Telephone Lines

Here’s a quick one, since I’ve been too busy to post lately…

Given the choice of what side of the road to put up a bunch of ugly telephone poles and lines on it seems like they always put them on the side that has the better view so people will be motivated to look at the neglected side of the road more often.

I really couldn’t help observing as I drove across the country that the telephone lines were almost always on the side of the road where there would otherwise be a gorgeous view of the mountains or some other scene, while the side of the road that lacked these visual obtrusions was often just a plain-ish looking view. Though not there wasn’t always a plain-ish view on one side… sometimes the view was awesome on both sides, but that’s when they usually had telephone lines running along both sides.

I swear, I’m not making it up.

A Sizable Issue

There were various issues that I encountered while passing through the mountains that I tried my best to work around in order to capture some decent images of these massive mounds of earth.

Obviously my near frantic schedule prevented me from going off the planned route too often to seek out perfect locations for many shots. Not to mention I couldn’t stop nearly as often as I had the urge to at times. So being limited in my time and trajectory meant that I had to take what views and light both mother nature and the highway department saw fit to bequeath to me from moment to moment.

Going Through Photos

I’m going through the photos that I took during this last road trip right now to see which are keepers and which ones really stand out in the crowd. And by crowd, I really do mean many. I have about 12 GB of RAW images to wade through… crazy.

I really need to reorganize my workflow. It’s not nearly as effiient as it used to be when I had everything nicely setup for all of the post editing work.

Speaking of which, I’m also really looking forward to stiching a few panoramas together that I had purposefully planned for. There were some amazingly beautiful scenes to behold and I even managed to get my lens pointed at many of them.

I’m not sure if I’ll get to posting any of them tonight because it’s going to take some time just to complete the first cull. But if I do, they probably won’t include any of the panoramas because they’ll take a bit more time and attention.

We’ll get there eventually though.

When You’re In A Forest

When you’re in a forest, it’s hard to step back and take in the beauty of a single tree. After all, it’s just like all of the other trees around you. Yet if you take any one of those majestic giants out of the forest and plop it down in the middle of a field, suddenly it becomes an object that draws in your eye as opposed to something that you are just trying to get around.

Likewise, if you live in a place where the grass is green in January, it’s hard to step back and take in just how beautiful the scene is. Especially since it’s the same scene all around you and you saw it just yesterday anyway.

So driving in from Tahoe felt like quite an eye opener as it reminded me of the paradise that I had almost forgotten I was standing in all along.

I had just spent the past 5 days (or 3000 miles if you prefer) driving through a snowscape. Amazingly beautiful as it was, snow was a common theme regardless of what state I was in the while away. Being winter, it certainly wasn’t something that seemed out of place and I have no doubt it probably made some places even seem prettier than usual. Dirt has limits to how beautiful it can appear when it’s not in a postcard.

In Tahoe, the snow banks were anywhere from waist high to above my head depending on drifts and pockets of microclimate. Then, as I descended from the high elevation all the snow magically disappeared in what was literally only a matter of miles and I was suddenly driving through plush green hills and mountains and looking once again at palm trees.

It was definately as stark a contrast landscape-wise than any other transition I had seen on my trip. And I’ll gladly admit that it made me really smile.

I really didn’t get out last weekend because it was my first full weekend back without any visitors and I felt the need to stay in and recharge a bit but I’m going to make a serious effort to venture out with my camera this weekend. I’m in paradise after all and it would be a shame to waste it.

Mountains

It’s been a long held view that mountains are a symbol of strength. However, before they became strong, mountains actually began as a weakness. In fact, mountains are a very majestic example of the beauty that can arise as a result of some inherent weakness and how such a flaw can be morphed into a model of strength if pushed hard enough.

Think about it, if mountains were always strong, there would be no mountains. When the plates collided, it was the weak part of the earth’s crust that crumpled and gave way to became mountains. Similarly, for volcanic mountains to form, the lava squeezes up through a flaw in the crust in order to reach the surface.

I passed by so many mountains on my trip it was amazing. To think that I only saw a tiny fraction of them in just the areas that I was in is almost mind boggling.

I really wish I could have given each one a few weeks to explore from different angles and in different light. Not to mention how different they would be in other seasons as well! But that’s a luxury that the financial Gods have not seen fit to afford me with yet and so I had to make a break for home as efficiently as I could.

Though they aren’t really so far away that I can’t venture out to visit them again at some point.

Time To Grind

Now that I’m back I’m hitting the ground running. It’s the only way I can pay for all that gas I burned through… not to mention the constant onslaught of bills that keep coming in.

My timing couldn’t have been better though, since first thing Monday was spent chasing wires because of a network outage at one of the clients.

However I did take a brief time out tonight to send a bunch of snaps from Christmas Day that I quickly edited. I hope everyone enjoys them.

Getting to my road trip photographs will need to be done in much briefer periods over the next month or so when I can steal a minute here and another there. But I do hope to post a few soon.

Updated My iPhone Firmware

After suffering for the whole trip with my phone crashing on me every so often when I was trying to do stuff on it, I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday updating it to the latest firmware. In the process, I set it up as a new phone to clear out the cruft, because that may have part of the issue. One drawback to doing that is I have to spend the time re-entering my account info in every little app and import settings in some others. So far it’s been well worth it as the phone is much more stable now… finally!

Now I can get to editing a few photos from my trip for some belated posts.

Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I offloaded a few more videos I took during my trip to UStream before I blasted the phone. But fair warning, if you watch the one of the Utah Salt Flats for a minute, you’ve pretty much seen the whole thing… I goes from flat to even flatter and that’s pretty much it for the entire recording except for when I drive by a microwave tower that they decorated as some funky cactus-like art installation for kicks.

I Will Not Panic… Yet

Before I left I had an external USB drive act up on me. I hadn’t plugged this particular drive in since I moved last year, so it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. After all, if it was important I’d have been using it all along no?

Well, after I jokingly tweeted that my first task now that I’ve returned was to back up the photos from this trip because losing them would make me want to do bad things, it dawned on me as I was doing it using a new USB drive that the one that died is actually the one that had all of my earlier photos on it. I had moved them all there for safe keeping when I ran into a space crunch on my system.

I’m looking for my backup DVDs now so I can figure out what I’ve lost, but I’m running out of places to look.

Preparing To Update My iPhone

Throughout the whole trip, my iPhone had been acting sluggish and often crashed on me.

I had held off on updating to the latest firmware because at the time, the choice was to update or to still be able to tether my laptop to it so I could have internet access on the road.

I’m not sure if the crashing had anything to do with it, but once I was on the road I could no longer tether it either even though it worked perfectly fine at home when I set it up originally. Google Latitude also had issues which forced me to fall back on to the original GPS tracking service that I had used last year.

So as it turns out, holding off on the update ended up being not just fruitless, but barren of leaves as well, especially since apps are now coming out that require the latest firmware in order to be installed even though 95% of them don’t even really need it as they claim.

So I’m backing it up now and will upgrade the firmware and re-jailbreak it either tonight or tomorrow.

My todo list is packed with little things like this. It’s amazing how much things pile up when you drop out of society for a few of weeks.

What Thin Air Is Like

The last time this bottle was open was somewhere around 10,000 feet.

As you can see, there’s only about half the air in it compared to down in the lowlands. There’s still some water in it, which comes up to about the middle of the “A” now in it’s collapsed state. Non-collapsed it’s probably about 1/3 water and 2/3rds air… or lack of it.