29th June 2008, 10:19 pm
Here is a photo of the underwater viewing room in the Environmental Discovery Center at Indian Springs Metropark. It is an acrylic cylinder with a domed roof, and an arched walkway leading from the basement of the building. Here is a photo of the pond behind the center, with the underwater viewing room visible as a light spot in the pond.
Wanting somewhere to wander, Danielle and I headed over to the park this afternoon. Everything was going well until we tried to head down some of the nature center trails which were much more insect infested than we would have prefered. I had numerous deer flies on me at any given time, and one of them bit my head. Of course there were also mosquitoes. Lots and lots and lots of mosquitoes.
(This photo was taken with a Peleng 8mm fisheye lens and is posted without cropping or other processing. I personally find it interesting how well a lens like that works for photographing the inside of a curved room. I feel that defishing and/or cropping would have made it less interesting.)
29th June 2008, 08:43 pm
Almost every morning I grind some coffee then brew it using an Aerobie Aeropress (photo of mine here). Back in 2000 (or so) I purchased an interesting tea press / travel mug at a Starbucks, made by Bodum in Switzerland, and the cup from this is what I use to carry the coffee with me to work or whatnot. (When drinking the coffee at home I just use a pint glass with an insulating cardboard ring around it.) After all the use the Bodum travel cup has received the seal between the two walls have stared to fail and, as can be seen above coffee, has begun slowly seeping in.
A couple weeks back I finally ordered a replacement cup, and that’s the new Bodum 16 oz Travel Mug seen above. I’m a bit disappointed that it feels to be of cheaper construction than the current one, and I can’t help but correlate it’s Chinese origins with the cheap feeling of the cup, especially when feeling the older (but failing) cup’s construction and reading the now-rare MADE IN SWITZERLAND stamp on the bottom.
Overall the design of the cup seems a bit better, with a nicer gasket system along the top and a more positive screw-close mechanism. Hopefully it’ll work well.
New to this mug is the ability to insert stuff between the walls, as demonstrated by the Bodum-logo’d paper currently inserted there. I think I’m going to duplicate this, but instead of photos I’ll do something interesting with transparency. It will be a bit complicated because the top and bottom are curved slightly, but hopefully I’ll be able to pull some geometry out of the air and properly duplicate it.
As part of this new artwork I think I’ll incorporate a solid band to ensure that when the cup is placed in the Flavia machine at work that its IR sensor can see that my cup is there. (Normally it just sees through clear cups and fails to dispense, so I have to hold my thumb over the sensor.) I think some sort of caffeine-based theme could be interesting as well, including graduating the cup with markings indicating how much caffeine is present in the remaining beverage, based on the presumption that there is 150mg of caffeine in 8 oz of coffee. Or… maybe something else. I’m not sure yet.
Tomorrow morning I’ll give the cup its first go, and hopefully piece together some manner of artwork sometime later this week. I’m really sleepy, so I think that for now I’ll just take out the trash and go to bed.
