My inner 12 year old is in love with the Bad Signs photo group at Flickr. Also good: Stick Figures in Peril
Monthly Archive for May, 2005
Went to see Built to Spill at the Madrid last night. I was surprised they were touring since they haven’t released an album since I last saw them in 2001 (though apparently a new album may be out this fall). I certainly wasn’t complaining though; I was thrilled to see them again and definitely not disappointed to hear a lot of their older material. It’s just that good. Heard a couple songs which I thought were probably new stuff though, and they sounded awesome. If the new album is like that it should be great, whenever it gets here.
I think the Madrid is now one of my favorite venues in KC, though it seems to be rarely used for shows. It’s really open inside, has an awesome balcony, and isn’t hot, sweaty, and odor-filled. It’s definitely nicely restored. Jolayne and I sat up on the balcony, because you know, we’re old and lazy. It was a great view though. I’m really hoping to be able to see more shows there in the future.
Revenge of the Sith may have been the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side, but thankfully it was something of a redemption for George Lucas. After seeing it tonight, I can almost forgive him for episodes 1 and 2. The movie was good, actually really good. Good enough to end the Star Wars cycle with some measure of dignity, which until now I wouldn’t have thought possible. It was suprising what a sense of closure it gave, even considering the fact that it ends on a darker note than even Empire Strikes Back. Even though you know everything that’s going to happen in this movie, and have known for years, after actually seeing it it really makes you think about parts of the original trilogy in a new light. I forced Jolayne to go see it with me (hey, she knew what she was getting into when she married me) and even though she had been convinced that she would be bored to death, she ended up loving it. She even wants to rewatch the original trilogy now. She’s never seen episodes 1 and 2, but I don’t see any reason to go and ruin things with that. So at any rate, I would say that episode 3 was just about as good of an end middle to the Star Wars series as I could have hoped for.
A funny thing happened as I was getting ready to post some of my favorite photos from Hawaii on coaxialshutter — I found Flickr. I’d heard about Flickr before, but the idea of a web hosted photo organizer always sounded pretty absurd to me. Why squander precious upload bandwidth for something that there are perfectly capable local apps to handle. What would be the advantage of that? After giving it a brief spin though, I realized I had been completely wrong. I also realized that it would be pretty pointless to try to maintain my own photoblog in MovableType anymore. The template I’d been using was a fairly clever setup, but still had some glaring problems such as requiring manual resizing of photos before uploading and no real way to do any kind of batch uploads. Putting even a fraction of our 800 honeymoon pictures online would have been tedious. Flickr, on the other hand, makes a perfect photoblog. I’ve decided to scrap coaxialshutter and just use Flickr, since I have a feeling that will result in me actually getting more of my photos online than I would have otherwise. I’m limited to just 20MB of uploads per month with the free trial, but I’m impressed enough that I might actually end up subscribing. As cool as it is as a photoblog, I think where it really shines is the combination of shared public photos and tagging. When people tag their pictures and make them public (as many do) it becomes really easy to find other cool pictures, maybe even of some of the same things you’ve taken pictures of. It’s an interesting experience to see a shot of someplace you’ve been, taken by some other random person. For example, these shots of Poipu Beach on Kauai. At the risk of being overdramatic, it almost feels like it gives you the opportunity to examine your experiences from another viewpoint. Or not. But the point is, I think it’s pretty cool.
Hard as it is to believe, the wedding is over and we’re now back in Kansas after a completely amazing honeymoon in Hawaii. Everything went really really well, and and I’ve never been happier, both to be married to Jolayne and that all the planning , preparation, and stress are over. The wedding itself was a total blur, and I’d been told it probably would be. There are a few moments that really stand out though, the most important of which being the moment I first saw Jolayne coming down the aisle. Maybe someone who was there can tell me, but I have the feeling I was just grinning like an idiot. Also, I really loved how the slideshow turned out (thanks Tobin!) Pretty much everything went perfectly, except for those little things that only you notice because you’re in it and even if anyone did notice them they’ve probably long since forgotten. Of course it did snow on the day of the wedding. At the end of April. Thanks a lot Ohio. At the end of the day, the best part is just that you’re finally married and you both can relax. But not until after the reception, which is an experience not unlike being a human pinball. I think that was probably the hardest part about the whole thing, being at the reception and not getting a chance to talk to everyone. We were supposed to go around and greet all the tables, but we only got to 2.5 out of I don’t know how many, a full ballroom. You see so many people there that you haven’t seen in years, people you could spend an entire evening talking to but all you have time for is a quick “Hi, thanks for coming” before you run into someone else, or the DJ comes up and tells you its time for this or that. Ok, actually the hardest part was that we never even got to eat our cake. It was some really good cake too. Right after we cut it we began to make our rounds, and never got back to our table for the rest of the evening as our pieces of cake sat up there taunting us. Before we knew it, Jolayne and I were having our last dance of the evening (note to self: should have taken dance lessons) to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Passenger Seat” which despite a somewhat scratchy cd, I’ll always remember as one of those rare perfect moments in life. Anyway, that was the wedding. Hopefully I’ll write more about the honeymoon soon and get pictures up, but I could write pages and pages about that so maybe I’ll just let the pictures do the talking. I took over 800 though, so I think I’ll just try to get the best of them up. Also, thankfully my mom fully recovered from her illness. The doctor thinks it was some kind of inner ear virus but she’s completely better now. Thanks to everyone for their concern. Unfortunately, Jolayne came down with something nasty, most likely on the way back from Hawaii. She’s been a little under the weather, but we went to the doctor and got her some cough medicine so she’s feeling a little better. I tried to convince her that I actually said “in thickness and health” during our vows instead of sickness, and that I’m off the hook for taking care of her, but she’s not buying it. Hey, I’m still new at this marriage thing.
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