Pay down a credit card, get investigated by Homeland Security!

A couple sends in a check for $6500 to pay down a Mastercard that was getting out of hand, the payment gets flagged and held for further investigation by Homeland Security to make sure that their attempt at paying off said credit card isn't funding terrorism.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/blog/2006/03/warning_financial_responsibili.html

Have you seen the Castrol Oil commercial?

The one where the guy drives through this cool stone tunnel then through sort of a southwestern high desert area?

That tunnel is 10 miles down the mountain from where I now live.

100 megabyte digital pictures?

This is a very interesting technology that I'd really like to work with. Conceptually it's quite simple. Partially disassemble an inexpensive flat bed scanner and do a couple of modifications to the scanning head. Spending more money on one probably won't improve the image quality. Mount it in a light-tight fashion to the back of a view camera. Obviously you have to take a laptop and some sort of power source for it when you go out shooting.

Each image takes about 2 minutes to expose, the same amount of time basically as required to scan a page. It also occupies a buttload of space on your laptop. Obviously a Firewire or USB2 connection will help things along.

http://www.scannerphotography.com/

I learned about this on Slashdot a while back and just started investigating it last week. It's pretty amazing. Produces very good images of static subjects, but once you understand what it does with motion distortion, that becomes pretty cool also. You can do some amazing portrait work with this setup. I particularly viewing the vehicle section of his photo gallery.

We might be getting a renaissance faire in Cloudcroft!

Russet brought home an email last night dated January this year about the concept of putting one on, either mid June or early August. It would definitely be dog-friendly, and hopefully fun. I sent one of the organizers the URLs to Chivalry Sports/Renaissance Store, Museum Replicas, and the AZ Ren Fest.

It will be more along the lines of a street faire than the Devonshire Faire as there just isn't the talent pool to pull from up here AFAIK. And it will definitely be dog-friendly as it'll be on Burro Street and Zenith Park, so lots of open area. We see tourists with dogs all the time up here.

If this happens.... WHEEE!