Space Needle Reflections

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This post is all about the space needle, and reflections. Annie and I were out walking through the Seattle Center area when I noticed the reflections on the side of the Music Experience building. Annie had the idea to sit on the wall and get her with her reflection.

The Annie Experience

I also noticed that the reflection of the Space Needle was coming in really clear, so I posed her to get the best reflection.

Annie and the Needle

I had actually been here earlier and was looking for reflection shots, but this was later in the day and the light was a bit better. It was a better angle for the reflection.

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Gasworks Park

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North of downtown Seattle, across Lake Union is Gasworks Park. The place is pretty cool. The was a place where gas and oil were refined and separated. This is the main boiler.

Gas works grunge

What’s cool is that someone had the sense to preserve all this old machinery and turn it into a park. It is a great place to walk around and take pictures. I bet you could get some cool pictures here in the evening. (I don’t remember when this park closes)

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Seattle Center Fountain

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There is a lot going on around the Space Needle in Seattle. There is the Music Experience, the Science Museum, a Children’s Museum, a concert hall, and amusement park, and (probably some other stuff I missed) this great big monster fountain. Taken from the right angle, you can see it and the Space Needle in the same picture.

Space Needle and Fountain

One of the cool things about this fountain is that you can go right up to it. It is not in the middle of a lake like most fountains. It is at the bottom of a big concrete bowl. It looks like a crater from when an alien ship landed from outer space, and they turned it into a fountain. Kind of Men in Black was my thinking. Anyway, kids loved this fountain.

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Intro to Java Observer Pattern

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We are well into this whole patterns thing now, picking up lots of new lingo, and becoming better at communicating with other developers. Next on the list: the observer pattern. This is an important pattern to use to help prevent tight coupling and keep code separated into discrete objects. This pattern allows communication between two objects at particular times without each object needing to be too tightly coupled to the other.

The Observer in the Physical World

The idea behind the observer is like a subscription. Do you have a newspaper or magazine subscription? Have you signed up for cell phone texts from your favorite band when they have new tour dates? The act of you signing up with the newspaper, the magazine, or the band, is you saying you want a subscription, or that you want to become an observer. When the subject (newspaper, magazine, band) has something new to share (on a schedule or not) they run down their subscriber list, and notify the observers by mail, or text.

The Observer in the Software World

On the software side, the idea is the same. Your subject needs to provide a way to take subscriptions, hold a list of observers, and when a particular state changes, notify them. There is usually a couple of methods on the subject that takes in an interface that is used for getting on or off the subscription list. On this interface is also the “call back” method. This is the method that the subject will execute when it wants to inform the observers of state changes.
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Mears Park St.Paul

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I have been going on photo walks for some time now from work. I am starting to tire of the places that I can get to within a short walk from work. One of the places that I frequent though, is Mears Park.


View Larger Map

This is one place that is great to come to in the Spring/Early Summer. This park attracts lots of people from the surrounding office buildings and people from the near by condos walking their dogs. There is a little fake creek running down the middle, and all around this creek and the outside are flower gardens.

Columbine

These gardens are kept in beautiful condition by a crew of volunteers. A person or group of people are assigned to each flower bed section. I was talking to one woman there recently that said there was a waiting list. How about that. A waiting list of people wanting to work for free.

Peonies

So this tends to be a spot that I can come to several times a week even, and just walk around, and take some pictures. It’s amazing how comeing back just a day or two later and I will see new flowers that strike me that didn’t the day before.

DSC_2371

So, if you live or work in St.Paul, I would suggest you stop by some day that you look outside and wish you were anywhere but inside. It will just take a few minutes.

What I learned from Zack Arias Critiques

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Zack AriasI really had no idea who Zack was until Feb 18 2009. That was guest blog Wednesday on Scott Kelby’s site, and Zack posted the first video guest blog. It was truly amazing and inspiring. This is another piece of his work that really must be watched. The picture on the left, of Zack, ¬†is from that post.

Anyway, after that I started going to his blog. Not long after the guest blog post, he started doing critiques of other photographers web sites, and their work. (People volunteer to be critiqued). I have now watched 10 video critique posts by Zack Arias and Meg (his wife). There is so much content in there to talk about, and I have learned a lot. Some of which I knew, some of which reinforced things I was thinking about, and other stuff that that I am thankful to have learned now. There would be too much content to try to cover it indepth in one post, so I thought I would really just summarize in point form what I got out of his videos.

While I was watching these critiques, I took brief notes. This is really a summary of the notes I took. I am not getting into discussion of these points too much here, but there is a ton of material for further discussion. The material¬†is also collected from across the 10 posts, not in a order by post. I would encourage you to start from post one and just start viewing. Some of these things he hits on many many times, and it becomes more obvious when you take notes because you see the patterns you have written down.¬† There tends to be more “Don’ts” in the photo galleries section¬†and more¬†”Do’s“¬† in the sections on¬†his thoughts on what kinds pictures to take.

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St. Anthony Main Area Minneapolis

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St. Anthony Falls 

I headed to the St.Anthony Main area with Rich to take some pictures last weekend. (It seems to take longer and longer before I can get pictures into a post!)

We discovered a little park that juts out into the river getting you past the power lines for a better view. This park has lots of Excel Energy signs all over it, and boards describing hydro electric production and their benefits (while curiously ignoring any downfalls)

St. Anthony Main

We walked out into this park and got some reasonable pictures. We would have stayed longer, but some officers from the parks service came and told us that the park closed at dusk. No set time, just dusk. Strangely, they don’t chase many photographers away, and the time they get there to tell people to leave varies with the day. I will have to head back again sometime.

The star pattern in the lights was not from a filter. I was just shooting at f/16 with my Tamron 17-50 f/28 lens. Most lenses will give some sort of star pattern at that aperture. Number of points depends on the number of blades the lens has.

Tuggs Tavern 

The Traveling Photographers Laptop?

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Apple MacBookPro 13 inch

Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.

The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. 😉 You can compare the the different models¬†at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.

Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.

So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299.¬†Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.

Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…

I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was¬†already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro,¬†still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade.¬†

The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…

Intro to Java Decorator Pattern

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This entry is part 13 of 13 in the series Intro to Java

We have looked at the Factory, the Adapter, and the Singleton patterns. Now we look at the Decorator. The Decorator is similar to the Adapter, but with a subtle difference. With our ReptileAdapter, we wrapped the Reptile class to map the interface methods of Animal to the appropriate methods on Reptile. With the Decorator we also wrap a class, but to add functionality, not to map it or replace the functionality.

The Decorator in the Physical World

The idea behind decorating things in the real world is pretty much how it sounds. We wrap an object with new functionality, while keeping the old functionality. How about a camera in a waterproof housing? When closed up, we have added the functionality of waterproofing, but we still provide a way to press the buttons and turn the dials so that the camera can be operated.

The Decorator in the Software World

On the software side, the idea is the same. It is usually used when we have one object that we like how it functions, but we want to augment the behavior for a different situation. Done correctly, we can keep inserting one object inside another adding functionality at every step.
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