may demolition

So I logged in just now and looked at a couple of posts in the drafts folder, figuring I'd do the virtuous thing and finish one of them before starting anything new. But I got tired just looking at them, and the draft posts will have to wait for another day. Instead, I thought I'd raid the archives again. So here are some photos of an old building in downtown Portland being demolished, from way back in May of this year.



Blogging is often thought to be all free-form, unstructured, and spontaneous, but that's not how things typically work here, at least not at the present time. The current formula for a Cyclotram post goes something like this:

1. Pick out a place (or thing) that seems potentially interesting, go there, and take a bunch of photos.
2. Sort through the photos, pick some of the best ones, touch them up a bit, and upload to Flickr. If a new photoset appears over on my Flickr page, it's often a sign there's a post in the works, sooner or later. But please, don't pester me about when the post about such-and-such park is going to show up. I don't need that kind of pressure, and I won't make any promises.
3. Create a draft post with a bunch of photos, and maybe some skeleton or placeholder text.
4. Add fascinating observations or amusing anecdotes about my visit to the place (or thing), assuming I have any. Alternately, just be snarky and disagreeable.
5. Whip out the Google-Fu, and dredge up all the weird or interesting tidbits I can find about the place (or thing), add all these links to the draft post.
6. Somehow whip all the ingredients together into a semi-coherent whole, hopefully something that someone out on the interwebs might want to read someday.
7. Reread a couple of times, hit "Post".
8. Immediately reread again, find a couple of things that need changing, and fix those. Optionally, rearrange the order of the photos on the page. This happens more than you might think, actually.
9. Wait, often in vain, for the search engine hits to roll in.
10. Repeat as necessary. Or much more often than strictly necessary, as I tend to do.

As I've said once or twice before, the ingredient-whipping is generally the hardest part. That often means I've gone overboard with either the photos or the research. It's fun to scour the net and find everything it's possible to learn about the topic (at least without consulting any dead-tree sources), but when that results in a couple of dozen links to sort through and make sense out of, that becomes kind of daunting. And when you realize you've just taken over 200 photos during the latest "expedition", well, who the hell has time to sort through 200 photos? Who has time to tinker with any decent-sized subset of those photos? Well, I occasionally do, but it's usually anyone's guess when the next opportunity will roll around.



Even now, I'm resisting the temptation to go hit Google and tell you all about these old buildings on Park Avenue, and the shiny new one that Tom Moyer's putting in to replace them. I could do that, but then this post would take longer. So not this time, I guess. I can always come back and add that stuff if it turns out I feel guilty about leaving it out. That's actually happened before. More than once, in fact.

ice, razor wire

You want snowpocalyptic? I've got your snowpocalyptic right here.

Ultra-Snowpocalypse™ 2008 II : The Sequel

It's come to my attention that the last batch of photos really wasn't all that snowpocalyptic, all things considered. It's probably fair to say this batch isn't very snowpocalyptic either, really. But hey.

The above photos were taken right around "sunset" the other day, and the river really was that color, briefly.



Here's something you don't often see: Seagulls floating down the Willamette, on a chunk of drifting ice.




A crappy snowman I made the other day while waiting for the bus. Once it was "done", a family showed up to wait for the bus, and the kids thought it was adorable. A "baby snowman", they called it, and they built it a friend. Their snowman was much, much better than mine.








Ice on the bus shelter, from the same wait for the bus. It was a long wait. I actually took these in a hurry just as the bus finally arrived, but I like to think they turned out reasonably artsy anyway. In fact, I feel I deserve a huge government grant to keep churning out reasonably artsy stuff like this. Or a huge grant from a big-name nonprofit, funded by some well-meaning philanthropic patron of the arts. That would be fine too.




City Hall, with someone's "Merry Xmas" message in the snow. It's gotten so whenever I see the word "Xmas", I always think of Futurama and Evil Robot Santa. But that's just me.



The stupid pioneer statue in the Plaza Blocks. I have a draft post about it sitting around half-finished; I'll probably get it done once the snow melts or something.

Ultra-Snowpocalypse™ 2008

The local TV stations have already swiped the obvious slogans for the current "snow event", like "Arctic Blast", "Deep Freeze" and "Severe Weather Alert", so I had to get creative.

I do think "Ultra-Snowpocalypse™ 2008" has a nice ring to it, though.

he found the remote

I guess this explains all those pay-per-view charges for "Endangered Flightless Birds of the World".

It may also explain that irresistible urge I get to give him another cat treat every time he presses the green button...

mid-morning snowstorm

...from the office, peering out at the storm while fixing somebody's wacky C++ JNI code...

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...and from home, playing around with flash plus an old East German lens at f1.8...

Vancouver Railroad Bridge

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A few photos of the Vancouver Railroad Bridge on the Columbia River, also known as Burlington Northern Bridge 9.6. Which, maybe not surprisingly, is on the same rail line as BNSF Bridge 5.1 over the Willamette.

Ever since I was a kid, I always thought swing-span bridges like this were kind of cool for some reason. Back in 6th grade or so, we had a big end-of-year class field trip where they put us all on a boat and cruised up and down the Willamette River, and we were supposed to take notes and there would be a quiz later, so that we could all pretend it was educational. I may have been the only one actually paying attention, teachers and parents included. At one point we passed the old Bridge 5.1, back before it was converted to a lift span, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, the way part of the bridge actually rotated out of the way.

Ok, so sure, this kind of bridge has its drawbacks. One of the big selling points when the lift span went in was that the harbor could now accommodate ships twice as wide as before, since the center pivot bit wasn't there as an obstruction anymore.

I feel kind of guilty this time around, like I haven't done enough work for a proper post. The "photo shoot" for this post took about 5 minutes (and I hope it doesn't show, but it probably does). I also don't have a lot of useful or interesting info to share about this bridge. A few years ago, there was a proposal to modify the bridge for the benefit of river traffic. The proposal was considered and eventually rejected, though. At this point, the Powers That Be are so focused on replacing the nearby I-5 bridge that messing with the railroad bridge is probably way down the agenda.

Except insofar as it would help out with the new I-5 (or "Columbia Crossing") bridge, anyway. I understand the rail bridge causes something of a design complication for the I-5 bridge. It opens practically right next to the Vancouver shore of the river, so to accommodate river traffic the new I-5 bridge will either have to do the same, which the design people don't like; or the shipping channel has to move south, which means modifying the rail bridge to be in line with the new bridge; or ships will have to make a sort of dog-leg sideways across the river between the two bridges in order to pass them.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole "Columbia Crossing" thing, so I don't really have an opinion about how they ought to deal with the shipping channel issue. Any option that doesn't involve ships hitting the bridge while I'm driving over it will probably be just fine, I guess.

Some photos of the bridge from around the interwebs, but mostly from Flickr:

from the river
pivoting
more pivoting
pivoting at night - a cool, oddly spooky photo.
one train crossing
two trains, side by side
vanishing point
a train and something called a "hi rail truck" I always thought those were cool, but until today I didn't know what they were called. Here's more about hi-rail trucks, if you're as curious as I was.
trains bound in opposite directions
more vanishing point - I wasn't quite brave enough to get up on the tracks and take one of these. It's a very busy bridge, you know.
from around the corner from where I took my photos
from the Hayden Island side of the bridge
again from Hayden Island
wider angle from Hayden Island
from mid-bridge, presumably from a train engine
the Marine Drive span of the bridge, which is actually a whole separate bridge, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge, aka "BNSF Bridge 8.8" from the Oregon mainland to Hayden Island.
christmas ships

"I'm Flying, John!"

Say "hi" to downtown Portland's new, more affordable aerial tram...