Back from guys' weekend

I got back today from guys' weekend up at the cabin. (Pictures from the weekend here.) Dad, Doug, Abe, Josh and I went up north to do a little fishing and have a little beer.

On Friday, we setup the telescope, looked at the moon and I took a few long exposures, though we probably had more fun using Doug's laser pointer than anything else.

I particularly like this picture of the lake and this one of Dad, Doug and Josh, though the latter is a bit blurry.

This post's picture is of the moon from the dock on Friday evening, not of the sun during the day. The foreground object is the boat lift's crank. It's still a bit blurry, as the dock isn't incredibly solid (at least not for purposes of photography).

Cue tired old Uranus joke

I did a bit of night photography tonight with Doug, as he setup his telescope for some stargazing. (Pictures here.)

I need to get an adapter so I can take good shots through the telescope. Until then, I'll do it the cheapo way and hold the camera up to the scope. I did this for shots of Jupiter and four of its moons and a number of shots of the moon. I also did a couple random shots, including an overexposed shot that was supposed to be a time lapse (like this one). Better luck next time.

Tomorrow I head to Minneapolis for a meeting with our modeling team. I hope to learn a bit about how our SAS code is written and how our modelers do their end of model validation, and hopefully I can convince them to change how they do their development to alleviate problems with our conversion of SAS to ECL.

Finger painting turns delicious

Jacob is getting to the age, I think, where he can start getting artistic. So in anticipation having a child with art that will someday be displayed at the MoMA, we got him started on finger painting with ketchup and mustard. As everything inevitably does, though, it all went to the mouth, and pretty quick he was moving the red and yellow to his face. Of course, I was there with camera in hand.

We made a discovery this evening -- Jake appears to have a molar that's already mostly in place. That will help with all the rocks he so enjoys to chew.

This one goes out to our beloved Republican conventioneers

A couple weeks ago as I was driving home from work, Rockin 101 had one of those be-the-eleventh-caller-and-win-Rage-Against-The-Machine-tickets things. You know those things. Anyways, to make a short story shorter, I won tickets, and as much as Andrea loves Rage, she decided she would not go. Instead, Luke and I went together, and we quite enjoyed it.

Anti-Flag opened, and they were pretty okay, I guess, but I was more interested in Rage, and they did a good job. Unfortunately, my pictures didn't really turn out (blame it on the camera phone), though you can see how much respect these guys have for the RNC.

Nothing too interesting happened. Oh yeah, other than the 102 people arrested after the concert. But Luke and I took off after their first set (before the encore) so we could beat the crowd out and avoid getting beat-down with a baton. There were probably 200-300 riot-gear-equipped police surrounding the Target Center.

Fun times were had by all.