eclipse during the early evening hours.

This was a good chance to try taking some long exposures with my tripod, and although the pesky white balance settings on the camera caused more than a few shots to lose their reddish tint, that's what post-processing is for! Click the image above to go to the Flickr gallery where there are several more shots of the eclipse.

Also, there is much plotting afoot as I've been spending time putting pictures up at Flickr, thus the lack of new posts lately. There are many new and exciting things that will be shown in the near future! (Or if you're tricky, you can probably already find a lot of them over there...)

Behold, the Jasper Project (version 1, at least) is now complete.

100 pictures of Jasper meeting the following criteria:

1. 50mm f/1.8 lens on the Nikon D80
2. No flash
3. No post-processing (no cropping, level adjustment, etc.)

The primary purpose of this experiment was to learn a bit about the limits of this lens and framing. I'm pondering several follow-up ideas -- one where I use the speedlight flash for all the shots, and one where I do post-process all of the pictures to bring them closer to ideal. Stay tuned...

All thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc... are both welcome and encouraged.

(Oh and also, I've moved over to Flickr because I like the more public setting and the ease of commenting over there. Other galleries will be popping up there in the near future, but for now the Skagit eagles and Obama Rally are both relocated to there.)

My precinct (SEA 43-2040) had about 75 people jammed into an elementary school library that was probably meant to hold about 50 children and one adult.  Turnout everywhere has been overwhelming, and there were about a dozen precincts at the school, all in their own rooms such as the gym, cafeteria, art room, and so forth.  There was supposed to be one large gathering of all caucus attendees in the cafeteria before the official start, but because turnout was so huge the organizer had to instead dash from room-to-room and address each precinct individually, meaning we were about twenty minutes late in getting started.

My precinct was a fair mix of seniors and thirty-somethings, with a few college kids thrown in to mix things up, but I'd guess the average age was a bimodal distribution centering around 35 and 65.  The Obama campaign clearly had larger representation (in all age, gender, and racial distributions) from the number of signs and stickers people arrived with, and when additional stickers were handed around the majority of people sitting around me took them.  When we all finally signed in and the first tally was complete, the raw numbers were Obama 50, Clinton 18, Gravel 3, Uncommitted 1.  With seven delegates to the district convention at stake, this resulted in five going for Obama and two for Clinton.  After the tally, there was a brief speech from one supporter for each candidate (the Gravel supporter luckily acknowledged he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell at getting the nomination, and instead her vote was in protest of something or other that the other two candidates weren't addressing sufficiently...) and after that two additional voters arrived and a two people (including the one uncommitted voter) switched allegiances.  I didn't catch the raw numbers for the second tally, but the net result was that from our precinct Obama remained with five delegates and Clinton with two.

At that point we split among the various viable factions and selected our delegates and alternates to go to the various state legislative district conventions in early April, where the numbers will be whittled down further before holding US congressional district conventions where the delegates to the DNC convention in Denver will be selected.  I'm attending my LD convention as an Obama delegate, so when that time comes around I'll let you know how it goes...

Twice Sold Tales in Capitol Hill is home to many floppy (and occasionally fat!) felines, although most are sleepy and curled up in hidden corners of the store.  Not this orange tabby, however.  He was feisty and playing non-stop with a nearby kitten... until we walked into the store and he pounced.  All this time I've longed for a shouldercat, and although he was probably at least 14 lbs and thus not a great candidate for such activities, it didn't stop him from leaping up there anyway.  Alas, I only had my crappy cell phone camera with me.

Twice Sold Tales, Capitol Hill, Seattle - Feb 4, 2008 (click image to (slightly) enlarge)

Barack Obama just spoke to a beyond-capacity crowd at Key Arena -- approximately 18,000 people inside and an additional 3,000+ outside listening on loudspeakers.  I (and thousands of others) walked to the Seattle Center from our homes, beating most of the traffic and buses in doing so.  I ended up standing in an entryway in the upper deck, and every stairwell, walkway and hallway in the arena was absolutely packed with people.

The last time I remember an audience even close to this boisterous was when the Buffalo Bills reached the Super Bowl for the first time in 1990 and the 80,000+ fans at the stadium nearly reached the same volume and intensity of excitement.

Lots more pictures to come here (click this one to enlarge... behind him are US Congressman Adam Smith, Washington Governor Christine Gregoire, and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.)  On a vaguely-related note, I officially wuv my camera.

UPDATE: Check out the GALLERY here!

For any Washingtonians out there confused about tomorrow's political follies...

Caucusing Is Easy, courtesy of The Stranger

Hey!  Ever heard of an awesome website for selling or buying stuff that has the following features:

1. Is free
2. Is easy (no logins required... just a valid email address)
3. Is local, so you don't need to deal with shipping
4. Lets you edit and revise your ad at any time
5. Protects your email address from spam by using a privatized contact form?

Why yes, I have!  Obviously the wildly successful Craigsl-- oh wait, we're talking about these jackasses, who plastered their signs all over Capitol Hill on Saturday? (this one at the northeast corner of E John St and Broadway):
Congratulations UsedSeattle, you've just taken a wildly successful business model and done a much worse job of presenting it, with neither the critical mass nor the site layout that makes Craigslist so popular... and to top it off you managed to advertise in the most assholeish way possible, by plastering big coroplast signs on every signpost and tree in the entire neighborhood.

On the bright side, people in the neighborhood ripped down nearly all of the signs within 24 hours, so maybe all hope is not lost.  One can only hope they're now being offered in the 'free' category on Craigslist.

In the process of reformatting my laptop I stumbled upon another piece of ancient video... this one probably dating back to spring 2005, and again starring Delia, though without any catnip or antagonists.

The Cat With Fruitbat Eyes