Who's your favorite movie villain?
Gary Oldman. What? He's a real person?
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August 2006
08/28/2006
Vox Hunt: Take Time To Reflect
Take a picture of your reflection.
One of my favorite passtimes! Here's a few I took on my last trip to Tokyo. A temple bell reflection:
Sekimura-san and I out for a walk at lunch:
My last day in Tokyo having some coffee and getting out of the rain:
08/25/2006
08/24/2006
Flower
The windows in my kitchen let in some great light in the mornings that make almost anything sitting on my kitchen table look like a renaissance still life. This morning I took a picture of some flowers I got two days ago and you can't even tell that they came from Safeway!
08/23/2006
Rubics competition!
I went to the Rubic's cube competition at the Exploritorium a few weeks back. I was older than most of the contestants by at least 10 years and the things they were doing made my head hurt. Here are a few pictures from the finals competition we watched including the categories:
- The blindfolded 3x3 Finals
- The 5x5 Finals
- The 3x3 Finals
- The one handed 3x3 Finals
08/13/2006
SRL Show in San Jose
This Friday I went to the survival research lab show in San Jose. From the posts I've seen on Vox already, it looks like there were a lot of 6A's there as well! Here's my collection of photos from this event:
SRL has been around since at least the late 90's if not longer, and has been buildling up a collection of scary, loud and dangerous machines who's sole purpose is to destroy each other. SRL has actually been banned from San Francisco.
The show itself is basically a magnification of bredth and scale of what I used to do as a kid in my back yard; I would set up elaborate situations with firework tanks and other firework vehicles and stage massive battles that left burning mounds of ash and charred, corroded metal in its wake. Thus this show had obvious appeal to me. Plus there's just something about fighting robots that everyone enjoys.
Most of the robots spat fire of some sort, some had huge mandibles for picking up and tearing through things and then there was the giant tesla coil for electrifying the large amounts of metal moving about.
Of interest was one machine that was a replica of a german V1 rocket engine on wheels. The V1 rocket engine was actually a pulse jet which works by igniting gas in rapid controlled explosions. During WWII it was called a buzz bomb because this pulsing made a buzzing sound as it flew. This replica was tuned to trade thrust for sound. The pulses were timed at 45 Hz which made this machine produce an extremely low and bassy sound each time it bellowed fire.
Another interesting machine also used pulse jets, but used much smaller ones that were ignited by arcs of electricity visible on the outside of the engine. These pulse jets were mounted on a hovercraft skirt to make a pulse jet hovercraft. Everytime the engines panned across the crowd we would feel a blast of hot air that was exciting and slightly scarry.
Finally ther was the giant telsa coil. No much to say about this one except that it produced a lot of lightning and was also pretty scary. Hooray for fighting robots!
08/11/2006
OMG Seahorses!
The seahorse play center...can it be beaten?
I found this while browsing around Amazon.jp. How can you go wrong?
08/02/2006
QotD: Desktop Show and Tell
What is your current computer desktop image? Let's see it!
I like organic, mostly homogeneous backgrounds. This is a view of some ginkgo trees I took during my trip to the SAKK office.