Category: life

where everything else happens

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Pixels!

Apologies for the lack of updates this week. It has been a crazy 10 or so days.

In short: Sue & I flew down to central Oregon, and found a new home, then we came back and I’ve been working like mad to prep our current home for sale.

As far as house-shopping goes, I am a good husband and just let Sue find what she wanted. I only ask for enough garage/workshop space for my hobbies of old British car maintenance and homebrewing. Everything and anything else is just a “sure honey, whatever you want.”

The choice came down to two places (after discarding dozens of alternatives) and both had excellent detached workshops for me. One had a stunning 270° hilltop view of all of central Oregon and the Cascades from Bachelor to Adams, along with a Garage Mahal of a workshop… easily room for a half-dozen cars and then-some. Unfortunately the house itself was … odd. Really a bizarre mish-mash of architectural styles thrown together in an outrageous excess of late90s/early00s Mcmansionism.

The alternative, and the one we ultimately chose, is a very understated and elegant house, that fits our personal style. It has a modest view (Mt. Bachelor & the Three Sisters) and a fairly generous workshop, though not in the Mahal-class of garages. I think I’ll have to put the homebrewery in storage until Spring, as the property will require a bit of preparation for it. The current owner runs a woodworking shop now, but it should adapt well to a car-wrenching area. Here, have a look for yourself:

The ceiling is a tad low, so lift clearance may be an issue. Not so much for the Jaguar, but certainly for the Jeep and maybe the Jetta. We’ll see.

We move at the end of August, which is timed to have Nick start at his new high school the beginning of September. Meanwhile my blogging may remain sparse until we are settled and I’m in a reasonable daily routine. I start my new job on Monday 8/2, but will be in the Bay Area at first. Would love to meet any Northern California readers for dinner/drinks in early August!

I’ve got a nice backlog of “Car Photo of the Day” posts, so I’ll try to make them live when I can.

Rain, mixed with showers and occasional drizzle

Forecast for western Washington

I love living in the Pacific Northwest. Really I do. Mostly because it rarely, if ever, gets very hot here. 80°F, which is about my tolerance for heat, is about the average peak summer temp. Oddly, it also rarely, if ever, gets very cold as well. This is all due to the moderating influence of a huge expanse of water to the west. You may have heard of it: The Pacific Ocean.

Weather here is very predictable. Unlike those places where the old saw “don’t like the weather? Just wait five minutes!” gets trotted out often, here you can stretch those five minutes into five months. In winter we have months of light drizzle. In summer we have months of clear blue skies.

My only quibble is the transitions between seasons. In Autumn we get storms. Big winds. Floods. Alternating grey and blue days. In Spring it is sort of the same, though the storms are nowhere near as powerful as Autumn’s. Some years we get lagging winters and others we enjoy early summers. This year, as you can see by the forecast above, is falling into the former camp. However unlike light, misty, drizzly winter rain we get honest to goodness RAIN. In winter rain you can walk across a parking lot and not really get wet. Spring rain drenches you in the same span of time or distance. As a homeowner it means your lawn is becoming a jungle but can not be mowed. As a classic car owner it means you look at the calendar and recall great drives of past years around the same time but instead look out the window in disappointment. Oh well.

Thirty days until the first JCNA slalom in the region. Hopefully the sun will come out by then.

That B-25…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have noted that I’ve mentioned the appearance of a restored B-25 Mitchell bomber that has made near-daily appearances over our house. It will arrive, and do lazy circles for 30 minutes or so, then fly away (presumably to Everett.)

Photographing it has been tough, as it is almost always “backlit”, that is appearing below high overcast or thin clouds, and at moderate altitudes. Even with my longest lens. I have tried though, and here are a couple of the better shots: (heavily processed to bring detail out of shadows)

Cascade Sunset Clouds

One

The weather here over the past few days has been dramatically Spring-ish. Unlike our traditional multi-layer blankets of grey, we’ve been treated to dramatic broken clouds and sunbreaks. This evening as we were finishing dinner (Nick made pasta and meatballs!) the dining room’s eastern facing windows began bathing us in golden light. A large storm cloud was over the Cascades and was being lit by the setting sun. Nick said I should get my camera. I stood up and looked outside, and noted the towering, spreading cloud top and said that I really don’t have a wide-angle lens wide enough to really and adequately capture the moment. Then I recalled that I had a step-up ring that fit my Olympus 0.7x teleconverter. I dug that out of the camera bag as fast as I could and screwed together the bits I needed, and scurried out onto the deck. Sure enough the 9.8mm equiv lens couldn’t capture the entirety of the scene. (You guys need to buy some of my photos so I can buy that 7-14mm lens! Click over there!—> )

I shot about 50 images, most in JPEG then finally remembered to switch to RAW as the sun finally sunk over the horizon.

Two

Today, after chatting with a few folks about the fixes in the latest rev of Aperture I re-downloaded/installed it (after nuking all evidence of its previous existence off my disk.) Oddly the pixels right off the sensor were pretty damn good on their own! I performed minimal adjustments. These three images are straight JPEG exports from Aperture. No round trips to Photoshop for my usual “save to web” treatment. Which do you like best?

Three

A Nice Sunday

Farewell Bill!

I spent yesterday in Seattle attending to several important life tasks. The foremost of which was saying “farewell” to a great friend and colleague, Bill Dickson. I’ve known Bill for around twelve years, and had the great pleasure of being his boss for a fair amount of that time. Bill’s a great guy, and one of the best sysadmins I’ve ever managed. Bill has found a new job, in another state, so is leaving Seattle in the next few days. He held court at the Big TIme Brewery in the University District yesterday from about 11:30 AM until sometime after 3 PM. I showed up about 12:30, and hung around until a bit after 3. A parade of well-wishers and old friends came by to say their farewells. Among the folks there were a few other ex-digital.forest tech staff, including the amazing Tom Kepler, and Matt Jay with his wife Jen.

L-R: Kepler, Jen and Matt Jay.

Quite a few other folks I had hoped to see were absent. 🙁

Earlier in the day I was actually at digital.forest, in my old office (now strangely and sadly empty) building a new server. It is a nice little dual-processor, 1U (but not unnaturally long!) server. Soon I’ll be moving this website, and all my other scattered web properties (www.goolsbee.org, etc.goolsbee.org, mac-mgrs.org, etc etc) onto this machine. I have stuff scattered all over both d.f shared servers, and a few of my own, very old, and very crufty servers (including a 1998-vintage 233MHz G3, which serves most of the images on this site!) The point being to consolidate and make my personal webstuff more portable. Less impact on d.f, and easy to relocate should I need to do so.

Before Bill’s send-off I spent a bit of time installing an operating system (BSD) on the hardware. In a lot of ways this new server will keep me connected with Bill, as he’s moving his web stuff onto this new server as well. I trust him with root more than I trust myself.

Our new web server.

After 3 PM I ran back downtown, and had a meeting/interview with the CTO of a company that is interested in me. Yes, a job interview on a Sunday. More news on that should it develop.

Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

I can say this phrase in near-perfect French. Like Magritte’s painting of a pipe, it has more than one layer of irony.

This is not a pipe.

I took four years of French when I was a kid. Two years in grade school – 4th & 5th grades, and two years in high school. Because I had to have two years of a foreign language, and I was a lazy slacker, I took the same two years of French over again. This was pulled off because between grade school and high school my family moved from Illinois to Texas. The Texas schools had no idea I had already been through the course and gave me credit for doing it again.

I haven’t spoken a lick of French since. The ability to read it hasn’t vanished, but there are always mystery words. If I listen hard I can understand spoken French now and then. For example if there is a hockey game on Canadian radio en Français I can mostly follow along. But if my life depended upon saying something in French right now I’d be a goner. It would be au revoir Chuck!

Something has come up lately that has me studying French again (too early to share, as details are sketchy, but be patient!) so I’m looking for suggestions for online or offline lessons. I’ve been playing with livemocha a bit, and may just spring for their course… but I’m open to suggestions.

Or even direct help from any of you Francophones out there!