You might remember that last week I got some cool lightning shots, right in front of the US Capitol building. Well, today I got a cool rainbow literally ending on the US Capitol building. Very strange.
Especially considering how young he is, 17, and how Richie Cunningham he looks. Oh, and this link is totally not safe for work, and even quite vulgar, I guess. But his music is simply great. Have a listen.
You have to click through, then when the picture comes up, scroll around with your mouse on the page to move the picture - it's literally 360 degrees of photo. Amazing.
Yeah, it was stupid as hell, standing on my balcony trying to get pictures of the lightning, but for the first time ever, it actually worked. And I got several great shots. I've been trying to do this for most of my life, to no avail. Yeah. For the photo buffs among you, I have a simple Canon Powershot SD700. Nice miniature camera. For the first two shots, I simply had the camera pointed in the direction that I had the sense the lightning might hit and waited until I just sensed some light, then snapped the shot. Got really lucky on both. With the latter shots, below, I decided to set my camera on continuous shot, so I just held the button down and shot 800 pics until I got 4 I liked. Funny that the best shots are the ones I just sat and waited and then snapped.
This one is totally cool. If you could see the original, you'd note that the lighting hit probably ten blocks or so from the US Capitol building, and you can see the Capitol just to the right of where the lightning strikes (a light is on in the dome).
This one has the Washington Hilton in the foreground, where Reagan got shot.
UPDATE: Well the storm kept coming, so I shot a few more:
A small science probe blazed through the salmon-colored skies of Mars on Sunday, touching down on a frozen desert at the planet's north pole to search for water and assess conditions for sustaining life, NASA officials said.
The spacecraft, known as Phoenix, landed at 4:53 p.m. PDT after a do-or-die plunge through the planet's thin atmosphere and thruster-jet landing to the Mars surface. It marked the first time that a spacecraft had successfully landed at one of the planet's polar regions.
I decided to use the fun tag-cloud tool and check out what words were most used in the recent Democratic and Republican presidential debates. I have no idea if this tells us anything. Just thought it would be fun.
Here is the Democratic debate from the other night.
It was the first time Rephael, who had held a technical position in the ministry before his posting to San Salvador, had ever distinguished himself in any way, the official added.
Despite the sun shining in Paris this morning, nothing but clouds last night making it impossible to see the lunar eclipse last night. We saw the moon for a few brief moments just as the color was due to start changing but by the time the major change had taken place, there was hardly a clear spot in the sky. Did anyone else have the good fortune of seeing it?
I'd posted eralier tonight a link to a Trompe l'Oeil expert who draws 3-D images on sidewalks. Well guess what, I photographed him at work in Edinburgh, Scotland and didn't even realize it was him until moments ago when I found the scene I photographed on the artist's Web site.
The scene, photographed by me from the correct side (and actually there's a better photo of it on his Web site).
The same scene, photographed from the wrong side.
You can check out lots more of his work here. And this one might be my favorite.
(UPDATE: I Bumped this old post back to the top, and will again another time or two, so folks understand how to use RSS feeds. They're quite useful for reading lots of blogs and news sites throughout the day.)
We've talked before about RSS feeds, and I wanted to mention another way you can use them to more easily read your favorite blogs and news sites.
First off, an RSS feed is simply a different way to read the new content published on a blog. The "normal" way is to simply visit my blog and read the content. But let's say you have ten favorite blogs and five favorite news sites (like the NYT, AP, etc.) Do you really want to read 15 Web sites a day for your news AND have to visit each of those sites every hour to find the latest news?
Well, RSS feeds helps you do this much more easily and efficiently.
Today, we're going to talk about Google Reader. Google Reader basically works like an email inbox, but the "emails" coming into your inbox are all content from your favorite blogs and news services.
First, here's a good and quick (45 seconds or so) video explaining Google Reader. I suggest you watch it, and turn up your speakers - it's literally less than a minute long (and the guy is hot). (And if you want to read even more, this is a good link for more general info on what an RSS feed is.)
Okay, now let me walk you through it. It's pretty easy.
Go to the Google Reader home page here. If you dont have a Google Reader account already, set one up - it's free and it's easy, and it's quick - do it, it took me like ten seconds, and you can use whatever email address you have, you don't need a gmail address. Once you set up your Google Reader account, head back to the Google Reader home page. When you get there, you'll see this page:
On this page, you see the Google Reader 45 second video I was talking about. Watch it if you haven't already.
Once you're done watching the video, click on the "Add Subscription" button on the left hand side of the page (I numbered it "1"). You'll see a search box open up. Let's say you wanted to subscribe to the AMERICAblog feed. If so, then type americablog in the search box, then click "add." You'll see a number of search results pop up on the right, and the first is our blog. Under the listing for our blog, click the "Subscribe" button. You've now subscribed to my blog's feed. Let's add one more feed so you can see how a few work together. Click again on "add subscription" and then enter "thinkprogress" - when the feed comes up, subscribe to that one too.
Now, in the top left hand corner of the page, click on "All Items." It should take you to a page that looks like this:
You'll see the blogs you subscribed to, listed on the left. The number of posts on that blog that you haven't yet read are listed in parenthesis. And on the right, you see all the recent posts from every blog you subscribed to. Click on any of the titles of the posts on the right and you'll see either a summary of the blog post, or the entire thing. Then scroll down to the next blog post and click again. Each time you click, it will close the previous blog post and open the new one. Very cool. And after you've clicked on several blog posts, look at the top of the row of blog posts and click on the blue button that says "refresh" - that will refresh the page and only list blog posts you haven't read yet.
There's a lot more you can do, experiment by clicking on various buttons, including "home," "expanded view," and even clicking on the left hand side on the names of the various blogs you subscribed to. Also, consider subscribing to your favorite news sites, like Reuters or the New York Times. Just type their names in the "add subscription" button and you can add them too. This is a great way to keep up on a lot of blogs at once.
Oh, and when you're previewing a blog post, you can click on the title of the post and it will take you to the post on the actual blog - that way you can join in the comments, etc.
Let me know if any of you try this, and what you think. Thanks, JOHN
You may recall that a few weeks ago, during Bush's State of the Union, I started playing around with "tag clouds."
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, tag clouds basically look at the recent content on your site and display it, visually, based on the frequency with which key words are used. Words used more often are larger, words used less often, smaller. In my post, I used the technology to take a look at Bush's State of the Union addresses since he took office, in order to get a sense of what key words he was most interested in citing in his speeches.
Anyway, I was playing with it on this site, and got the idea that it might be interesting to compare what words/issues we talk about the most here versus other top progressive blogs - sort of a not totally scientific zeitgeist of what the blogs are thinking, as it were. So, I've set up a comparison at the bottom of the AMERICAblog home page - scroll all the way down, you'll see it - of live tag clouds from 9 of the top progressive political blogs. I just set it up this afternoon, so it only reflects the last 6 or 8 posts or so, but eventually it will display the words most used during the past 3 days, larger words used more often, etc. It will update several times a day, hopefully. I'm not sure what this will tell us, if anything, but it could be interesting. So check it out.
I've grabbed a screen capture of the tag cloud set-up earlier today, it looks like this.
UPDATE: I emailed Mike Luckovich, the editorial cartoonist, to ask him about the coincidence, and he says there's no coincidence at all - he heard about the skeletons last week and that's what inspired the cartoon. So now you have a small window into how political cartoons come about. Kind of the same way blog posts come about - read the news :-)
