In answer to thenarrator’s query:

Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’! Keep the Honda rollin’!

I’m in the lovely town of… Er… Wait, where am I? Glancing at the phone which has thoughtfully been labeled for exactly this sort of crisis, I see that I’m at some hotel in Hays, Kansas. Through the magic of digital media and in-room wi-fi, you get to now see the view out my window:

Tres pittoresque.

Here’s a picture I took at a gas station in northeast Texas:

And, finally, a picture of Weird not wanting to be photographed:

Weird is Garfield’s Harley-customizing big brother who was in special ops and can’t talk about those years with anyone.

Last night there was a huge lightning storm south of Dallas, and I drove right through it. It was an amazing light show, but not horribly dangerous. Later on that evening, north of Denton, there wasn’t any rain, but there was a quick flash of intensely bright light… Brighter than lightning. Being a little stunned, it took me a few seconds to realize that it was coming from a transformer on an electric pole next to the road about a quarter mile ahead. I noticed that all the lights had gone out in the vicinity, but they started to blink back on, one by one as a secondary system brought them some juice. Then it happened again, and this time I was less than 50 yards away. Sparks shot over the interstate, and I’d have slammed to a stop except there was a semi right behind me. I sped through the area, hoping to put the exploding transformer behind me.

Looking around at the other drivers, I seem to have been the only one to notice. No one else even slowed down. Apparently this kind of thing happens all the time.

Who wants to do some springtime bicycling at Yellowstone? The road opening schedule at Yellowstone means that the roads are plowed about a month before the public is allowed to drive on them. This allows maintenance on the re-opening park facilities. During this time, bikes (and even skaters) can rule the road.

Yellowstone in ‘winter’ without snowmobiles… Sounds good to me.

More photo geek linkage:

How to shoot art repro slides. Good advice for shooting any static object, actually. Comes from a site called Arts for the Parks, an art competition for art featuring the ‘spirit of the national parks.’ Too bad there’s no photography division.

OpenAperture, a blog by a photographer using open source software.

I’ve always wondered about the IPTC standard(s). That page is at controlledvocabulary.com, and the same guy who does that has some excellent (looking) software to manage IPTC metadata and so forth.

The friendly-sounding Image Numbering, Filing, and Retrieval

Dry Creek Photo has a bunch of good stuff about color management. Learn why you should calibrate your monitor.

Rawformat is a newsblog about so-called digital negatives.

Adobe has proposed a standardized RAW file format called DNG that has been widely accepted. No free Photoshop plugins for it, though. Open standard: good. Non-free software: bad. Helas.

Pentax’ Photo Laboratory software sucks, by the way. It’s slow and unreliable. Raw Developer looks like a good alternative, but I’m too busy with other things to give it any real attention.

Raw Developer swipes a lot of code from dcraw, which is an amazing piece of software.

Also: Photographyblog.

It happens every year, that I come to Texas for Thanksgiving and/or Xmas, and I end up with a cold or the flu or a sinus infection, or some other strange malady.

I got here just before Christmas, had a day or two of rebound from the trip, was inundated with the various social events (Xmas eve party and Xmas day visit to my brothers’ house), and then the next day… Bam! Sore throat, nasty cough, clogged nasal passages, etc.

It’s taken until a couple days ago for me to really feel up to anything. I have zero extra energy for getting excited about the return trip, however. I had all these notions, and they never materialized into plans, and even if they had, being sick soaked up all the time, and now I’ve just got to wander back to Seattle so I can find a new place to live before next month.

Like I said: This is just how it goes when I visit Houston. I should just stay away. Maybe make it as close as my sister’s, up in Conroe, without actually entering city limits.

via Worldchanging:

Before/during/after satellite images of tsunami destruction, from DigitalGlobe.

The throat thing is mostly over. I’ll be ready to travel back home real soon now (as they say).

Xmas brought me the opportunity to buy a new camera, so I did.

And I took it with me yesterday to the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Reservation, with my sister and my dad. They’re avid birdwatchers, and while we didn’t see any prairie chickens (the public is kept away from that part of the reserve), we did see lots of species I never thought I would.

I was most impressed by the birds of prey, since they’re big and cool and sexy and so forth. We saw harriers and caracaras and the ubiquitous TVs and BVs (turkey vultures and black vultures). One white-tailed hawk. Probably some others I can’t remember. Also ducks and herons and phoebes and all the birds you expect to see in the coastal plains of Texas. Here’s what the coastal plains of Texas look like:

There are some tiny birds in that tree, but you can’t really see them. Did I mention, the Texas coastal plains are FLAT?

There really aren’t any decent pictures of birds, since I don’t have the kind of lens that would allow such things. If anyone wants to supply me with a 300+mm lens, I’d be happy to go back and shoot some more pics. But there was one bird that was still long enough for me to get a few good pictures…

The irony here is that the bird is a shrike, which is a species that takes the bugs it catches and impales them on thorn bushes and barbed wire in order to come back later for a snack. This shrike got entangled in a wild rose bush and couldn’t get back out. My sister pointed it out to me. She has an eerie ability to find birds in trees. Even dead ones.

The other irony is that this little bird died a claustrophobic death in this wide open space:

Free wi-fi (well, $1.50 wi-fi, if you include the excellent fair trade organic Peruvian coffee I bought) means PICTURES! Film is so limiting… You can’t blog until you get processing, and then until your dad decides to buy a scanner so he can scan in his old slides.

On the drive, I stopped at Malad Gorge. It’s a lovely crack in the volcanics of the area, caused by underground streams transforming into above-ground ones. The creek feeds into the Snake River. Another view:

That’s an aqueduct snaking along the bottom of the canyon. And though you can’t really see it here, at the mouth there’s a bridge with a semi driving over it. It’s a big canyon.

Meanwhile, the next day in Colorado:

This is a random mountaintop in Colorado. The weather was really nice for the first half of the trip, with bright days and nice clouds. I don’t have any pictures of the nasty weather in the second half, because who wants to see me driving through snow in Oklahoma and north Texas?

I’m at a cafe in Houston, one with free wi-fi. There’s a sign on the door, and it says, “One drink minimum.” You usually see stuff like that at bars, but now that wi-fi has eclipsed sex as a commodity…

Anyway. There’s a guy sitting behind me, and he just said these words: “…he got his masters, and then the next day he was shipped off to Iraq.”

More file-it-for-later linkishness: Travels with Samantha, a photographic travelogue.

That’s the problem with photo.net… I go there to find out the best way to store negatives, and I end up side-tracked reading some guy’s travelogue. In fact, that’s pretty generally the problem with the web. And the world. And it’s not really a problem, is it?