Arctangential

I have had these pictures around for weeks, I actually tooke them before we went to SF, but for some reason I forgot to post them until now. I’m hosting them on Flickr, so click each thumbnail for the full-sized picture.

The first two are of the personalized incriptions on my most recent Achewood book purchases:

And the covers of those two books:

This is the stupid Superman Returns USB hub I bought; it was the cheapest one they had, and it works just fine. I keep it hidden, though, apart from this photo. I think it came out pretty well; I like the lighting here.

And finally, this is my hand. The light came out terrible, I think — it makes my hand look all wrinkly. I tried a few times, but it turns out it is really hard to take a picture of your own hand, especially your own right hand (if you’re right-handed, that is). Anyhow, the point of this picture is to show off my trick: touching my pointer and pinky fingers together with no external assistance. It’s pretty hard and I have to strain at it, but I haven’t met anybody else yet who can do it. Can any of you?

As you both probably know, I maintain a web page about myself, that is (if possible) even less interesting than this journal. On this list I maintain a page listing all of my books, which is machine-generated from a database which I maintain using some home-brewed software. One thing that’s bothered me about the system for some time is that it never captured the contents of any of my anthologies or omnibuses, so I recently worked that feature into my system. Now I have left the task of actually putting in all that data, and without having all the books in front of me, there’s a bit of guesswork and a lot of research involved in the process. So far I’ve finished the “K” page:

http://finkel.org/avi/books/k.html

I started there because I knew for sure I had at least one Damon Knight collection, and it turned out I also have a ton of Stephen King collections, and one enormous collection of Kornbluth’s complete short fiction (which is a fantastic book, by the way.)

I hope over the next few weeks to get the rest of them done. I am not really sure why though. Massive nerdiness, I guess.

Edit:

All of the pictures I liked to before are broken now. I didn’t feel like going through and updating all of the links, so I just removed them. However, I’ve replaced the images with hosting at Flickr, and you can see them all here:

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/collections/72157600912737160/

So good luck!

Original post:

I feel like I will be writing about this trip for another month. For now, I will just post pictures. These are all taken with my new camera, and I think they turned out pretty OK, although I had a bunch of trouble with the light being blown out in a lot of shots, and I have a combination problem of not having the eye to tell when my camera is cooked when I’m taking a picture and not having the patience / skill with GIMP to fix it after the fact. So, I’m not super happy with them but they are alright, so I am posting them onto the internet. All of the pictures are click-for-bigger.

These pictures I took of Alcatraz from the end of Pier 39. The first is taken with my 70-210 lens at 210mm, the second with my 200-500 at 500mm. The third is a digital zoom & crop of the second from the original high-rez source, showing just how much detail I got out of that lens. Seeing as how this is the only picture I’ve taken with that lens so far, I have to get my mileage out of it.

These are some pictures from our visit to Alcatraz itself. It wasn’t really very interesting, visually, so I mostly tried to take “artsy” pictures. Tried and, generally, failed. The first is the second and third level of cells in one of the cell blocks; the place is surprisingly large, considering that they never had more than, I think, 200 inmates at a time. The second is a similar shot of a row of windows; I liked how they put a big grate around them so they could still open to allow in air, but there’s no way a person could get out. Next is a picture of the city from the southern tip of the island, with the 200mm lens again. Next is a guard tower; the guards were actually locked into the towers overnight and couldn’t get out even if they wanted to — a good example of the kind of security they employed. After that is a picture of the island’s water tower, I assume now unused. I give “mad props” to whomever climbed up there to add the graffiti. There were similar epithets about India all over the island, I’m still not sure what they mean. The next is actually a picture I took on the dock while waiting for the boat to take us to the island. I thought I had some sand in my lens and I was fooling around to make sure it was OK. I just happen to like how this picture turned out. Finally, we have a picture of one of the many run-down and destroyed parts of the facility. I don’t think they have a ton of money to fix the place up, and getting construction equipment and material out there must be absurdly expensive, so the place is mostly a ruin. It’s kind of unfortunate.

These are some pictures I took of the Rodin sculpture “The Gates of Hell” at the Stanford Art Museum. First is a (badly crooked) shot of the whole piece. It was very bright when I took this picture; you can see that the wall behind the camera is entirely blown out. I was sure this picture wouldn’t turn out properly, but my camera did a truly magnificent job of making up for my mistake. The next 3 pictures are all detail shots of various parts of the sculpture, which is incredibly detailed — you could probably take 100 pictures of it and still miss small aspects of it.

Next we come to the sea lion pictures. If you don’t know the story, this is a group of sea lions that took over a part of pier 39 on the SF waterfront. For reasons I am not entirely sure of, instead of driving the seals off, they just built them a bunch of floating platforms, put up a fence to keep the people away, and let them hang around. They’re extremely loud, but quite cute. Not all of these pictures turned out incredibly well, but here they are anyways.

And finally, we come to the obligatory zoo pictures. The animals were very uncooperative this day; I would see one sitting in a spot that would make a good picture, and by the time I got my camera out, it would get up and move. Also, I was having too much fun actually being at the zoo, so about halfway through our visit I just gave up on the whole camera thing. Still, I like how most of these came out.

The first is of a giraffe which had been drinking; I like that you can see a drop of water falling, and the glinting off his whiskers. The second is a baby giraffe, eating leaves near its parents. The third is a small little deer-like creature called a Günther's Dik-dik and the next two are of a bird called a Waldrapp Ibis; an ugly bastard to be sure, but I liked its head plumage. Next we have a “François’ Langur“, who was just sitting around, looking at everybody walking past him. The next two are chimps and then two of flamingos.

And, that’s it. This turned out pretty long; sorry about that.