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I like to have something of interest to say along with posting a picture here, but I don't have a lot to say, but not much is new since last time I posted. I went to bed. I slept about seven hours. I got up again. Whee?

Moira and I had good food with my parents last night and Moira showed them The Adventures of Lil' Cthulhu (along with some Christmas carols like The Carol of the Old Ones). Good stuff. Makes me want to learn to play the music on the keyboard or the guitar and get some people to sing at a con or something.

I'm going to call Gateway again; I never got a hold of them yesterday. But I tried!

And I think I need to take some time off soon. I could use a break, and I have 28 days of vacation left to use this year. I should make the most of that while I have it.

Hey, coworker G told me about these rumored transit tunnels under downtown Chicago. He had no idea if they're still accessible, but he said he knew somebody who used to go all over the city in them. I took this with a grain of salt. But I just looked on Google and found The Chicago Pedway! I have to check this out!

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Now, about that picture.


Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool



This is the Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool that sits between it and the World War II Memorial site.

I'm pretty happy with this one. This is a 10mm wide-angle shot from the edge of the reflecting pool. I tweaked the sky and the water individually to make the sky a little brighter and more vivid and to try to get a tinge of green out of the water. It must have had a lot of algae that day; it's still a little too green, especially in the bottom middle where the water is closest to the camera.

I can't remember ever getting such an awesome reflection in a body of water like this. Most times there's too much wind and the surface isn't smooth enough. It doesn't take much.

(no subject)

Appointment made with a career counselor! March the 1st at one P.M. That's a Monday, so I'm going to put in for the day off. In fact, I might just think about taking Monday through Wednesday off. Or maybe a week. I could use a break. I'm very excited about the meeting and about getting input on career changing and electrical work from someone who does this professionally. I've already started making a list of questions I want to ask, and I'll make sure to bring my transcript and see how that looks.

After getting annoyed with Facebook's image editing features, I finally just googled up some info on how to manage photos in its interface. I therefore now have a decent picture of myself up on my Facebook profile over here. I'm not really sure how to give you a link to it, but my name on there is Arashi Inu. I do plan to create an account there under my real name just for purposes of keeping a public profile and for work people to find so they don't go looking for my 'real' one, but I haven't yet. (I feel fortunate that there are already a number of people with my real name who do things like write books and make music and who will, I hope, always have a higher Google rank than I do. I still can't find anything very personal about myself via Google, which I'm pretty content about.) Those of you who read this journal and have a Facebook account, please feel free to friend Arashi Inu. I'm still learning how it all works, so I might be slow in doing anything about having friended you, but I'll figure it out eventually. I don't plan to devote much time to playing games on it though. I have enough time sinks already!

I need to start putting a copyright notice on my images. I'd like to use my real name, but I'm a little bit concerned about linking my real name to this journal. I'll have to think about this and figure out how to manage. It might be good enough to just realize that a copyright notice in an image isn't going to pop up in any kind of Google index. Someone who already reads my posts here could obviously figure out my name, but someone doing a Google search for my name wouldn't be lead here or to my Flickr page. That may well be obfuscation enough.

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The Ariel Rios Building Roofline


This is the Ariel Rios Building in the Federal Triangle area of downtown Washington DC. This picture does not incorporate any weird Photoshoppery or anything; it really is shaped like that. (Though my wide-angle lens accentuates the perspective somewhat.)

This was built as the Post Office headquarters and served that function until 1971, when the EPA moved in.

More Washington DC coming up! I have, literally, thousands of pictures from there to go through. I'm having a hard time picking any from the World War II Memorial that I really like, and that really show the feel of the place. I may pick some later on after I go through the rest. Or maybe I'll just have to go visit again and get better pictures! *grins*