Amanda and I visited the Blanchard Springs Caverns in Arkansas a few weeks ago, just before Christmas. If you can believe the tour guides, it’s the top rated show cave in the United States, as determined by the National Caves Association. Regardless of the hype, it is definitely an impressive cave, with some very large formations. If you’re ever in the area — a couple hours north of Little Rock — I recommend checking it out.

Unfortunately, I forgot to load a blank memory card in the camera before the tour, but I did manage to get a few photos before running out of space. Click on the photo to see some of the highlights on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: travel, photography, caves, caverns, Arkansas

I recently submitted a photo of my dog and I’m very impressed by the results, especially for just $1. In looking over some of the other submissions, the results can vary quite a bit, but if you’re disappointed with a sketch, you can simply pay another dollar and resubmit your request. Or you can contact individual artists who contribute to the site to find out about custom work.

For years I’ve been wanting to order a print of a 1910 panoramic photo of downtown Austin that’s on the Library of Congress Website. However, the price and/or the hassle has kept me from doing so. It turns out the LOC site has a much easier system for ordering prints now, but I have already taken matters into my own hands.

I used a program called The Rasterbator to convert the image into a series of 8″x11″ sheets that fit together to make a poster that’s over 7 feed wide. I used Scotch Clear Removable Mounting Squares to mount the individual sheets on my office wall. I’m very happy with the end result. Click on the photo below to see a larger version.

On a trip to Hong Kong a couple of years ago, Amanda and I wished we’d had some kind of Rosetta Stone to take with us to the dim sum restaurants we visited. We knew dishes we liked, but we didn’t know the Chinese names or characters for them. Most of the places we tried didn’t have the typical dim sum carts to order from, so pointing wasn’t an option either.

In getting ready for our recent trip to Beijing, I decided to put together my own dim sum cheat sheet. I used Wikipedia to find a list of dim sum dishes along with the Chinese characters for them. I then searched Flickr for photos tagged “dim sum” that were under a Creative Commons license. I put the two together to create a Dim Sum Beginner’s Guide. This guide is released under a Creative Commons license, so please feel free to add to or build-on the idea.

The printout did come in handy on our trip to Beijing. Dim sum wasn’t as prevalent there as it was in Hong Kong, but we did come across a few places. The ones we ate at didn’t have English menus or picture menus, so the cheat sheet was a big help.

Admittedly, I’m still a dim sum beginner myself, so this is not a comprehensive guide. There are lots more dishes I could add, but I stuck to the ones I know well—things that we hoped to eat on our trip and would recommend to anyone who hadn’t tried dim sum before. For more options, check out the book “Dim Sum: A Pocket Guide.”

I’d love to see more twists on this idea? How about a beginner’s guide to tapas, sushi, meze, and other snacky foods around the world?

Michael Michalko has written some great books on creativity. His book Thinkertoys contains a chapter on a technique called Brutethink, where random words are used to generate ideas by forcing you to associate the words with the problem at hand. Thinkertoys includes a three page list of words (pp. 169-171) intended to be used in generating ideas.

When I read the book a while back, I thought the word list might be handy to have to refer to, so I OCRed it and converted it to text. It came to mind when I ran across tagged photos on Flickr. It was fun to plug in the various words to explore interesting photography.

After seeing Mike Matas’ post about creating a Life Poster, I decided to create a poster to use for a visual spin on “Brutethink” problem solving. Since Flickr has a great stock of photos licensed under the Creative Commons, there was a lot of source material to pull from.

I searched Flickr for photos tagged with some of the terms from Michalko’s Thinkertoys list and compiled them into a single poster-sized image. Not all the photos will necessarily evoke the words that got me to them, but I think the end product will still prove useful for generating ideas. There are also a couple of words duplicated, in cases where I couldn’t decide between photos I liked.

I used my favorite freeware image viewer, Irfanview, to crop the photos and create the contact sheet to make into a poster. The process was very similar to the one using XnView.

The beauty of Creative Commons is that I can make the poster available for download from Flickr under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To access the full sized version, click on the “All Sizes” button towards the top of the page. Many thanks to all the photographers who made their work available via Creative Commons.

After some price comparison searching, I decided to go with P-e-photo to print the resulting poster. With shipping, a 30″x40″ poster comes to a little under $30. I’ll update this post to include a photo of the final product, once the poster arrives in the mail.

If $30 is too much for you, an 18″x24″ print would be significantly cheaper and wouldn’t require cropping. Also, the resulting montage makes for an interesting—though busy—desktop background.

Keep in mind, the same idea can be applied using a variety of random stimuli. Some other sources to seed ideas include:

• fortune cookies
• visual films
• comics
• other random words

Technorati Tags: cc, creative commons, flickr, tagging, life poster, lifehacks

Amanda and I got back from Beijing about a week ago. It was a whirlwind trip, since we only had six days to spend there.

The highlight of the trip was visiting the Great Wall. On our second day in the city, we woke up in the middle of the night. Since we couldn’t sleep, we decided to get started towards the Badaling section of the wall. Rather than take the $80+ tour or hire a private car for $100, we opted to take the subway, then the local #919 bus. For two of us, the subway fare totalled about $1.50 round trip and $6 for the bus. We got to Badaling around 7am and it was still pretty quiet. The tour groups were just rolling in around the time we left.

The Chaoyang Theatre Acrobatics show was also impressive. The tickets were pricey, at $25 each for a one hour show, but the talent was top notch.

The most impressive food was at the two restaurants inside the Grand Hyatt. I had read multiple recommendations on Chowhound.com for the Made in China restaurant, but it was booked up the first night we went. Instead, we tried the restaurant downstairs called Noble Court. The food and service were excellent. We went back for the “Beijing Duck” at Made in China a few nights later and were even more impressed.

The Beijing Zoo was mostly depressing. The pandas had a decent enclosure, but with $2 admission, it’s not all that surprising that the cages for many of the other animals were dilapidated. The newly built aquarium—located inside the zoo but with a separate $12.50 admission fee—was impressive at first. However, you soon realize that the exhibit area is rather small and most of the building houses the dolphin show. Unfortunately, we were pressed for time and weren’t able to stick around for the show.

Another downer was our hotel. Luckily, we got a good deal via Priceline. The lobby of the hotel smelled very strongly of stale smoke. Overall it had little worth recommending, except for the huge grocery store in the basement of the attached mall. I was amazed to find that I could get Dr. Pepper (in the imported foods section) for about $1 per can. My favorite find was the bottled green tea they stocked, at less than $1 for about 1.5 liters. I probably drank about 8-10 liters while we were there. Now that I’m home, I’m hoping I can find some comparable bottled green tea at one of the local Asian grocery stores.

I enjoyed the trip and I’m glad we went, but Beijing is not high on my list of destinations to recommend to others. I know that they’re trying to make the city more tourist friendly in preparation for the Summer Olympic games in 2008, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly tourist friendly yet. In hindsight, I would have planned and researched more, to try to avoid some of the less impressive attractions.

I’ve posted my favorite photos from the trip. I’d love to hear feedback about the photos or from others who’ve been to Beijing.

Technorati Tags: Beijing, travel, photography

The Texas Juggling Society held its 13th annual Jugglefest earlier this month. The festival just keeps getting better every year. This year, visiting performers included Alex Chimal of Circus Chimera, Luke Burrage from Europe, and unicyclist Connie Cotter.

I’ve posted a few of my photos from the event on flickr.

Technorati Tags: juggling, photography, Austin

Technorati Tags: digitalcamera, camera, manual

If you’d rather do the work yourself, a site called OnTheGoSoft offers a $10 shareware program called called Passport Photo. Or there’s an online tutorial for making your own passport photos using Photoshop.

I haven’t had to get a new passport in a while, but I do sometimes need I.D. photos when traveling, especially for things like rail and subway passes. Between the tools above and all the online photo printing options, I’ll be making some I.D. photos to take on my next overseas trip.

Technorati Tags: photography, travel, passport, software