Another Word for Nerd

I finally uploaded a few pictures showing some of the damage after hurricane Ike in my neighborhood and down Westheimer.

We took a quick trip to Oklahoma on Friday to visit my mother, brother, and sister-in-law. While we were there, I took a lot of pictures, and some pictures-of-pictures when my mom got out the photo albums.

Pictures of me as a baby, young kid, and early teenager

Panorama photos of the land around Mom’s house

Smokey the Farm Dog

Other Random Vacation Pictures

I recently came across a 4-volume set of the Popular Mechanics Illustrated Home Handyman Encyclopedia & Guide (from 1961) in the bargain bin at a local used book store. Of course, I grabbed them – for less than $5 total!

The ~4000 pages of projects are amazing – it’s basically your grandparents’ equivalent of today’s MAKE Magazine; with a lot of projects that wouldn’t be printed today due to liability concerns.

They’ve got everything from planning/building/remodeling a house, woodworking, metalworking, making your own boat/go-cart/children’s playground equipment, indoor shooting ranges, to radio repair, electronics, photography, gardening, farming, and equipment to make handling your farm animals easier.

Over the past four days I’ve taken pictures of the title pages and illustrations for the most interesting articles, and put them up on Flickr. I’ve also contacted Popular Mechanics to see about getting permission to break out the scanner and make proper PDFs of the best stuff.

The Flickr collections page, with one set for each volume, is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/collections/72157603639900790/

JANUARY 14th UPDATE: I’ve received permission from Popular Mechanics to make PDFs of the articles and put them online! That’s coming soon.

When we came out of our house around 1pm to go to lunch, our crazy neighbors down the street had set up three flat-panel TVs and a PA system with loudspeakers in order to watch today’s NFL football game.

I know this has got to be violating a rule or two about “public performances”. I was only able to find rules about Super Bowl parties, however.

For groups that want to host Super Bowl parties — other than sports bars and businesses that normally show televised sports — here are rules the NFL says must be followed:
- No admission fees (even to pay for snacks).
- Only one television (55 inches or smaller).
- No use of the words “Super Bowl” in promotional materials.
- No exhibition of the game in connection with events “that promote a message.”

I normally wouldn’t mind, but when we came out of our house we could clearly hear everything from their sound system, and we’re 4-5 houses away. They’d turned it down when I went out an hour later to take pictures, but the game may not have started yet.

Update: When the game(s) did start, they kept things to a reasonable volume, and had everything packed back up by around 6pm as far as I can tell.

The entire set of pictures is here.

Wired’s Threat Level blog used this picture of mine to illustrate this entry from the 25th.

Amy and I visited Houston’s 1940 Air Terminal Museum today, and I took a lot of pictures. I really love the architecture and look of the place, and am glad that it wasn’t bulldozed and is instead being restored for people to enjoy.

The museum is housed in The Houston Municipal Airport Terminal, an airport terminal that was constructed in 1940. The terminal building is an example of classic art deco airport architecture from the 1940s. Designed by architect Joseph Finger (who also designed Houston’s City Hall), the terminal was built to meet Houston’s growing role as a center for air commerce in the 1930s. The terminal served as the primary commercial air terminal for Houston until 1954.

Edit: here’s some of my favorite pictures. Click a thumbnail for the Flickr page.

My AT&T Central Office photographs have been featured/used on Consumerist.com again – this is the eighth time they’ve illustrated an article with one of my pictures.

I’ve been watching the iPhone hysteria over the past few days, but thought “I can never justify spending that much on a phone, and I don’t want to have to wait in line for one”.

Today, I woke up to find that Amy had a little surprise waiting on my desk:

See here for more pictures of the phone and pictures taken with the phone.

Consumerist chose one of my pictures to illustrate a recent article.

I went out today and duplicated some pictures that I’d taken a few weeks ago using the new camera.

Compare:

AT&T Central Office Pictures taken with the SD550

AT&T Central Office Pictures taken with the S3 IS

What do you think? I’m really impressed with the optical zoom.