Day: December 6, 2004

Photos from the April/May 2004 trip to Ecuador/Peru are finally available in JPEG format at http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/ . I am going to make a further selection of my favorites soon but for those with plenty of patience the index files might be of interest.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200404-ecuador-peru/200405-machu-picchu/photographing-llama-3.tcl is my personal favorite photo so far.

[It took all of this time because the photos were in Olympus RAW format from an Olympus E1 camera and I needed to script Adobe Photoshop to add black borders, copyright info, convert to JPEG, save in four different sizes, etc.  Plus I needed a Perl script to make the index files (thanks, Jin!) and some AOLserver Tcl code to deliver the larger images after someone clicks on a thumbnail.  Then I had to do at least a first pass editing the 1500 photos.]

Driving by Harvard’s latest B-school dorm visitors often observe “That’s one of the ugliest buildings I’ve ever seen; was it built in the 1960s?”  Actually the dorm is almost new and it has been featured in http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200407.html

(Other interesting articles from the same site:  http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200405.html (the new MIT CS building referred to as “a theme park on angel dust”), http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200408.html (another Frank Gehry design)

A huge twin-engine turboprop (jet-powered propeller) Convair 340 cargo plane with a max take-off weight of 47,000 lbs. ditched in a Florida lake.  The pilots swam away unharmed.  The photos of the incident are interesting because they show “Re-elect George W. Bush” painted across the entire length of the fuselage.  Supposedly this was caused when one engine failed and the pilots were unable to hold altitude so decided to land in the lake rather than on top of some houses.  If true, this is consistent with the old pilot adage about twin-engine planes that “the second engine carries you to the scene of the accident”.