And the lunch hour was no better. Cold and windy with threatening skies. I walked for all of 4 blocks before giving up.

Ok, so it's supposed to be in the 80's soon but I don't really want summer, I want spring. We've had a couple days of actual spring but mostly the weather been bouncing between a few unseasonably warm days to cold, rainy, cold, rainy, cold...

Anyway. It's May 26th and I'm wearing a winter hat. That is all.

But then later I noticed that our kitchen computer wasn't running. And when I tried to start it, it wouldn't boot.

So I pulled it out and found this on the video card:

Detail:

Yeah, that's not good. Interestingly enough (to me at least) in all the years of building my own machines and working with old hardware, this is the first time I've ever had a capacitor go bad (which is what caused this to burn out). I've been working with computer hardware for /years/ and never had this happen before today. Kind of amazing.

I finished up the project this past week and was able to take my "normal" train home. Except, I sorta missed the last of the light in the evening sky during my long days. So, when I stepped off the train on Wednesday, I was really rather confused, not about where I was but /when/ I was. It felt so much like a late night that, for part of my walk to my car, I actually thought it was.

Thankfully I was able to take yesterday off. Also I am only working two days next week and then not again until Jan 4th. I'm really looking forward to being home for this long. I really need to be away from work for a while. Also, Monday is the Solstice and soon enough I'll be seeing those trace bits of sunset in the western sky as I step off the train.

Edit:
As an aside, why can't we get some of that east coast snow?! The 2" or so we got today was rather disappointing. Though, it did help cover the harder frozen stuff that's been sitting around. Nate and I enjoyed almost two hours of outdoor play this morning.

Well, around 4:30 pm, on January 15th it was a balmy -10 deg F. with a wind-chill of around -20. Walking from work to the train station I encountered the following scene:

I don't know why he was wearing only a thin sweatshirt, shorts, and below-ankle socks...but he was. A very dangerous thing to do...

Banana, apple, cherry, blueberry, pineapple, guava, apricot, peach, grape, mango, pear, cranberry, and on and on.

Cranberry. There's a good one. Ocean Spray, which I am sure you are aware, is big into cranberries. Really big. When we drive up into central WI, we pass by acres and acres of cranberry bogs (one web page claims there are 110,000 acres of cranberry bogs in Wisconsin). Ocean Spray buys a lot (if not all) of those cranberries.

I like Wisconsin and I like cranberries. It's a match made in dried fruit heaven.

So, I have a couple bags of dried fruit at work that I purchased at the new Jewel near downtown. Except, despite being a brand new store, they didn't have just regular dried cranberries. All they had was cherry-flavored dried cranberries.

Yes, cranberries flavored to taste like cherries. Except not really. They taste like industrial cherry flavoring. Like something you might find on a snowcone. And why is this? Well because they don't actually flavor the cranberries with cherry juice. They use elderberry juice.

Elderberry juice...To turn dried cranberries into something that is supposed to taste like dried cherries.

???

Can you see the meeting at Ocean Spray headquarters? "I'm telling you, people want fruit to taste like other fruit! The guys down in R&D are working on making bananas taste like kiwi!!"

Fear not, dear reader, for my love for dried fruits is greater than my confusion over the existence of dried cranberries that taste like industrial cherry flavor. I will continue to eat them and, in fact, might even buy them again. Maybe they'll be on the shelf next to the kiwi-flavored dried banana.

http://www.local6.com/video/14815346/index.html

Back in May I made a fairly lengthy walk up to the neighborhood of West Town, right next to Ukrainian Village. I did this in order to visit a rather famous house that was in the process of being renovated. And I believe by "renovated" they mean "torn down."

The house is known as The House of Crosses.

I will not replicate what's already on the web regarding this house. You can read some of the story of the house here:

http://www.weirdchicago.com/crosses.html

Of particular interest is an audio segment linked to at the bottom of the page for iTunes users. The conversation with the nephew of the owner of the house is quite interesting.

I was not expecting to see anyone there, but two men were busy removing the crosses from the house. I tried to strike up a conversation with them and inquire about the future of all those crosses but I think they were annoyed at my cameras' presence.

If you take a close look at the images you can see the outlines of the crosses that had already been removed. There were a staggering number on the front and (not pictured) the back of the house. I'm glad I was able to see some of the house before it was gone, but I do wish I had made the trek earlier.

This morning, while walking across the parking lot at my train station, I found the missing glove. It was sitting next to a small tree on a grassy divider in the parking lot. Prior to the warm weather, what occupied this space was a four or five foot-high pile of snow that the plows had pushed there when they came to clear the lot. And my glove, apparently, was at or near the bottom of this pile.

And since the snow all melted away due to the nice weather we've been having, my glove appeared.

I'm amazed by this. Several people have said I should have purchased a lotto ticket today.

But because it's bad means it can sometimes be very interesting. For example:

Notice how everything is leaning one direction, in particular the road sign? This image does not represent reality. Everything I photographed was perfectly straight. But because we were in a car moving at a very fast rate, the digital camera produced this image.

Why?

The digital camera starts reading data from the sensor by rows of columns: from upper-left to lower-right.

So, as we moved from right to left in the frame, the first thing the camera recorded was the sky above the barn and the last thing it recorded was the grass and the base of the sign. But by the time it got to reading that information, we had moved forward just a little bit.

This is a pretty pedestrian example of slow progressive scan. For something a bit more interesting, take a look at this photo on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=8798593&size=m

The image comes courtesy of a blog entry on a similar type of photographic distortion due to focal-plane shutters. Worth a read.

http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/10531/

Transitioning from heavy winter coats to lighter jackets is fairly easy, because I still feel a weight on my person. But the change from jacket to no-jacket often leaves me feeling uneasy. I feel like I'm forgetting something or that I've missed some sort of deadline.

I'm not "complaining" mind you, I love spring and the pleasant tempertures and rain/storms it usually brings, but it is something I notice.

This morning, however, I noticed that two utility poles down, there was another shape on top. As I passed by I was able to see what it was: a rabbit. The hawk had caught a rabbit (and a good sized one at that) and had left it on top of the utility pole for later consumption (perhaps to take bits back to its young?) It was a bizarre sight, to say the least, seeing a rabbit up a 50 foot utility pole

In Europe (and Asia), there is a genus of blue butterfly that has a symbiotic relationship with the local species of red ant. Here's how it works:

• Blue butterflies mate.
• Female lays eggs on the stems and leaves of wildflowers
• Eggs hatch and the larvae hang out on the leaves for around three weeks
• larvae fall to the ground and, if found by a red ant, are picked up and brought to the colony.
• Butterfly larvae are kept with the ant larvae and are fed, cleaned, and raised as if it were an ant larvae.
• chrysalis forms, larvae pupate, and emerge as new blue butterflies, quickly leaving the colony.

How does this happen? Why do the ants not turn the fallen larvae into ant food? Near as anyone can tell, the larvae produce the exact same pheromones as ant larvae. To an ant, if it smells like an ant larva, it must be an ant larva. (Though, it must wonder how it got so far out of the colony...). In addition, the butterfly larvae also mimic the sounds ant larvae make. It completely fools the ants.

Symbiotic relationships are not uncommon in nature, but here's where this one takes a twist.

The entire colony of ants treat these butterfly larvae as one of their own because it smells and sounds exactly like one of their own. But someone else, without even looking, can spot the fakery: a wasp. And it uses this information to climb into a colony and inject its own larva inside the larva of the blue butterfly, where it feeds once the chrysalis is formed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4460030.stm

Rather than re-type pretty much what the BBC article states, I'll just link to it. But what should be noted here is that this species of wasp (Ichneumon eumerus) can find, in a field of hundreds of ant colonies, the ONE colony that contains butterfly larva. Simply amazing.

This is just one story from a show called "Life in the Undergrowth" narrated by David Attenborough.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EBD9W6.

We watched a couple others and were equally fascinated.

edit/update:
This ad campaign has apparently been running for a while:
http://lnk.nu/google.com/7vk

In the city, melting snow piles don't just leave the sidewalks dirty with soils, salt, grime, and oil, but another joy: dog poop. I noticed this today while taking advantage of the warmer temps to do some walking during my lunch hour. I was in the River North part of downtown which is one of a few recent residential growth areas (lots of conversions). Apparently, when it snows out, dog owners let their pets crap in and around the large snow piles that build up from shoveling and plowing. As long as there is fresh snow and fresh shoveling, they are hidden from view. But now that the snow has melted, the sidewalks are saturated with dog poop. Urban dog owners in this part of Chicago are either idiots, lazy, or both.

That bit of unpleasentness aside, being able to get out and walk during lunch was nice. I took the cheap point and shoot digital camera I picked up via craigslist back in October and had some fun. Tomorrow I hope to do more of the same.

click for larger view

Detail of a sculpture called "The Athlete" outside the East Bank Club, an athletic club in the city

I found this pumpkin on Randolph St. today during my lunchtime walk. Written on it is the rather creepy phrase: "I know what you did Justine"

I wonder what someone thinks Justine did?