I find it interesting that there are former ammo factories in, say, Belarus, which have been converted into plants for making photographic lenses.

The lenses are cheap and of decent quality (most of the time), and perfect for a good-enough-ian such as myself.

I don't have any of these things, but here's a review of the Peleng 8mm/3.5 fisheye lens. I'm interested in this lens because it's a relatively cheap way to get into immersive QTVR without taking a zillion overlapping pictures.

Also many links from that page to other articles about this lens specifically, and the Russian lens phenomenon in general.

Out West magazine kept this list of great burger places updated until 2001.

See if your favorite place is on it. Mine's not. Sigh.

The guy that runs Out West is living my dreams:

Aboard his 24-foot motorhome-newsroom, Woodbury set off down lonely two-lane roads seeking out great burgers, teepee motels, roadside trading posts, jackalopes, offbeat museums, towns with odd names, and folks with fascinating hobbies.

Yesterday, M and I hiked up Porcupine Creek from Rainy Pass to Cutthroat Pass, in the North Cascades area of Okanagan National Forest.

The trail we covered is a 5-mile segment of the Pacific Crest Trail, and the area really should be part of a wilderness preserve or national park.

The hike is mostly a moderate but insistent climb up through the valley, with a number of wide switchbacks at the eastern end. Each switchback seems to get steeper as you climb up to the pass, which connects the Porcupine Creek watershed to the Cutthroat Creek one.

Discovering groundglass.ca, which is a pretty spiff photoblog.

See this, and this. And this. And the rest of it, too.

Don't expect this to make any sense.

A mile is one minute of arc in latitude. That's the nautical mile, anyway. The other mile is about 200 meters shorter or so. But I prefer the definition of one minute of arc... It seems somehow less arbitrary. Only as arbitrary as the size of the earth and its speed of rotation, and the decision that there should be 360 degrees in a circle.

A knot, by the way, is one nautical mile an hour, which is a highly recursive definition.

But anyway. A mile is a large unit of measure. It's a semi-big distance. A motivated person could walk 23 miles in a day, couldn't they? So the distance isn't insurmountable.

...just where the name "Mile23" comes from.

Tiny alcohol stoves made out of soda cans: Zen stoves.

I modified the image module to spit out a ColorInfo tag for IE.

I want to host some image gallery type stuff here, so eventually there'll be a mod to image.module to determine an image's ICC profile and send it out properly, but for now, it's all sRGB, bay-bee.

More info on color management for the web.