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This plane is a better dancer than I am. I’m amazed that it can just float there and hover like that. I want one now.

Starlords starts off kind of slow, and the introduction goes on way too long. Once they break into the dance number though all is forgiven. That’s some funny, wacky editing right there.

Cripes! What do you suppose the chances are that I won’t be acutely aware of Justin’s Rattlesnake Bite story the next time I go hiking? Seriously, I was overly aware of looking for snakes before, and that was when I thought that snakes would mostly try to avoid humans if possible. Justin says he was just sitting there with his arm dangling. The Pictures are absolutely horrifying.

Windy Days is a delightfully cute little game. It gets old pretty quick, but it’s nice for a few moments. I like the depth of field — until I start feeling like I’m going blind.

Bendito Machine is a cool little flash animation, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to be about. The site that’s hosting it says it’s about our capacity for hate and war. I don’t get that out of it, but I guess it’s as good an explanation as any.

Since I still had some time off, I checked on visiting the Getty Villa. It just reopened, so you have to get reservations to visit. The rest of the month was full, but I got lucky and was able to get in yesterday.

I think I like the Villa even better than the new Getty Museum. You don’t get the same views of the city, and it’s a little smaller, but the gardens are a lot more pleasant.

Here are Photos.

I had some time off from work, so I took a quick trip North to California’s Central Coast Area (Morro Bay, Cayucos, Hearst Castle, Cambria, Big Sur, Carmel-By-the-Sea, and Monterey) (photos). Then, I cut over to Yosemite National Park (photos).

It was a nice and relaxing trip. I hadn’t really been to either part of California before, so it was great seeing some of the most beautiful scenery in the country.

The coastal areas were fogged in most of the time. That was a bit of a drag since my main mission was to take some interesting photographs, and I don’t know how to photograph fog well. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels sort of mysterious and magical, but it creates this diffused light that I just don’t know how to deal with in photographs. Everything always seems to come out gray and flat and lifeless.

Hearst Castle is amazing (and thankfully the elevation put it above the fog). You can’t use flash though — even outside, so that presented some photographic challenges of its own. I went on two tours, but I didn’t even come close to capturing that place. I’ll have to go and try again sometime. It really is impressive.

Yosemite is a spectacular place. The views are unbelievable. It had its own lighting challenges though, which left the sky blown out compared to the shaded areas under the tree canopy. I tried to use fill flash where I could, but given that the area I was trying to fill was so vast, there was no way my little onboard flash could light it. The bigger problem is that so many photos ended up looking the same. I took several huge capacity cards worth of photos, but they ended up being basically the same shot. I blame my eye. It should be easy to find variety in that setting, but I kept finding my attention pulled to the big, stunning vistas.

How is it possible that Donald Rumsfeld still has a job in this government. Actually, I’m not even sure why Bush still has a job, but the country spoke, and we get the government we deserve I guess.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Rumsfeld. Well, how about a little: Donald Rumsfeld Orders Breakfast at Denny’s. It was written back in 2003, but it’s saddly just as timely as ever.

I found Anatomy of a Software Bug to be fascinating. Now, I’m a bit of a geek, but I think most people would be interested in this in a detective story kind of way.

It basically walks the reader through an error in an old version of Microsoft Word and explores some of the differences in the Windows and Mac versions of Word. It’s really very interesting.

What if… presents a series of ethical thought experiments.

I was kind of turned off when I read the first thought experiment which was really transparent. However, the second twist on the trolley experiment was interesting. I think I can rationalize my choices, but even still, I feel like I’m less consistent in my thinking that I normally am. That’s really interesting to me.