Repeats

This is a picture of Kate that I took in March 2006. And this is a picture of Tom that I took on Saturday and posted to my blog this morning. It's uncanny watching Tom pick up the same mannerisms that Kate had as a toddler, like watching her childhood rewind and spool forward again in slow motion. On Saturday I took two rolls of film of Tom, one outside and one inside, and he was such a dream to photograph. Like Kate, he's very natural and doesn't wiggle around much. Ana will never that be that easy to take pictures of. My sister calls her our square peg, but... well, I'm too close to her to tell. My sharpest memories of her are all the times I held her and jiggled her to sleep in my arms, just a blurred stream of memories of her teensy body curled in my arms, endless rocking her. She's two and a half now, and she's finally starting to look a little bit older. She engages a little more with people around. She's always been listening, but seeing the responses from her now feel a little startling in ways. This weekend I was holding her on my hip and attempting to find my car keys in my huge work purse. I stood by the car, in the light drizzle, for a good two minutes, fumbling around through tissues and EVDO cards and headphones and my notebooks, and then yanked them out and held them up. She broke out in a huge laugh. We had such a funny moment, standing there trying to get the car open so that I could buckle her in.

This afternoon I walked to pick up a late lunch, down Bowery, past construction site after construction site, blocks and blocks. When I reached St Marks, I remembered all of a sudden what it reminded me of. The staircases and storefronts are exactly like Newbury St in Boston. Really, this had been bugging me for months, every time I walked through there I would get this odd "I know somewhere just like this" feeling about it. St Marks is a crazy place to get that sort of feeling about, in some ways it could be anywhere.

tom

tom
Originally uploaded by wck

11 months old already!

My Pumpkin Vine

My Pumpkin Vine
Originally uploaded by wck

That's my pumpkin vine from 2 years ago. We're supposed to have decent weather this weekend, so it's time to set up the summer veggie gardens! Mmmmmm yum.

transit hubs

Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park has gorgeous views of Elliot Bay, but it also has a grassy elevated path which runs over some (rather heavily used) train tracks. I spent a lot of time sitting on the red chairs near that pathway, watching planes lining up overhead to land at SeaTac, and cargo ships pulling in and out of the port of Seattle, and the freight trains underneath. I loved that this one spot allowed visibility into so many transportation hubs. There's a place on the NJT rails where the M&E line runs next to the PATH rains and then splits off from the NEC line... which is also directly under the usual approach path to Newark Airport. I have a feeling that only transportation network geeks like spots like that.

Birthday Letters

Isn't it a bit weird how something can be so deeply a part of your life at one point, and then it slips away and you almost forget about it? And then the jolt when you suddenly are re-introduced to it... Marginal Revolution does a regular "what I'm reading" series, among other small series of posts, and today's contains Ted Hughes Birthday Letters, which is a book of poetry.

My sister gave the book to me for a 21st birthday present at the end of my junior year. The next year, I needed to do an indepent study project in the studio art department for my major, and I chose to do a series of digitally manipulated photographs inspired by on poem in the book. I lived in the darkroom and computer lab with that poem for months and months and so on. Then I graduated, and packed it all away.

There are two pieces from that project in my flickr stream, here and here.

On Contracts

I don't think that there has ever been a foray into legal territory on my blog, if I think about it. Which is a bit odd, because I'm not a lawyer, but my dad is, and I love talking about trials and legal things with him. The downside to having a trial attorney as a father is that I've never in my life won an argument with him, but there's a lot of upside to it in terms of dinner table conversation. All of which is a small introduction to a great WSJ article on Wal Mart's former video taping firm.

Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart

My dad is not terribly tech savvy, so I print out articles on legal topics that I find for him sometimes, and this one was way too good to pass up. We had a great dinner conversation about it today. Speaking of which, WSJ's Law Blog is always an excellent read. I'm not saying that because I'm thrilled that I've found another person who will admit publicly to arriving at work at 7:30 AM. Really!

Painted Powerbook 520

Painted Powerbook 520
Originally uploaded by wck

My white macbook has been looking a bit grungy recently. I wonder if I should pull out the laptop paints again?

The powerbook in the picture was my computer in college... yes, I have a Studio Art degree to go with my CS degree. Notice that the apple logo on the cover was upside down- they were all the way up through the powerbook g3s.

Amazon Web Services DCI - The Dog Computer Interface

This is Declan in early 2000 at Amazon.com:



It was an early version of the DCI - Dog Computer Interface. Here is a later version, from 2003 or so:


(notice integration with Official Amazon Door Desks in this one, enabling each web dev to have a Declan available under their work surface)

And today, the AWS group announces the official release of the DCI - The Dog Computer Interface!