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This weekend Mary and I packed up the car before dawn and headed north for Sonora, CA.  We got lunch in Sonora, then saw “Christmas, My Way” — a Frank Sinatra Christmas tribute show — at the Fallon House Theatre in Columbia State Park. Afterwards, we headed off to Yosemite valley to spend the night camping in the snow.  I’ve been to Yosemite twice now. The first time, we camped in Toulumne Meadows, and that area was awesome. But, when we went into the Valley it pretty much sucked. The roads were a traffic jam, and there were people EVERYWHERE. This weekend was so much calmer, and the snow was nice. When we first left camp around sunrise, the valley was nearly deserted. People started emerging from the lodges a bit later, but it was still a pretty quiet place.

Inscriptions on the wall at the Hong Kong Garden Restaurant in Sonora, CA. We figured these to be cattle brands for local ranchers(either past or present). We're not really sure though. FYI, if you are in Sonora and thinking of eating at this restaurant, I definitely do not recommend it, despite the interesting decor.

Just some blocked off stairs on the end of a bridge that caught my eye

Yosemite Creek

More is in this set on Flickr (or view slideshow).

Hello wandering reader. You are, no doubt, here because you are looking for something desperately enough to make it all the way to page 10 of your search results, where you found me. I know it is you, because I’m quite sure that my three regular readers from long ago have long since stopped checking for any new posts. However, I am not dead. Just quiet. I don’t actually have anything to say, but I have been taking a lot of photos recently (Mostly using my wonderful girlfriend’s Nikon D50), so I thought I’d share a few here.

I saw this lucky bamboo at Ikea today for $3. I thought it looked cool, and they had the perfect vase for it for only $0.79. I got to wondering how you make bamboo curl like that, so I went and looked it up.  So, someone, somewhere, has been patiently and slowly rotating my bamboo around for at least a year, until it was shipped to Burbank so I could buy it for $3. I’m often amazed at just how cheap some things are. Then again, perhaps they fed it some kind of bamboo super-grow fertilizer and it grows a couple of inches in a month instead of a couple per year.

Paraglider at Torrey Pines Glider Port

The pier at Paradise Cove in Malibu. Went for breakfast here last week. Was a pretty nice place, ate breakfast at a table on the sand, then walked on the beach for a bit.

More on my Flickr page. Just click any of the photos.

Photoshop is pretty cool. Gimp is nice…but photoshop…its just better.

This is a combination of shots taken while walking out into some sand dunes at Death Valley a couple months ago.

Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

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I had my first Disney theme park experience recently. Mary finally took me after talking about it forever! All in all, I’d have to say I was pretty impressed. Nothing like the roller coasters of Busch Gardens or Kings Dominions, that’s for sure. In fact, there were only really two rides that qualify as roller-coasters as far as I’m concerned. But they definitely go all out on the immersion factor. Whether it is the stars flying by in the dark and the music of Space Mountain, holographic ghosts on haunted house, or images projected on sheets of dry ice smoke, I spent a lot of time going, “Wow that’s cool! How’d they do that?”.

They also really know how to run a theme park. Compared to others I’ve been to, it is way cleaner, people are nicer, and they amazingly efficient at moving a line through a ride. I mean, they run double loading stations, have non stop loading on conveyor belts, and have a “Fastpass” system, so you can get a certain number of bypass the line passes per hour, and can then come back at a future time (marked on the pass, depending on demand) and bypass most of the line. Also cool: Interactive rides. On Astroblaster, you get to go through the ride shooting targets with a laser, competing for a high score. Nothing like competition to make the ride more fun . The California Tower Hotel (Tower of Terror) was also pretty cool. I can almost see why people would want to travel across the world to visit the place. For a young disney fan at the right age, I think it would seem downright magical. Pictures can be found here. Also, this girl was going crazy on a rope on the Lion King float in the parade!

It’s time for the second place in the “Places to Go” series: The Bonneville Salt Flats. You may have heard of it before, as it is home to the annual Bonneville Speed Week, and has been the location for many land speed records in the past. It’s about 110 miles west of Salt Lake City, and while visiting a friend there, we decided to make the drive out to see it. We weren’t sure what to expect. Would there be a visitor’s center? Could we even get to it? Could we just go out and drive on it? We certainly hoped so! Turns out we could. More after the jump…

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Whenever possible, I like going to new places. They could be new places like Antarctica (Which by the way, is where God wants me to go, maybe more on that later), or new places like a park down the road. Some are more exciting than others, of course. But most all of them are better than sitting around at home. So I’ve decided to start posting information about places to go. Or rather, places I’ve been. Places that maybe you might like to go, or, if you can’t, you can at least see pictures and know they exist.

The first place in what may (or may not) turn out to be a long series of places is way out in the desert, on the Mojave National Preserve. It is just a pile of sand, really, and we came across it completely by accident. It proved to be a fun challenge though, and I liked it enough to include it as the primary graphic on this web page. Yup. You’re already looking at it at the top of the page. For more information and pictures, continue on… (more…)