…but I’ve been having fun with this image in Photoshop. It was taken near the corner of NW 21st and Burnside.
Although I didn’t get any good pictures, I had a great time in Portland. I was really impressed with how friendly the people are and the beauty of the place.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I would check in. I’m swamped with school, but I’m also going through one of those phases where I’m rethinking what I want to do with this blog. I find this blog rewarding, but I’m wondering how much attention I need to give it for the rewards I perceive.
1 Comment Taking some more time off from blogs and blogging to refocus…
Holy crap, it snowed in Austin. These images don’t look all that impressive, but I’ve never seen more than a few flurries here in Longhorn country.
![McChris standing in front of his sweet Apple ][e.](http://www.infobong.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/wonkychris550.jpg)
When I was at my parents’ for Christmas, I spotted this picture of me posing in front of my sweet Apple ][e, and I knew it had to go on the blog. My best guess is that this was 1986, and I was ten years old. Note the digital watch and the Lacoste polo shirt.
I’m back in Austin, and I thought I would share a few photos and experiences from my trip. After spending the night in Norman, I decided to go to Crossroads Mall in OKC. A few months ago, I read of New York Knick Stephan Marbury’s partnership with retailer Steve and Barry’s to sell a $15 basketball shoe, which the baller would actually wear in NBA games. As I pulled up to the mall, the wellsites around the mall jumped out at me. It occurred to me that the donkey pumps weren’t an unusual sight when I lived in Oklahoma, but they stand out now. Then I thought, “Dude, you live in Texas.” Regardless, I was pretty amused by the wellsite in front of Macy’s.
Steve and Barry’s is like a downmarket Old Navy if you can imagine that. The store sold college-licensed and novelty t-shirts for three for $20. If you need to load up on OU (or for that matter, UT-Austin) apparel, this would be a good place to visit. I had forgotten to pack a winter coat, so I grabbed a warm polyester fleece sweater for five bucks.
After Christmas, I took a day trip up to Bartlesville, which is about an hour north of Tulsa. Bartlesville was until recently the headquarters of Phillips Petroleum and also home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s only skyscraper. The Price Tower was built in 1956 as the headquarters of the Price pipeline company, and it’s a strange 19-story building that rises over the prairie
Inside, the building is surprisingly small and awkward. Wright avoided the use of right angles in the building’s floorplans, and even the elevators use 30- and 60-degree angles. When I took the tour it was difficult to fit four adults into an elevator car, partially because of the strange shape. Wright originally designed the building to be used as charity housing in New York’s Lower East Side, but the plans were scotched during the Great Depression. Wright altered the plans in the 1950s for a mixed-use building in Bartlesville, which included the Price headquarters, corporate apartments, and a dress shop. Today, it serves as an upscale hotel and art center, but the high modernity of the building make it seem like little more than a conceptual building.
I’d recommend visiting the Price Tower if you’re in Tulsa for a few days. The drive up US75 is really quite enjoyable. As I watched the rolling hills of northeastern Oklahoma go by it, I thought of how in Texas that strip of highway would be covered by exurban tract housing, and how nice it is to actually see the landscape.
I didn’t realize that Flickr users can send photo printing jobs to their local Target photo center. I just spent about ten minutes uploading images to Yahoo! Photos, since I clicked through the Target.com website. (It didn’t occur to me that Yahoo! owns Flickr.) Perhaps if I read the Flickr blog, I would know about the integration with Target’s photo services. This would have saved me some time, since I had all of the photos I wanted to print uploaded to my Flickr account.
Well, maybe. When I upload images to Flickr, I almost always downsample them to 1024×768 for a few reasons. I don’t have a Flickr Pro account, so I’m limited to 20MB of transfer each month. I never hit that threshold, but images are about 2MB fresh of my camera, so I would hit it pretty fast if I didn’t downsample and optimize my images. In addition, the largest size Flickr will display for us Flickr Amateurs is 1024×768, so I don’t see much point in uploading larger images. Obviously, while I want to downsample and compress for the Web, I want the highest quality for printing, so, if I print directly from Flickr, I’ll be printing with images with a lower quality than I would ordinarily use for printing. Target is offering ten free 4×6 prints for new users right now, so I’ll see how these Web-optimized images look.
I’m starting to hit the threshold where I may need a Flickr pro account. In addition to spending a bit too much time adjusting photos in Photoshop, I may hit Flickr’s 200-image rule. I can upload more than 200 images, but only the 200 most recent images will display. I’m not sure that $24.95 a year is worth it. (Perhaps one of my kind readers will buy me a subscription.) I’ve got more to say about my mixed feelings about Flickr, but I think I’ll stop here with an image I uploaded yesterday. Be sure to click through and see the notes my friend Eric added.
A few weeks ago, my mother asked me if the leaves were changing color in Austin. I told her that most of the trees I see are live oaks, and so there’s really no color event like you may see in some cities. In Tulsa, where I grew up, the leaves simply turn brown and drop, unlike Carthage, Missouri where the maple trees would turn a brilliant red each year I went there for a high-school band competition. What the trees in Tulsa lacked in hue, they made up for in volume. My parents have about 35 full-grown trees on their lot, and leaf removal became a dreaded autumnal ritual.
I’d forgotten about Austin’s elm trees however. When I was down in the Barton Creek Greenbelt at the end of October, I was pleasantly surprised to see bright yellow elm trees preparing for winter. Oddly enough, I only got one lame elm picture, but I snapped quite a few pictures of the fall colors for my mom.
The fashion blog Still in Berlin says that “the mustache is the new full beard“, so I thought I might experiment with growing a moustache. I’m not very fashionable – most of the time I flop around town in Birkenstock clogs and baggy cargo shorts – but I thought a moustache might give me a little trendy elan. I’m now thinking I’ll abandon this experiment.
One thing I didn’t count on is the fact that about half of my whiskers are blonde.
This crop might show my blonde whiskers in more detail.
This is a little surprising since my hair is nearly black.
As a youth, I was disappointed that my height was just short of six feet, and my hair was just short of black. My dad’s hair was black before it turned gray, but he’s only five-and-a-half feet tall. I guess I’ll take dark brown hair for 5.75 inches.
On the other hand, maybe my blond whiskers shouldn’t surprise me, since I have the weird mutant eyebrow hairs that are blond and much longer than the rest of the hairs.
It was pretty hard to get a good shot of my eyebrows, since my camera wanted to focus on my eyes. I guess I could have gotten someone to take these shots instead of holding the camera up to my face and hoping for the best.
Anyway, I think I’ll lose the ’stache and return to my clean-shaven ways, but the moustache experience has been worthwhile, if only to prove that I shouldn’t try to grow facial hair.
Update 8/22: The experiment is over. I shaved the ’stache earlier this afternoon. I didn’t think it was particularly uncomfortable, but I feel much more comfortable now that it’s gone. Facial hair is just not for me.
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