permanent daylight
the obsessions of Adam Findley

Palo Alto had perfect weather for the 4th this year. We had a nice little barbecue in a local park and enjoyed some super delicious food. This is the first time I've tried to capture fireworks. I wish I had left the shutter open for longer (I left it open for about 1-2 seconds) and capture multiple fireworks at once, but overall I'm pretty pleased with them.

View full set on flickr.

Robert Bradshaw taught this great little photography class in his studio. About three classes in, he in front of the light and the camera and I snapped away. He turned out to be as good a model as he is a photographer.

I went sailing with my family up at Deer Creek Resivour in Utah a couple weeks ago. I taped and bungied a GoPro Hero Wide Camera to the front left pontoon and got some pretty stunning video footage. It's amazing how may stops of light the GoPro can handle.

The music kinda sucks, but that's because I wasn't able to use the music I had originally (Daniel Lanios - Still Water) because YouTube figured out that it was copyrighted material and wouldn't let me post it. This was one of their free alternative tracks. I'd recommend playing the video in the background then loading up mine. That should give you the experience this artist originally intended.

Twitter has only been around 3 short years, yet it has become as important to communication as the telephone. Now all you naysayers (I'm looking at you "The Trouble with Twitter" retweeters) may think that it's just another stupid internet fad destined to go the way of AOL, pets.com and MySpace. When I signed up for it I thought the same. I too went through the stupid tweet phase, thankfully never stooping so low as to tweet every meal (except when I'm at Bob's in San Francisco). Now it's so critical the US federal government asked Twitter to delay it's planned outage for upgrades.

You still think I'm ridiculous? How about some evidence:

1. It was a means of taking back a terrible interview at the South by Southwest Festival in 2008.
2. One word, 'Arrested,' freed a student imprisoned in Egypt for covering an anti-government demonstration.
3. It has given a unique voice to celebrities, such as Adam Savage of MythBusters where they can interact like human beings and not just like rock stars.
4. The picture of the airplane that landed in the Hudson that covered nearly every newspaper was taken with an iPhone and posted on Twitter.
5. Perhaps most important, it is one of the few means whereby Iranians' protesting voices can be heard despite the stifling of their government. Finally the people have a voice against the state-run media.

Twitter has brought new found freedom, while like all freedoms it still has it's consequences, I for one welcome it.

This is perhaps the longest possible public transit way to get where I'm trying to go:

My friends Bruce, Scott and I strapped a camera to a rocket and launched it at Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA. For those of you who don't know, Moffett Field is a little airstrip owned by NASA and is surrounded by some pretty huge buildings for storing giant air and space crafts. The camera is pointing downwards so you can see the rocket launch. Check it out, it's pretty fantastic.

This is a small series of launches. I trying to see if I could get some pretty cool blur effects and I quite satisified with my results

See the whole set on flickr.

The Sea Otter Classic is a big bike race just out side of Monterey. I went down to take a few pictures with some friends and came away with some great photos and a GoPro (thanks Nick).

Two girlfriends are better than one!

See the whole set here on flickr

Thursday, April 2nd, I get this email:

Hello Iron & Wine Ticket Buyer, Thank you for purchasing tickets to Iron & Wine's upcoming May tour, we're very excited for these shows.

We wanted to let you know that all ticket holders will be receiving a free copy of Iron & Wine - Norfolk 6/20/05 live CD. The CD will be released on April 18, 2009 as part of Record Store Day (available exclusively at independent record stores) and we have secured enough copies of the disc to hand out each night on tour (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York).

Thanks for the support! See you in May!

-Iron & Wine

Aside from a great product, what keeps you coming back for more is great customer service. I think this is one of the big reasons why indie bands are doing so well these days: they know how to treat their customers. Lots of the big label bands (you know who you are, Coldplay) only take the time to raise their ticket prices. One notable exception is Radiohead: they put together a killer discbox for In Rainbows that quality was only outmatched by the music it contained.

I've been messing around with MySQL, git, macports and a couple other things that place files where they weren't part of my search path (aka as the $PATH variable). I've been adding stuff to /etc/profile or to my own .bash_profile to get around this problem, but it never quite felt right. With Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), all you have to do is add a file in the /etc/paths.d directory with each path you want on a separate line. Ah, now that feels better.

Here's an example:

$ pwd
/etc/paths.d
$ cat git
/usr/local/git/bin

This is all due to the path_helper program in your /etc/profile.