palm (detail)

mystery fruit

When I first posted this I said:

I have no idea what sort of fruit this is. My plant ID skills are pretty bad at the best of times, and I don't exactly improve while visiting unfamiliar tropical locales.

If you know what we're looking at here, please feel free to leave a comment.

The mystery is solved now, thanks to yus_prinandy on Flickr. This is a noni fruit (Morinda citrifolia). They aren't supposed to be very tasty in this form, and they're said to be rather stinky (although I didn't notice that part). Despite that, it's a traditional medicinal plant, and the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture has a site full of info on growing them.

papaya tree

A papaya tree at the Honolulu Zoo. It's a rather odd-looking plant that is apparently not a real tree, technically speaking, and has a whole genus ( Carica ) all to itself.

night, las vegas strip

old motel, las vegas strip

The abandoned White Sands Motel, across the street from the Luxor. This page about old Vegas motels has a vintage photo for comparison. More info on the White Sands and other vintage Vegas motels here.

TR, October 2010

red crested cardinal, kapiolani park

A red-crested cardinal in Honolulu's Kapiolani Park. They're native to South America and were introduced to the Hawaiian islands around 1930. I haven't found any info on why they were imported originally. As far as I know they're strictly decorative; they aren't edible and they don't control agricultural pests. So maybe they escaped someone's aviary or something along those lines. In any case, they're kind of cute and they seem to be everywhere.

waikiki jellies

Jellyfish at the Waikiki Aquarium. As always, I forgot to note the exact species shown in either video clip, which sort of limits the educational value here. And I could probably have gotten better clips if I'd filmed them with something other than a Blackberry, for instance if my DSLR took video, which it doesn't. And I'm sure they'd be much more relaxing if I added a gentle New-Agey piano soundtrack or something, if I knew anyone who made that sort of music, which I don't. But hey.

twilight, waikiki

catamaran, waikiki

aria at night

evening fog, lincoln city

chinatown cats, honolulu

mindanao gum

A colorful Mindanao gum tree (a species of eucalyptus) at the Honolulu Zoo.

Octopus cyanea

A day octopus (Octopus cyanea) at the Waikiki Aquarium.

waikiki sunset, christmas 2010

waikiki, infrared

waikiki afternoon

Just got back to Portland, thought I'd pass along a typical hotel balcony photo. I was probably sipping on a nice cold beer and listening to the hotel tiki bar's cover band when I took this. Meanwhile, I understand it was snowing or sleeting or raining buckets or something similarly awful here in PDX. Could somebody please remind me why the hell I live here again? Because I've completely forgotten.

Why I'm getting on a plane for the holidays

Here's a video I took around this time last year, trudging through ice and snow and slush in downtown Portland, wielding an iPod nano and trying not to fall over. It really wasn't all that much snow, but it was quite slippery and hard to walk in, hence the heavy breathing towards the end of the video, for which I'd like to apologize in advance. I'm sure it didn't help that I'd spent the entire day in meetings, leveraging proactive synergies outside the box on a go-forward basis. Also, it was uphill the whole way. Also, it was my birthday and dinner plans were cancelled due to the snow. A supremely crappy day all around.

So this year the plans are a little different, and involve vacation and a plane to somewhere a bit more tropical. Stay tuned.

5

So this humble blog turned 5 years old yesterday. I suppose I ought to have some remarks prepared about what I've learned so far, or a list of favorite posts from over the years, but I haven't gotten around to that. I kind of meant to do something like that for the 1000th post, and failing that the 1024th, but I was busy and just didn't get around to it. In part I think it's that anniversaries like this are of no possible interest to anyone but me, and they're of only passing interest to me. On top of that, I also have a birthday in a few days that I'm kind of dreading, so looking backwards over all the many years that have passed just doesn't feel very compelling.

I have been tinkering around with the blog, though. I thought it was looking a bit dated so I've been doing a bit of template tweaking. What's changed so far:

• I thought the sidebar was getting kind of cluttered & junky, so I moved a bunch of stuff off to static pages instead, like the ginormous Link Tree and my paltry About info.
  
• Speaking of static pages, this humble blog now has a navigation bar up top, including links off the site to Flickr & Twitter (instead of the sidebar Flash widgets I used to have for them).
  
• The post area has been widened so Flickr's new 640x427 image size fits. I've been going back and updating old posts to use larger images, starting with the ones listed in the Popular Posts widget, and continuing with others as they get hits. Speaking of the Popular Posts widget, would anyone be too upset if it went away? I'm of two minds about it right now.
  
• Reduced the number of colors used, and toned down the remaining ones. The post background is just white now instead of yellow/cream/whatever. I tried to find a more subdued version of that color first but didn't see anything I liked. I think the thing's a lot more readable now.
  

I admit the new static pages aren't too fabulous yet. That's still on the TODO list. Lots of things are still on the TODO list.

column detail

Actually the main reason behind this post was to help tweak the humble blog template a bit more so that larger-sized Flickr photos will fit.

Of course now I'll probably feel obligated to go back and update old posts to use larger photos. Oh, the fun just never stops here in the blog industry.

template tweakage

Tinkering with the humble blog template again, and I'm not done just yet. Comments are welcome if you have strong feelings about it either way.

The vast media empire shrinks again

We must be up to at least Web 3.0 now, because a lot of vintage Web 2.0 apps are hitting end of life these days. First Bloglines got axed, and now comes the news that Yahoo! is killing off del.icio.us, the "social bookmarking" service. I used to use del.icio.us all the time but haven't done so as much since I got into Twitter. I first saw the story on Twitter, come to think of it.

So it turns out del.icio.us has this really great feature where you can export all your bookmarks as a ginormous HTML file so they aren't lost forever. So it's not really the end of the world, like it would be if they decided to kill off Flickr, or Google decided to nuke Blogger. And it'll be one less gadget cluttering up the blog sidebar, so there's that.

So since I've got this big blob full of HTML bookmarks, I figured I might as well post it here, so it continues to be shared and all that. So here's the whole schmear (after the jump), starting with the most recent entries and going allll the way back to 26 April 2006.

FWIW.

Carwash Fountain

A couple of video clips of downtown Portland's "Carwash Fountain", on the transit mall at SW 5th & Burnside. The city water bureau's page on downtown fountains describes it thusly:

Popularly known as "The Car Wash" (Officially Untitled)
Located at SW 5th and Ankeny Street.

This tubular fountain designed by Carter, Hull, Nishita, McCulley and Baxter was installed in 1977. A wind gauge shuts off its water on gusty days to prevent hazards for motorists.

There isn't a lot on the net about this architectural firm except for references to this fountain, but an intriguing detail emerges from a thesis titled "The Fate of Lawrence Halprin's Public Spaces: Three Case Studies", in reference to a park project in Fort Worth, TX:

The park was conceptualized by Halprin, but primarily designed and planned by associate Satoru Nishita, as indicated by the office documents. Therefore, when Lawrence Halprin and Associates disbanded in 1976, much of the correspondence reveals confusion regarding with whom Fort Worth officials should consult. The newly formed Carter Hull Nishita McCulley Baxter (CHNMB) seems to have been the primary contact after the Halprin and Associates breakup. Perhaps due to this final confusion, very little reference to this design exists.

Halprin and Associates, you may recall, was the firm behind Portland's Keller Fountain and Lovejoy Fountain, among other things. The Wikipedia bio for Halprin's associate Satoru Nishita indicates he worked on both of those projects, and apparently was the Nishita in the name of the subsequent firm. So this fountain has an interesting ancestry. And an unexpected one, since "Untitled" here looks nothing at all like the earlier two.

You might be curious why I posted a couple of video clips rather than the usual overly large set of fair-to-middlin' photos. For some reason I don't have a lot of photos of the thing, despite having an office a couple of blocks away for over 5 years. And of the few I've taken, none really seemed worth posting here. Part of the problem is that the wind sensor everyone goes on about also seems to detect me waving a camera around nearby, and the fountain has an uncanny way of shutting off as I'm framing a shot. Not really sure how that would be possible, but it's happened at least twice that I can recall. The once exception to that rule seems to be the shooting of brief yet boring video clips, so I have two of those, and here they are.

The YouTube video was previously seen here by the elite few people who visited that particular 2006 post. At the time I said:

It's often called the "Car Wash", but don't be fooled. If you try to wash your car in it, a nice policeman will drop by and shoot you full of holes. I mean, not to detract from the relaxing(?) tone of this post or anything, but the fuzz really will do it. Go ahead and try it if you don't believe me. [Legal Disclaimer: Don't!]

If I'd written this a couple of years later, it would have contained a waterboarding joke instead. Ah 2006, you were such an innocent bygone year... Anyway, what will actually happen is that you'll get a misdemeanor citation with a small fine and maybe some community service, plus the entire internet will make fun of you for a few days, especially if there's video, and forever after strangers will approach you on the street demanding to know if you're that carwash fountain guy/gal. Maybe you'll eventually get a cheesy reality show gag out of it, if you're lucky.

Elsewhere on the interwebs:

• Here is someone else's video, which is better than either of mine, not that that would be very difficult.


• Photos by Artnchicken, UnrulyJulie, & an overhead view by JAFO09


• Blog posts at Portland (OR) Daily Photo, EnzymePDX, Edward Blank, & The Travel Gal.

---

Updated: This little post here has been lifted -- naturally without attribution or anything, by what looks like a spamblog. As far as I can tell, it's nothing but randomly swiped content about car washes, posted anonymously without any credits or bylines, and with hyperlinks stripped out for some reason. They don't appear to be selling anything, and there aren't even any ads there, so it's not clear what the point of it all is. There's surprisingly little one can do about content thieves on the interwebs if you aren't a ginormo-monstrous record company or movie studio. Google suggests you try a DMCA takedown. I still might do that, but I'm not a huge DMCA fan and I'd hate to seem hypocritical by using it to my advantage. What makes this doubly annoying is that the Portland Water Bureau posted links to the swiped post -- rather than the original -- on both Facebook and Twitter this morning, and the either haven't clued in on the mistake or haven't bothered to fix it. I mean, I'm not selling anything either, and I don't have any ads, so purloined content and waylaid traffic doesn't translate into lost revenue or anything. I'd have to say it's purely an ego or vanity thing: I just don't like to see people making off with my stuff, even if they don't benefit and I'm not harmed in any concrete way. And besides, the videos themselves are still getting hits from the copied post, even if the original post isn't. The fact that it was done anonymously is puzzling; I'd probably be even more aggravated if there was a name attached, someone falsely claiming to have written this post. As it is, it's merely incomprehensible. I just don't see what their angle is. Maybe they're trying to boost a search engine ranking for some reason. I didn't see anything weird in the page source, so if they're trying to give you malware, they're doing so very subtly. Or it's a fresh attempt to figure out (or confuse) Blogger's spamblog-detection algorithm. Or someone's being paid to blog about washing cars, and they're lazy/greedy and are taking the shortest of shortcuts. Honestly, I can't come up with very many plausible hypotheses as to what might be going on here. I'll update this again if I decide to try to anything about it, which I may or may not do.

Stark Street Bridge

View Larger Map

Today's installment in the ongoing bridge project takes us out to the Sandy River once again, this time to the Stark Street Bridge. Stark was one of the first roads on the east side in Portland, and generally follows the Willamette Baseline for much of its length. It extends all the way from the Willamette River to the Sandy, and originally sported milestones (some of which still exist) at one mile intervals along its entire length. At the Sandy end, the road winds down the hill to the river, and ends when it merges into the Columbia River Highway. Although the historic mile markers along surviving parts of the Columbia River Highway continue with the Stark St. numbering all the way to The Dalles, believe it or not.

This bridge dates to 1914, around the same time as the old highway went in. Apparently there was a ferry at this spot before that, and the original road alignment went more or less straight downhill to the river, and roughly straight back uphill on the other side on present-day Woodard Road. Those steep roads wouldn't have been paved at the time either, so it would have been muddy most of the year in addition to being steep. The newer road alignment along the river on the east bank of the bridge required a bit of blasting and excavation, apparently.

Although I just said "east bank", there's a geographic quirk here that's worth pointing out. The bridge sits on a bend in the Sandy River, so when you cross to the east bank of the river, you're actually heading north and slightly west.

Info from across the interwebs, mostly the usual suspects:

• Structurae
  
• BridgeHunter
  
• Byways.org has a historic postcard image of the bridge.
  
• Series of photos on Wikimedia from something called the "Historic American Engineering Record", which sounds like a fancy name for going around taking photos of bridges, basically.
  
• Photos by Mike Goff, Michelle Smith, Jodi Tripp, Richard Doody
  

There's one amusing bit of trivia to relate about the bridge. This isn't the first bridge at this location; the first was an extremely flimsy wood truss bridge that collapsed under the weight of traffic. The Oregon Highway Commission's 1914 Biennial Report described the current bridge and its ill-fated predecessor:

Located two miles from Troutdale, Oregon, over Sandy River, near the Portland Automobile Club House. This bridge replaces an old wooden structure which fell on Good Roads' Day, April 25, 1914, dropping a 5ton auto truck into the river.

The report even includes photos of the original bridge, both before and after it collapsed. It's not hard to imagine the cruel mockery that would have ensued had the Internet existed in 1914. I suppose it's not too late if you want to get in on the mirth and mayhem. Just copy one of the report photos and give it a meme-compatible caption, something along the lines of "GOOD ROADS FAIL". Upload it somewhere the cool kids can find it, and shazam, you win +1 internets.

Walking across is about the same situation as the slightly older bridge downstream in Troutdale, although the walkway is less rickety. If anything, it gets even less pedestrian traffic than the Troutdale bridge, since there isn't a public park right at either end of the bridge, and there's no sidewalk once you're on the east bank of the river. I don't really have any helpful safety tips when it comes to the usual "not dying" angle. If you're superstitiously inclined, you might want to avoid the bridge if they hold another Good Roads Day here. Not sure there's much danger of that; the practice seems to have fallen out of favor except for one town in New Hampshire that's kept the tradition alive semi-continuously since 1914. Same time of year and everything. So if New Hampshire falls into the ocean or has a civil war, or all of New England is consumed by an unholy Lovecraftian apocalypse or whatever, and we're colonized by the refugees, and they try to transplant one of their quaint and unironic New England festivals here, and you're of a superstitious bent, and you happened to read this humble blog and know there's something to be superstitious about, there are a lot of nice places you could be on that day that aren't this bridge. Yeah, ok, that's a real stretch, I readily admit that. But the rules say I have to come up with something, because them's the rules.