Ski Trip 2009

View over Lake Tahoe

PowerBook 520

PowerBook 520 plastic parts

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

PowerBook 520

PowerBook 520

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

PowerBook 520

900 Grayson

900 Grayson

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

Thanksgiving 2009

Thanksgiving

Setting the table.

Iceland after the boom

We don't think so.

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:

Empty advertising frame

Keflavík

Copenhagen Bug

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:

P1020673

Copenhagen Book Fair

A few shots from the Copenhagen Book Fair in November:

The show floor was insanely crowded:

Copenhagen Book Fair

Monica Ali (speaking in English):

Monica Ali

The Treasure Collection at Rosenborg Castle book talk:

Copenhagen Book Fair

Cashing in a coffee card

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

Baresso stampcard

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:

IMG_8381

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:

IMG_8431

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

Photshop World 2009

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

photoshopworld 2009

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:

photoshopworld 2009

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:

camera

gold shoe

sunset

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.)

Cumberland, MD

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:

Downtown Cumberland

Downtown Cumberland

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

Cumberland, MD

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

Cumberland, MD

Cumberland, MD

On to Washington DC

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

Portrait Gallery

Can’t forget the Organization of American States!

OAS

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

WWII Memorial

NMAI

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

Air & Space

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?

LOC Madison Building

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Bilder

Flash Required

Recent Comments

  • Peter: Hi Chris, thanks for your comment! If you haven't seen read more
  • Chris Treen: So good to see someone else building one of these. read more
  • Laura: Wow, Peter. Thank you for this most helpful explanation. Anything read more
  • Sathish: I Tried and it says "CODE ERROR".. what should i read more
  • Scott: The way that Facebook is redesigning stuff these days, I read more
  • Peter Leonard: Hi there Maria, your problem may be that the Updates read more
  • Maria: Hi there, Thanks a lot for this very useful link. read more
  • Shandor: Are those crackers on the closest plate? Was there some read more
  • Peter: Test of commenting. read more
  • Anonymous: Many thanks for the post. I find it enormously useful read more