Majel Barret Roddenberry passed away this morning after a battle with leukemia. She was Gene Roddenberry’s wife and an active member of the Star Trek series throughout its lifetime. In fact, she was often the voice of the computer on many of the star ships in the series and movies – including the upcoming Star Trek movie coming out in 2009. May she rest in peace.
There’s this sort of regular thing we (Christine, Sam, Rece, and I) do almost every Tuesday. It started off when Christine was taking some more college courses and asked if we wouldn’t mind hanging out with Sam while she was in class on Tuesday evenings. To make things easy (and cheap) we began going to Del Taco for their cheap, 3 for $ .99 tacos. This got old real fast, so we began checking out other local taco places for their dollar taco specials. We now have a few places to choose from – and while it isn’t always tacos, it tends to be Latino cuisine,
Tonight I thought it would be fun to make tacos at home with fresh ingredients and fry our own tortilla shells for a change. As usual, the tacos were delicous, but we ended up with some extra shells left over.
 
Had I been thinking about it earlier, I would have snapped some photos of the tacos we actually ate. Delicious!
This entry can’t believe how unbelievably boring this post has been.
Who doesn’t love The Muppets?
[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob6TTU1knUM]
This entry is craving chicken.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t take many photos of people. So today I decided to try a natural photo of my buddy, Nam.
Nam is the other tech at the company I work for. Like me, he’s almost entirely self-taught. He grew up in Vietnam and moved to the U.S.A. as an adult. His accent is pretty thick, but he works hard to correctly pronounce words so he’s clearly understood. He’s a great guy to work with and smart as hell – not to mention having a sharp sense of humor.
He was a bit reluctant to allow me to take his picture; knowing that I’d be posting it here. But he relented after I promised that I’d delete the photo if he didn’t like it. Apparently he did.
This entry thinks people photography isn’t as scary anymore.
Here you have it; a pattern seems to be forming. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to take and post my daily photos on the weekend. So I’m going to blog about both photos in one post.
No real trick to this one. “Hey, Rece … stand here in this dark room and spin this lit lighter in a spiraling circle.” In all honesty, I had spent most of the afternoon and all night playing Lord of the Rings Online and hadn’t taken a picture all day. This one was rushed so I could get it in under the wire. It’s still an interesting photo, regardless.
Here’s me editing the above photo. I set up the camera on self-timer and sat down to start editing the photo. This is pretty much what it looks like: me at my computer, sitting in my jammies, tweaking the photo until I think it looks right. No magic to it, really.
This entry thinks it was too lazy this weekend.
The concept isn’t new to me. In fact I told my friend Karen about it awhile back. She actually tried it and turned out taking a couple of really cool shots. So it was my turn to actually try one of my suggestions.
This is something I’ve thought about doing for awhile, but didn’t have the camera to do it. My current camera allows for this to happen and I’ve had it for long enough to be comfortable trying something different. The sign was chosen the evening before when we ate at the burger joint next door. So at around 10:30 pm Rece and I stopped and I snapped a few shots. This actually turned out to be easier to do than I thought, although I couldn’t imagine trying to do it without a tripod without some serious blur and shake.
This entry thinks the sign is staring at it.
Rece’s doctor appointment was canceled at the last minute (with us sitting in the waiting room!) so we had some time to spare before picking up Sam for dinner. My first thoughts were to capture the sunset as a reflection off some buildings, but I couldn’t find a building or the right angle to pull it off. We headed down to the same park I took the previous sunset photo to see what we could find.
 
When we arrived Rece spotted some of his friends from school skating around the park. We asked them if it would be OK for me to snap some pictures of them doing some tricks and they agreed. I have to say that shooting photos in low light situations and trying to capture action is no easy task. I liked the action and framing of this shot, though there were a couple that would have been perfect had I been to the left or right a bit more.
Afterward, we picked up Sam and ate at Johnny’s Burger Joint, a new place not far from where Sam and Christine live. Good burgers and cold (29.7° F) beer really hit the spot.
This entry wishes it could perform a kick flip.
Feeling rather demented, I opted for something both silly and sick in the head as a scene for today’s photo.
 
It took a little time to sort through what’s left of Rece’s Lego collection and find enough pieces to set this up. Then I sucked a little ketchup (catsup?!) into a straw and blew it out, splattering it right where I wanted – and looking better (worse?!) than anticipated. Rece got home not too long after and inquired as to why his Legos were in the drying rack …
This entry doesn’t understand the point.
There’s a beehive under a water valve cover in the parking lot at work. I noticed them more when it was warmer and had almost forgotten about them until today. It must have been because it was warmer today that the bees were abuzz with activity. I just so happened to park next to their hive and saw it as an opportunity to take some pictures. After shooting a dozen or so pictures and previewing them I realized that I had again forgotten about the camera settings and everything was completely overexposed – and not in a fun, artsy way either. I snapped another dozen and came up with a few decent shots.
The fact that I was in my work clothes and, well, they’re bees, I didn’t get close enough to make a nice large sized photo. So instead, I had to settle for cropping it and living with a smaller image.
This entry was happy that it wasn’t covered in bees!
Sometimes I forget to turn the autofocus back on.
 
This was cute and quick. I stopped by the store and saw this dog sitting in the passenger seat of a car. It was a handicapped spot, so either the dog drove the person to the store or the handicap is that the driver is a dog. I’m not sure which.
I pulled my camera out of my car to snap this so quickly that I forgot to turn the autofocus back on and I wasn’t paying much attention to what I saw in the view finder, so I didn’t think to manually focus either. This was the best focus out of all the shots.
This entry forgot to finish this entry.