what do you order when the sushi restaurant smells like fish

the veggie sushi, that's what you order...

here's a pic of my plate of twelve veggie sushis. this is the first time i've ever seen nigiri veggie sushis. they looked good and taste almost matched their visual appeal.


ahh... so you counted and wanted to warn me that i might've been ripped off? ahh... no, i just didn't think to take a pic of this plate until i'd downed one of the avocado sushis.

ok, and for my favorite pic of the day

i had to pull it into gimp and mess around with it. for a free image processor, gimp can do quite a bit.

anyway, this is no advertisement, it's just a place for me to share my stupidity. so, here goes... this is a pic of the wall of the museum i showed in an earlier post. when i got back to the apartment, i realized that some of my photos would've looked much better in black and white. urgh... why didn't i snap them that way? well, because i don't have to do that with digital photos.

oh, yeah... right, i don't have to. just to see them in b/w. well, i got to messing around in gimp and here's the progression of a photo as i fooled around with a bunch of the filters.

this one is the original

here's the first black and white. i used "colorify" setting it to a gray i liked.

i don't remember exactly, but i took the b/w and used a lighting effect here, don't remember which one, though...

here, i added a lense with a 1.7 distortion, mapped the non-lensed area to a gray color and used the smudge tool to soften the edges of the lense and "color on" the mat.

here, i played with the artistic settings, i think this is chalk on canvas. not that it looks like that, but i liked the final effect.

ha, the push of a button and i've got "photocopy." i like the effect, but i'm ashamed to say that copy quality like this would've just peeved me if i were trying to get a nice image.

er... and what's this? oh, i think it was "cartoon"

most of these were done using stock filters with stock settings. the hardest work i had to do was to pick the gray i wanted and to soften the edges of the lense marking on the one picture. fun stuff.

streetscenes

wandering around town on sunday before the town was really "awake," i snapped a few photos.



this is the street just outside my hotel.



here's the "local" lutheran church.

here's the cathederal (lutheran).
it's just about a five minute walk from the other church.

a museum. in the us, we'd have a high fence around the building to keep you from harming it. making the building the artifact not the contents.

a side alley in linkoping.



a closer look in the alley, this is the building on the left in the pic above. it's living space. i glanced in the windows enough to know that, but tried not to look too long lest i would be chased away for "peeping"
turning off the last alley into another. in the US this is where the dumpsters would go. where's all your slimy crap? well, if you don't buy so much, you don't have as much to throw out, i guess.

here's a blurry photo down by the river. the old guy is fishing.

ok, so i look down a lot when i'm walking

and sometimes it's fun to take pictures of what i see...

here's a rain gutter across a sidewalk. a downspout from a gutter dumps to this on one side and this takes that water out to the street.


oh, and here's the shadow of a loner wandering the streets.

bikes around town

ok, so we're talking about the utmost utility here, but there are bikes everywhere. i forgot to take a pic at the train station today when i was buying my bus pass, but i'll get a pic tomorrow morning of the racks and racks of bikes parked there.

this is the church parking lot... no, really

and the other lot. really, there's a service going on and there are only two cars parked near the building.

a public bike rack
and getting around town? you just do it on a bike...
in your regular clothes. i wonder if the industry that caters to sport cycling in the US has been the biggest barrier to the practical usage of bicycles. well, not the biggest barrier. there's legislation and the car lobby to blame for that, but the cycling industry itself focused on cycling as a sport, which, i believe, comes from the fact that it's a higher margin sale AND it represents much more return sales as bike nerds upgrade their bikes incessantly.

it's probably easier to stay in business selling new bikes than it is to repair (and stock the parts for) really old bikes. however, that doesn't mean they shouldn't try to sell practical bikes to everyday people.

mapping of one language to another

it's funny to find pieces of your own language embedded in the oddest of places in a foreign land.



heh, yes, i'm soooo juvenile.

looking at the swedish definition of fart in lexin my favorite tool for communicating with swedish coworkers, they describe it as such:

---

Swedish entry word

fart [fa:r_t] farten farter noun

hastighet, snabbhet

English translation

speed, pace, rate

Examples

• i hög fart---at high speed
• det var full fart på försäljningen---the sale had really taken off
• av bara farten---automatically, unintentionally

Compounds

• fart|fylld |fyllt---speedy
• fart|begränsning -en---speed limit
• fart|blind---fail to adjust to a slower speed
• fart|gräns---speed limit
• fart|kontroll---speed check (trap)
• fart|syndare---person who exceeds the speed limit

---

Swedish entry word

fart [fa:r_t] farten farter noun

färd

English translation

part of journey

Compounds

• nedfart---descent

---

i'm thinkin' utfart and infart maps more to the part of the journey than the speed thing being as they were the exit and entrance to a parking garage. however, this got me to thinking of the etymology of the american-english usage of fart... i'm thinking it came from the "unintentional" part of the definition. like, "uhh i didn't mean to do that," or "oops, couldn't help it."

ok, i didn't mean to spend too much time on this. i guess i'm just farting around :-)

just found this in the gallery

i'd overlooked it from one of my shadow-pic sessions because it didn't include the whole bike, but when i looked at it again it looked pretty cool to me. (maybe i'm just jonesing for a bike ride, what with all these swedes riding bikes ALL AROUND ME.)

pics around linkoping

i got a guided walking tour around town from per, one of the directors here in our linkoping office. we went for coffee on this square.


beautiful day. a little windy, but it didn't endanger my espresso. even the re-laying of the pave in the square couldn't spoil the view. bra!

then, on my way up the stairs to my room, i noticed how cool the spiral staircase looked, so i had to snap a photo:


yeah, i like it too!

well, that's about it for today. more adventures await tomorrow, i'm sure.

so, i went to the gate in amsterdam for my flight

and a bus pulled up...


i thought to myself, "i didn't know i could get from the netherlands to sweden on a bus," but after the bus was loaded up it drove us out to the tarmac where we boarded a fokker cityhopper bound for linkoping.

phew!

my digs this week

ok, since i'm in linkoping for a week, i've rented an efficiency apt with a fabulous kitchenette. here's the tour:

this is the office, livingroom, and bedroom.

this is the "wc" (and if you interpret "c" as closet, think of it as a step in and not a walk in).

and... the kitchen(ette). jättecool! really. it may not be the best, but it beats the heck out of being in a bland hotel without the ability to control your own food!

which is worse?

a bike on a car or a car on a bike? speaking from the perspective of a guy whose had a car-mangled bike, i'd prefer the bike on the car if these were my only 2 choices.

family day by the creek

t, the girls and i went to minnehaha falls today and wandered around the trails for an hour or so. it was pretty cool. it'd been a looong time since i'd been there. oh, yeah, and the dog got to go too.

in the trenches

ok, so i didn't ride today, but i was fairly active. i ran a 5k this morning, stained a cedar porch, and dug a twelve foot trench for a catch basin and a 4 " drainpipe. i think i got my workout in.

the moon this morning

happened to see the moon still up on my ride into work.

harvest moon

the camera phone doesn't capture the essence of the moment, but the residue...

what's "dummer" than a box of rocks?

a couple of pictures of a box of rocks. actually, they're kinda cool looking. if you like that sort of thing.

go time?

hey, should i play some soccer?

yup it's fall

sure, the kids are back in school, but it's not fall until you've watched a silly soccer game and cooked a squash.

having to admit defeat...

before the race starts...

ugh, ok, i've been obsessing about this saturday's race and my lack of training for it, but now i've decided to pull out of the race. i had made peace with the fact that i was going to "participate" instead of race. i was lookin' forward to just gettin' out in the woods on my bike right up until today when I read the weather forecast for hayward. the forecast calls for rain and that isn't really conducive to havin' fun in the woods.

so, i may suck for backing out, but i'd like to think that i'm really just "donating" my entry fee to the promoters. i'm of the mindset that i'd pay $60 for the privilige of NOT cruising around inthe wet woods.

gour-met meal

ugh, got home late from a youth & family ministry meeting at church. the family had dinner without me, so i was on my own. i decided to start carboloading for saturday's race with four, count 'em, FOUR, veggie corn dogs. yeah!

a final tribute to the garden

with the weather callin' for chili and baked squash, i had to make one final tribute to the garden with these amazing salads.

tribute? yeah, the rnc, tonight, proved you can have a tribute to just about anything.

non-vacation new shoes

the last pair of shoes i bought (flip-flops) weren't gonna cut it in the office.

something about this

smacks of bad planning...

someone wasn't thinking when they posted the folks who are required to wear camoflauge to work in situations that require you to be highly visible. "here, son, put on this vest."

"but, sir, it'll clash with the 'flauge!"

the view from our office is a little less friendly than usual

the cops are prepared for somethin' sheesh, i'm not usually distracted at work by the view of st. paul.

deathflower in full bloom

i saw a bunch of these along the way on my ride. my only hope would be to have stuffed a claratin up each nostril. bleh, it's gonna be a goopy evening.

in search of singletrack

found some...

fred's playin' dolls?

fred was a little hesitant about climbing into e's dollhouse, but i'm sure he liked this better than the days in which e and b used to dress him up.