Looking over the lake
My Valentines Day photo selection – this was taken on the ferry on Lake Como on our trip to Italy a few years ago. This was a reflection in the window of a couple looking over the lake and enjoying the view and romantic scene…
Possibly the funniest/randomest part of this ferry ride was that two independent groups of people from Oklahoma were right behind us and talking about the Sooners chances in the upcoming season and analyzing starters and strengths weaknesses. Boomer. Sooner.
Aussie Aussie Aussie
Looking back at our trip from a couple years ago this is the only picture I found with Australian flags in it…
Happy Australia Day 
snow-covered Ireland
Finally getting around to posting about pictures that I took on our trip to Ireland over Christmas. I was there for around a week, and we were snowed in for almost all of it. Which means that the rental car looked like this for the majority of the trip:
Even if it was a bit tough to get around, it made for great scenery…
Unfortunately it was also extremely cold and windy up on the hills so I got a bit lazy while we were out hiking. So I’ve got some shots where I took the time to throw on the polarizer and get nice deep blue skies like the shot above and these:
And sometimes I was too cold to bother with it and the skies aren’t quite as nice 
. I’m sure if I took the time to brush up on my photoshop skills then i could ‘fix’ these too.
Good reminder that my photography skills are very much a work under (snowy) construction.
Like normal, you can find more photos online in the gallery.
technology that never fails…
I admit it, much to Clodagh’s chagrin, I’m very much a gadget person. I lasted with Windows Mobile for years because it was the best smartphone for me – being able to send work email has generally been a hard requirement for me. Last year I moved to the iPhone and I’ve generally been quite happy with it and it’s been as user-friendly and reliable as advertised. Lately my iPhone has been a bit crappier and I think it culminated last weekend when I was out playing golf and trying to use the GolfCard app to track scores, the type of shots, etc. And it crashed on me losing my round 14 holes in. Three times in a row (I’d re-entered the data twice). This is not to mention that battery life is worse after updating to the latest version of the iphone software. So much for wanting to stay with the latest and greatest .
Oh and that technology that never fails? Paper scorecard plus a golf pencil .
my head is in the cloud…
I’ve mentioned it on facebook, but not here yet – about a week and half ago I started a new job over in Windows Azure. It was a hard decision in some ways because I’d been in Windows Servicing [really old link for definition] for so many years (so much for the couple-year-plan when I first joined ) and the mission, customer value, good people to work with and hard problems to solve were all something I very much enjoyed. That said, 1.5 wks in, so far I’m glad I’ve made the move. Ask me again in a few months . In a lot of ways, I’m already recognizing that I maybe should have moved earlier. I think a piece of advice I heard a VP give after a talk sums a lot of it up (paraphrased): ”You should stay in your group until you’ve shipped one or two product cycles. When you’re in the back of the meeting and you’re the guy rejecting all of the ideas brought up to improve the next version because they’ve been tried and you’re pointing out how they failed last time, it’s definitely time to move on.” Times change, ecosystems change, assumptions change and the reason something failed last time might not hold true anymore.
Anyway, random thing that’s really cool about my new job is that to familiarize myself with <movie trailer guy voice>”the cloud” </movie trailer guy voice> is that I’m actually writing some stupid small apps that use it. It’s the first time in the last few years that I’ve actually written code and while it’s not something I’d want to spend all day every day doing right now, it’s a lot of fun to get a bit back into it. Yes, I’m a geek. Oh, and Azure is super cool. I’m not biased at all (already) .
“summer” weather got you down? Go somewhere else!
When the strange weather we’ve been getting for “summer” in the area (grey, cool, rainy) gets you down, you should get out of dodge! We’ve just wrapped up a second trip this summer, both in the last few weeks. First was a trip to Montana for whitewater rafting and hiking on the Middle Fork of the Flathead river for a week. I’ll have a longer post about the trip coming in the next week or so – it was fantastic and I can’t say enough good things about it . The second trip was a few days in DC with some friends to see some of the sights and the Sounders take on the DC United. Very fun if a bit hot, humid, and tiring and I’ll also post more specifically about that trip too . In the meanwhile, here’s a photo from each.
Creek coming down from the lake towards the river that was next to one of our campgrounds:
Gerry pointed out at one stage that you’d actually be better off just getting photos of most things in DC from the web or a book or something. He’s right, but nonetheless here’s my photo of the White House . Just above where the photo ends there’s actually a nice blue sky rather than just the haze and clouds you see behind it here…
Shots from Otter Falls hike
Last weekend we took advantage of a break in string of bad weather weekends and finally got out for a hike with some friends and, of course , Shay and Rascal. We headed out to Otter Falls based on recommendation from our dog hikes in Washington book. I’d rate it as a nice fairly flat hike and it gets bonus points for being relatively un-crowded.
We’re going on a hiking and rafting trip later this year and part of this was to try out the lens I’m planning on bringing in conditions closer to what I expect to see. I have some photos of folks from the hike, including a beautiful shot of Bruce’s taped together and falling apart boot , but like normal will stick with some nature shots here. I got a couple shots of the falls, but none of them are the nice creamy flowing water shots you see on photos sites – I need to invest in some filters and bring along a tripod if I’m ever going to get those…
It's a ledge, eh?
Lots of downed trees around and some of them looked fairly fresh – great for texture photos…
There were more instances of trees that shared a common base and then split as they went up than I expected.
And, of course, a couple of Shay and Rascal too . The turnaround point for us was this old concrete bridge from when the trail was a road - it was a great stopping point for lunch, and it overlooks some falls which Rask is staring off at in this shot:
We had to stop at one point for Sharad to repair Bruce’s boot, and Shay happened to step into a sunbeam admist the shadows of the tree canopy while we were there. If we were in a movie from the 40s and 50s, it’d be a sign that she was the heroine
No post about Otter Falls hike would be complete without a comment on the road to get there. Driving those last 6 or 7 miles is pretty intense – it really let us know what we were getting into when we hit the start of the stretch of potholes-with-a-side-of-road and one of the potholes had a carpart in the middle of the road where it’d fallen off. Fortunately I think all of my car made it back .
Adventures in BBQ, OK, Grilling: glazed rotisserie chicken
My earlier posts were about smoking food and I’ll be getting back to cooking on the smoker soon . Unfortunately our beautiful mild late-winter-early-spring has turned a bit crap, so I’ve been looking at higher temperature and shorter timeline ways to cook outside. And I remembered that I bought a rotisserie attachment for the grill years ago that’s had little use. Onwards to the rotisserie chicken
I’m starting to turn into a Weber’s Way To Grill fanboy – I haven’t hit a bad reciepe here yet. This time was a glazed chicken reciepe.
Start with a buttermilk based brine for a few hours
Dry off the coating throw on the spit, and put it on the grill over a pan with some water and indirect medium-high heat for a bit more than an hour. For the last part you brush on a sweet glaze – fruit juice, syrup, vinegar, etc that were boiled down to thicken.
‘
And the final result – sitting for a few minutes before I remove the spit and carve
Adventures in BBQ: Smoked Beer-can Chicken
Resuming the series* of trying out the new smoker, today was beer-can chicken… I know a few people that make this and it’s usually just on the regular grill. Well, timing aligned that I’ve been wanting to try this and I’ve been wanting to smoke a chicken so that’s how she went. Like my last few tries on the smoker – Weber’s Way to Grill was the source of the reciepe. They haven’t steered me wrong yet .
Before you rub the chicken, it’s supposed to be covered in salt for a while. They actually say it should “look like a light dusting of snow”.
Once that’s done, it takes the rub and after a bit of a rest, on to the beer it goes…
Hour and a half later and here’s what you get 
(of course you can’t forget the potatoes)…
So, three meals in and the gas smoker, travesty that it may be, is already delivering better than the charcoal one was. I haven’t tried ribs yet, which is the one thing that always came out well on the charcoal smoker – that’ll be the true comparison. Maybe I’ll need a double-blind test?
*It’s a “series” because on the old site I had a couple of posts about smoking meat – the first was a brisket and the second pulled pork… Since it’s not looking good for migrating the old posts here I’ll just note that a couple photos are still online.
sunset at the beach (Lincoln City)
Apparently I’d just missed a beautiful sunset the night before, and this is the best that I got while in Lincoln City. I had some other shots that would have been very cool if I’d had a tripod and could have used a long enough exposure to let the water go smooth / foamy, but since I was hand-holding the water always was too crisp for my taste. On the other hand, I enjoyed a nice walk on the beach with Clodagh without carting around a tripod . Just reinforces that you can take pictures while you’re out doing stuff, but you’ll rarely be doing other stuff while you’re out to take pictures…
EXIF excerpt: f/18 ISO200 @ 24mm 1/40sec; edited including adding gradient in lightroom