04 September 2008

Maybe it’s just as well it’s only the radio that’s on… Say what? People can live without television? Preposterous!

03 September 2008

I’m regretting listening to the radio tonight, let me tell you. Oh, look, more Boogie Knights uploads.

02 September 2008

It would be funny if it wasn’t dangerous: the Google Safe Browsing page identifies the site of the local LEGO® users group as suspicious (PDF). I apologize for linking to it yesterday. Google has not visited the site of the local LEGO® train club recently enough to evaluate the safety thereof.

Other Google news that I wasn’t planning on mentioning: the Google Chrome browser (pfft, for Windows, learn more in Serbian); Picasa name tags (which is getting billed as face recognition ); and Webmaster Tools (although Set your canonical domain at Google looks like it might be useful).

01 September 2008

Intellectually I suppose I knew that the McDonald’s which served as a prototype for my construction in LEGO® elements last year didn’t always have a red roof. But now there’s proof which could help to narrow the time in which the remodeling occured. The scanning project has also caught up with the 23 May 1995 capture of the McDonald’s at 7265 Arlington Boulevard where the sign still said Over 99 Billion Served last seen on this website over 4 years ago. That previous scan wasn’t terrible.

Hmm… the tricorder replica is now expected in January…

Pages at the current site of WAMALUG link to the Home page with an absolute reference to the current URL. The pages that I wrote (which remain available if you know the folder name) linked to the Home page using what I called the dot-slash trick 5 years ago. Upshot: the pages I wrote have Home links that survived the change of top level domain. How future-proofed is your site?

31 August 2008

A Mercedes-Benz W110 was used to install standpipes in the Washington metropolitan area subway tunnels, according to this caption at Flickr. The engine in my Focus has more displacement than was available in that fine example of German engineering.

Surely they have to invite me to the Roy Rogers pool now…

30 August 2008

I was persuaded to eat phở today.

Two people saw fit yesterday to ask if I had heard about the pick for vice president by the presumed Republican candidate for president. Maybe they could, like, get together and chat about mutual interests or something.

BBEdit alerts me that a new version (9.0) is available. Already know about it, and to the extent that I don’t use Unity mode in VMware Fusion, I’m having difficulty seeing why I shouldn’t stick with 8.7.2. It probably means I’m way underqualified to be using this particular text editor.

Tonight I concluded the scanning of the one hundred ten rolls I shot in the Minolta Maxxum 7000i and scanned the first roll through the Minolta Maxxum 8000i. The five-year jump back in time puts me in the Arlington Courthouse Plaza address again.

29 August 2008

I am reminded that this is the weekend of Brickfair.

The one hundred ninth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i also had a frame ripped, but this time the photofinisher created a copy negative. The Nikon COOLSCAN V ED always puts up a fuss when I change modules (the single frame of negative must be mounted in a slide holder, the film module removed, and the slide module inserted). I think they must have made the copy negative from the print, though, based on the crop and the slightly worse resolution and color tone. I’m displaying the original negative of my visit to the S.S. United States at Pier 82 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’ve rotated the corner of the frame to align the date imprint and road patterns. I was aboard this ship twice in 1966.

28 August 2008

Facebook passes 100,000,000 active users and Yahoo! gives 30-day notice that its Mash social network will shut down.

The scan of the one hundred eighth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i means that the refurbishment of the photo series documenting the construction of the AMC Hoffman Center 22 can start. The last rolls I shot through this camera were Fujicolor Press 800.

A mis-directed upload yesterday delayed the appearance of the dispatch.

27 August 2008

I have no reason to go, so I rely on a report: there is a Fresh Farmers’ Market Wednesday afternoons in the King Street Gardens Park.

DASH is encouraging ballot stuffing of its entry in the 2008 BUSRide/Oracal USA MotorVision Competition but I think I’ll have to go with the entry from Fargo and the North Dakota Soybean Council wrap. If I didn’t have to complete a form first, that is.

26 August 2008

The WamaLTC display in Brunswick, Maryland last year was not the first time I photographed a cruiser in the municipality’s police fleet. That happened 8 years earlier when I came across a Ford Crown Victoria in a parking lot near my old apartment. I’ll say this for the force—they stick with their graphics… not like those guys in another jurisdiction.

25 August 2008

Editing my AIM Profile is the first step towards a profile at bebo, the social network that AOL bought earlier this year. Sorry, that’s social media network.

24 August 2008

The last obstacle to my abandoning the ZIP format has been persuaded to switch to using the built-in compact disc burner. A generous quantity of Iomega stuff can be made to disappear now.

Did I not say Just say no to Eurostile ? I did. The Baltimore Sun was not listening.

As the number of rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7000i left to scan dwindles into the single digits, the arrays of photographs on each of the cinemas page, the trains page, and from the police menu continue to expand. The one hundred sixth roll promises additions to each category and to another as well.

23 August 2008

This page has helped identify more specifically some of my photographs of Metrobus at Flickr. Also, photographs of Metrobuses by other people.

I continued to use the Minolta Maxxum 7000i past the purchase of the Minolta Maxxum 700si. I’ll have my staff get back to you on just how many cameras I ended up with over the years.

22 August 2008

So, are you going to finish that comment, or what?

The demand to install Service Pack 3 for Windows XP finally arrived.

21 August 2008

These two photographs ought to get me invited to the Roy Rogers Restaurants pool at Flickr… Bonus upload of the Roy Rogers in the Burke Town Plaza.

The uploads to Flickr of Boogie Knights performances from years ago achieved some popularity yesterday in part, I suspect, through one or more e-mail messages.

Lustine Dodge found someone to take a Dodge Ram 1500 off their hands recently. Lucky dealer, as of the end of last month there was a supply which would last more than 5 months at the current sales rate. Lucky buyer, too, with 17 mpg on the highway! No new full-frame digital SLR for you!

20 August 2008

One of the members of the Boogie Knights has commented at my Flickr account that my tentative identifications are correct. The photographs of former members at the band’s website make it tricky to ID some of the men. Sorry, their page at WikiPedia was deleted in March for, you guessed it, lack of notability. The commenter knows.

19 August 2008

With one hundred rolls through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i scanned, it’s time for another break. The next roll will allow me to update the scans of the photographs of the Roy Rogers which was at 5603 Leesburg Pike. The ever-reliable Wikipedia now asserts as fact that this location was the first for the fast food restaurant.

18 August 2008

What a classy guy… wearing his Seven-Up watch to a wedding. Now you just know there are people out there stealin’ these photographs to use as desktop backgrounds… so here’s a cropped version with fewer bathroom accoutrements.

17 August 2008

Another never before seen exclusive! From the scrap at the end of the ninety-eighth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i I find this previously unprinted view of Al’s Motors at 3910 Wilson Boulevard in Ballston. Now a Gold’s Gym, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places for its Streamline Moderne construction and detailing (supporting documentation for the registration). The Virginia Department of Historic Resources considers the change of use to be one of its success stories. The next roll has another location on the register (already scanned and uploaded).

16 August 2008

Oh, yay, everyone’s favorite electronics and appliances retailer is remodeling where the CompUSA was. </sarcasm> I don’t plan on visiting the establishment which eventually moved in to where Chi-Chi’s was, either.

Where could I find out when the 2008 Democratic National Convention was? I wonder…

How am I able to caption my photographs of WMATA’s New Look GMC buses? I was using a list of surplus property, but the Ohio Museum of Transportation has a more comprehensive list.

15 August 2008

The previous scan of this frame didn’t have the quality needed to check, but this Ford Crown Victoria in the service of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department in 1997 was not one of those that went missing, either.

I wasn’t part of her cult following, my notes misspell her name.

My high school graduating class is having its thirtieth reunion this October. It’s not my first impulse to join them, I’ll tell you. It’s easy to think that my attendance at the twentieth reunion exhausted the possibilities. Maybe my friends on Facebook can persuade me otherwise…

14 August 2008

Just doing my bit to help the Flickr community. The building’s architecture is unmistakeable, but I wasn’t absolutely confident until I saw the address in the front door.

Labelscar is a blog about retail history named after a term I’ve been seeing at Flickr (meaning what gets left behind when a sign changes), it treats local examples of declining retail Landmark Mall and Springfield Mall.

13 August 2008

Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 is supported until 13 July 2010. Which means anyone hoping that an End-of-Life would force an upgrade anytime soon is out of luck. There’s a Service Pack 3? My install of Windows XP Home is still reporting Service Pack 2… and Internet Explorer 7 is reporting 7.0.5730.13. Hmm.

All is right with the world? You exaggerate.

12 August 2008

It still bore the logo of the Bell System from 1964 a generation after it was changed and years after the breakup of the company in 1984. When I took a photograph of the last phone booth in Arlington County, Virginia it still had more than a decade to go. I used a lot of words in the caption on Flickr to avoid saying Post.

I have a suspicion that the occasional delay in reaching the desktop has something to do with VMware Fusion. Today I waited it out (where previously I had tried restarting upon reaching the blue screen and experiencing no shifts in hue thereof) and while it took 6 minutes, the desktop was reached.

11 August 2008

I drove past this Maryland State Police trooper on the local Beltway one day in 1996 and thought: that is one freshly washed cruiser. Look at the reflection of the Honda Civic in its side!

Metrobus in transition: the protoype scheme used all-capital solid lettering. I’d first spotted the Orion V in the new striping over a month earlier. They’ve basically kept that scheme ever since.

10 August 2008

I may have mentioned previously that there seems to be a Flickr group for everything… I can only hope my latest upload gets invited. I cannot hope to rival this collection of local movie theaters and successor uses.

A 1996 Chevrolet Lumina in the service of the District’s Metropolitan Police Department and bearing license plate number 96104 was not one of the ten vehicles (out of more than six hundred purchased in FY96 and FY97) which the agency could not locate.

Even dogs have heard of MySpace (in the comics, anyway). Those of you who couldn’t figure out that I’d signed up for an account in April… what did you think it meant when you read about my mood on MySpace (again)? I can forgive not knowing about Friendster, there are people on Facebook who identify themselves as MySpace users (not me) but I have yet to find anyone who admits to a Friendster account. It would be wrong to out a long-abandoned Friendster account I’ve managed to identify.

09 August 2008

It’s easy to add to the collection of photographs of trains and to the collection of photographs of movie theaters (it looks like I could have had another page for the photographs of buses) but the lineup of police cars where each thumbnail links to another page is more problematic. But 11 months after capturing the new scheme of the Maryland State Police using high-speed film I came across an example of the older scheme in tan which deserved its own page. That was easy enough so the Manassas cruiser at sundown get its own page, too. Another page at this site has new entries as well. The ever-reliable Wikipedia says Lexy Hickok was the weekend meteorologist but on 12 June 1996 she was reading something about the District’s mayor. She seems to have been at Baltimore’s ABC affiliate WMAR-2 next, but she is no longer among the station’s talent.

The 5.2 version of the disc burning software Toast was released in the days of System 9 (while running on OS X as well), I suppose we should be lucky it runs at all in Leopard. Roxio is now on Toast 9.

08 August 2008

At long last the misidentification of this police cruiser can be corrected and the visit by a K-9 officer from the city of Orange, Virginia to Fair City Mall in Fairfax, Virginia can be properly commemorated. See the PetsMart store in the background…

Today Flickr changed how it reports geographical information.

What is your plan tonight? It’s just a question.

The Wendy’s in the Van Dorn Plaza wants you to know that they’re now open.

07 August 2008

One day 12 years ago I found myself on the Blue Line between the Pentagon City and Pentagon stations realizing that I was alone and managed to take two photographs of the interior. Although it can’t be read in the 900×600 resampling I uploaded to Flickr the number on the door at the end of the car looks to me like 1076 (the 1 is good enough to identify it as one of the original cars built by Rohr). The car with that number was damaged in the 03 November 2004 crash at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan station which wrecked 1077. I can’t read the number on this car which inspired some building in LEGO® elements previously.

The entrance side of the Bread & Circus Whole Foods Market at night. Yesterday’s frame of the west side was damaged before prints were made by the photofinisher, so the post below was a never before seen exclusive.

Oops, Sunday was the eighth anniversary of something.

06 August 2008

The day a black hole appeared in the sky over Arlington, or
, er… someone took a hole punch to my negative and ripped it, too. I have several photographs of the front of this store at 2700 Wilson Boulevard but so far this is the first of the east side. The acquisition of Bread & Circus by Whole Foods Market was in 1992, so the initial branding of this store that opened 4 years later is a bit of a mystery. Incompetent or malicious processors aside, scanning the rest of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i will be slightly more tedious: from the winter of 1996 to the fall of 2000, I only bought 36-exposure rolls.

Look what’s this Saturday for some people.

Shouldn’t this have a konicaminolta tag? ;-)

05 August 2008

My municipality now keeps its hazardous materials and electronics recycling facility open on Saturdays as well. I delivered the keyboard, mouse, and webcam yesterday anyway reaching the facility on foot. While the Wendy’s in the Van Dorn Plaza is almost ready to re-open, the sign for the one on Duke Street has seen better days. Maybe it’s not so good on the inside, either.

04 August 2008

The Recovery of Color feature in Nikon Scan 4 is working overtime on the eighty-seventh roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i. Whether the film was defective or was fogged before processing or was improperly processed (note the ghost of sprocket holes in the complete frame) the negatives are dark and prints from them had a heavy orange cast. Result: yet another blurred image of a City of Fairfax Police cruiser and it’s different.

03 August 2008

Kodak Royal Gold 1000 was not fast enough to capture this Arlington County Police wagon on Wilson Boulevard, yet an equally blurred Falls Church Police cruiser made it into the gallery. The film bore an expiration date for the previous August (these photographs taken in January) but there hadn’t been much choice. When the snowstorm of 1996 closed the federal government for days, I bought what I could find at the Giant Food on Monroe Street. Yes, the ISO on this page has been wrong for years.

The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service® is something I would have known about years ago, if only I read Parade magazine.

Ten minutes of Clara Bow in Call Her Savage (1932).

02 August 2008

You say that you don’t like the flash feature of Photo Booth? No one does, and holding the Shift key will suppress the feature. The only way to find about that in the Photo Booth Help is the See all topics option. The more adventuresome way is to invert the screen colors using the Command-Control-Option-8 key combination.

Another unfortunate blur, this one shows the City of Fairfax Police on Pickett Road northbound approaching Arlington Boulevard (US-50). The design is the words FAIRFAX POLICE flanking the city’s seal over a reflective white stripe outlined in blue. The subject of attention would appear to be an older Chevrolet Camaro. Fujicolor Super G Plus 400.

I must have thought this photograph of a police cruiser in Manassas, Virginia was too dark to include in the gallery even though it’s no darker than the one I took of the police at Washington National Airport. One can’t drive around anymore without displaying the area code of a phone number. The page for the K-9 version of Manassas’s cruisers awaits its update a few more rolls down the road. My link to the Manassas Police web site has been bad for almost 4 years.

Cinema Treasures has been useful in putting an address to some of my photographs of movie theaters. The new scan of the United Artists Fairfax Towne Center 10 marquee (compare) allows one to read what was playing at the time.

01 August 2008

In September of 1995 I started using Fuji’s 800-speed Fujicolor Super G film. The Alexandria Police Department had confiscated a 1986 Mercedes-Benz 190E a few years earlier and placed it into service, but this exposure is too blurred to be part of the gallery.

Sometimes when I’m updating my record of where a photograph was taken, I can use the 4000 dpi scan to just read the address. (In the original size of the scan, the number is plain above the door.)

31 July 2008

You won’t catch me getting sentimental about it: the iBOT™ FireWire® Desktop Video Camera from Orange Micro was always inadequate with its 640×480 resolution and hazy color rendition. The company seems to have disappeared at least 3 years ago.

BuddyUpdates from AIM (via).

A random commenter speaks the truth: Paulina Porizkova likes Star Trek.

30 July 2008

Whew. The National Do Not Call Registry list that I signed up for 5 years ago was made permanent in February.

The Federal Ballpark E$timate® lets me see if my projected Federal annuity and Thrift Savings Plan benefits are enough to fund a comfortable retirement.

What do you really know about your family? Your co-workers? Your neighbors? An eye-opening search of public information. I can afford to tut-tut because my own failure to pay due attention 5 years ago is not retrieved.

29 July 2008

My scanning project policy of every roll, every frame is not a chore, it gets results: a Metro Transit Police cruiser with an earlier design that I neglected to include in the gallery of police vehicles (itself updated for the new link to the Postal Inspection Service).

U R DOING IT WRONG: The Mac is Not a Typewriter.

Find out how Blue Coat has categorized your favorite website (via).

28 July 2008

Two more updates to the menu of police vehicles from a visit to Pennsylvania Avenue 13 years ago. The avenue had been closed to vehicular traffic for just over 2 months at the time. Were pedestrians still hesistant to walk on the road, or did I deliberately wait until it was clear? A couple more photos of a Metrobus and its advertising uploaded to Flickr.

I responded to the first commenter at my photo of the derelict State building by FlickrMail but d00d… seriously, did I set the Exif in Graphic Converter for nothing?

Now this is a Flickr set! Similar selection of vintage police cars. This one probably best represents what I would remember from growing up in Queens. Allpar advises on the difficulties of collecting police cars.

27 July 2008

I backed off the high-speed films and next loaded the Minolta Maxxum 7000i with Konica Super XG 200 which was still in that body when I went to see the Yugo Next exhibition at Union Station in the District. Low resolution video. The moving company explains how they made it a national tour. Actually I went the other drection on film speed, the Minolta Maxxum 8000i I also brought to this exhibition was loaded with Kodak Royal Gold 25; those negatives await another day.

For the Novacon convention later in the month, I had Kodak Kodacolor Gold Ultra 400 in the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (and Kodak T-Max 400 in the Minolta Maxxum 8000i). It had been over a year since the final episode of Star Trek The Next Generation and Marina Sirtis could pack a room. I was close enough to the stage, and the film wasn’t as grainy as the Ektar 1000 I’d been using in previous years, that the results from the Minolta AF 500mm Reflex lens look better than those from the 70-210mm zoom lens. The scanning project is the first opportunity to see these without the distraction of red-eye (not everyone is so considerate). Sirtis has taken to wearing looser, more lower-cut clothing recently (hem length seems about the same, though).

26 July 2008

LEGO.com Customer Service has downloads of building instructions.

My next foray into high-speed films in the summer of 1995 was with Konica Professional SR-G 3200 with which I captured this cruiser of the Maryland State Police. Updated page for this image.

My aim with the camera when I wasn’t holding it up to my eye was not always so successful, maybe I can pass off the bad aim as art.

25 July 2008

Go ahead and laugh: No fax modems were found. I cannot take advantage of the Fax PDF option in the Print dialog in Mac OS X because I was too cheap to order the $50 Apple USB modem when making my purchase last year.

The page for photographs of movie theaters has been upgraded with four new scans. Because I am scanning the rolls from each camera in the order of the camera’s purchase, there will be some backtracking because of the overlap: I bought a Minolta Maxxum 8000i in February of 1995 but continued using the 7000i for another 5 years.

I used the phrase I’m Audi in an instant messaging chat this week and I was not understood. I first heard the phrase when I saw Clueless at the United Artists Fairfax Towne Center 10 on 19 July 1995. I took a picture of the promotional stand-up for that movie in the first floor lobby of that movie theater earlier in the month (I watched Smoke that day). The film was Fuji Fujicolor Super HG 1600, the next step in my experimentation with high-speed films, which I used earlier in the roll to snap this traffic stop by the Virginia State Police on I-66 eastbound approaching the ramp to Fairfax Drive.

24 July 2008

Silly radio station. Didn’t they know that evolution doesn’t operate at the level of the individual? The summer of 1995 I experimented with high-speed films, starting with Kodak Royal Gold 1000.

It has been 2½ years since I designed a wordmark for WamaLTC.

Trek booth babes, uh, I mean promotional models from Paramount.

People are trying to get me to join them at the movies, but the superhero genre is leaving me cold. It’s about a month away, but this looks more my speed.

23 July 2008

Your patience is rewarded. I have instructions to update the WamaLTC website to reflect the plan for four displays in the coming months. We have a meeting this Saturday.

Suzie Plakson has surpassed the previous holder of the most-viewed upload to my Flickr account. This shot of the Oshkosh P-15 firefighting apparatus on display at Washington National Airport’s 50th Aniversary celebration on 16 June 1991 is the latest to be invited to a pool.

22 July 2008

Tonight’s roll in the scanning project was exposed with the Minolta Panoramic Adapter in the Maxxum 7000i. From April 1995: The Biograph at 2819 M Street NW; Palace Radio & TV at 2907 Wilson Boulevard.

21 July 2008

Generic error: the long-expected revision to the Facebook site is now available to me. There are some glitches: {actor} uploaded {=a photo} to {=Flickr}Flickra photoConstantine. (They mean this one of a costume call contestant at Farpoint in 1994.) Unfortunately the Always show these friends tool as currently deployed is too literally a Top Friends clone which pins the profile pics of those friends to a specific corner of the array (rather than dispersed among those on display). There are at least three places on the home page to logout.

Maybe I should wear my eyeglasses more often.

20 July 2008

A year ago today, I was returning from a trip with colleagues to Los Angeles. I wouldn’t be blogging absolutely daily for another three weeks. For what it’s worth, I don’t know the significance of this: one hundred fifty-nine days from today is Friday, December 26, 2008.

From the Post of September 18, 1994: A 93-year-old Bethesda woman was killed in a head-on collision Saturday night on rain-slickened MacArthur Boulevard in Bethesda, Montgomery County police said. The next day, I drove that curve just west of the District line and took this photograph of the scene.

Terry Farrell modeled swag from the U.S.S. Enterprise (CVN-65) at the Sunday session of the Shore Leave convention in 1994.

Blogger links to photo on Flickr by the file’s URL which technically is not a violation of the Flickr Community Guidelines because the image is not displayed in his blog. Flickr Services documentation on URLs. Flickr API to get information about a photograph. Flickr API Explorer using flickr.photos.getinfo. Result: Anita on Flickr.

19 July 2008

Mmm, the young women in the orange tees greeting me at the entrance of the Apple Store in Fair Oaks Mall, they weren’t ugly. (Their shirt color makes them concierges apparently.) The store has no barrier to entry with a store-width opening at the front, and the specialists carry their credit card swipe devices around with them. I purchased the fixed-focus LogiTech QuickCam Vision MP for Mac, but maybe I really wanted the recently heralded Vision Pro with auto-focus. Comprehensive rundown of the Apple Store as a retail business links to an image of an old web page listing the first two: Tyson Corner Center and Glendale Galleria. (Image of me taken using the Video -> Take Snapshot command in iChat has been flipped in a photo editor.)

There were a number of actresses who appeared at Star Trek conventions who could be considered photogenic—Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Suzie Plakson, Denise Crosby, Robin Curtis—but none induced such a room-wide case of beauty intoxication in the male audience as Terry Farrell. She was 30 at the time.

Serbia will get to see the next Star Trek movie a day earlier.

18 July 2008

Micro Center in Fairfax couldn’t accept credit cards this evening. That’s got to put a crimp in business.

Oh, look who has an album coming later this year.

17 July 2008

See, I told you: the preview of the upcoming profile design for Facebook users exposed more than it should have.

16 July 2008

I’m sure the residents are grateful: a certain hotel heiress asserts I haven’t been to Glendale in months.

The CBS HD Gallery for Star Trek Remastered offers advertiser-supported streaming of remastered episodes, two for now. Ha! In HD I can see that Captain Kirk in approaching Balok is holding his phaser one backwards! View of the black and white phaser one held properly.

From Sunday, the slash fiction just writes itself: Cassandra… offered to let Slylock Fox search her… .

15 July 2008

When the self-service checkout at Shoppers shortchanged me by a penny last week, I counseled myself to be calm and said nothing. When I found a nickel and two pennies in the change dispenser today, again I said nothing. (When I found a dime in the change dispenser at Safeway on Saturday, I did mention that something was left behind—then pocketed the coin.) After all, that medical tricorder toy has to be paid for somehow!

14 July 2008

De-friended again! It’s nothing personal, I hope, since said friend seems to have deactivated the account.

What is the likelihood that this exhibit at the Star Trek Earth Tour at Paramount’s Kings Dominion in 1993 was an authentic screen-used prop? The label for the prop on the left is dubious, too, the props in the second movie were rentals and never seen again. The exhibits currently on display at Star Trek The Exhibition in San Diego are identified as replicas. I’m on the front page of TrekWeb again.

13 July 2008

Revision of my Upgrades page has been long overdue, it was last edited the fifth of August last year. Rather than a dual Windows|Macintosh listing, I’ve changed it to list each computer and virtual machine separately. Scrutiny will reveal that I don’t keep the older machines completely updated and I’ve not bothered providing links to some of the older software sources (indeed, quite a few no longer exist). With automatic updating now a part of the newer browsers and Apple Software Update installed everywhere it can be, the need for the page is reduced.

Thanks to image search engines, the views on Flickr of my photograph of Suzie Plakson at the 1990 Shore Leave wearing an above-the-knee dress and flats have surged to make it the second most-popular upload at my account.

Speak for yourself, candidate: Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. An old man who doesn’t know how to use the Internet. I don’t know about you, but I read web pages, not watch them. Ok, maybe YouTube pages are watched, mostly.

12 July 2008

Yeah, this looks authentic </sarcasm>.

I’m at the halfway point of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i; the fifty-sixth was taken on Sunday at Shore Leave 15 in 1993. Robin Curtis wore the same oversize jacket she had on Saturday but what a difference a pair of glasses makes. Shore Leave 30 was this weekend.

Allpar can barely keep up with the police departments buying the Dodge Charger, this includes the Virginia State Police which had a trooper design new graphics.

11 July 2008

So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia? (via).

How long has a blue IMAX sign been hanging off the side of the AMC Hoffman Center 22? The announcement of a joint-venture agreement to install 100 IMAX® digital projection systems at AMC locations in 33 major U.S. markets was last December, and the AMC Hoffman Center 22 (misidentified jurisdiction notwithstanding) may be one of three to be the first to offer the system this month. Now if only they had something to show.

I have been exploring the new Facebook design scheduled to go live next week and found one data leak among my friends on the social network, a birthday which is not displayed on the current version of the site. It bugs me that I can’t find the logout link. MySpace used to play games by having the Sign Out link on only a few pages but the recent refresh of that site’s appearance has placed it on every page now.

The fares of the local municipality’s bus system will move to a two-tier structure on the twentieth.

For those who liked Darth Vader until they sat through the prequels this is a little funny (via).

10 July 2008

A 35mm lens like the one on my Olympus XA was no good for celebrity photographs at a distance, but by 1993 Robin Curtis had taken to dressing more demurely, so I dug out the snaps from her appearance at Shore Leave in 1986.

I suppose his biggest fan already knows: Nadal has a girlfriend. So does that other guy.

09 July 2008

What hold does Italy have on the manufacture of sponge mop components, I wonder?

08 July 2008

See, now there’s a reason that will convince everybody why I don’t watch television.

As I approach the summer of 1993 in the scanning project and near the halfway point of the rolls that went through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (through that camera under my command, that is), Flickr has given up on displaying a specific number on the map and simply states lots at the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn when I’m assigning a location to my recent uploads.

This Ask MetaFilter thread links to descriptions I can’t read with a dry face.

07 July 2008

Um, just no. Not a potential replacement. Something more like this maybe…

TrekWeb’s criteria for including a Flickr upload are… somewhat tenuous.

When the mood strikes me to use FAIL again, Tim Gould offers an animated GIF for the occasion.

06 July 2008

If I was smarter and thriftier, I would not have a pair of gardening gloves in the back of the Focus.

05 July 2008

While my attention was elsewhere: The AMC Springfield Mall 10 closed on February 14, 2008. The mall is due for a total makeover (more details).

My page for a certain E! News reader was once upon a time the number one hit for her name. The scanning project has caught up with that day and the result is definitely an improvement over the previous incarnation (thumbnail).

For his appearance at OktoberTrek in 1992, Star Trek The Next Generation actor Brent Spiner requested no flash photography. I abided by his wishes (others did not) so most of my photographs are blurred even as I was using Kodak Ektar 1000. I have no idea what is going on here.

04 July 2008

The traffic to my Flickr set was coming from TrekWeb. The front page there has a display of uploads to Flickr, today’s leads to what I would call unclear on the concept : four people (employees of a bank?) in the town of Vulcan in Alberta (Canada) give individual interpretations of the Vulcan salute.

My notes for the first picture I took at Shore Leave 14 on Sunday, 12 July 1992 were: Skipper of Navy’s Enterprise. I was able to locate a list of commanding officers for that aircraft carrier which included the individual assigned to the ship in 1992. I was even able to find the vessel’s report for 1992 with the command organization on page 4, and I’m pretending that I can read MR RICHARDSON/EXECUTIVE OFFICER on the badge of the man in uniform (er, Navy uniform, that is) in the next photograph I took that day. The trouble with Google is that within a matter of hours these men’s names are going to be associated with an appearance at the convention in a way that may or may not be justified. If I knew that I had retained the program for the convention I might be persuaded to look for it…

A steampunk keyboard (of course via)… with Eurostile® on the keys. FAIL.

03 July 2008

WamaLTC plans a meeting on Saturday the twenty-sixth.

Food & Friends provides meals, groceries and nutrition counseling to people living with life-challenging illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and cancer. This is their twentieth year of operation. There was an advertisement in the City Paper I picked up this morning for their TEAM Food & Friends Cycling Event the same weekend.

Yesterday’s upload to Flickr of a selection of photographs from my visit to the Star Trek exhibit in the National Air and Space Museum has been receiving attention (that is, views, but so far no comments or favorites). I used Fujifilm’s FinePixViewer program to resize the selections (which seems to have shortchanged the vertically-oriented compositions) and the Graphic Converter program to set the Exif date of each JPEG file to April 19, 1992 which left just the mapping to do upon upload.

02 July 2008

The gas mileage spreadsheet has yet to confirm this, but I don’t see how I can maintain an average of under 5 miles a day of driving in the Focus when, y’know, I drive a minimum of 8.2 miles a day in it.

01 July 2008

Aww, and I had gotten used to typing Control-W, 6, comma, 112 in WordPerfect to insert the Character Number for the star.

So, was the communicator on display in the exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum 16 years ago authentic? If you believe these are the only possibilities then signs point to no. Gregory Jein’s involvement in prop collection is amply documented, but I’m unable immediately to locate anything on the third entity mentioned as loaning items in that case.

30 June 2008

How do people stand it to drive a vehicle with no wiper for the rear window? Anyhoo, for now no more kittens are being harmed.

29 June 2008

I’m about a third of the way through the rolls out of the Minolta Maxxum 7000i which, in the early nineties, I seem to have used only for special occasions. Months would go by between conventions without a single frame exposed. In comparing my uploads to Flickr with those of other people with the same tags, I can’t help but notice that my photographs are from long ago, Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton and Gates McFadden were all in the middle of their employment on Star Trek The Next Generation and Nichelle Nichols was still going with black hair (she looks this way now).

With the last roll from OktoberTrek in 1991 finished, the next three rolls are from my 19 April 1992 visit to the National Air and Space Museum for its Star Trek exhibit. I know, it’s not as exciting as skydiving, but negative scanning is a low-cost hobby if you discount the stress caused by how worthless Nikon Scan 4 is. I used Kodak Ektar 100 for my visit to the museum. What a shame someone was allowed to restore the paint scheme. No red-eye reduction needed on these ;-)

28 June 2008

Parisians Under Occupation is a controversial exhibition of photographs taken by a French photographer, André Zucca, using Agfacolor film for a German magazine considered to be a Nazi propaganda organ (via). The caption in Russian at this LiveJournal identifies the automobiles depicted as having been modified to run on charcoal and compressed natural gas, respectively. I don’t understand Russian all that well but I can copy a phrase into a search.

Sony announces HVL-F58AM flash in advance of the expected full-frame camera.

Hey, cousin (from a year ago). Meanwhile, I find myself referred to (the photographer showed up for our table building day 3 years ago).

The Wendy’s that burned last year is rebuilding and the banner in the window says they’re hiring.

Faith Baker recognized her mistake at Shore Leave 13 and her costume at OktoberTrek later in the year proved much more popular. There were multiple views on Flickr before I’d clicked the button to save the upload. Google has subscribed to the feed for the tag faithbaker (it’s the third result for the search oktobertrek).

27 June 2008

Leaving one’s sex indeterminate on Facebook (as I did for a while upon signing up) is no longer acceptable.

26 June 2008

This file of the insert art of all the compact discs I’ve ever purchased hasn’t been updated since the last such purchase prior to the transition to the Mac Pro. Surely the purchase of this title was obvious 10 days ago.

I’m late to the party in downloading Firefox 3.

The Internet Broadway Database® allows me to revisit the venue and the cast of a play with unexpected nudity which I saw on a high school field trip to Manhattan (via).

25 June 2008

Do you imagine that watching Ratatouille has made me more sentimental about domestic rodents? Not a chance. One spot of qap’la this week (I’m not saying where).

More commenting possibilities!

24 June 2008

In my stressed condition last week, I overlooked the Wachovia in the Pan Am Center in Fairfax—even as I drove right past it.

23 June 2008

The Egg Yolk Yellow hatchback managed to escape scrutiny another day.

The origin of my buddy icon on Flickr has been reached by the scanning project.

22 June 2008

I don’t know what search terms a Blackberry user was trying tonight (no iPhones for North Dakotans), but there is a Piedmont Virginia Community College on the south side of Charlottesville. Because you just can’t trust everything people say.

The review in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review of The Two Kinds of Decay caught my eye because of the author’s photograph (the one found in the review and in the reading guide), but the kinship of the author’s illness to my own (in the summer of 1981) kept it.

It looks like I’ve spent the weekend uploading to Flickr, and that is not a good impression to leave. Fortunately no one is reading…

21 June 2008

I haven’t called long distance in so long that my alleged provider decided it was no longer interested in granting me access to their network.

20 June 2008

The towing contractor for the homeowner’s association was active this afternoon, but my otherwise eye-catching Focus escaped their notice, and it’s back in a newly mold-free garage.

19 June 2008

It’s worse again.

You know how it seems like there’s banks everywhere but when you’re a cheapskate and want to avoid ATM fees there’s never one of yours to be found? Fortunately my habit of walking to the barber from where the 29K makes its turn onto University Avenue allowed me to remember the location of one when it was needed.

18 June 2008

I didn’t have the chance today to say the word thirty-nine but maybe that would have been mean.

Mmm, don’t think that’s canon, either (via).

17 June 2008

The recovery of color feature of Nikon Scan 4 is doing its heroic best with my photographs of Gates McFadden at OktoberTrek ’90, but I was shooting through a handheld 500mm lens at the back of a long, crowded ballroom with Kodak Ektar 1000… this one isn’t too bad.

16 June 2008

So I’m flipping through that local education and media conglomerate’s free tabloid thoughtfully left behind by a previous rider on the subway and see that Đoković has lost again. I don’t suppose the proximate Nadal/Lakers booster will let me forget it. El último punto del Roland Garros.

Actually, Laura Linney’s dress at the Tony Awards reminded me of the Chromoite from the The Mice episode of The Outer Limits. Wow, if I hadn’t been searching for links for the previous sentence, I wouldn’t have known: fifteen years later, the follow-up soundtrack album release.

Still no. I’ve come to appreciate the upright seating in the Focus and Escape and don’t foresee a return to the kind of seating where basically I have to push off the rocker panels with my hands to get upright upon leaving. Unfortunately that would mean compromising my no foot-operated parking brake rule. Dilemma.

15 June 2008

Oh, please, lady, there’s no need to turn and stare, I know it sounds like I’m strangling kittens under this Chrysler. My theory: it’s the air conditioning.

Now is not a good time for fans of the Los Angeles Lakers.

14 June 2008

So what is the deal with these new dollar coins? The Sacagewa at least had some dignity, these look like foil-covered chocolates. Eh, the self-serve checkout recognizes them. That’s what we need, more pennies.

I had the opportunity to drive a 2003 Chrysler Sebring today. V6, pfft. How can anyone stand a three-speed automatic anymore? For a vehicle with five thousand fewer miles on the odometer than my Focus, it sure sounds like something is about to expire under there. (Seems like my judgment is flawed, the automatic in the MY2003 Sebring was a four-speed.)

This isn’t my first photograph of Faith Baker and it's not the last. She was still at it 8 years later. (I am so far the only person to use faithbaker as a tag on Flickr. I’m also the only person to use lisaputmanwhite as a tag.)

I have decided not to join WamaLTC’s display tomorrow. I know everyone is disappointed that Alexandrians and other visitors to the Oronoco Bay Park will not be able to see miniatures of the public service vehicles of the municipality.

13 June 2008

Okay, it got worse.

12 June 2008

I imagine there’s good nostalgia and bad nostalgia. The former owner of the airplane I linked to below points out that in its more recent condition the tailcone is also missing. Almost a tenth of the way through the one hundred and ten identified rolls from the Minolta Maxxum 7000i (I’ve interpolated one more since the last count) and there’s a particular ex-wife that limits the market for the scanning results. Uh, not my ex-wife, someone else’s ex-wife.

This prototype has led to building activity today, so that’s another new construction one could look for at Sunday’s display.

11 June 2008

My mood on MySpace is currently stressed but I suppose I shouldn’t complain, it’ll just be getting worse. I still haven’t rebuilt the back of my HM202 in LEGO® elements to match the real thing and WamaLTC’s display at the 27th Annual Alexandria Red Cross Waterfront Festival is scheduled for this Sunday—oops, that didn’t take long, all fixed now.

If you’d asked me, I would have said it’ll never work: a free digest-sized biweekly magazine of book excerpts for local commuters.

10 June 2008

Today looked a little like this:

1. Ride the Metrobus 38B for free
2. Return books to the library
3. ?????
4. Profit!

What’s that? Finding three pennies doesn’t make up the fare for the subway ride to Rosslyn and back? Oh, well… if I’m asked again how to get to Annandale from Rosslyn I should say the 3A.

09 June 2008

Today was a Code Red day, and I saved my employer some commuting dollars by riding the local municipality’s bus for free both ways. It was not a good day to be riding the subway or to be choosing to ride the Metrobus too early.

08 June 2008

The photofinisher who processed the fifth roll through the Minolta Maxxum 7000i simply didn’t care where the frame divisions were. It’s not the most important thing on my mind today, but there it is. I am keeping to my every roll, every frame policy but for some of these frames the hope is that no one ever asks to seem them complete.

Let’s try that again:

The day started foggy, then turned hot and sunny. Ed’s house burned again and no firefighting apparatus was even on its way. People recognized the McDonald’s by the sign towering over the franchise and I worried that the adjoining fast food establishments went noticed less. Even with prices at the gasoline station valid from last Tuesday, some weren’t satisfied and thought they should be higher (even though, again, through the fog I could see that local prices were lower). Sorry, no links to photos in this entry, I have an appointment with zzz…

Complete album on Brickshelf from yesterday and WamaLTC page for the display.

tl;dr: Serbian scientists apply their investigatory impulses to the phenomenon of Facebook. Another Serb publication celebrates a recent victory: Лепотица с инстинктом убице јуриша на Вимблдон (Beauty with the killer instinct assaults Wimbledon). Đoković lost to some Spanish guy…

07 June 2008

The day started foggy, then turned hot and sunny. Ed’s house burned again and no firefighting apparatus was even on its way. People recognized the McDonald’s by the sign towering over the franchise and I worried that the adjoining fast food establishments went noticed less. Even with prices at the gasoline station valid from last Tuesday, some weren’t satisfied and thought they should be higher (even though, again, through the fog I could see that local prices were lower). Sorry, no links to photos in this entry, I have an appointment with zzz…

06 June 2008

Almost forgot… I needed to print a sign for the Exxon station in LEGO® elements which will be displayed tomorrow with this year’s prices.

05 June 2008

Some people treat the photo-sharing site Flickr as a dumping ground for their unfocused, unrotated pics of buddies at the local drinking hole… and others look to upload only art. This frame might be my first upload that could qualify as the latter (although I think the one of the B-58 has some majesty to it).

Ana Ivanović on top of the world. Silly IBM… the Share on Facebook feature offered some self-promotion instead of, say, any portion of the article. Maybe I should have respected the English-language text I am quoting. ;-)

Seems like it was just yesterday that I was installing Corel® WordPerfect® Office X3 Professional Edition and already there’s a version X4.

04 June 2008

After a day’s break, scanning of negatives has resumed with the first roll through the Minolta MAXXUM 7000i from 04 November 1989.

A search on the N-number on this airplane in which I was a passenger a few months earlier led to its more recent condition under a different owner (it seems to have had some previous history as well) and allowed me to give the upload to Flickr a title. That’s the airplane in which I was flown over Fort Worth, Texas and from where this photograph of that city’s convention center was taken with the SRT-202.

03 June 2008

The young redhead with the accent wanted to know how to get to Edsall Road and first I say the 8 but then, I correct myself, Edsall Road goes out all the way to Backlick Road, so… ah, she understands, I need the number, yes, maybe not knowing the word for address. She pulls out a daybook and turns to a page with the address and I recommend the Fairfax Connector 321. What she wanted with the Social Security Administration at that location we did not discuss.

02 June 2008

It was a little hole in the line leading to the icemaker/water dispenser in the refrigerator. The community has other concerns. The wait for a plumber, though, means that the scanning of frames from the Minolta SRT-202 has been completed. I’ve changed my mood.

The domain maj.com is redirecting to majhost.com?

01 June 2008

I have changed my mood on MySpace to gloomy and it’s not just because of the waterfall in my garage.

BrickBuildr is a way to view LEGO® creations that have been uploaded to Flickr.

Offered without comment.

31 May 2008

The page for the Arlington County police cars that I photographed in 1988 has been updated. Taking advantage of yesterday’s opportunity, I have prepared and applied stickers to a construction in LEGO® elements to represent the new look of my current jurisdiction’s fleet. It’s been a year in the making. Look for it next Saturday when WamaLTC displays at the 14th Manassas Heritage Railway Festival. At the time of posting, that’s still a photograph of our display in 2006 that they’re using to decorate the page.

I have been using the scanning project to catch up on identifying the date, location, and subject of each frame. That’s not always possible, and my apparent abandonment of data entry about the rolls through the Minolta SRT-202 after the one hundred and sixth isn’t helpful. However, the cards I pulled from the Rolodex when they were no longer valid have been useful a few times, as has the ability to ty