Friday photo

There's apparently a rule of blogging that states that you have to offer some kind of serial post on Fridays - photographs, music compilations, cephalopods, whatever. Hitherto, I have been in blatant violation of this statute.

So, to get back on the right side of the law, here's a random photograph from my collection:



In 1995 I was working as the controller at the Bridge Bay marina, a pretty soft and cushy job, if you want to know the truth. Maybe I should have kept it. Anyway, there was a family of otters living in the marina, but you didn't often see them during the height of the summer, they being the skittish creatures that they are.
By September, though, the crowds were getting thin, the weather less reliable, and you might have a very slow day with almost no tourists in the marina. On one of these days, the whole otter family came out to snooze in the sun and I could leave the office to shoot some photos.

As the Flickr caption states, these guys could not lie still for more than a few seconds, so the scene was constantly changing and the biggest challenge was to avoid knocking over the tripod while giggling at this little comedy troupe. A flopping otter looks comic enough, with that elongated body, but when they're lying all over each other in a pile, it couldn't be funnier. I didn't have a reload of film available, but I did shoot off the remainder of what was in the camera.

Unfortunately, I don't have all of those slides any more. Living in dorm rooms and moving twice a year kept storage space at a premium and I developed the habit of weeding my photographs ruthlessly. If I had two dozen photographs of an animal, I would keep only the best two or three and pitch the rest. That means I don't have much in the way of 'record' shots, those photos you take just to help recall the time and place. I kept only those photos that struck me as having some artistic merit. One of the advantages of digital images is their easy storage demands; a 100-GB external hard drive takes up less space than even one of the binders that I kept full of slides. Most of these new digital images are rather boring, if not outright crappy, but there's a place for that sort of thing, too. In twenty years, I'll be glad I still have them.

Just when I was getting better

What did Nixon say?

Remember the infamous missing 18 minutes on the Nixon tapes? They're commonly presumed to have contained recordings of Nixon ordering the cover-up of the Watergate break in, and to have been erased deliberately. Of course, no one can prove that.

But a researcher (and former NSA analyst) thinks we can now find out the gist of the conversation. It seems that H.R. Haldeman's notes from that conversation are uncharacteristically light, and there's physical evidence to suggest that they were unstapled and restapled - perhaps to remove some pages? Hmmm?

So the idea is that maybe, just maybe, Haldeman pressed hard enough with his pen to leave very faint impressions on the papers beneath the one he was writing on, and perhaps we now have the technology to read those impressions? Then we would at least have Haldeman's (presumed) missing notes, if not the actual words.

Stay tuned.

[via the archives listserv]

How to tell you missed the big time

Donald Rumsfeld got an opera singer. Sarah Palin gets William Shatner:

Why the President's advisors don't tweet

Google News offered me this little article, which is a nice explanation of why working in the White House is different from sitting in chem lab.

Firstly and most obviously, in a sensitive environment such as the White House, controlling the flow of information to the outside world is extremely important. Secondly, Twitter is not immune to malware, viruses, and scams. Then there is the Presidential Records Act, which requires all White House communications to be saved. Abiding by these rules would prove difficult on an external service such as Twitter.

O'Brien also explains why switching to free Firefox would actually be rather expensive.