I recently got a MacBook Air. Julie has one too, so we’re constantly mistaking hers for mine and vice versa. This seemed like a natural opportunity to stick a decal or ’skin’ on our laptops to tell them apart.
I’ve never really been a guy who puts stickers on, well, anything. I’ve never had them on my car or binders in high school and never on a laptop, either. There’s nothing wrong with them–I’ve just never had the impulse.
I wanted to make a custom skin from a photo I’d taken. So I spent a while trolling through my Flickr account and settled on this one (click for bigosity):
I wrote about taking that shot–it’s from Malta. So, too, is the photo on Julie’s laptop.
More or less at random, I chose Unique Skins, and placed an order. It costs $20 per skin, which seemed pretty reasonable to me. The skin arrived last week, and here it is on my laptop:
I’m pretty happy with that result. That photo doesn’t really do the colours justice, but they feel quite true to my original capture.
I asked around on Twitter, and a couple of people recommended Gelaskins as an alternative, Canadian vendor of custom skins.
I recently spent some time in a government office. While in the usual back and forth through the front door, to the bathroom and so forth, I observed that they had a surprising number of signs that stated the obvious.
They seemed, like so many preventative measures, to attempt to indemnify the government against potential legal action. They amused me a little, so I snapped some photos. Each one is really mundane by itself, but the volume of them was a little overwhelming.
This one was on the inside of the mens’ room door. I wonder how I’ve survived the hundreds (thousands?) of sign-free swinging doors I’ve confronted in my life.
Ironically, I had to hold the door open to snap a photo of this one:
Here’s one more photo from the same office. These packages were attached to the underside of each desk in the conference room:
I gather they’re individual disaster preparedness kits. I didn’t look too closely, but they contain a filter mask, a little bottle of water and whistle, among other things.
I only discover them because I accidentally kicked one under the desk. I’m not sure I’d like to be reminded of my potential doom every time I took a meeting.
While I’m uploading some new photos to my Kentucky photo set, here are a couple of favourites:
This dog was awaiting its owner outside of the monastery. It came over to confer with us, and paused only momentarily to check out this box turtle. The turtle, as you might imagine, was non-plussed:
Even in rural Kentucky, you can’t avoid the social media:
This sign is pretty self-explanatory:
I’m pretty happy with this mushroom photo, taken at dusk. Here’s a slight variation:
While living in Morocco last year, we made a trip to the Sahara Desert. The last town before the desert was a scruffy little outpost called M’Hamid. Because we’re self-employed, we needed to check our email. Happily, even M’Hamid had a (small, grungy) internet cafe:
Farflung travelers know that, wherever you are on the globe, there always seems to be an internet cafe nearby. I remember admiring one cafe owner in the small South African town of Hermanus. His lazy life of surfing and occasional tech support for young, hot Australians looked pretty appealing.
I got to wondering about where some of the most distant and remote internet cafes around the globe. Off I go to the Flickr.
To begin, here’s one from the other side of the Sahara, from Siwa Oasis in Egypt (photo by Jeff Werner):
A worrying backup power suppy in Manali, India (photo by alles-schlumpf):
I was more interested to learn about why there are a bunch of feral horses on this tiny island with a permanent human population of five. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The first horses on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada were brought to the island during the late 1700s. Many people believe that they arrived on the island from off of the many shipwrecks, however, this romantic notion is false - they were in fact intentionally left on Sable to graze and multiply, and were most likely seized from Acadians during their expulsion from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Although often referred to as ponies due to their small size, they have a horse phenotype.
The whole island is a wildlife preserve, so the animals are left in their natural state. You apparently need special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard to visit.
On Monday I was supposed to fly to Vancouver on a Harbour Air seaplane, but was foiled by all the fog. Even the ferry was running a half-hour late. And, to add insult to injury, on Tuesday we were stuck at the ferry terminal for two hours because one of the, uh, super ferries had a mechanical problem. Sabotage, perhaps, by a laid-off worker?
All of this is just a whiny introduction to this gorgeous photo that Derek mentioned. It’s from Buzz’s photostream on Flickr, but apparently some guy named Blair (Kent) shot it while up on Cypress on Sunday. Click to view a larger version with 47% more fogginess.
UPDATE: As per Buzz and Derek’s posts and the comments below, this photo belongs to one Blair Kent.
We took two cameras to Panama last month–our workhorse Nikon D70 and Julie’s old-school Pentax K1000. We shot four or five rolls of film with the Pentax, and (after soliciting advice from you, my dear readers), I finally got around to getting it developed at the local Lens & Shutter (click-click, click-click).
The battery on the light meter on the Pentax was depleted, so for the first couple of rolls we had to just eye ball things. Compound this with the fact that some of the film was expired (we knew this, and embraced any wacky results), and our efforts were a bit spotty. Here are a few–I won’t say favourites. Here are a few that were not deleted with more certainty than the others:
We took two cameras to Panama: our trusty Nikon D-70 and Julie’s awesome old Pentax K1000. We shot three or four rolls of film (some of which were expired) with the Pentax.
I haven’t had film developed in Canada for, oh, seven or eight years. In fact, the last roll of film I had developed was in Dublin in 2003 (by, if memory serves, the most delightful French girl on Baggot Street). In that case, they provided prints and also wrote the photos to a CD.
What should I do with this film in Vancouver or Victoria? Do you recommend a particular film developer, now that it’s become a kind of horse-and-buggy industry? What form should I expect to receive the digital files (in addition to the prints) in? On a CD or uploaded to the web somewhere, maybe?
A reader named Miranda (who, sadly, recently lost her camera on a trip) sent along a link to the terrific blog Found Cameras and Orphaned Photos. The concept, as you might imagine, is pretty simple: people who find cameras or memory cards email photos to the blog, and the photos get posted. If you’ve lost your camera (or if you recognize anybody in the photos), you can contact the finder through the blog to get your photos back.
I might have done the implementation differently (enabling people to search a database by location, date lost, etc), but it’s a good start. The site will become more invaluable once photo-matching and recognition technology becomes more available.
