The prodigal dog returns

Yesterday was particularly chaotic - big family visit, and our gardener and his crew were here getting the patio ready for new sod - lots going on.
In a really wierd incident, one of our hoses, which the gardeners had been using, somehow caught in the garage door, causing it to open sometime in the […]

Family dinner

Our Potter Valley-based cousins, the Rockels and the Eddies were down for dinner this evening, so we went out to Mike’s Cafe (and enjoyed every moment). John an d Julie joined us from Oakland to make the family scene complete. John amused the younger set by showing funny cat videos on YouTube.
We took a table […]

Water and Ethanol

The front page of The New York Times has an AFP photo that sums up an intersection of issues and technologies that are going to drive the world’s affairs in the months and years to come, IMHO.
The photo shows Somalis, displaced by fighting that is in part caused by the migration of populations displaced […]

The moon redux

Sure enough, using a Nikon D50 and setting the exposure manually allowed us to get this snap this morning of the near-full moon, showing crater detail this time (unlike yesterday), once again from a corner of the new patio. The Nikon was mounted on our very lightweight Quantaray tripod, which seemed to hold it just […]

Water prompts a podcast

First Blush has an almost painterly photo of water gushing from a Stanford culvert this morning. Which gets us to the topic of water, which was a really big deal at the AlwaysOn Going Green conference in Davis last week.
Water is already in short supply in many parts of the world, and climate change has […]

Bright moon from the new patio

A very bright, near-full moon was visible as I rose at 6:00 this morning, so I took the Lumix DCS FZ50, mounted on a tripod, out on the new patio. I was hoping that at 420mm it would capture some crater detail, but no luck in auto-exposure mode. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can do […]

Back on the N Judah (and other public transport)

So we - meaning me and the Leica D2 - are back on public transport, set to B&W mode at ISO 400 and once again documenting moments in the lives of public transportation users (a CalTrain rider in the case presented here) as we make our way to UCSF for Wednesday physical therapy sessions.
While I […]

Strength

So, we’re off to UCSF shortly to do additional physical training with Osher Center physical therapist Heidi Engel this morning. I’ve been doing a strength workout that Heidi has prescribed and continuously fine-tuned for some 2 months now, and it has been one of the positives in my therapy.
I’ve definitely become stronger, can get out […]

The Cube returns

Our Macintosh G4 Cube was among the most beloved, and longest-working of all our Macs. It came home in 2000, almost as soon as it hit the local Mac dealer, and sat in the family room in one role or another until this year’s major overhaul of gulker.com World HQ.
2 weeks ago, we started a […]

Looking at Annie L’s ‘A Photographer’s Life’

Annie Liebovitz‘ very fine book ‘A Photographer’s Life’ arrived last Christmas. At the time, recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, I was very interested in her documentation of partner Susan Sontag’s death, hoping it would help me with the task of dealing with and visualizing my own shortened mortality horizon. I thumbed through the Sontag […]

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