In the time of the chimpanzee...

...jack was a monkey.  Once again, I'm not sure how this will work since I'm submitting it via email. 

A few shots from Master Jacksons dance thingy at his school.  The one with his arms spread out happened at the climax of "Also sprach Zarathustra".  It was an homage to a scene from 2001 (which I found strange for a 1st grade class), but cute nonethe. 

Area hero saves dog...

Not the best photo, I know.  I took it this morning from my car, stalker style.  I even got a few looks from passers-by, which was awesome.  I'm posting this via email as well, to see how it works.

I was scooting to work the other day and I saw this dog walking on the freeway overpass in American Fork.  I thought "That dude is in the wrong place."  I swung around and caught up to him, and he seemed really glad to see me.  Ran right up to me and huddled close.  After calling the Humane Society and giving them the tag number, I got the owners phone number.  I called, and they came to retrieve their dog.  They were relieved to have found him.  To quote Gordon (the owner):  "We're retired, and he's all we have left."   He described where they lived, so I was able to drive over there this morning and find it (again...stalker style.)  There was my little dog buddy hanging out. 

I've never liked dogs really, but this experience has softened me a bit.  Maybe I won't hate it if Blackson has a dog after all. 

Blogger (google) drops the ball...

You may notice that in my last post the photo layout is broken. I think I can fix it manually, but I shouldn't have to. For nearly 5 days now users of blogger.com's FTP or SFTP publishing feature (we publish our weblogs to our own domains via ftp, rather than using whatever.blogspot.com) have been unable to publish photos, and publishing text has been spotty.

There is some pretty heated public outcry on blogger.com's help forum here.

Blogger.com (owned and operated by google) remains frustratingly silent about this. So much so that ftp publishers are starting to leave blogger for other weblog services (like wordpress). I don't post very much lately, so I tend to take a wait-and-see stance here. But I admit, this problem is lasting too long, and googles absolute silence approaches infuriating.

My personal belief is that blogger no longer wants to support ftp as a mode of publishing. Blogger.com offers some pretty great features for embedding photos and videos and they offer a wide variety of cool layout features. Nearly all of these are not available to those of us who use ftp publishing. I'm ok with that. I'm running my weblog on my own simple apache server in my basement. The weblogs hosted on blogspot run on googles servers which support all those neat advanced features. I think Google is tired of providing a dumbed-down version of their software and is hoping we'll all just go away. And I will, if that's how it's going to be.

Hey Google, either give us an ETA for a fix here, or give us our walking papers and maybe some tips on migrating. You're not making any friends staying silent.

Legos...

I've been working on a bit of macro photography (if you can call this that), and I got one that I like. There is room for improvement, but I like where it's going. I've been getting help from this forum.

J has been building the coolest stuff lately. He and I think it would be fun to have largish prints of these types of shots in his room. A 12x18 of this looks pretty cool. Anyone remember that reflections project that got rejected? Pictures of legos. :)

Plus, I think this would make a neat photo book after 50 or 100 of them. What kid wouldn't love to see his old lego creations after 20 years?



55mm, ISO 400 1/8 @ f/32