I’d like to consider myself a photography hobbyist, so picking out a new camera is a fun activity. I loved the photos I took while backpacking with an SLR, but I found this DSLR camera to be too cumbersome — it hardly fit in my massive backpack. The new micro four thirds format is smaller than SLRs and more powerful than a compact, but still too big to fit in any pocket. I need a camera that I can leave in my backpack and I’ll always have it around, so I bought a Canon S95. Here are a few of my first shots:

I made a website to display some of Ann’s art, seen here.

It was useful to put her creativity on display – she designed it end-to-end – but it would have been quite difficult for me to hook up cart / shopping functionality. She decided to move to squarespace and that has worked pretty well for her: annlouisesullivan.com.

I ended up sleeping on several East Coast couches before heading off to England, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. This was my first trip across the Atlantic so it was a serious introduction to European culture. It’s hard to understand what a monarchy is before seeing palaces firsthand. Government buildings in the states simply aren’t gilded.

Yesterday, for roughly 2 hours, I went into a sensory deprivation tank, and almost turned into a monkey. The experience was somewhere in between therapy and torture in the same way that a deep tissue massage hurts a bit, but you feel better afterwards. I enjoyed floating, but close your eyes in a salt bath and you’ve got 80% of the experience… for 1/50th the price.

Long ago in a distant land, I received a Rubik’s® cube as a gift. A challenge was presented to me, to solve the Rubik’s cube in 2 weeks without using any external sources of information. I already knew how to solve 1 layer, how hard could it be?

Well, as it turns out… it didn’t take me 3 * (time necessary to solve one layer) amount of time to figure the whole thing out. I was able to solve 2 layers but after that I was lost. Meh, at least I acquired an entertaining object.

Four years later, I Google’d how to solve a Rubik’s cube and learned 3 missing techniques. It took me a few days to properly apply the moves… but I can solve a cube in ~2 minutes now. I’m not interested in improving that time as that simply means memorizing trickier moves that accomplish more. I’m content with my methods of solving the cube as it’s 99,999% faster than the average person and it’s simple to remember slash explain.

In that process, I became quite fond of the Rubik’s cube surface, that led me to create “Rubik’s Cube Paint”™. You can play with it below, or try the full screen version here!