I’m reading the collected writings of Ben Franklin from the Library of America (yes, all 1600 or so pages of it), and I ran across the following passage: It is remarkable that soldiers by profession, men truly and unquestionably brave, seldom advise war but in cases of extream [sic] necessity. While mere rhetoricians, tongue-pads and scribes, timid by nature, or from their little bodily exercise deficient in those spirits that give real courage, are ever bawling for war on the most trifling occasions, and seem the most blood-thirsty of mankind. ...

Back in September, I was doing a fair amount of plumbing. I installed a water filter, new hot water heater and an acid neutralizer. I never mentioned it, mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about it, but the stupid neutralizer never did work right and I finally just bypassed it in the water line. The problem seemed to be that I couldn’t get the fittings right, so they leaked and filled the neutralizer completely up with water. The instantaneous pressure in the line caused by turning off faucets in the house would then create a huge amount of pressure in the neutralizer and the top would pop off. ...

HR should be so proud

Wow – the 10 most dangerous toys of all time. If only I had known, I would have had Christmas presents for my nieces (just kidding mom). The scary thing is that I remember most of these. The disappointing thing is that we never owned any of them.

Some mornings I should just plan to be late for work. This morning was probably one of them. While driving in, I kept getting distracted by how beautiful everything looked. No, I wasn’t high, it’s just that the light was so gorgeous that the most mundane, and even ugly, objects looked beautiful. Perhaps I should explain. When you’re interested in photography, you quickly learn that it’s all about light. The amount, the color, the quality, the reaction of your film to it – it’s all about light. The ISO number for your film is all about light, go from ISO 50 to ISO 100 and you half the amount of light you need to make an image (aka, you can use a faster shutter or smaller aperture). Open your lens up one stop, e.g., from f/11 to f/8 and you’ve just doubled the amount of light reaching the film (f-stops go up by the square root of 2, but they related to the ration of lens diameter to focal length so the area of the lens doubles). Change the speed of the shutter and you affect how much light reaches the film. By working all of the doubles and halves, you can attempt to achieve the effect you want given the limits of the light you have. For example, when I shoot water, I often want a slow shutter speed which necessitates a small lens aperture. But sometimes when there is too much light, even the smallest aperture won’t get you a slow enough shutter. ...

you get home from the office Christmas party and are in a mood to see the movie, Office Space you go to sleep and dream about co-workers gah – i really can’t wait to get through the next two days

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another: National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already. ...

The new dog (Sierra) seems to be fitting in well. She’s looking up to the older dog (Darwin) and learning all sorts of new things. The cutest is something we call “kicky foot, where she’ll periodically stretch all of her legs by kicking them back one at a time. The one I didn’t expect to see was her lifting her leg to pee. I’ve never seen a female dog do that before. Dog owners – is that normal? or is it (as we suspect), just not right?

For the past few years, I’ve put together a calendar using pictures I took in Yellowstone. In 2004 (for the 2005 calendar), I was very excited about the project and used only photos I took that year. Last year, I had to raid prior years (it wasn’t the best Yellowstone trip for pictures). This year I think I can pull enough decent pictures from our 2006 trip. The pictures I’m going to use for the 2007 calendar are posted here. I need to crop a couple of the bird pictures, but the rest should be okay. ...

it’s probably not fair to blame etselec, but i do. You scored as Friedrich Nietzsche. Well you’re an egotistical maniac, and you are so very iconoclastic that you probably are currently lost in a post-modern Jupiter, I mean jungle of self-definition. Don’t let it get you down though, someday, through a willful onslaught of reinterpretation of dated forms and ideas, you will strike on something that passes as remotely new, and people WILL be into it on the basis of how hip it is alone. Also, the average espresso drinker looks up to you. Friedrich Nietzsche83%Dante Alighieri75%Miyamoto Musashi67%Stephen Hawking58%Jesus Christ42%Sigmund Freud42%Elvis Presley42%O.J. Simpson33%Hugh Hefner25%Charles Manson17%C.G. Jung17%Mother Teresa17%Steven Morrissey17%Adolf Hitler0%What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.comYou Belong in San Francisco You crave an eclectic, urban environment. You’re half California, half NYC. You’re open minded, tolerant, and secretly think you’re the best. People may dismiss you as a hippie, but you’re also progressive, interesting, and rich! ...