Back to NYC in this installment of the Top 200 Photos.

photo #183 is:

In March 2002 I went to NYC for the second time in my life.  It was exciting for so many reasons.  I was meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time and I was going to one of the biggest cities in the world.  I’d been to NYC once before as part of a college trip up the east coast, but we only got to spend one day there.

See it online here.  This month it’s mostly from a trip to NYC.

Today’s entry in the Top 200 photos is

photo #184:

This photo was taken when I was taking one photo a day, but before I’d heard of the 365 project. So sometimes I’d be the subject and sometimes it would be squirrels, inanimate objects, or insects. I was going for the look and feel of something out of a movie.

For the Top 200 Photos,

photo #185 is:

This arch is part of some of the oldest dorms on Cornell’s campus as well as being an arched entryway to West Campus. In 2001 when I started at Cornell, they made the change that all Freshmen would be on North Campus and all the Upperclassmen would be on West Campus. During most of my four years, West Campus consisted of a mix of old, gothic dorms and “temporary” dorms built to accomodate GI Bill students in the late 1940s. In my Junior year they began demolishing the old dorms (all named after graduating classes) and building new, modern dorms. This photo was taken in my Senior year when I used to walk around with my Fuji almost everywhere I went. From the date/time stamp, I was probably walking back to my apartment after getting lunch at The Ivy Room.

Today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #186:

Sometimes when I was at functions with Danielle’s family (especially before Dina and Daniel started dating (others, not each other)), I’d get bored because everyone was speaking all Vietnamese, so I’d just grab my camera and wander around taking candid shots. And I’d often get gems like this one. After all, most people look better when they aren’t posed. By the way, this is Danielle’s cousin, Mai, and she’ll be featured a couple more times, I’m pretty sure.

Today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #187:

What I love about this photo is that it captures two things that were key to the Cornell experience - passing out quarter cards (known as carding) and attending a Capella performances. It’s not far-fetched that the Andy character from The Office was in an a Capella group at Cornell. There were about six of them when I was there. Some were all male or all female and some were unisex. Pretty much every semester each of them had at least one concert. This group was called The Hangovers. Here are some other ways they advertised on campus:

Today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #188 is:

I got my first digital camera over Christmas of my freshman year. It changed my photography forever. Since the photos were essentially free, I took my camera EVERYWHERE on campus. A lot of my photos, especially one of my favorite ones from my top 10, came from this impulse. I am able to look back fondly on nearly every single one of my Cornell memories because if something was going on, I probably had my camera there.

I’ve been using KDE since November of 2010 around the time that 4.5 was released for Fedora. Around the time of 4.4, the KDE folks, especially Aaron Seigo and the rest of the Plasma team, started really pushing activities. I kept talking to people on identica and I couldn’t quite figure out the point of activities. They seemed to be redundant in a world with virtual desktops. (And, as you can see in the comments of the article I’ll be linking to, most people feel the same way) The biggest reason I seemed to hear was that each activity could have a different set of widgets. But one weekened I was messing around with KDE system settings and found out that you could set each virtual desktop to have different widgets and not have to mess with any of these activities. So after that weekend I *really* didn’t understand the whole hassle of activities. This is how I configured my desktops:

Back to Cornell for this entry in Top 200 Photos.

photo #189 is:

This photo is from of the earliest batch of photos I uploaded to flickr.  I had just discovered Photoshop and was using what I learned from a book to create paintings from my photos.  After spending a good semester doing stuff like this, I realized I preferred straight photos much better than these bits of art.  It doesn’t mean I’ll never do it again, but I prefer for my photos to be photos.

I was born and raised in the USA, so I am not sure if it’s fair to call these songs racist, I think that racism requires malicious intent.  And, given that the US has a different and unique relationship with its non-caucasian descendants than Latin America, I’m not sure there’s the same level of maliciousness as in the US.  All I can do is view these songs through the perspective of an American.  The song that sparked this article is by La Banda Gorda and is called “El Negro Pega Con Todo” which means “black matches with everything”.  I’d heard it before, but I was listening a little more closely to the introduction this time around.