Hey man, or should I say Hay Woman!

Today just by accident I ran into this very interesting hay-art (is that a word?). It is a friendly parody of the famed 1857 painting "The Gleaners", a tribute to rural work and rustic piety, by French artist Jean Millet that you can view in the Paris' Louvre. This art I saw when I went out for a walk today at the pathway to Stanford's radio telescope, "the Dish". They are huge! There are 3 of them and they are all about 16' (5m) tall. They are made of hay and steel and they stand amid 11 large decorative bales of hay. The figures will stay at the Stanford Dish for a year. Read more about in the Stanford Report

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The Money Look

You always wanted to look like a million bucks? Well how about creating your own Dollar ($) or Euro (€) shirt. I took these instructions and created my new wardrobe. Looks cool right?
Now the question for you is.. From what money you think I created this children's shirt that you can see on this picture? It can't be that hard if you look at the image on the money shirt.

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Greece in California

When you see this picture, what is the first thing you think about? Well for me when I took this shot, I thought this is just like Greece. The white fence with the beautiful blue ocean in the background, the bright blue sky.. just as I remembered it from several years back. But no, it isn't Greece, it is at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse with the Pacific Ocean in the background as it looked today. Then there is something else that I noticed here that is remarkable. If you look in detail at the little image here (click on it tot enlarge it) you will see a date above the door saying 1872. Well if you would look at the lighthouse itself (photo on the Front Doors blog), you would see a different date. Interesting isn't it? Now the question is who is right.. The people who made the tourist sign (based on historical data), or the people who built the lighthouse and just put the current year on it. Do you know the answer?

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Lunar driving directions..

Today it has been 35 years since the first manned Moon landing by Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Micheal Collins took place. And in honor of that Google added it's space view which they have of our planet earth also for the moon available to the public. The site is accessible through moon.google.com.So if you are one of those people (and who isn't) and love to find the aerial picture of your home... Now you can find your lunar summer retreat as well.

The only thing I am missing are the lunar driving directions. What is the shortest route from my home to the landing site of the Apollo 11.


On this very same day Star Trek's Scotty was beamed up to heaven. Click here for Reuter's news story. He will be missed.

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3 bad taken pictures transformed into triplets

Normally these pictures would be considered as poorly shot. The vertical sunlight on the middle of the day made it hard to take right. But I thought I can do something else with it instead. So as of today Sydney got 2 more identical twin sisters.

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A random moment yesterday

Yesterday I went out with my camera to take some pictures of things I see, and this is what I ran in to. A guy behind me was irritated that he could not pass because it took me a few seconds to aim. And even though I hurried taking this shot, it came out almost exactly as I saw it with my eyes. The light and the shadows were just magnificent.

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I'm satisfied

It was a lot of work, but I am pretty satisfied with the result. I redesigned my only 2 weeks old Front Door blog. Why already after 2 weeks already you might ask? Well I started with my Front Door blog just as an experiment and some in my mind beautiful pictures. I picked a standard template and thought that should do it. Well no.. the light background color did not add values to the pictures. The wide screen of the template made the pictures look small because almost all door pictures are portrait oriented. That is just how doors are designed. With the new design, which is based on a picture of the Cheese Cake Factory in Palo Alto (try to find it in the Blog...), the photos look much better. What do you think? Better? Anyway, please take a look and see for yourself. Also please send me those photos of doors to frontdoors@gmail.com. I want to nominate 3 photos at the end of the month to be elected for the "winners circle".

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How American are you?

After living in the US for about 5 years I did this little survey thingie and it turns out that I am already 31% american. That is more than I expected. If I had only been 15 and a half years old, then I would have lived 31% of my lifetime here, but I am considerably older than that. So either I am americanizing much faster than anticipated or this test was probably designed for people born here. Anyway, here are my results:

You Are 31% American

America: You don't love it or want to leave it. But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over. On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead... And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

How American Are You?

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NeoCOUNTER sure is a new counter!

While browsing I came across something today that caught my attention. It's called NeoWorks NeoCounter and I thought I'd share that with bloggerland because I think it is something pretty neat. On their The Matrix-like website they announce it like this:
"You thought you had seen all there was to see in matters of counters? Prepare to be impressed! NeoWORX proudly presents NeoCOUNTER, an innovative and unique web counter that displays on your website the number of online visitors by country. Ever wonder where "on earth" your visitors come from? Do you want to wow your friends with a cool new tool on your blog? Do you need to show your clients, patrons or users how truly global your website is? Search no more! NeoCOUNTER will put your vistors in their country and your website... on the map! And the best part is that NeoCOUNTER is FREE!"
Well I think they are right.. This scrolling counter sure looks nice and different then a little ugly button that you see on most websites. Maybe it doesn't give you all the stats you need, but it at least is good for the eye I think. I immediately did a suggestion on their website to allow for multiple counters within one account. We'll see if they will make that addition possible in the near future.
And the image on the right is a screenshot with my stats only a couple of hours after I put the counter in.. pretty neat, right? (The real counter is scrolling, as you can see on my sidebar.)

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The 2005 California quarter

Today I discovered what the California quarter will look like that this year will be released. Maybe it is old news and I just never saw it, but I liked my discovery and felt the immediate urge to place the quarter here on this blog.

This quarter is the 31st in the United States Mint's 50 State Quarters® Program. California was admitted into the Union on September 9, 1850, becoming our Nation’s 31st State.

What I like a lot about the quarter is that for once it is not the Golden Gate bridge that gets all the attention, but California’s quarter depicts naturalist and conservationist John Muir admiring Yosemite Valley’s monolithic granite headwall known as "Half Dome" and also contains a soaring California condor.

Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and having that on "our" quarter is something that makes me feel a little bit proud.

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Late lunch

Today I ate (actually not yet started) left overs. Still looks good, doesn't it? If you look closely you can also see where I will be eating it... at my desk. Bon appetit!

And this is what it looked like 14 minutes later.

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I'm not looking...

Sometimes just eight fingers are enough for the picture she must have thought. And she is right, why should a little girl pose for the camera when she can have fun instead. And that is what she had in the park again.

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Created my Front Doors Blog

Yesterday I created a new Blog. It's a blog about Front Doors. And it looks like this Blog is getting some attention. Quite a number of people started linking to my blog. So I am quite honored. It has been on my mind for a while now to do something with doors. And finally I decided to post them in a blog. The purpose is that it one day this blog will grow big. And that then actually people will be sending me pictures of their front doors, or pictures of beautiful doors in the area where they live, instead of me taking all the pictures. There are many millions of doors in the world and many of them have the character that I am looking for on my website. So spread the word about this Front Door site and we'll see where it will lead to.
So far I have only taken pictures in the U.S. Some of them are pretty old. But I definitely will be taking more pictures of doors when I am on my trips. In fact I am looking forward of getting front door pictures of my family in Sweden, the Netherlands and France. If you haven't discovered where to find the Front Door blog.. well here is the link spelled out:
http://frontdoors.blogspot.com

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Alpine Pond

After I hiked the Russian Ridge and came back to my car, I looked on my map of the area and then I noticed that I was also very close to the Alpine Pond. I had heard about the beautiful pond but never seen it, so I went out of my car and added a little bit to my hike of the day to check out the pond. Well it sure looks beautiful. I checked out the area a little bit to see if it is worth to come back another time, and I bet this area will be explored more. I bet a future coverage about it will appear here in this blog.

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Hiking Russian Ridge

The weather was (like most of the time) great today and I decided to check out Russian Ridge. So I took the car drove up the winding Page Mill Road for a couple of mile to end up at the Alpine Road parking lot of Russian Ridge. It's as you can see on the pictures I took, really beautiful up there. I went over the Ancient Oaks trail, via the Alder Springs trail to the Hawk trail. And from there I went back over the Ridge Trail to where my car was parked. The only drawback about this hike is that flies were bugging me. They constantly decided to land on my arms, neck and wherever they could annoy me. But all and all it was definitely a well spent afternoon.

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At the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo.

Today I took Sydney to the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo. It was a nice change of venue. In the Zoo section Sydney got to see some bats hanging from the ceiling, a bunch of turtles swimming and sunbathing, two geese that were welcoming Sydney with their sounds, 2 sleepy racoons, an owl, snakes and more. I was impressed when the peacock showed all it's feathers but Sydney did not seem to care much about that. The museum part where we went in first was fun too. Here Sydney could run around, climb through little holes and play in a little children's kitchen. Overall I think the most fun Sydney had was when she made the green frog hers that she was sitting on and also told everyone else that that frog was hers and that the red frog was daddy's.

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