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Exploits, Out and About
Tuesday, February 16. 2010
This building at 1515 Flagler Drive has been a bit of an eyesore since it took hurricane damage in 2004. It was brought down with explosives on Sunday, the third tallest building to ever be demolished so in the United States. And I was lucky enough to be there!
I set up my Canon G6 on multiple-shot mode for this—it did pretty well, especially given that I was just holding it above my head in the tightly-packed crowd.
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Exploits
Friday, June 5. 2009
My apologies for the belated post. This was my first, though I certainly hope not my last, visit to the famous endurance races; I'd like to offer my thanks to our gracious host Bell Microelectronics, sponsor of the Panoz team that took third place in the GT2 class, for making it possible.
The pictures are all the work of my cousin Torm.
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Exploits
Saturday, May 16. 2009
I spent some time after my training session in Denver driving around with my co-workers in the Rockies, seeing some worthwhile sights; I apologize for the pictures but all I had was a disposable camera.
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Exploits
Wednesday, December 31. 2008
in the smallest of ways. I was an extra (excuse me, "Background Artist", as they like to be called now) in the Twentieth Century Fox movie Marley and Me while it was being filmed in Fort Lauderdale. Observe closely the scenes in the Sun-Sentinel offices and you might just catch a brief glimpse of the back of my head, say. If you want your money back because the movie made you cry or disappointed you, address your demands elsewhere: I just stood where they told me to stand. All I added to the picture was a handful of photons. Of course I'll still get the blu-ray disc when it comes out, if only to freeze-frame through the scenes I was in!
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Exploits
Wednesday, April 23. 2008
An instant classic from the Busch Gardens log flume, with Jay Wilson and myself. This one was just too funny to leave behind.
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Exploits
Wednesday, October 24. 2007
Believe it or not, being a member of junk-mailing lists, in particular those targeted at consumers of high-end "lifestyle" products, can be good. Being a close friend or relative of a person on those lists can be even better. This second approach has gotten me past the door of a surprising number of product launches, luxury car test drives, and top-shelf whisky tastings, usually in the company of my cousin Torm, whose tastes are somewhat better funded than my own and whose addresses are in somewhat wider circulation. But it was this October that Torm, my friend Jay Wilson, and I headed south to the Homestead Speedway to participate in the ultimate free-of-charge luxury-goods marketing event: the Audi Driving Experience. Click on the link to read more and be prepared to accept that all Audi requires from you is a driver's license and the flimsiest pretense of being richer than you actually are to stuff your head into a helmet and set you loose on a racetrack piloting several hundred thousand dollars worth of powerful machinery.
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Exploits
Wednesday, April 12. 2006
Mr. Mark Miller, true friend, pipe-crawling engineer, vagabond musician, gentleman-scholar, got married this weekend to his girlfriend Nicole in a lovely ceremony followed by a crazy party and supported by three days of various other entertainments. Per request, I am providing here a copy of my toast:
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Exploits
Monday, February 27. 2006
I was woken one day by my father, who had been visiting my house. He asked me about my tomato crop. I am no gardener and went outside, mystified, to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, growing in a line on a patch of sandy dirt outside were 10 or so tomato plants, many with small green fruit already in evidence.
We stood around scratching our heads until one of us spotted the obvious. The long narrow barren patch in the middle of my lawn had been caused by our sewer pipe rebuild of a month or two previous, in which we replaced with PVC an ancient tar-paper pipe, ruined by tree roots and leaking torrents of sewage into the ground. We turned this fertile soil over with shovels in the course of digging out the pipe and refilling the ditch, and the current theory holds that this brought close to the surface tomato seeds planted there by the old method that fruits of all kinds evolved to exploit.
That's right! WE planted them, every time we ate tomatoes and flushed the remains. Although some members of my family have expressed uneasiness at the history of this harvest, I'm sure that they'll taste far better than the supermarket product, cruel suggestions of the flavorful terroir coming through notwithstanding.
UPDATE: April 7, 2006
Fruits are being harvested and indeed they do taste better than commercial ones, like a typical tomato but more. Apparently we "planted" no less than three varieties: cherry tomatoes, nice mid-size round ones, and some kind of lobed Ugly-Ripe looking tomato.
Unfortunately, maybe 10% of my produce has been lost to boring fruitworm. Infuriating! Lecture me all you want on Organic Gardening, you lose your harvest and you'll be just as ready as I am to gas em' all and let God sort em' out! For now I've settled for moving the plants to the backyard (away from the sewer pipe insect-incubator) and tying them up higher to a plastic fence which I've installed (also keeping out marauding possums).
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Exploits
Thursday, May 26. 2005
I went with some people associated with FAU fencing to Disney MGM Studios in Orlando for the 2005 Star Wars Weekend, a nice event for Star Wars geeks, although not everybody was quite as hardcore as we are. When one of the "crowd control" stormtroopers cracked "He hasn't been the same since he hit his head on that bulkhead" the entire audience was silent except for the five of us, laughing and cheering maniacally. Regardless, a good time was had by all; pictures follow.
A mob at the Star Tours attraction.
Meeting the characters is a cool feature of Star Wars Weekend; Vader was by far the most popular.
Emily, wearing the coolest Star Wars T-shirt EVER, tells Greedo what's what.
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Exploits
Friday, November 5. 2004
Concerned about hot post-election tempers and the fractured nature of the American polity (and always after an excuse to drink like mad), my roommates and I threw a smashing election party on the night of the 2nd. We invited our most radical friends from both sides, served drinks in red and blue cups ("party self-identification"), and nicely avoided stewing in front of the television all night cursing the other half of America in a blind rage. This was also a chance to display a healthy contempt for the political process and its probably irrelevant outcome by partying through the wearying hours of exit polls and electoral vote counts.
My vision: four years from now, election parties will spread across the land, partisans of all stripes will be brought together, and the jagged rift in our nation can begin to heal! People of America, please, please care LESS! Or at least, drink yourselves silly!
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