PPD 35

Another good late afternoon shot. This was taken from east of the city, off a fire escape on Children's Hospital. There were lots of people around, but nobody seemed to think it odd that I was climbing up a fire escape. Go figure.

Edits: Cropped, Gamma Adjustment
Taken: Thursday, August 31st

PPD 34

I just love the late afternoon sunlight, it gives such great shadows and tones. This is the wall of an apartment building near the old iron bridge over Cherry Creek.

Edits: Cropped, rotated
Taken: Tuesday, September 12th

PPD 33

Edits: Cropped
Taken: Sunday, September 3rd

What Would Brian Read?

In the interests of messing around with this nifty RSS technology stuff that I purportedly work with all day, and also a fit of incredible hubris, I've decided that you all want to read even more of the stuff I like. To that end I've set up what Newsgator geekily calls "clippings feeds", but could maybe be better described as "What Does Brian Think You Should Read."

For those of you not familiar with the concept, these are feeds made of things that I've read and thought interesting enough to recognize to anyone unfortunate enough to be listening.

I've set up four of these wonderful, one way communication devices.
(note: Blogger.com seems completely certain that there need to be 12 line breaks here. I'm tired of arguing with it, so just scroll. Sorry bout that.)

Funny
Technical
Geeky
Interesting

These should also be autodiscoverable from my blog page, so you can subscribe from the Newsgator Toolbar if you've got it (or, I suppose, any other feedreader on the planet...)
Of course this is all totally useless to you without a feedreader. So go sign up for Newsgator or something!

More Homeowner Fun - Masonry

Continuing my intermittent series of the joys of being a new first-time homeowner we have my latest adventure, brickmasonry. Many of you have probably heard this already, but perhaps some other poor soul with find this and feel less bad about themselves. Plus I've got pictures up!

Anyway, a few weeks ago we had a rain & hail storm. In fact Wendy even took a few pictures of it. In between photography sessions she heard a rattling sound in the ceiling near the dining room.


As it turned out, there was half a brick missing from the outside of the house! I'm not quite sure how this happened. Probably it just weathered apart, but who knows? Either way, it's a hole in the side of the house, and if you look up close you can see a piece of wood back there. It's not a woodframe house -- that's the floor joist on the inside of the house. That rattling sound Wendy heard in the ceiling? That was hail, coming into the inside of the house.

Clearly this couldn't be allowed to continue into winter. I tried getting insurance to pay for it, but they declared it "normal wear and tear." Much as I would've loved to argue with them, I suspect they're probably right. That left me in charge of getting it fixed.


So after a trip to hardware store, up the ladder I went. Unfortunately the remaining half of the brick was still tightly mortared into the wall. So I ended up breaking it apart with a chisel, which pretty much covered me and the entire side of the house in red brick dust. I also got one of my goofiest self-picture yet!

After that a little fun with brick and mortar and I've got a complete wall. It remains to be seen whether it's going to fall down in the middle of some dark and stormy night. But I take comfort in the thought that it can't be worse than it was before, and that the house has probably been treated worse than this at some point in it's 115 year history. Besides, it stayed in the wall for over a week, so it must be good, right?

PPD 32

This is another shot from the late summer perfection of last weekend. Near the end of the afternoon I was biking through widely underappreciated Cheesman Park when the lush flower beds near the pavilions caught my eye.

Of course I wouldn't just give you an out of focus picture of flowers. There were dozens of bees buzzing around the flowers, stocking up on nectar before the end of summer. The one in the upper right was even obliging enough to pose for this picture.

Edits: None
Taken: Sunday, August 3rd

PPD 31

 
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Last weekend was the Taste of Colorado here in Denver, which is basically just a downtown festival for you out-of-towners. Sunday also happened to be a nearly perfect late fall day. Between the two of them, I actually managed to get a decent panoramic of downtown despite 3 hours of sleep and a respectable hangover (damn bachelor parties...)

The picture covers about 150 degrees, so it looks a little squashed. If you click through to the original size it'll look a bit better, or at least bigger. The stitching worked out quite well this time, except in the crowds where you'll see some ghosts if you look closely. Spooky... :)

Edits: Stitched
Taken: Sunday, September 3rd

PPD 30

What I really like about this picture is how well the brick wall captured the redness of the pre-sunset light, it really captures that "end of the day" feeling for me. Also the acute angle of the near corner makes it look a bit odd which I find visually interesting.

Edits: Saturation up, brightness down, hue'd a little red
Taken: Thursday, August 31st

Ming Dethroned

I wrote last week about the new photo on my mantle. What I didn't show you was the incredibly classy bit of art that was there before.

That's right, an original movie poster from the incredibly cheesy 1980 movie Flash Gordon. Nothing says class like the bald-headed alien overlord Ming the Merciless, especially with birdman warriors and floating castles! And of course the perfect topper to it all, the quote at the top: "Pathetic earthlings... WHO can save you now?" I wonder if it could be "Flash Gordon, quarterback, New York Jets?"

My brother got that poster for me as a Christmas present years ago. Flash Gordon is something of a cult favorite in our family for it's stupefyingly bad plot, acting and dialogue. So I actually do love the poster... maybe just not right there.

Normally I wouldn't have even thought to put it there, but when I was moving into the house I needed somewhere to put it that wouldn't be in the way. What better place than six feet up the wall? I thought it would come down in short order, but for whatever reason it sat there for almost 9 months, threatening my living room with destruction from the Planet Mongo. It was a surprisingly long reign, but all good things must come to an end.

PPD 29 - Immature/Inappropriate Humor

Since I haven't posted anything since last week Thursday, I figure I can get away with posting a bunch of pictures at once because it averages out to one a day. Rationalization is fun, isn't it?

Also in honor of a long weekend, I think it's time for a bit of humor here on PPD. Specifically, immature and mildly inappropriate humor. I should note that some of this could be called offensive by some more sensitive people, so consider yourself forewarned. (For the record, that's mostly aimed at any readers I don't know about)


So first of all we have this billboard. Heh heh, it says "nuts." I wonder if that guy is looking for his?




Next we have this photo from the smoking area at Children's Hospital. Aside from it being a little odd having a smoking section at a hospital, it's also funny having a super-happy kid-friendly garbage can there. "Hey kids, welcome to the smoking section! Don't litter, just stick your butts in my mouth! Hahaha!!"




This is a building downtown. Yes, it really is the "Denver Hitting Club". Of course it's a perfectly legitimate establishment, but my first thought was that it's some sort of weird club for smacking people around. More like this...





Lastly, we have a picture from work. A while back a group of us found a box in a storeroom that had the nameplates from our offices previous tenants. The one on top was for one "Bob Fuqua". I'm sure that name has a perfectly normal pronunciation, probably something like "foo-kwa". But of course it's much funnier if you move the accent to the first syllable, because then it sounds like a four-letter word. And from there it's not hard to add a "d" on the end, making a well-known but immature insult. And of course, immediately after that, you end up with a picture like this...





Anyway, that's about it for today. Hope y'all found it at least mildly amusing. :)