Kings among men.

Shadow of the bench

Are you ready for school?

Do you think these kids are ready for school? What with the case of "Cup of Noddles" and the big box of Frosted Flakes in the back?

New present

Look at the amazingly cute penguin flash drive my mother in law got me!

Settlers of the Afternoon

Saturday, we got together with our friends to visit the Renaissance Fair here in the Seattle area. While the fair was enjoyable, it was a bit smaller than the previous year. Out of the few fairs that I have had the opportunity to visit, this one seems to be much more focused on merchants selling their arts and crafts which means that there is less to photograph due to my own feelings. I feel that it can be very rude to take pictures of others hard work or art with out actually buying anything, so I tend not to do it at fairs. Because of the smaller size of the event, we only ended up staying for about four hours. You know, enough time for Heather to eat a turkey leg, roasted corn, and other yummy treats. She sure does love those fair foods; something I have never quite understood. Anyway, after leaving we decided to go back to our friend's place for the rest of the afternoon and evening. We ended up playing a couple of games of Settlers of Catan followed up by watching Forrest Gump on Netflix. All and all, a wonderful end to a beautiful day.

Jealous?

Jealous? I'm not quite sure that would be the word I would choose.

Mobile recording system

Nick has been having this idea for awhile that he wants a system that he can carry on himself that will allow him to record everything that he does or that happens to him. At first, I thought it was just another one of his quick lasting, spur of the moment ideas that he would forget as fast as he thought of it. That was until today, when he walked in wearing this DIY recording system.

At first, he was looking at a small helmet cam that he could were or pin onto his shirt. This was quickly dropped due to the fact that it could only record up to 2 hours on its internal storage, and the battery issue/charging was a hurdle for him as well. Now, it looks like he is going to go with a web cam connected to a netbook that he will carry around in a backpack. I believe the headphones are just so that he can listen to music and to hold the web cam onto his head.

Now, since the first time I heard Nick talk about this idea, it has never really made sense to me. But as my friend, Jason, explained to me, he is doing this because wants to be able to accurately share his experiences with others. However, faced with the inability to actually pull memories from his head and place them into his audiences', he feels that this is the next best thing. Now, I have known several people with this same desire, but many of them have learned the art of journaling or creative/descriptive writing, or carrying a camera with them at all times. So I suppose that this might be the next step in that form of documenting our lives, and it is not like this is the first time we as a society have seen this done. There was Justin TV and several other very much like that.

I how ever still think the better approach is the writing or a still camera for several reasons. One reason being is that so much of our lives are very mundane and ordinary. If you think about your daily activities, what are you really doing? Sleeping, eating, watching TV, surfing the net, or walking/driving to a location. And only on the last one might, and very rarely, have something interesting happen to them. Which leads me to the second main reason I feel that writing or photography is the better way to document events. That is it requires the person to learn how to remember and later describe the event in detail, or how to look at the event and be able to tell the entire story in just a few images. Thus training yourself to better look at the world around you, and remembering the events. Because in the end, really only you probably care that much to remember and reminisce about what happens to you on a daily basis.

But these are just my opinions, I would love to hear what your take on his setup or his ideas might be.

Magic Bean

So, appearently one of my coworkers thought it would be a interesting thing to plant a "Magic Bean" in my wandering Jew pot here at the office. This was all unknown to me until this morning when I came in to find a very tall bean stalk growing out of my pot.



So I told my office mate, Jason, about it, and he just says, "My gosh, he actually did it?". Turns out it was Nick that had planted the bean sometime while I was either on vacation, or gone for the day.

The interesting part of this is the fact that it has writing on the side of the bean. As you can see in the next two images, there are the words "I like you" and two hearts on each side of what I suspect was the sides of the beans. Although, I am not sure what Nick is trying to tell me by this gesture, or whether I really want to know.

I just wonder how long these engravings will last on the stalk.

Red Sunset over Bellevue

Captured this shot while getting ready to watch the northern lights show last night. Sadly, the clouds were moving in so I was not able to see them, but I at least did not come back home empty handed.

Pushing the Sands