how now brownpau
Today, a little something different: macro shots of Pandora’s lovely white coat of fur. In the thumbnails, more macro fur, and other assorted shots, including one of her curled up into a ball with her face tucked into her paw, and another of her sitting up and giving you a look.
As always, more in the Pandora tag.
I had originally whipped up 2.0 RLY OWL for the Web 2.Oh No! Pool, traced in Photoshop from the original O RLY OWL, then goopified into the gradiated, shiny, reflect-y style that Strong Bad calls “molten plexiglass.”
2.0 RLY OWL has since then garnered thousands of views, 20 faves, and is now my #2 most “interesting” photo, right after Squirrel at Fountain. I’m happy to report that 2.0 RLY OWL is now, with my blessing, the logo at 2.0RLY.org.
Yeah, really.
This happened to catch my eye as I was heading for the Metro yesterday: a delicately balanced, slowly melting bit of ice on a blade of grass in front of the American Indian Museum. It’s a pretty cliché macro shot, but I like it anyway.
The above strip is a 360+° panoramic stitch of photos I took from near the Capitol yesterday afternoon on my way to work. Get it at full size if you dare. More post-snow photos follow, and here’s a full photoset for both times it has snowed significantly so far this season. As you can see from the handprint and the scattered thaw on the Capitol lawn, we really didn’t get a whole lot of fluff downtown, but it was enough to make things briefly pretty for a morning.
Turns out the birds Pandora was watching aren’t grackles, but starlings. I often make that mistake. Here’s one of them, perching on my air conditioner box unit yesterday to preen a bit before flying off again.
More on starlings from DCeiver. (Advisory: strong language and adult situations.)
Here is Pandora in a rare moment of wide-eyed alertness, watching a grackle which had landed on the ledge outside. The bird eventually flew off, and Pandora didn’t figure out that she could see the ledge better from the chair. Also included: a bunch of other photos from the last two weeks.
I thought my African Violet‘s flowering days were over till spring, but now she’s putting out blooms in the dead of winter! A real botanical trooper, this one, especially considering that the heat in my room is off. Maybe having a sun-facing window helps.
It came from Flickr this morning:
Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
So Flickr has gone ahead and made Yahoo logins mandatory effective March 15th, on which date users whose accounts predate the acquisition will be required to merge their logins with a Yahoo account. I am very unhappy with this, but lacking a quick and easy way to transfer my photos, metadata, and photolog links to PicasaWeb, I will simply have to suck up and hope Yahoo logins work better than they used to.
(I really hate the “Old Skool” label, by the way. It sounds infantile and patronizing, and as we can see from this login requirement, doesn’t really indicate that they hold their classic members in high regard. But then, maybe that’s the point: to annoy non-Yahoo users into submission with puerile condescension.)
Official Flickr forum thread is here, in which Ludicorp staff patiently answer many user concerns. It looks like my main problem of intermittent Yahoo login is solved with a separate Flickr cookie. Privacy and intellectual property ownership issues abound, of course, and many of the anti-Yahoo sentiment seems to stem from a fuzzy feeling of “badness” about Flickr being more and more absorbed into a Monolithic BigCorp™. That’s not something I’m too worried about, though you may want to review my Brief History of Yahoo Acquisitions for a possible preview of what may happen to Flickr in the next decade or so.
More from Torrez, Binary Bonsai, Kottke, Anil, Strange Attractor, Don of SmugMug, ThomasHawk of Zooomr, Matthew Ingram, Scott Karp, Chris Messina, Blake Killian, Shelley Powers, Ken Camp, Chris O’Donnell, Jason Levine, Slashdot, BBC, and CNET.
(I would be a lot happier about this if the people at Yahoo would let me have the “brownpau”, name, especially seeing that whoever took it before me hasn’t updated for almost a decade now.)
I saw this pickup truck drive by my building today, flag-draped coffin in the rear, with a large US flag flying above it. He pulled up by the Hall of States, either to get a hotdog from the sidewalk cart or get interviewed by C-Span or Fox.
Turns out it’s Carlos Arredondo, the man who, distraught when informed by the Marines of his son Alexander’s death in Iraq, set himself on fire in the Marines’ van. Carlos survived, and is now an antiwar activist who reaches out to other families who have lost military children in the war. He spoke at the Saturday protest.
Here’s more on the memorial truck. It’s not Alexander’s actual casket in the back, but it’s surrounded by artifacts from his tour of duty. The boots, for example.
This is the Caturday Yawn Edition. The challenge is to look at these photos of the cat and not yawn. Ready? Go.
