Restoring a circa-1994 PowerBook 520. This is the grayscale 25Mhz 68LC040 model, offering sixteen shades of gray on the screen.

The vain hope that a 16-year-old battery will hold a charge: the most amusing part of the whole process.

900 Grayson, a new-to-me cafe in Berkeley.

Setting the table.

Ads touting Iceland’s new affordability (thanks to the currency collapse) are in danger of outnumbering ads for anything else at Keflavík. Look around and you see an awful lot of empty metal frames that no doubt once advertised international goods and services:

This ladybug showed absolutely no respect for the informative sign at Assistens Kirkegård, telling you where Hans Christian Andersen and other famous people are buried:

A few shots from the Copenhagen Book Fair in November:

The show floor was insanely crowded:

Monica Ali (speaking in English):

The Treasure Collection at Rosenborg Castle book talk:

A quick trip to Copenhagen in November offered me the chance to cash something in that I’d been carrying in my wallet:

At current exchange rates that’s like US$80 worth of coffee… :-/

The middle of October was taken up by the annual Swedish Teachers Conference, which came to Seattle this year. On offer were two days of language-teaching seminars, as well as a display of recently-published books brought by the Swedish Institute:

The guest speaker on the second day was Robert Charlson, professor emeritus in Atmospheric Sciences and Chemistry at UW. He has written on an early 20th-century scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who accurately predicted global warming:

Also presenting was Paul Norlén, who read from his new translation of Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berlings saga.

After western Maryland and DC I set off to Las Vegas, where the big annual convention of Photoshop users is taking place.

This is sort of hard to explain, but the theme for these Photoshop conferences has always been “NFL Football” — so all of the materials and publicity and big opening keynote are styled like a professional football game. It’s hard to believe there’s that much overlap between art-school graduates and people who were QB’s in highschool, but there you go:

Most of what we were doing during the convention was sitting in darkened rooms looking at color correction techniques, which ironically aren’t very photogenic. So instead here are some pictures from a photo walk on foot around the Strip:

The highlight of the trip for me was winning a copy of Jeff Schewe’s new edition of Real World Image Sharpening with Camera Raw, which I got by being the first person to shout out Photoshop author Thomas Knoll’s home town (Ann Arbor, in case anybody attends next year.)

We were in western Maryland to track down a building owned by a relative in the late 19th century, which took us through downtown Cumberland in between late-summer rainshowers:

Cumberland’s earlier economic importance was based in large part on its relationship to the C&O Canal:

Parts of the canal area have been nicely landscaped and turned into a pleasant biking/walking path:

Continuing September’s festival of travel, on to the capital for some Sir Norman Foster inside the old Portrait Gallery:

Can’t forget the Organization of American States!

Plus a tour of museums and monuments that weren’t here when I lived in the area in the late 90s:

Some things haven’t changed, though, like the Air and Space reliably delivering freeze-dried ice cream in their gift store.

The highlight of the trip for me was a visit to the otherwise unremarkable Madison Building at the Library of Congress. I spent a long time here as an eight-year-old, while my dad was doing research in the archives. (Other highlights from that trip: Montecello, Colonial Williamsburg.) I had high hopes of re-visiting the blue-tiled interior fountain court, where I was left to amuse myself in what a more innocent era regarded as not really such a big invitation to kidnapping, I hope. The only person who knew what I was talking about was the septuagenarian gentleman behind the Lost and Found desk, who was shocked that anybody else remembered that there had once, indeed, been a blue-tiled interior fountain courtyard, right over there where cubicles and partition walls now stood. I’m hoping some otherwise-forgotten article in Government Architectural Review happened to publish a picture of the interior courtyard sometime in the 1970s, before it was lost to the demands for more space. Where do kids hang out nowadays while their parents work?