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Something a little different... artistically that is... Does the painting work? or should I stick to straight photos? Heh.

Am I a shit head or what? I have just been too busy to update this thing. Umm... let's see... What the hell have I been up to besides work, work, and more work? Good question. I got some pimp business cards. I went out for "a drink" with my boss and co-workers last night after work and ended up closing the place down. Yeah... as in the-lights-are-all-off-and-the-doors-are-locked kinda shit. I found out that I'm moving to another office a couple floors higher in my building with a better view. Excellent. I decided that I need a little wagon. Oh... and EL and I are going to see Joe Rogan tonight! Funny dude.

Ahem... um... right. "There are a lot of girls out there like me who would like to do something for the country and really have no idea where to start. Our philosophy is if you are out there partying and engage in casual sex you might as well 'Take One for the Country'" "The men go off into harms way gratified, and because the organization is covert, they get the boost in ego thinking that they scored on their own attributes, they ship out relaxed and confident, with a distinct impression of a grateful nation behind them" Interesting venture... really, really odd.

A couple more from yesterday's shoot... a Columbine (bottom) and this purple flower that I forget the name of...

Mitch Wagner's editor's note from Security Pipeline: Don't Strangle Businesses Before They're Born "I love the history of technology, so bear with me if I take a while to get to the point: In February, 1976, Sony introduced the first Betamax VCR in the United States. Sony believed that consumers would buy the technology to record TV shows and watch them later, a practice which later came to be called "time-shifting." Sony advertised: "Now you don't have to miss 'Kojak' because you're watching 'Columbo' (or vice versa)." (Who loves ya, baby?) But VCR sales malingered until a couple of entrepreneurs had the insight that consumers didn't want so much to record tapes as play pre-recorded ones. Magnetic Video started selling videocassettes mail-order, and, in December 1977, the first video rental store, The Video Station, opened in Los Angeles. VCR sales got another boost when Jane Fonda released "The Jane Fonda Workout" in 1982, leading to a rush in exercise videos. Around the same time, the first consumer PCs were being introduced. Advocates said one of the chief uses would be to store recipes. Indeed, one of the very first consumer PCs was the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, introduced way back in 1966, designed to store recipes. It required two weeks of programming and cost $10,000. I can't be sure of this, but I believe that its target market was the extremely wealthy (and stupid). My point: Very often, when technologies are introduced, we have absolutely no idea how they'll be used. We're utterly ignorant. We're completely clueless. We stumble around for years, thinking this "hammer" thing would be great for putting on top of paper to keep it from blowing away, and only later does it occur to someone that, you know, I bet you could drive a nail with this thing. One of the worst things that can happen to embryonic technology is to be strangled by regulation. That almost happened with VCR technology in the late 1970s, as media companies sued to try to get time-sharing blocked as intellectual property theft. Those same companies are now seeing most of their revenue from VHS and DVD sales, which would not have happened if those original lawsuits had killed the VCR industry before it was born. (Advocates of filesharing use those very lawsuits as evidence in favor of filesharing. But that's not the point of this editorial.) We're now at the pioneering stages of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. We think we know what RFID will be used for: by business, the military, and government agencies to track their supply chains. RFID tags are cheap enough that they are already being used to track pallets-full of stock, and they are expected to get cheaper, and more powerful, so that tracking individual items of merchandise on store shelves will become possible. Privacy advocates fear this will be used to keep track of everyone's possessions, and are raising the alarm. Politicians are responding to those fears in the way that politicians do: introducing legislation. And that's scary, because we don't know what we're trying to legislate, and what potential business might be strangled by clumsy legislation. We're already seeing RFID being used in unanticipated ways. In Denmark, the Legoland amusement park is using RFID tags combined with mobile phones to help parents find their kids after the kids have wandered off. Legoland Uses Wireless And RFID For Child Security And a recent survey showed that developers aren't using RFID for inventory control so much as for security. Developers Use RFID For Security Applications Most Probably someone reading this article is right now thinking up the killer app for RFID, the one that drives it into the mainstream. In 20 years we'll look back and say, "Hey, remember in 2004 we thought RFID was going to be used for inventory management? Wasn't that silly of us?" But that won't happen if RFID is strangled by government regulation before it's born. P.S. Here's some links about the history of the VCR and the Kitchen Computer: Consumer Electronics Association: Digital America Video cassette recorder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Kitchen Computer Honeywell Model 316 "Kitchen Computer""

Stopped real quick at Mercer this afternoon... I did something I never do... I left my camera bag in the trunk. I selected *a lens* and *a method of flash* and strapped my camera on and took off. Ugh! It was torture. I saw a million shots that could have been a million times better with the rest of my tools. I've decided that I need a small wagon that has enough surface area to open my bag without putting it on the ground to be able to switch out configurations quickly in the field... kinda like a mobile work bench. The worst and most painful left-in-the-trunk gear was my tripod. I photographer should never be without a tripod... ever. I saw this shot and couldn't pass it up though, so I took it 1/15 sec handheld at 78mm with the 70-200mm and 500D. This would have been greatly improved with a tripod and another stop or two smaller aperture. Oh well... next time. I have more, but I'm tired and need sleep.

A female dove on the nest... keeping her egg(s?) warm. on the tin awning over Joe's kitchen window... neat.

Finally, a moment of calm. I have been so busy today... usually that's when I post a bunch of crap like those cheesy jokes. I just don't have time to talk about the events going on around me. The weather has been fabulous. I wish I could spend some time outside. I did eat lunch on the patio, but it was back to work and more meetings to spoil the mood afterwards. Tonight is "poker night" at Harry's... I can't wait. It will be nice to see those guys again. Sam set up a tee time for a foursome on Sunday, but I'm not a big golfer. It should be interesting. I am so sleepy. I haven't been sleeping well the last few days. I just want to sleep.

Who knew?

LITTLE TONY ON GETTING OLDER Little TONY was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th one a man on the bench across from him said, "Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat." Little TONY replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old." The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?" Little TONY answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business.

LITTLE TONY ON GRAMMAR One day, during lessons on proper grammar, the teacher asked for a show of hands from those who could use the word "beautiful" in the same sentence twice. First, she called on little Suzie, who responded with, "My father bought my mother a beautiful dress and she looked beautiful in it." "Very good, Suzie," replied the teacher. She then called on little Michael. "My mommy planned a beautiful banquet and it turned out beautifully." She said, "Excellent, Michael!" Then the teacher reluctantly called on little TONY. "Last night at the dinner table, my sister told my father that she was pregnant, and he said 'Beautiful, just fucking beautiful!'"

LITTLE TONY ON ENGLISH Little TONY goes to school, and the teacher says, "Today we are going to learn multi-syllable words, class. Does anybody have an example of a multi-syllable word?" TONY says "Mas-tur-bate." Miss Rogers smiles and says, "Wow, little TONY, that's a mouthful." Little TONY says, "No, Miss Rogers, you're thinking of a blowjob."

LITTLE TONY ON MATH Little TONY returns from school and says he got an F in arithmetic. "Why?" asks the father? "The teacher asked 'How much is 2x3', I said '6'", replies Tony "But that's right!" says his dad. "Yeah, but then she asked me 'How much is 3x2?'" "What's the fucking difference?" asks the father. "That's what I said!"

Wouldn't you know that the rain is reserved for just the weekend. Bullshit.

Need a chuckle over your morning coffee? Check this out.