papyrus

A few photos of papyrus plants at the Honolulu Zoo. I don't recall ever seeing papyrus plants before (at least not labeled as such), so I took a few photos. Not overly fabulous photos, I guess, but it's kind of an interesting plant so I figured there was a minor blog post to be had here. And it just wouldn't seem right to do a post on papyrus plants without including a token bit of writing, which is what you're reading now. And since there's a bit of writing anyway, why not use the Papyrus typeface for this post? I mean, it's an ugly cartoonish typeface, but it seems semi-appropriate somehow.

pink ginger & raindrops

taz, july 2011

carwash

This is just a video voyage through a carwash, taken earlier today. I kind of like the abstract quality the clip has, plus I've been procrastinating about washing the car for months now, so I'm kind of saying "Hey, look what I just did" by posting this, as unimpressive a feat as it might be. In my defense, there's really no point in washing a car while we're getting an inch of rain every day, which is most of the year. Furthermore, I also don't drive a lot, and I only remember how dirty the car is when I'm driving and trying to see out the windshield. Also, driving a clean shiny car is simply not the way of software engineers. It would be like wearing a suit to work or something. In short, the whole carwash thing is almost certainly a much bigger deal to me than it is to any of you out there.

Since you're here already, let me direct your attention to the Wikipedia article for "Car Wash", which includes a bit of history and explains briefly how automatic car washes work. For more gory details, there's a rather comprehensive HowStuffWorks article that explains the whole process in depth, with lots of photos. In case you've ever wondered what all the stuff spraying and flapping around is for, I mean. Oh, and here's a History Channel video with some vintage video clips and so forth. It's only about six minutes long, so I guess the History Channel just didn't have time to explain how car wash technology is connected to Hitler, UFOs, and Bigfoot. If they don't already have a multi-hour special on the topic, it's probably only a matter of time.

Anyway, the car's clean now. So now let's sit back and watch it rain nonstop for a few months.

moon, aria

the portland, honolulu

Couple of photos of Honolulu's Portland Building. The name surprises me, and I've yet to determine whether it refers to our Portland, or to some other place, company, person, or thing. A survey of historic buildings of Hawaii mentions it briefly (all typos are theirs):

Portland Building -Constructed in 1903 at South Hotel and Union Mall in Honolulu, in the architectural style of the the Portland Building is the Late Victorian period.

Oregon has a handful of Hawaiian place names, including the Portland suburb of Aloha, and the Owyhee River in the far SE corner of the state. So I suppose it's not unreasonable to have something in Hawaii named after something in Oregon. Still seems peculiar, though.

various flowers, june 2011

pdx indie marketing fail

detour

200 market, infrared

june metablog update

• I've finally updated the Official Map for this humble blog again. If you'd rather look at it in Google Earth, the KML file lives here. Which is part of a tiny Google Site that I just switched from private to public, for whatever that's worth.
  
  I think I've got creation of KML files ironed out now; the next problem is going to be formatting the KML file so that the huge pile of placemarks is more manageable. I have a couple of ideas on how to address that, but I'm not quite ready to start implementing yet.
• I've turned off anonymous comments for the time being, since they're almost always spam. Blogger actually does a pretty good job of filtering out spam, except that I still get email notifying me when spam comments arrive, which is almost as annoying as having to manually delete spam. If there was a setting to only send alerts for non-spam comments, or to enable captchas only for anonymous comments, that would be great. Maybe someday.
• I'm still trying to think of a better way to present the Links page. Right now it's a very long, shallow tree, with plenty of wasted whitespace to the right of it. Going to a two column model might work, although that's not a style I use anywhere else right now so it might look kind of weird. I still have this vague notion that the link tree ought to be an external OPML or XOXO file that gets pulled in, so that the tree structure exists independent of formatting. Not sure how useful that would actually be, though, since OPML hasn't exactly set the world on fire, and XOXO still wants to be OPML when it grows up.
• Oh, and I just noticed that the post count here is exactly 1337, not counting the post you're reading now. But that is counting 24(!) posts clogging the drafts folder, some of which I might end up deleting. Never let anyone tell you that this blog business is an exact science.
  
  It would be kind of interesting to have a Blogger widget that gives visitors a peek at the Drafts folder so they can see what posts are in the works and (possibly) how long they've been in the works. Maybe just titles of posts or something, I dunno. I'm not an expert on writing Blogger widgets, but I suspect this isn't actually possible. Still, it sounds kind of fun to write, and I might even use it if it existed.
  
  In lieu of that, here's a quick summary of what's on the way, maybe, someday. You'd think I'd be out of bridges by now, but no; there are seven bridge posts in Drafts right now, and another two on Willamette River ferries, which seems a bit excessive. I won't argue with you there. Four art posts, three waterfalls, two cheesy monster movies, a partridge in a pear tree, etc. In other words, there's more of the same old, same old in the works, for good or ill.

keller fountain, june 2011 (iv)

keller fountain, june 2011 (iii)

keller fountain, june 2011 (ii)