<em>Another</em> QOTD

Just once I'd like to ask a question that doesn't have a stupid answer!

The Mercury Men, a lovingly retro web-based sci-fi serial. Diggin' it.

QOTD

"If the whole thing is a put-on, a bit of Vincent Gallo life-as-theater for the benefit of whoever happens to be sitting next to them, that's no excuse. It's being an asshole about being an asshole."

Steve Albini on Odd Future

Heron

My workplace campus maintains a pretty nice water feature, and it is home to a variety of wildlife. We get lots of ducks and geese, and have a number of nutria waddling about. But over the last few years, we've become a summer home for a handsome Heron. I recently took to parking my car at the far end of the campus from my building, to force myself to walk a bit more at the end of the day. This has had the side benefit that I often see Mr. Heron.

I've begun snapping him when I can, first with the joke camera in my iPod Touch, then with my P&S, which I've started taking to work for just this purpose. He wasn't there this weekend, but I plan to try to grab him with my D70 and my 70-200mm lens some weekend, and I'll add any results to this photo set.

LXD Season 3!

Yay! The Extraordinary 7 kicks off the new season of LXD!

Spotify

If you check my Last.FM list, you'll see that instead of getting ready for bed and tomorrow, I've been frittering away the evening playing with the free stream from Spotify, which launched in the US today (Hacker News was full of free invites, and in fact included a Python program to scan for available invites, so I used that).

Like all music services, for sale or streaming, it is incomplete, failing some of my 'acid test' list of hard-to-find musicians and albums, but it nevertheless has an impressive playlist with many 'soundtrack-of-my-life' songs. It won't replace eMusic, or anyway, it won't replace the eMusic I liked before they tried to become iTunes-only-more-expensive-and-less-convenient, but it will let me play in the more popular streams. Still need a good indie/jazz/world/outsider vendor to force me outside of my comfort zone, but this will be fun for more conventional needs.

Photo Finish

Okay, I finally worked through the pile of photos from Paris. The photoset is complete at 248 pics. And while there are many I enjoy (and many I admit are pretty pedestrian), this metro candid and this Montmartre stairwell photo are my favorites. So much for snaps of tourist attractions!

Paris

Before I left for work this morning, I queued up an upload of the first batch of photos from our trip to Paris, which happened last week. The first batch I managed to work through since our return home amounts to around eighty pics. When I'm finished, however long that takes, it should be around 300 photos, some interesting to the general public, some only to me. You can watch the evolving photoset here.

And for the record, I am a bad person. I did not get anybody souvenirs. This is partly because we packed a single carry-on each (even going so far as to hand wash a pair of pants in the hotel tub during the trip). The only 'souvenir' I got myself was a museum shirt so that I had something to wear one day, and I wore it home on the plane.

Sorry friends, I am a bad friend. If I ever go on another trans-continental trip, I'll try to mail things back home...

On a lighter note, I discovered that my stabbing sinus flight malady can be greatly reduced by applying saline nasal sprays every half hour during the trip, and taking a vicodin about an hour before the final descent. This is a single data point, so it may have been just luck, but the landing in Paris was nasty, and the landing in Sea-Tac was merely unpleasant, so I'll be trying that drill again if ever forced aboard another jet.