the further adventures of Mike Pirnat a leaf on the wind

This empty hanger was almost an afterthought today as I shot a few of the red things around my area of the office, so I'm a bit surprised that it ended up as today's photo. There's something about its simplicity that I like, as well as the way my brain fills in the hanger outside of the frame.

A pile of tools that had accumulated, of all places, on the table in our entryway.

Yes, my daughter apparently has her own pipe wrench.

Last night I noticed that, without planning it, I'd done three shots in a row that prominently featured the color red, and so I've decided that this is Red Week. This is the bed of the rusty pickup truck that I parked behind this morning when I arrived at work.

I find it interesting that I've stayed away from preplanned themes this whole time, I think because:

1. Too much forethought -- I barely have the mental cycles for my normal life, how could I possibly plan ahead on this project?

2. Too much constraint -- I initially set out to be spontaneous and in the moment and discovering images; why limit my freedom?

3. Too trite/latent hipsterism -- Oh, you're doing themes? That sounds so mainstream.

4. Fear of failure -- I already live with the fear of blowing the whole project if I miss a day, now I can fail at a smaller scale too!

And yet, in spite of this, and maybe because I happened into it unconsciously, I'm finding comfort and purpose here that I feel like I've been lacking since returning from the Disney trip (which, due to the still-massive photo backlog, is another giant psychic weight that I'm juggling). Having even a little bit of a plan means that I'm paying attention differently and coming up with ideas several days out, a little mission that helps make this feel like a game and not an obligation.

This jives with Rule 7.

I like that.

Strapped for inspiration at the literal last minute, I return to the subject of time pressure, this time as an actual villain in the form of my daughter's Lego Darth Vader alarm clock.

The hasty setup meant that I decided to shoot hand-held without a flash; thank goodness for image stabilized lenses and lying flat on the ground! The hardest part was getting a stable shot with the time illuminated--you have to push on his head to get a few precious seconds of the red light, which is easier said than done; getting him in focus meant being just beyond arm's length from his head, so pushing the button, getting back in place, composing, focusing, and getting a few shots off was quite a challenge!

I'm pretty much in love with Alfred; it's usually the first thing I install on a Mac. For whatever reason, though, I rarely use it to fire off Google searches, usually going straight to my browser. But today I fired off a search from Alfred and was aghast to see a crappy hijacked results page from my ISP, who I'd previously praised for having a fairly mature attitude toward all things internet and not requiring me to have TV service with them. I think I invented at least three new, wildly-offensive swear words when I realized what was happening.

Now, my ISP hides a tiny little opt-out link in an area of the page that, is virtually invisible due to its proximity to what my brain perceives as pure garbage. (In fact I'd written most of this before I even noticed it was there at all!) But you might not be so lucky, or, depending on the way the opt-out is implemented, you might not stay opted-out, and anyway, isn't a clever DIY solution more fun?

Since Alfred just makes a URL and hands off to the OS's preferred browser, I fired up Charles to see what was going on. Sure enough, they're intercepting GETs to http://www.google.com/search?q=whatever and throwing back a 302 to their own, crappy search, and I was able to quickly duplicate the behavior in my browser by cooking up the same form of URLs.

But why hadn't I noticed this before, using the search box in Safari, or by going straight to Google first? The reason is that my ISP's pattern-matching is delightfully naïve, so it doesn't catch the richer URLs that Google or Safari construct. This gives us the key we need to craft a workaround for Alfred: a custom search!

Custom searches are the cat's pajamas--I've rigged up a bunch for work to quickly drop me into our wiki, issue tracker, and so forth. Rather than waiting for the Alfred developers to provide a fix for the search hijacking, we can make our own custom search quickly and easily.

First, start by disabling the default Google search in Alfred. Open up its preferences, navigate into "Features", then "Web Searches", and then uncheck the Google checkbox:

Next, select "Custom Searches" and click the "+" to create a new one. You can then monkey with the URL to slip past The Man--for example, a simple alteration to the query string like http://www.google.com/search?&q={query} can do it. In my case, I chose to make the simple switch from HTTP to HTTPS, as it's likely to be more robust and gives me a nice, encrypted channel.

To get the same nice logo that Alfred's default has, we can go get the icon out of the app itself. Right-click (or control-click) Alfred.app in your Applications folder and select "Show Package Contents". Then open the "Contents" and "Resources" folders and you'll find all of the icons. Find the "google.png" image and drag it over into the icon drop zone in your custom search.

Finally, we need to wire our new search into Alfred's "Fallback Searches". Pop open the one that's currently set to "Search Google for '...'" and scroll down to the bottom, where you'll find the custom search below a separator:

And that's all there is! Alfred is restored to full Google-searching glory. I'd like to say a huge thank you to the developers of Alfred for providing the flexibility that made this not only doable but easy. Huzzah!

I've said it before, but it bears repeating--few things are as wonderful as the pure, white-hot joy that can be emitted by a four-year-old child.

Here, Claire demolishes a handful of raspberries, one finger at a time, and I'm young again too.

I took a nice stroll around Crocker Park after lunch, and decided that I should probably get a couple of shots in while I was out and about.

Here we're looking up into an octagonal umbrella; I'm in love again with the lines and shapes here. For some reason, I'm reminded of the airlock scene from 2001.

As I left a going-away party for a coworker last night, I marveled at the light from the setting sun. This doesn't do it justice, but it's curious to see the light leaving, pedestrians leaving, and a car leaving, moments before I got into my car to depart as well.

Spent a lovely Thursday enjoying the awesome weather in downtown Cleveland as part of the Amazing Race-themed company fun day. After zooming around downtown and coming back to the old Power House for lunch, we spent some time meandering through the new Greater Cleveland Aquarium, where my regret at not bringing the DSLR along went into overdrive.

I was hard-pressed to choose my favorite shot of the day, but ended up going with these guys, because I have no idea when else I'll encounter overhead lobsters. The rest of the set has a few others that I really enjoyed, such as Martin having a staring contest with a fish, an underwater stingray and his reflection, a stingray passing under a bright light, and a shark passing overhead in the tunnel.

In the brief window between Liz's return from England and her departure to Virginia Tech for our niece's graduation, I managed to steal a few hours of her time for an impromptu date night--Avengers on the 3D IMAX screen and late dinner and drinks at B Spot.

This charming fellow kept us company, looming large on the wall above our booth.