Blog. Thoughts, photos, and more

I was supposed to shoot a basketball today at Boston College (versus Virginia Tech)…but it is raining so hard. And apparently the BC campus is completely surround by a gate and charges like $10 for parking that isn’t even close to the stadium.

Instead I’m home with chips and salsa and trying to think of other things to do. Oh boring winter. Maybe I’ll do more crossword puzzles.

Look how high that score is.

I used Google Latitude for maybe a month. Someone invited me to it and it seemed like a cool idea at the time, but it’s also a huge (though consensual) invasion of privacy. Think about it. If you’re using Latitude, Google (and whoever may be associated with Google) knows where you are – always – and is endlessly collecting data about you. They also know where you’re not. They also can see everything in your Gmail inbox, but that’s another story.

It seems like this can be used for strategic advertising, but also possibly by criminals. I stumbled across this site called Please Rob Me that finally persuaded me to shut off latitude. I don’t use foursquare or anything GPS related with my twitter. Social networking is going a little too far.

This is pretty awesome, and appears to be in the middle of nowhere, New Zealand (actually it’s located in a private art park owned by an art patron). I love optical illusions.

More about it here.

While I was working on my new site, I wanted to create a simple image gallery using my installation of SlideShowPro (SSP) Director. Director is a sort of content management system used for arranging images into Flash galleries. I’m not much of a fan of Flash, so luckily there’s an easy to use Director API that lets users create galleries using whatever they want. Here I’m going to talk about a rather simple gallery I put together using simple PHP to gather thumbnails and a little jQuery to pre-load all the larger images. Check it out, and keep in mind I’m new at this PHP thing!

Early on in 2010, Massachusetts faced a pivotal senate race. President Barack Obama visited Northeastern University on Sunday, January 27th to campaign for democratic senate candidate Martha Coakley. I don’t usually associate myself with politics, but I attended this event as part of the White House Press Pool to capture a few images. Check out some of my images from Martha Coakley’s campaign!

Since graduating I haven’t had many opportunities to travel around taking pictures. That changed this winter when I was invited to shoot the 2009 Chick-fil-A Bowl in Atlanta, GA. The Virginia Tech Hokies were playing the Tennessee Volunteers, and I was able to take a few days off from my real job to go on a little ‘vacation.’ I was back again thanks to Planet Blacksburg and had a blast shooting the game. Keep reading to see some of the pictures from my trip.

Here I am in Boston, and I’ve never even heard of this thing. Apparently it’s the largest Regatta in the world! Someone told me about the race at one of our camera club meetings, luckily I remembered the date and woke up early enough to catch some of the action. It doesn’t look that cold, but it was actually snowing a bit during the morning. Packed my 300mm f/2.8L IS and headed out to Harvard Square to see what I could get.