It’s bad enough that there’s paranoid ambiguity around whether you can photograph a Federal Reserve building, but now the Secretary of Homeland Security has suggested that continually photographing a vaguely-described “critical piece of infrastructure” is grounds for calling the cops.
Complete idiocy.
Okay, so here are my shots of Kodachrome that I’m willing to share with the world. It’s not much, but 11 good pics from three rolls makes me happy.
Ch-ch-ch-changes! AGAIN!
So I put the WordPress blog back in place, but I’ve commented out all the CSS.
I didn’t feel like tackling two things at once right now (learning EE and CSS) while I’m preparing to be a grad student. Also, I was tired of things like embedded objects showing up all screwy.
So, my RSS feed should work again, people searching for stuff should be able to find the pages they’re looking for, and I have my nice, comfy admin panel back 
Maybe now I’ll start hacking up the CSS a touch to gradually shape the page into the form that I want. We’ll see. At this pace, I’ll have columns in five years!
The camera nerd and the part of me that drools over beautiful engineering can’t resist staring at this page for far too long: A pictorial (appropriate, yes) history of Hasselblad cameras used in space.
Holy smokes…some news for which I’ve been waiting a few years: Sufjan Stevens is releasing a recording of The BQE, a symphonic piece he composed and presented only in a series of live performances in NYC back in 2007. I’ve heard only small portions via NPR and the Asthmatic Kitty website, but I’m glad to see he’s publishing the piece soon so I can hear it in its entirety. I’ll be pre-ordering as soon as I get the chance.
Oh yeah, and bonus! It will include a freaking VIEWMASTER DISC.
Sure, there’s a lot of humor in Rands’ translation of contemporary business jargon, but when I’m neck-deep in it every day it’s more than a little depressing.
(via Daring Fireball)
It felt hot as a furnace this weekend, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t go outside to take some pictures.
I’ve often heard people describe the sound of an approaching tornado as closely resembling an oncoming freight train. What do you suppose it sounds like if you’re already ON the freight train?
This is terrifying and breathtaking at the same time.
(via wiseacre)
On my iPhone I routinely type “*** wiki” in Safari’s search field, where “***” is the subject for which I’m searching. So “beer wiki” returns the Wikipedia entry on Beer as the top search result. Last night, however, I noticed I was redirected to a page optimized for mobile web browsers. Since the mobile page renders differently in standard browsers (or at least on FF 3.5 on my work computer), I took some screen shots. This is what you see after the mobile version of the article loads:
There’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect for a mobile-optimized website but have only, until recently, hoped for on Wikipedia. Even on this initial screen you can see there’s a single column, larger text, and better word and line spacing. Instantly more readable. There’s also the clearly indicated feedback link since this version of the site is recently launched.
If you clicked on the first link to the standard Beer article you would have noticed that it’s a reasonably long entry even on a desktop browser. I can’t imagine many iPhone users would enjoy the finger cramps required to scroll all the way down to the Serving section, and it seems Wikipedia’s designers/developers felt the same way. After the introduction, the article sections have been collapsed to their headings with handy buttons to expand the content:
After expanding a section the “Show” button changes to a “Hide” button so you can keep the page from growing too long on your small screen:
Overall I’m pretty happy about this considering my heavy use of Wikipedia. My only gripe at the moment, however, is the redirect process. If you visit an article from Google search results, quite a bit of the standard page (including some images) seems to load before the redirect. I could see this getting a bit tiresome if I don’t have a 3G signal, and it makes me wish the intercept occurred earlier. I’m not a web developer, so I can’t speak to the simplicity/complexity of such a change, but I’ll certainly submit it as feedback.