Oy Vay

Originally uploaded by Mitch Eaton/bodhi47.

Off camera lighting. I guess we can now observe that the most prevalent lighting in the roller rink is fluorescent. Why? Everybody's greenish yellow. I might be able to photoshop this with a color correction layer, but maybe not. This flash stuff is making my head hurt.

Late Spring Moon

Late Spring Moon
Originally uploaded by Mitch Eaton/bodhi47.

Ever since I was a little kid and our Dad woke us up to come see the The Landing On The Moon on the black and white TV in my parents bedroom I have been fascinated by this sight. We used to have a Reader's Digest Collection of albums (vinyl) of all of the communications that went back and forth between Houston and the Apllo Spacecraft and the Eagle Lunar Lander. I even tried to assemble a model of the lunar lander. I was a space freak. And I've been trying ever since to figure out a way to get that National Geographic Magazine photo of the moon. I knew it would be like shooting against the snow, having to stop down the camera to compensate for the grey point. But until now I've never had a camera that I could crop the picture and still get this much detail. This rocks. You don't know how much I get a kick out of this shot. Is it perfect? Nope, but gosh I could sit and look at it for hours.

Does it take an Einstein?

Does it take an Einstein?
Originally uploaded by Mitch Eaton/bodhi47.

Does it really take Einstein to bring this to our attention. I love this quote. Why? Because I live in a city where this is not self-evident. It's an ivory tower city. A city where people have gotten so used to having people take what they say on faith. And they say a lot. And sometimes what they say is meant to draw your attention away from what they don't want you to know. Today we found out that after 3 years of chasing someone we had already had in custody the estimated 100 billion dollars we have spent in Iraq has finally paid off by killing one guy and his posse. It will not make a difference. For every Al-Zarqawi we blow up there are at least 100 more to take his place. Why does it not matter if we kill Bin Laden? Because the thousands of minds he has molded and shaped in his training camps are like bacteria. They feed and grow in isolation. Once he has germinated them they self-propogate. Al-Zarqawi no longer matters. He is in Heaven with 21 virgins. He died fighting his good fight. Instead of capturing the enemy and wringing him for all he was worth, we martyred him. We continually try to deal with this problem utilizing beltway logic. It's tragic. The jihadists do not have our agenda. They do not care if they have cable tv, a new SUV, a house in the burbs, or a fat bank account. They want to die killing us. That and only that is what they are living and dying for. Be honest, when you figure out that a consequence of your search for truth brings up something you find distasteful or unpleasant you own it as well as the parts that you find good. Does our government really think that we are that easily led around by the nose? That we are so media unsavvy as to not recognize a red flag waved in our face to distract us? So we killed a terrorist. As long as the conditions exist that led to his development are around, there will be thousands more just like him.

They're at it again

Open letter to:

Senator John Warner
Representative Jim Moran
Senator George Allen

One of the few things in our society that is a level playing field for everyone is endangered by greedy corporations who want to inhibit innovation and the egalitarian way in which the internet functions. It is a direct attack against entrepreneurs and the free dissemination of speech and news. The phone and cable companies already have a monopoly on the access to the internet via modem and broadband, and now they want more. In some ways this boils down to a free speech issue. Without access to the "fast lane" the small business, the citizen journalist and the entrepreneurs who have made the internet a thriving tool for prosperity for all of us will be penalized and relegated to a backwater of society. It will squash innovation and stifle the voice of the common man. Is this the kind of society that you think is worth voting for? I hope not, and I will keep this in mind in both the mid-term elections this year and the larger elections coming in 2008.

Traveling

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.


I've been thinking a lot about this recently. I was taking a class in Microsoft project and was talking to this guy from Pennsylvania who works for Bayer. Yeah, the aspirin company. And as such things come up, I said something like, "When I was in ________". And he said, "I've never been there." So we talked for a while about that. And it turns out that he's been to North Carolina to Hatteras for vacations and that's about it. And the kicker was, he was really surprised that I had been to the places I've been. Now, I don't consider myself a well traveled person. Really. I've been lucky enough to go to a few neat places, but not all that many. Work has also sent me places. Wonderful places like Cleveland (3 times), St. Louis, and New Hampshire in January. But unless you really work at it, you don't get to see much outside of whatever venue you're in at the time. And you see, I've always been around people that had gone to cool places. Places I'd heard of but hadn't ever really thought possible. I'm still working on the USA as well. About 30 states so far. And the ones that are really calling to me now are out west. Photographer's country. Utah, Montana, and New Mexico. Maybe California. But it's so big it ought to be considered like three separate states. I still find it weird though that the old saw about most people never going more than 250 miles from where they were born to be unreal. I don't think I could handle that, even though I'm now back within that distance from home. There are still so many places I want to see that I doubt I'll be able to do them all before they look like just a disneyfied version of themselves as well. So I'm not going to publish the google hack map of the world as it is just a little disheartening.