Category: Uncategorized

After a long delay on my flight, I managed to get up to Seattle for a few days with Thom. Day 1 was a lot of fun.

We had some lunch and then went to the flagship REI store (REI headquarters are in Seattle) to pick up a few things. While there, Thom pointed out the wall-sized photo of Mount Formidable near the checkout lanes. He took the picture– pretty cool to see it on a wall in a retail store!

There’s also a slightly smaller shot of Mount Baker that REI licensed from him and used on an endcap for gift cards:

We had about an hour to kill in downtown Seattle so we went (where else?) to a little coffee shop. I think the ratio of coffee shops to people is about 1:4 in this town.

Then we headed to the Youth in Focus class that Thom was leading that day. It’s a program designed for at-risk high school kids, teaching them about photography and helping them develop (get it?) skills to express their creativity. Today happened to be the “field trip” class where they were scheduled to head outside for some photography work, instead of sitting in a classroom environment learning about how to edit their pictures.

The class is led by a grizzled photographer named Zorn (awesome name!) and has about a dozen teens. Only eight of them showed up, so we bundled up and headed out into the cold. It was about 25 degrees– unseasonably cold for Seattle, even in February– and early evening with grey skies, so the light wasn’t great. Nonetheless, we were encouraged to take some pictures based on a “theme”. It was sort of a rough, industrial area of town, so I latched on to that and took a few close-ups that I felt expressed the industrial nature of the area. Here are a few of them:

There were a few cool neon signs shining in the fading dusk, and Thom thought this one was totally a cliche stock-art shot:

We ducked into a pizza place where the kids bought a few slices for a quick bite (and also to get out of the cold for a minute):

The side of a food truck had a flat silver surface reminiscent of a funhouse mirror:

After a little over an hour, it was getting too dark and cold, so we hopped on a city bus to go back to the classroom. Here’s a shot of our little group:

In the front, that’s Violet, Kamaya, Enya, Zorn, Pearl, Istahil, and Madi; the back row is me, Antoine, Ethan (hiding), and Thom.

It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed hanging out with these great kids.

My wife’s awesome.

Alex is a happy camper today. He went to the orthodontist to have his braces removed. Woo hoo!

Before:

And after:

It was a wee bit chilly driving this morning.

What the heck is this, Boulder County?

I don’t use Windows, and I certainly don’t use Internet Explorer– both of which are required for Silverlight to work. With the sort of web technology available today, it’s shameful that a government organization (or any organization, for that matter) should limit their web site to a limited audience. This goes against what the web is all about.

Harumph.

I live in Denver, so I’m required by law to say Go Broncos!

But, well…

Funny because it’s true.

In what may be a new record for me, I’ve almost finished my personal taxes. And it’s only February 1!

Yesterday I spent the bulk of the day working on my corporate taxes. Usually it’s an exercise in frustration, figuring out where all of the numbers go, but since I took the time to organize all of the income and expenses to the penny, I knew I had all of the data I needed. Then it was a matter of finding the fields in the tax software. Unlike years past, once I found them I took notes so I can repeat the process next year without so much headache. (Why didn’t I do that ten years ago?)

With my corporate returns in hand, it was pretty straightforward to enter everything for my personal return today. I’m still sad that the IRS has tax rules so complex that an entire industry has risen to support them, but H&R Block’s Taxcut software helps tremendously by asking the right questions and walking me through the gazillions of forms and numbers.

I’m waiting for a few documents from various places so I can plug in mortgage interest and dividends and IRA contributions and whatnot, but I feel like I’m close… and it’s not April. Even better, it looks like Uncle Sam might owe me some money. For a change.

My main data drive failed a few weeks ago (fortunately I have backups) so I wanted not only to get rid of it, but to make sure all of the personal data was unrecoverable. That meant, of course, cracking open the hard drive casing and trashing the disks.

For some reason I find the guts of hard drives to be fascinating. Terabytes of data stored on silvery magnetic platters, delicate motors and read heads that can position themselves to micrometer accuracy, the ability to stream hundreds of millions of bits of data per second… cool stuff.

Permit me a few macro shots.

After I had everything out, I took the platters outside, set them on the sidewalk, and smashed them with a hammer. Laralee pointed out that in the movies, all data seems to be recoverable no matter how bad the fire/explosion/chemical spill was. But I’m pretty sure I took care of this stuff…

We woke up this morning to find about 10″ of snow on the ground. The kids were disappointed that school hadn’t been cancelled (the roads were pretty slick) but after all of the days that were cancelled due to the September floods, I suspect it would take a snowpocalypse to get out of school now. Or a polar vortex, whatever that is.

Anyway, I walked Zack to school and it was pretty cool to see everything in quiet white. I took a few pictures on the way.

I had to pay my state employment taxes today so I went to the State of Colorado’s home page at www.colorado.gov. I don’t know who they have handling their graphic design, but…

Wow. Stay classy, Colorado. Dude.