WANT. GO BACK. GOLDMYER.

In other news: Last night I went out to take pitchers from very specific places, but they were all occupied by people making out. So naturally I told them to take a hike, quit making out, and let me take my pictures.

Well, no I didn’t. But I thought about it.

I did, however, discover the new footbridge over the railroad tracks for public access to Myrtle Edwards park. M.E. is unfortunate enough to be on the most prime of prime Elliot Bay waterfront property. The park itself is scarcely more than a commuter bike path, but there’s some cool public sculpture and a fishing pier.

The park is a strip along the water, and access would only be through the top and bottom end. Once upon a time, you could park a car in a gravel lot near the pier (which is right smack dab in the middle of the length of the park, of course) and folks in wheelchairs could just cross the bike path and be there.

Now, however, things are different. There are condos and office buildings and warehouses crammed into that space, and the way to get over the railroad tracks is now this bridge:

The lovely brushed-stainless post says that the bridge is only open from 6am to 11pm, and since it was 3am when I got there, I decided not to cross. Besides, I felt underdressed. Imagine, if you will, some homeless guys crossing this bridge to get to the pier so they can catch dinner.

Photoblogs.org leads me to daily dose of imagery, which contains:

This entry of pictures of the Drive In Wheel.

I’m linking to the Drive In Wheel, because I dreamed it a long time ago. I had a dream where you got in an imported European car and rolled onto a platform and it took you on a Ferris wheel type ride. Only at one point it flung you off onto a roller coaster track.

My dreams are other people’s reality. Sometimes. Or maybe I was co-dreaming with John Körmeling.

Looking for photoblogs leads me to Photoblogs.org, which leads me to JewelBoxing.com, which leads me to:

Processing, a computer language designed to teach programming to visual artists. It looks an awful lot like Java, folks…

Also to blurbism.com, which I won’t say more about except that it’s really cool.

Update: Nope, no pictures. I didn’t want to spend my time obsessing over f-stops. But here’s the springs’ official website, which has some pictures, as well as the email mailing list archive, which has user-submitted photos.

I spent most of Thursday at a lovely hot spring in the Cascade mountains of central Washington state.

Some friends of mine are doing caretaker work there, looking after the place, making sure people play by the rules, and otherwise enjoying themselves. I went with some other friends up there to visit and do some soaking, and we all had a nice low-key time.

The main spring is in a cave. It extends about, say, 25-30 feet back into the side of a mountain. Just large enough to stand upright inside. The opening has been walled off, so it’s full of water just above waist deep.

The water is around 110 F, and (I’m told) smells of sulphur and lithium. The water has a relatively high lithium content, so if the warm doesn’t mellow you out, the minerals will.

This water spills over the wall into a series of smaller pools artfully built out of local rocks and cement. The whole thing is in a steep gorge, so there’s a mountain river crashing down over the rocks nearby, and this river has been diverted a little bit to provide a cold plunge pool for spring-goers.

Covering this whole scene is a layer of moss and ferns, growing under huge evergreens. One tree on the trail leading to the spring is wide enough for about ten people to hug it at the same time. This is the real-deal Pacific northwest mountain ecosystem.

(I was going to write more, but decided to go public with this entry before that happens.)

A how-to for digital infrared photography.

John Stewart explains talking points.

Did you know that Congressperson Corrine Brown of Florida was censured by Republican leadership for characterizing the 2000 presidential election as a ‘coup d’etat’ on the floor of the house?

Well, she was.

Successful gen-X hipster marketing: Crumpler Bags.

They make camera bags, laptop bags, backpacks, cell phone cases, that kind of thing. Here’s the copy for their ‘Bunion’ camera bags, designed to be stored in other bags:

BUNION INSERTS
(No this is not a foot care product.)

Like a bunion goes on a foot, the Bunion Insert goes in ya bag.  It grows in there; it’s a padded happy chamber but removable.  While it’s in there it sucks all your camera gear inside, turns it into pus then miraculously restores it back into your gear when you open the lid.

A bit extreme, but also funny and charming. All the bags and backpacks are modeled by the same nude cutie. She’s got CENSORED! bars over the naughty bits, however.

They look like good bags, too.

A bash script which uses ImageMagick’s composite command to add all jpegs in a directory together, leaving behind a trail of huge PNG files for later comparison.

Yes, the previous iteration of this script was crap. Here’s the updated version, for the edification of all:

#!/bin/bash

counter=1
for image in *.JPG
 do
  if [ ! -e "output$counter.png" ] ; then
    echo "addimages: converting $image to output$counter.png"
    convert $image output$counter.png
  else
    # outputimage exists, so we can add to it
    let "newcounter = $counter + 1"
    echo "addimages: adding $image, output$newcounter.png"
    composite -compose Add $image output$counter.png output$newcounter.png
    let "counter=$newcounter"
  fi
done

I use Mac OS.

And I use Gentoo Linux.

And once they get some bugs worked out, I’ll be using Gentoo Mac OS.

…Which should really be called Portage Mac OS, but Gentoo Mac OS sounds cooler.