motogobi

This was the view from our back porch as of Monday evening, looking west:

A fairly large forest fire is burning in the foothills of Boulder. We saw the beginning of it at around 10:30am while out walking Thatcher and watched it quickly grow into the major conflagration it is now. Unseasonably high temperatures combined with a drier-than-normal August brought about what amounts to a tinderbox in Colorado at the moment.

EDITED to include this time-lapse video of what we were basically watching from Erie last night, shot from Flagstaff last night:

Since we saw the first plumes, we’ve seen or learned the following about what is now being called the Four Mile Fire:

continue reading…

It’s no joke: we love (love!) our pup Thatcher. So much that one or two days a week we’ll drop her off at doggie day care to enjoy the pack for the day. To that end, we’re big supporters of a local business here in Erie called Bowhaus, which also provides live indoor and outdoor webcams for when we’re really missing Thatch. Yeah, we’re those people who log in while on vacation to catch a glimpse of her big black spots when she’s boarding there.

In a little bit of tech support serendipity, the front desk at Bowhaus had recently posted a plea for help – $100 credit for whomever can help get their web cams back online. Seems that, with an ISP change and resulting IP address changes, the good folk at Bowhaus have been beset with anxious owners unable to pull up the web cams. So guess how I spent a bit of my Saturday, and guess who gets a free ride at Bowhaus next week?

I used to have a little sidebar thing that said I was a father-to-be that I’ve since misplaced in the shuffle to this new layout for motogobi. Well, part of the time spent mucking around with the redesign (which I like a whole ton, ackshually) was done while sitting on the couch watching my son sleep. Everett was born Monday July 26th to a very overjoyed Mom and Dad who’ve been nothing less than totally in love with him since the moment we first set eyes on him…

Last weekend I got sucked into one of the most interesting and cool features of Picasa, Google’s Mac and PC application for organizing photos: facial recognition. Last year, my father began scanning all of the thousands of family photos that he has stored using a slide/negative scanner and a flatbed scanner for prints. I ended up coming home last Christmas after a family visit with 40+gig of digital imagery – and that’s roughly 1/3 of what he thinks he has left to digitize!

As soon as I got home, I simply dumped the collection into my Picasa albums folder and let the software crank through it. But only a few days ago did I stumble upon the facial recognition features of Picasa – and it opened up an totally unexpected world of family history for me. You see, in sorting through all of the faces and tagging them with names either from my already-imported contacts list or by adding new ones on the fly, I’ve begun to gain a deeper understanding of my family history. I’ve always known the basics, such as my grandparents and some aunts and uncles here and there. But putting names to the faces of people like my father’s aunt, sitting down to dinner dressed to the nines in the 1930′s with her dapper husband Jack, has just brought a whole new level of appreciation to where I’ve come from and how deep my roots – and my own growing family’s roots – are and will continue to be for generations to come. And yes, that’s my father leaning out of the back of that 1960′s Beetle, not me. Something about the apple falling somewhere in close proximity to the tree…