May 30th, 2002: LAN Partay
[Comment from Future Peter from the year 2007: and I wondered why I didn't get any dates in high school.] We had a LAN party. Nine computers networked together, playing some Half-Life Team Fortress, Starcraft, a little bit of Quake 1, some Unreal Tournament, probably a couple of other games.
Several of our rigs.
Ilya, Mike, Andrew, Tim, Ben, Graham.
Ben
May 29th, 2002: Last Day of High School
I took a bunch of pics of our last day of NNHS. Many of them suck and there are a bunch, so I haven't put any on this page yet. For the moment, they can be found in this directory and browsed manually. Or you can look at the full-size versions in all their grainy glory here. I hope to cull out the ones I like the most and put them on this page relatively soon.
May 17th, 2002: Owen's Graduation
I went to Madison, Wisconsin for Owen's graduation. On the way there, we stopped in Detroit, which apparently recently renovated its airport. It has this high-tech inter-terminal tram thing which is all polished and scary. Like, each tram stop has a little display that tells you exactly how long it will be until the next tram comes (down to the second). And, as I've been seeing in more and more airports, the signs are all in English and Japanese.
The first night there we had dinner at La Paella, a Spanish restaurant. The menu was very insistent on the fact that they were Spanish, and not say, Mexican or South American.
My head and Owen on his cell.
Owen and Char.
Note the amount of difference the flash makes.
On the way home, I tried taking some longer-exposure pictures.
Look! Long-exposure taillights! I'm creative!
The next morning. (There was a picture of my sister here but she deemed it too unattractive. Oh well.)
Where UW graduations take place.
Piggly Wiggly adds a touch of class.
Lotsa people.
The best part was that the graduates started batting around a bunch of beachballs. The graduation marshals would take them away but a new one always popped up. This went on for basically the entire ceremony. I tried to get a good picture but the beachballs were way too hard to see.
So, the way UW does its graduation is that it's totally unorderded. All the graduates just sit down in the seats somewhere and write their names on a card. They file off by their seating and hand the card to a person who reads their name off on the microphone. This is open to abuse, c.f. the person who wrote down "Homer Simpson." But on the other hand, there's no graduation rehearsal and the graduates only need to arrive 20 minutes early.
>And, of course, you can't get your real diploma this way. It comes in the mail a few weeks later.
What you get during the ceremony.
The happy graduate and his homeboys Nick and Grant.
Haha, mortarboard-hair.
If Seinfeld were in Madison, this would be their coffee shop.
In Owen's apartment.
An amazingly durable wombat.
And a scary green truck.
We then went to the Madison garden-y type place, where the Badger Bonsai Society was having a bonsai show. Here are some of the more interesting ones.
Outside, in the land of pretty and well-kept flowers.
Goodbye, Papa Korn... ?
Note the bird at dead-center.
I was low on free pictures and batteries, so I didn't use my camera much the rest of the day and the next day. They had a neat enclosed tropical arboretum, but it closed earlier than we expected and we had to come back the next day (not having too much else to do). We ate dinner at a few more restaurants and bought the entire second season of Star Trek, featuring such episodes as The Measure of a Man (Data on trial -- alive or not?), Q Who? (the first Borg episode), and other classics.
Then I came home, and took a few more pictures of Scary Airport Architecture.
That coloration is from windshield tinting, BTW.
Sumner Tunnel.
The Lenny Zakim bridge.
May 15th, 2002: Experimentation
I ran around late at night trying out the macro lens.
Blurry faucet.
Remote -- is not so bad.
Muffin. Uninspired.
I also tried some long exposure shots. I didn't get anything normal that looked cool, but I messed these up and they came out pretty funky. Well, what mostly got me was how cool the blue astronomy chart in the center of the picture looks. It's all glowy and shiny and all-around neato.
Scary overexposed death kitchen.
Not as bad as the above.
I need more work, but making progress in at least understanding what the heck I'm supposed to do.
May 14th, 2002: Not so nice day.
It was a bit cloudy today but I had some free time after the bio AP so I decided to take a few pictures around my yard, with the vibrantly colored foliage and whatnot.
But first, I've always liked how my neato calendar looks with the daylight shining through it.
Calendar from some museum gift shop.
Then I actually went outside.
Pink. Purty.
This next one didn't really come out as well as I would have liked, but hopefully you get the idea. This little part of my yard is just totally covered in these pink petals, it's really cool.
Down on the ground.
I was under the impression that you had to know how to use the mysterious macro mode in order to get pictures like this, but on automatic they came out pretty nicely I thought.
Um, rhododendron, right? No.
Bleeding hearts.
I really like how the background is all fuzzy on that last one. I mean, duh, no surprise there, but it's still cool looking.
May 11th, 2002: Nice Day
A very nice day today.
May 8th, 2002: Mmmmmmmmm
Chocolate chip chocolate cheesecake, on chocolate. And Coke. For the inexperienced, chocolate and Coke do not go well together, but they're so good apart....
If this is wrong I don't wanna be right.
May 7th, 2002: Workingness
Hey, I got it to take a not-bad picture setting the settings myself. I changed the white balance to get the color right, the exposure to make it not need a flash, and the aperature to keep shutter speed high to prevent blurriness. And it only took three tries!
Another look at Mr. Orange Head.
May 3rd, 2002: Boo Frickin' Yah!
Amherst tournament is this weekend. Am I pumped? I think I am.
This is so awesome.
By the way, I can now make links with my fancy little XML suite that I use to generate this page .
May 1st, 2002: Au Revoir
Well, I haven't seen him in several years, but still, it's sad that he's gone. Henri Atkins was gentle and funny and made my summer seem twice as long as it was. But, as Stroker said, he's gone off to that big island in the sky. So long.
On a happier note, I saw a cool bluejay using our birdfeeder, so I went to grab my camera, but it was gone when I got back. So instead I give you Wiley.
He lives in the kitchen.
