Happy Birthday Chris! (Updated)

Chris Goolsbee turns 20 today.

I’ll be offline most of today as Sue & I are heading down to Olympia to celebrate Christopher’s 20th birthday. I’ll bring along my camera, but here are a couple of shots I made of him when he was home recently on Spring Break. He came with me to watch his brother Nicholas compete in the state Hi-Q finals. Since Chris’ team from three years ago were state champs, it was fun for him to come back and say hello to the teachers that still run the program at AHS.

Happy Birthday.

Speaking for myself, I’m amazed that I have a twenty year old kid! It seems like I was twenty not too long ago myself. (In reality it was 27 years ago!) I have a photo of my somewhere on my 20th birthday. I’ll dig it up and put it here if I can find it. Meanwhile you’ll have to make do with my reasonable facsimile. Those of you who knew me when I was twenty can attest to the resemblance, though I think Chris is better looking than I ever was. 😉

As promised here’s a photographic update, fresh from the scanner:

Chris and Sue on his first day.

Chris and the proud father on Chris' first day.

The whole family, circa 1990-1.

Two classic young Chris shots.

Chris yesterday, on his 20th Birthday.

Chris and Sue on his 20th birthday, in front of his apartment.

Finally, my favorite photo of Chris & his mom, taken on Vancouver Island in the summer of 1991:

Sue and Chris

Car Photo of the Day: Name That Car

Since the last CPotD turned into a stumper I’ll toss a fairly simple one in the mix for the weekend. It even has a short name (can be condensed to 5 characters) so all you folks typing on your new iPads can easily guess.

Can you name this car?

Qualifier: Marque specialists ( I know who you are!) must provide full model details, or no iPad for you. 😛

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

Weird Seen: Isuzu I-mark

It is not every day that you see a Japanese Diesel car, especially an I-mark from the early 80s, apparently still being driven by its original owner! I stumbled upon this one just north of downtown Seattle recently. Pardon the crappy cell-cam shots, as my good camera was in the trunk.

Ironically I saw this as I was between picking up two small-scale collections of WVO for making BioDiesel at home.

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.