We got back a number of  photos from our photographer and they came out pretty well.

Hey what’s going on? I am having some beer while I wait for food to cook. I think it’s called Longboard ale?  Something like that.

Found on SE Salmon at 8th.  Someone else reported seeing some Banksy stuff in Portland is this one also?

EDIT: Yeah, this is almost certainly Banksy as indicated by a quick googleimagesearch.

UPDATE 8/14/10: I found some more elephants at about SE 26th and Hawthorne on the Vintage Pink building.

I decided to make the guestbook for my wedding, right down to cutting the pages out from a roll of paper and labeling them tri-lingually in English, Spanish and Quenya. Here’s a sneak preview of it.

I generated the code using the open source phpqrcode script, which is pretty sweet. I then drew up a grid using old fashioned pencil and ruler and penned the thing out with a calligraphy marker.  Amazingly, it really scans and pulls up a URL that I set.  For that I used a URL shortener that I control so that the ultimate destination could be changed without actually altering the code. This has the side benefit of shortening up the amount of characters to encode, so the number of pixels is much smaller.  I think I may make up some more of these suitable for framing, and hang them on the wall.

Try scanning it, and see!  There are a number of apps for Android and iPhone that should let you read the barcode and should theoretically pull up the website for you.  Currently the URL points to a page with the poem I used with original Latin and english translation.  Any spelling or other errors in my copying are strictly for authenticity, yep.

Originally I thought that maybe Foursquare would be a cool way to find new things in town and meet new people and what not, but it’s really not payed off for me.

I suppose I’ll still keep my Foursquare account in case I change my mind. Maybe it’s just that I don’t go out enough or something, but I’m pretty much done with it at this point.

By the way, I completely love the sad mayor 404 graphic and would like a t-shirt of this.

Even though my spare time has been becoming less and less these days, I have actually been writing quite a bit more often. I’ve made a concerted effort to write something every single day no matter how stupid or short or badly written and it’s gone pretty well.

I’ve been keeping all this stuff just in a private journal thing, and it’s been going on without a day missed for about a month. It goes back as far as April with short gaps here and there. Most of it is crap, and will never see the light of day but the important thing is that it actually improves over time. The last four or five entries have been pretty lengthy and have been moving towards something.

After having read Rudy Rucker’s Transrealist Manifesto the other day (it’s pretty short, as any manifesto should be) I think I’m going to basically throw some characters into a room and see what happens. Maybe something interesting will come of it, who knows.

Also, I’m getting married real soon. It’s almost come to the OMGPANIC stage of planning but once we push through that it should go over well. The heat is making it difficult for those higher brain functions to work real well, so I’m not real sure what else I can share.

It was a hundred degrees I tell you, or damn well near it. I improvised a swamp cooler out of a cooler, wet towel and a box fan but it didn’t really work that well. I imagine if i used a lighter fabric and hung it directly in front of the fan it would be more effective. May have to give that a whirl.

P.S. The picture above is from a totem pole right by Pike’s Market in Seattle. It was mostly covered by scaffolding when we visited, but still. Pretty neat.