Two Cents and a Thousand Words

I found this photo in my backlog of shots from this year. I like Columbia stuff, but this is kinda sad.

I can’t speak highly enough of phpFlickr, a Flickr API wrapper class by Dan Coulter. I wrote a new gallery upload page that will come into use later; my main reason was to integrate Flickr uploads into it. I’m happy to say that within 15 minutes I had a method to upload photos from my gallery to Flickr… and I spent the rest of the 15 minutes actually uploading photos. It does a wonderful job. Thanks, Dan.

If you’ve been annoyed by my lack of Flickrness in 2006, check out my latest. I’m going to be making up for it quickly.

I’d like to ask – which do you think is more interesting?

Time Magazine’s Pictures of the Week

or

Interesting photos from October 2006 on Flickr

I’d personally say the latter.

Ten years ago today, I was probably sitting in a math class on the second floor of Reeds Brook Middle School, and I was probably waiting for the weekend to arrive as quickly as possible. At the right side of the room, I would have looked over to see a bright, young woman jotting down notes and drawing diagrams of geometric shapes. And I’d bet money that there were at least two rhombus shapes on the whiteboard.

My recollection of an 8th grade math class isn’t that amazing. But on October 25, 1996, somebody must have mentioned rhombuses. Or they might have mentioned rhombi. On October 25, 1996, the Rhombuses and Thesauruses Fan Club was founded.

In the heat of the 1996 election campaign, I sat alongside a Latin-loving classmate and argued about the correct pluralization of the word rhombus. Over the next years, we’d add other -us words to the growing fire of our debate: thesauruses, campuses… and later we would add -a words such as antenna and agenda. I think we’d both admit now that the argument grew out of hand and caused more tension than we had hoped, but I also think it helped us both with time.

Why does a seemingly insignificant disagreement matter? Just look at what’s happened since then. If I recall correctly, the RTFC site was the first public Web site I ever created, and it would function as a platform for me to test out new Web technologies (JavaScript, Java scrollers, marquees, and more) alongside its opposition site of the International Society of Rhombi and Thesauri (ISRT), both hosted on Geocities (Athens/Olympus/4201, to be exact). It also honed our debate skills. But most of all, it encouraged creativity. With the myriad of song parodies I did for the club in the 90s, I think it’s pretty obvious that I was more creative then than I am now (I hope that changes soon, though).

The presidents have gone their separate ways now. Laura will be able to use her intelligence and wonderful debate skills throughout and after law school and I’m sitting on top of a to-be-brainstormed world of possibilites at Semsym. I think we’ve done well, even if we still disagree about those pluralizations.

Sometimes I miss those days, though.

After going out to dinner one night a couple weeks ago, I was somehow roped into going to the Fryeburg Fair with a few friends.

I don’t mean to sound inconsiderate or anything. To be completely honest, I don’t really enjoy fairs. I’d much rather go to a festival or a concert or even just a new place to explore. I had a bad experience with the only other real fair I’ve ever visited: I only won a small white seal stuffed animal after spending a lot of money and time at some stupid game at the Bangor State Fair. Ah, the naïvity of youth.

My initial impression of the Fryeburg Fair wasn’t much different. After finishing the two-and-a-half to three hour drive to Fryeburg and a mediocre yet expensive lunch along the way, we were confronted with another one-and-a-half to two hour wait to go about three miles in traffic. (Again, I stress that I could not manage living/driving in a city.) By the time we actually entered the gate, it was around 3:30.

Once inside we realized how difficult it is to keep track of a group of six in a crowd of a lot of people. We walked around for a bit and looked around some of the craft areas and a few of the places where shows and demonstrations were planned for later in the day. We also took a bit of time to reflect upon the differences in our perspectives as college graduates; as Sarah, Erich, and I realized, fairs were less about grabbing that neat-o stuffed animal and more about spending a lot of money to get a prize in a probably-rigged game that wasn’t really worth it.

After realizing that, we started to notice that some of the food looked really good; we decided to get some dinner. Kind of. I had a blooming onion with ranch (yum) and some apple crisp with vanilla ice cream (yum). We sat in the grandstand looking at the racetrack and eating our wonderfully unhealthy food. I took time to notice all the paper from previous horse races still lying on the ground in front of us, and we also estimated how much money the fair must generate in order to support such a big venue for a one-week-a-year event.

After we finished eating we checked out some of the livestock. Sarah wanted to see the rabbits. We all laughed at how much noise all of the cows and the sheep made. I got to feel a cow’s fur and see a 5-day-old calf. I was even able to have a photo shoot with some really photogenic chicks.

As we were leaving, we were able to explore the fair for an hour with two of our college friends who found their way up to the fair from New Hampshire and Massachusetts. We were all really glad that we had a chance to see them; it had been a year (Columbus Day weekend last year, in fact) since we had seen them, and it provided a nice end to the trip. Kind of.

Matt, Sarah, Erich, and I headed back home for a drive strangely reminiscent of the trip home from Boston last year. As we drove down route 302, we noticed that we weren’t far from Portland. The Mexican magnet captured us once again, and at 10:00 we were walking through the doors at On the Border. It was definitely worth the extra few miles.

I plopped into bed at around 1:30. It turned out to be a great trip; our tempers flared a few times, but that’s not really a surprise. I’m not sure if I’d go back to the fair, but I’d definitely love to do more trips like that again.