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Knoxville Snow: First of 2014
Knoxville got hit this week with its first real snow of 2014. Shutterbug that I am, I couldn’t wait to document it with photos. Here they are! UPDATE: The snowfall pictured above, the week of January 29, was followed on February 12 by a much deeper and heavier snow. For comparison: Except for the animated…
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Facebook’s Digital Unclaimed Freight Train
What will happen, 30 years from now, to the 300 million photos we uploaded yesterday to Facebook? Image Source Here’s your answer: Facebook will have them. We (probably) won’t. Facebook will have them labeled, categorized, ranked, and documented as to where and when they were taken, what they’re of, and who’s in them. We (almost…
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The Evolution of … Cardboard?!
When I was a kid, a cardboard box was a cardboard box. No longer! Those days, a cardboard box consisted of several rectangles folded over to create an enclosure. An unusually complicated box might have one to three flaps you could tuck inside. But that was pretty much it. You still see boxes like that.…
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Make Your Own Animated GIFs
Animated GIF files are the rage these days. You know, those digital photos that contain moving objects and people, not unlike the hung pictures at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. Here’s an example: My niece, Bella Tanguay, making her first-ever horizontal dive. She already was doing straight-down vertical dives, headfirst, but needed coaxing from…
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Insert Special Characters
Back in the typewriter age, we knew how to add “special characters” such as exotic punctuation marks: Press a key along the top row for “$” or “%” etc. More common ones, like periods and commas, were among the main keys. Now with computers, we have Unicode characters, HTML characters, extended ASCII characters — more…
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A Walk in the Park
Cheri and I live just a couple of blocks from Chilhowee Park, an important and historic part of Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s the site of the Tennessee Valley Fair, held every September, as well as many conventions and exhibitions. To us it’s a walk in the park: a site, that is, for exercise walking. There’s a…
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Boomer Proves You Need Your Own Website
Still not sure you need your own website, under your own name? Boomer the Dog proves you do! Before we get to Boomer, here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve been saying about owning your own name: Like it or not, you have a public image. It’s an image magnified many times over by the Internet.…
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Holding on to Autumn
This time of year, I cling to the beauty of autumn. Brightly colored leaves, I love. Falling leaves — not my favorite. Because once they fall, they’re gone. So I “hold on tight”, cherishing every scrap of beauty, even as it fades away like the smile of Alice’s Cheshire cat. More and more trees show…
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Crawling the Web
It has long seemed to me that with the onset of autumn, spiders become more active and audacious in their web-building. Is that just me — or is there some basis for this theory about crawling the web? Either way, I’ve recently captured some interesting photos of spider webs that appeared behind our house. The…