Random Access 3.0: Flickr Badge: “Scott joined Flickr some time ago (side note, how ironic he did it to see if it was better than Yahoo and it is now OWNED by Yahoo).”

I revisited Flickr a couple of months ago. I ended up paying for a pro account. A lot of the things I had a problem with the first time around ended up being fixed. The Flash organizing tool now has a ‘Batch’ mode and it zooms in on the pictures when you are viewing them in thumbnail mode. There are a plethora of uploading and tagging tools. There is supposed to be a way to automatically post to your blog when you email a photo to Flickr. It doesn’t seem to work yet, at least I haven’t gotten it to work. The Flickr badge and the Zeigest are cooool. The RSS feed for your photostream is a nice feature. I added my photostream to my Mom and Dads “My Yahoo” page. Now whenever I upload a picture to Flickr, they get a link to it on their “My Yahoo” page.

You can check out my Flickr photos over here

…they’re dead. I had a day off today and about 10 hours to kill before my flight back to Seattle, so I decided to walk around Manhattan.

I started at 63rd and Lex, at my hotel (the Melrose), and walked over to 5th avenue. Then I started walking down 5th ave. My intention was to walk along the ave for a few blocks then take a cab down to 33rd st, the Empire State Building, and walk to the Flatiron building. Well I ended up walking the entire way to Flatiron. I took a small detour at 34th and walked over to Herald Square and Macy’s. Then I started walking down Broadway towards Union square and ended up at Washington square. I wanted to see the Village Vanguard and the Blue Note Cafe, so I walked over towards Greenwich Village. Found both of the clubs. At this point it started getting hot and muggy so I walked back over to 6th and caught a cab up to 42nd st. I wanted to see the Nintendo store. It was pretty unimpressive. Now my feet were hurting, so I caught a cab back to 63rd and Lex, showered, checked out, and now I’m killing time in the hotel lobby until about 2:30 or so.

Over a hundred pictures are in my gallery of this trip.

Badcatphoto.com

My friend Mike’s bad ass photo site.

I’ve posted a few images of our new blooms in front of our house. The tulips really came in this year. They opened up so wide I thought they were going to turn themselves inside out. The Rhodies are starting to open up, you can see the red one has already bloomed. We have a pink and purple one coming in too. Their color is a surprise since we’ve only had this house since Oct. We didn’t get to see them bloom last year.

I’ll post more there as the other plants start to bloom.

Space Needle

Friday Harbor on San Juan Island – Look around the island, there are a lot of whale watching boats. I wonder if we can see any pods in the water?

Mount Rainier

Mt St. Helens

Pike Place Market

While we were in Houston we drove out to visit some property we own out near Lake Livingston. While we were there, we saw this mailbox and I had to take a picture of it.

Yahoo! News – Egyptian Doctors Remove Baby’s Second Head

Every now and then you see a story like this and you immediately think “That picture has been modified”. Then you sit back in awe of how often a developmental error like this doesn’t happen. Think of the error rate of the human race over the course of history and think about what natures QA department is like.

Matter of fact, It’s all dark!

I don’t know what’s more funny. The shirt, or the ad I had underneath it telling me I could “Make a Valentines day card from this image.”

I don’t kow about down south yet, but we got a lot of snow up in north Seattle. Here’s some pictures of the snow in our backyard.

Michael J. Totten: A Photo Tour of Libya

Amazing photos of Libya.

via:

Image-14C14A60291B11D9.jpg (JPEG Image, 480×640 pixels)

Dirt can’t vote either. When will the pro-plant people stop marginalizing the minerals?

n.b. I originally wrote this article back in June when we returned from San Francisco, but I had some issues with the image gallery

Last week Kim and I went to San Francisco for her old college friend Elizabeths (sing sing) wedding. We stayed in Milbrae, CA about a block from a BART station. We didn’t know it was that close to a station when we arrived at the airport. Kim couldn’t remember if we were staying at a Quality Inn or Quality Suites. So we tried to find their hotel shuttle, couldn’t find it. So she called “Quality Inn at the airport” and apparently got the Quality Inn down by Union Square or something who told her “We don’t have a shuttle, just grab one of the downtown SF shuttles.” We tried to find one of those, but the helpers by the shuttle bay kept telling us different places to go. Sheesh, so I finally just said “ok, where can we catch a cab?” “Downstairs”. Great, fine. A cab will take us right where we need to go. We get a cab and tell him “Quality Inn here at the airport” He says in a thick russian accent, “yeah, yeah sure Quality Inn.” . We get in his cab and off we go.

Ten minutes he pulls into the Holiday Inn by the airport. We explain that we wanted to go to QUALITY Inn and off we go again. Meter going “tick tick tick” the whole time. We get to Quality Inn and they tell us that we don’t have a reservation there. They call the other Quality Inn and Quality Inn Suites hotels in the area and find out we are at the Quality Inn Suites in Milbrae. Great, where’s that at? They end up sending over a limo to pick us up and take us there. Great, then we notice the BART station a block away and remember the BART station at the airport. We were only ten minutes by BART from our hotel and didn’t know it.

We get to the hotel and I decide that I want to take the BART to downtown SF and have a look around. We got out on Powell street and wandered around, Kim was on the cell phone trying to find us a ride out to the wedding in Belmont. Finally I decided I’d like to sample the local cusine and beer. We went into Lefty O’Douls and I ordered and Anchor Steam and got perhaps the best roast beef sandwich I’ve ever had. We ate, drank, listened to the piano player and his audience belt out some songs and then headed back to our room.

The wedding was nice. It was a catholic wedding so we were popping up and down like a whack-a-mole game. The funniest part for us was how everyone just jumped right into the ceremony with their cameras and video cameras. No shame, “with the ring, I thee wed.” “{clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick}”. Afterwards we went to a Chinese restaurant they had booked and had a nine course chinese dinner. They just kept bringing out food.

Dr. Neil’s Adventures: Icing on the top

While Dr. Neil was off at Mt. Rain-Here, which I have yet to go to despite having lived here for over a year, I took my cousin-in-law from Ks. and my wife up to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. Kim and I went there for our first wedding anniversary last year, but that time we were late and just walked on the ferry. This time we got there early enough to take our car over so we could explore the island.

We circled the island. First we stopped at Lime Kiln Lighthouse to try and see some Orca whales, they were all apparently running errands down at Lopez island and wouldn’t be back until later. We didn’t get to see any whales, but we did see a few seals bobbing up and down.

The next stop was Westcott Bay, Kim and Billy are big oyster fans so they bought some fresh oysters and ate them later that night. After that we stopped at the Pelindaba Lavender Farm. Kim loves lavender and needed to buy some gifts for a friends birthday party. We ended up harvesting some fresh lavender and somehow someone managed to buy her some lavender soap and a wand while she was out cutting the lavender. Our last stop for the night was the San Juan Vineyards for some wine tasting and buying. We spent the night up there on the spur of the moment and got a pretty good rate. It was a great weekend.

FARK.com: (1041506) Photoshop this troll bridge

Fark is having a Photoshop contest starring everybodys favorite Fremont troll. I think my personal favorite is either the troll on Mt. Rushmore or the iPod troll.

The Artist’s Statement

If the story in question is factual, then I’m ashamed for our Police force. Sadly, recent supreme court rulings have made it illegal to refuse to offer ID when asked by a police officer in a move reminiscent of East Germany in the 1970’s. (’Papers please!”)

Yesterday, Kim and I met Brian over in Fremont for the 2004 Solstice Parade put on by the Fremont Arts council. As usual the naked cyclists were the hit of the show. Although there one guy just walking around naked with no body paint. The crowd yelled at him to “buy some paint”. My favorite part was when the solstice fairies handed out chalk to the kids along the way and told them to decorate the street.

uhhhhhh, I installed a new gallery plugin and I’m still trying to figure it out. The photos are all overlapping right now. If you click on them you can see the whole photo.

WaterCar – Builder of the World’s Fastest Amphibious Car, Amphibious Cars, Amphibious Vehicles and Amphibious Automobiles

After seeing a link to the water borne camaro at Slashdot last week, I remembed that we had seen a water car when we went down to a lake south of Seattle a few weekends ago. Although the car we saw was a classic car.

I’m posting some pictures I’ve had on my hard drive for a few weeks. These I took over at Childrens Hospital. Every morning I take the shuttle from there to the SCCA down on Fairview Ave. When all the trees started blooming I thought I just had to take some pictures.

For Kims birthday we took a short day trip out to Second Beach on the Olympic Peninsula.