[caption id=“attachment_6546” align=“aligncenter” width=“444”] The Family by the Willamette in the mid-90s[/caption]

When I was still a young lad, we lived in Oregon for a while; just outside of Portland. I remember my mom making us chew these horrible tasting “vitamins”. I asked my mom what they were and she told me it was because they didn’t fluoridate the water. She didn’t want our teeth to get messed up and so we had to chew the nasty tablets until we moved back to Florida. My mother loved how laid back life was in Oregon when compared to the frenetic pace of Miami. Yeah, you’ll get that when you live with hippies. They also didn’t use reflective paint on the lanes in the road which made them dangerous to drive on when it rained (which was a LOT of the time), especially if it was dark. That reflective paint was bad for the environment and no one came up with any alternatives so I guess they considered it better for people to die.

Summer is here and for many of us that means going to a beach - whether it’s just a drive away or a cross-country flight. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on photography!  There are great opportunities whether you want to do landscape photography, wildlife photography, or portrait photography. Let’s start by talking about equipment. The equipment you bring to the beach depends on your purpose for being at the beach that day or that session. If you’re going specifically to take photos, then you’re probably OK bringing your dSLR and, optionally, flash. If you’re going to the beach to enjoy it and also want to take photos, you’re best off getting an underwater housing for your camera or getting a weatherproofed camera. Sand and sea salt (which is in the air at the beach) are both VERY bad for cameras and could wreck your expensive camera. If you will be having fun you don’t want to take the chance that someone who’s with you or a stranger kicks sand onto your camera accidentally. Also, sometimes waves can come up farther than you realized at first. An underwater housing or weatherproof camera is protected from the elements. It also has the bonus of allowing you to carry it with you into the water (should you happen to be at a beach where you can get into the water) and lessens the chances of your camera being stolen.

I had no intention of seeing Man of Steel in the movie theater; I was voting for Monsters University. I’ve grown quite tired with the constant universe rebooting. We all know where Superman (or Batman or Spider-Man etc) came from. Can we not waste another 2+ hours and $millions to retell that. Why can’t we just tell new stories? These characters have such rich histories and such iconic villains that it just seems so pointless to keep hitting the same notes. Additionally, while I liked Snyder’s Watchmen, I was NOT a fan of Suckerpunch. But my parents wanted to treat Danielle and I to a nice dinner for our wedding anniversary and Man of Steel was the movie that would get us out of the theater in time to make out reservations.

I came across this story back in May, but things appear to be at a stand-still. Essentially, The New York Times came up with an awesome new way to tell stories on the web and when someone figured out how to duplicate it, they sued. Let me start by saying that one awesome thing about the NYT is that they are incredibly innovative at how they use the web. About 10 or so years ago they had a state of the art photo journalism blog that I frequented and LOVED. They were telling neat new stories and really taking advantage of the web. Snow Fall, the prototype for this new way to tell stories on the web is incredibly beautiful. Go check it out on that link. Back? OK, wasn’t that great? It is the NYT taking what’s awesome about the web - what it can do better than print - and making it beautiful. When I came across this site it made me feel like this is the future of magazine journalism. This is what Time Magazine, Newsweek, etc should look like on the web. Instead of ugly (in comparison) walls of text with a few tiny photos, this website really does everything right. It has animation and video and good margins, great fonts. I know it’s not appropriate for the daily news - at least when it’s a short story. But I am absolutely shocked that Rolling Stone magazine isn’t using it for their 5-6 page stories - I think their legendary photos would work so well with this format and it would provide a great transition to digital that would rival the print version. (And perhaps give a compelling reason to pay for the magazine?) Right now it’s like when you see those awesome prototype cars and then they never come out. It just sucks that someone out there has come up with something that could be a real order of magnitude shift in how we experience journalism and stories on the web and no one seems to be using it. Instead the news website and blogs are just slightly better than paper in that they have hyperlinks.

[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]

Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.

[caption id=“attachment_6456” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] So, if gays get married this will no longer mean anything?[/caption]

This Thursday morning I tweeted that I would need to take a look at the actual ramifications of the Supreme Court’s 26 June decisions before I did too much celebrating. I was right to have a tempered reaction. As is pointed out in the Rolling Stone story on the decision, all the overturning of DOMA does is allow for Federal rights to be given to gay couples. So they can be married in the eyes of the IRS, Federal Healthcare, etc. Now, this CAN have incredible financial ramifications, but we’re still a little ways away from gay marriage in all 50 states. Although, I wonder if the decimation of the Defense of Marriage Act leads the way to a lawsuit about states having to reciprocate marriage. I’m a little ignorant on whether states do that because they’re federally required to or because it would bonkers if you could go from married to unmarried just because you moved for a job. So there’s that.

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post.  For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service.  Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Of course, it consists of Scarlett photos. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, I can’t believe now much she’s changed in just one year!

[caption id=“attachment_6442” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”] Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip in Packaging[/caption]

I’ve been using MP3 players since they first existed. I can’t remember the name of the device, but I got it with my Audible subscription. Then, I used my PDA for a while - remember those? Then I used an iPod Shuffle, but it didn’t work well with my Linux computer. The database kept getting corrupted since Apple can’t play nicely with others so it has to be reverse-engineered. So I told myself I’d never get another Apple music playing device. About three years ago, I went with a Sandisk Sansa Fuze. Since then I’ve gone through three of them, approximately one per year. What keeps happening is that the headphone jack gets looser and looser until the slightest nudge makes it so that I can’t hear one of the audio channels. Since I use it work out, this quickly gets VERY annoying. But I really, really like Sandisk’s GUI for their devices - it has a specific podcast section that resumes the podcast where I left off, even if I go back and forth between different podcasts. I don’t do that too often, but I do it often enough that it’s important. So I got a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip because the Fuze+ has horrible reviews (for the way they changed the buttons) and since I’m using it to work out, I could use a smaller, lighter device.

Memorial Day was pretty awesome this year. All three original Mesa Brothers were reunited for the first time since Christmas. It was my third major holiday celebration since Scarlett was born (in 2012 we only celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas), but it was the first one I hosted. Even with Danielle’s family only 3 hours away we rarely have an opportunity to have a BBQ out in the yard. I find this lack of BBQs irksome as my childhood involved lots of house parties since our entire extended family lived within 30 minutes of each other. What is the point of having a yard and home in suburbia otherwise? So I took the rare chance to take out the speakers I bought back in High School for my short DJ career and set my netbook to play from Google Music. I created a playlist of songs with “summer” in the title since Memorial Day is the cultural start of the summer in the USA.

Over at Popehat they presented an interesting article about the Ideological Turing Test. The regular Turing Test says that a computer passes if you can interact with it and you don’t know you’re interacting with a computer instead of a human. One of the closest things we have right now are the chat bots whose eventual goal is to get you to some website. Well, the Ideological Turing Test tests:

whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.