Out onto the Pacific for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #150 is:

I’d never seen a whale in the wild before, so I knew we HAD to take advantage of the humpback whales who come to Hawaii for the winter. We went out on a lunch cruise to go see some whales. The only disappointing thing (which is not mentioned in the brochures) is that you can only get within 100 yards of the whales. That’s a whole football field away! And I didn’t have my Sigma 120-400 (link to B&H) yet, so this is the closest I could get to the whale. At least we got lucky and this mother jumped out. She was teaching her kid how to slap the water and other things and at first I thought we’d just see fins and tails.

Today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #151 is:

I was practicing my macro photography and I chose to try and photograph myself. And I decided to focus on my stubble because that seems to be a perpetual feature of mine. I was very happy with the comments I ended up getting.

Back to Baltimore for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #152 is:

Another photo from Otakon. I was especially happy to see these guys at Otakon. Ranma ½ was the first anime I ever saw. It was my entry into the whole genre. I remember discovering it at a video rental store in Tualatin, OR. They had some VHS tapes of Seasons 2 and 3. I remember being so psyched that there were cartoons that weren’t for kids. I couldn’t wait for them to get the next tape. I spent all my time in the library at school researching Ranma and learning about the story and getting into fan fiction for the first time. If I’d been born about a decade later I probably would have really gotten into the whole fan-sub scene. Bandwidth was just too small back in those days.

So I’ve been using reKonq for about 3 weeks now.  (Regardless of what the date of this blog post is in relation to the previous one - I usually write these ahead of time and then stick them into the queue)  So here we go:

The Good -Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences -Integrates perfectly with KDE -When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites.  I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.

Still at Cornell for this Photo.

photo #153 is:

I was just walking back to my apartment when I passed by this mail truck. I’d never seen the inside of a mail truck before, so I took the shot. I also remember thinking it was neat how the back of the truck framed the inside which framed the windshield which framed a view of the outside. (If only it were more scenic out there)

Back to Cornell for today’s entry in Top 200 Photos.

photo #154 is:

One day we were just walking around campus and just pulled into the stadium to watch some lacrosse. Unlike hockey, there was no fee and there wasn’t really anyone in the stands. So I practiced my sports photography with the team. I was into photo editing back them and I decided that this shot would be perfect for a cutout (selective colouring) because we were The Big Red and red is so vivid. I think it work perfectly with this photo. I think it’d look great in a book of Cornell sports photography (without my byline/watermark, of course)

I heard something really sad on NPR today.  Kids are complaining that their parents are spending so much time on their smartphones with twitter and Facebook and so on and they feel neglected.  I had always assumed that parents from my generation would put away these stupid habits once we had children.  It’s part of the reason why I’ve been on a video game binge.  I’m hoping to have a kid sometime in the next few years and I am pretty sure that once I have one that I won’t really have any time for Civilization.  And, at least with the way I feel with other people’s kids, I feel like I’d probably want to spend every waking second with them, at least until they were old enough to be entertained with their own games and toys.

Usually for my blog posts, I write them in isolation and try to guess how my regular readers might respond.  However, for this topic, I spoke with Dan about it as I wrote it.  As someone who’s visited Hiroshima, Dan has a pretty unique perspective on the topic compared to most Americans.

Here is today’s Top 200 Photo

photo #155 is:

Ever since I moved to Baltimore, I’ve been in the city during Otakon, the annual anime convention. The first couple of times it was a complete accident. For the the past two years I’ve looked up the dates ahead of time and made sure to be there to take some photos. I haven’t yet bought a ticket, but almost all of them tend to spend some time outside and everyone’s amenable to photos. After all, they’ve spent as much as the entire last year working on their costumes in some. I usually have a great time enjoying all the awesome costumes and they usually do pretty well views-wise on flickr. So I know there are at least two more Otakon photos on the Top 200 Photos.

Today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #156 is:

Which is weird because, at the time, it was my favorite photo of Danielle and she hated it.  And the weird thing is that, looking at it nearly 4 years later, I’m not as keen on it as I once was.  I can’t figure out what I loved so much then.  It’s so weird to have feelings associated with a photo change that much in just a few years.