Yesterday, mew0422 and I visited Magic Wings, a butterfly conservatory near where we grew up. We'd been meaning to go there ever since it opened while we were in college. Now it looks like her brother is thinking of getting married there ( Read more... )

Some addenda from the trip:
I went to Carmen at the Santa Fe Opera on Wednesday night. I hadn't been to an opera before although I've been to zillions of operettas. It was enjoyable. There's something great about a opera-style music to accompany a tragedy, especially when much of the show is really fairly upbeat ( Read more... )

After visiting Cliff Palace, I went on the tour of Balcony House, which requires a fairly serious climb up a ladder to get to.

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It's hard to believe classes start tomorrow.

The trip to New Mexico was great. The work, the play, the food, and the photography were all successful.

Albuquerque is known for its hot air balloons; while it wasn't the big balloon fiesta, there were balloons out and about most clear mornings. I tracked some down pre-flight.


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Highlights

Jimmy Wales began with a clip from the Cobert Report then went on to discuss the need for the English Wikipedia to begin a focus on quality over quantity through “stable versions”. A move towards accuracy was to be a major thrust of the conference.
Update: Wales posed this thought: Wikis are enabled by inexpensive communication. ( Read more... )

My car radio recently gave up the ghost. In pulling it out of the center console I managed to blow the fuse for my dashboard backlight. Driving at night without a speedometer backlight was annoying, but not dangerous and not problematic. It was frustrating, so before I left to drive from Greenfield, MA to Troy, NY (a two-hour country-road drive) I ( Read more... )

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We woke up early, had our crappy continental breakfast and hit the road before sunup. In an hour or two we arrived in DC, which mew0422 had never visited. We took a lap of The Mall and parked by the Lincoln Memorial.

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We woke up early to this view:

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A first trip to Atlanta wouldn't have been complete without visiting the World of Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Corp's massive shrine to their own marketing brilliance - only $9 each plus gift shop. The following photo is from their collection; I liked this early piece of marketing directed at store owners. It is an effective use of props to convey a ( Read more... )

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We packed up our tent and drove out of the state park listening to “Black Betty” (“She's from Burmingham (Bam-ba-Lam) / Way down in Alabam' (Bam-ba-Lam)...”) and had another southern breakfast at Cracker Barrel with more biscuits and gravy. Mmm...
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