I made this sketch on Sketchpatch today. I wanted to mess around with transparency, and overlapping circles. The result reminds me of an engraving, so that's not bad.

Took this picture today using an old 50mm/1.4 Nikkor lens on my new Nikon D90. No automatic exposure control or focus, but with a 1.4 aperture, you get really limited depth of field, which can look cool.

Click through to Flickr to see a bigger version.

I just tried my old lenses (from my old Nikon SLRs) on my new D90 DSLR and they work great! Most are fully manual, so no autofocus or automatic exposure control, but I like focusing manually, and since the cameras digital, it's not hard to shoot a few until you get the exposure to what you want, while adjusting the aperture ring on the lens.

One of my old lenses is a 300 mm lens that has AF, so the D90 works completely auto with it. I had no idea it would be so easy to continue using these lenses. I am somewhat excited by this.

On of the lenses is nice, old, worn 50mm/1.4. It's pretty fast, and gives short depth of field, which everyone loves these days. I'll be using that a bit, I think.

A poem written in flight.

Twenty Three Down
Twenty three down is asbestos.
What other inflammable materials are there?
Besides cod.
That fish never burns.

I'm reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens, part of my ongoing project to read all of his novels. I just read this awesome list:

The old man, looking up at the cages [of birds] after another look at us, went through the list.
"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That's the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by my noble and learned brother."

I finally got out and rode outside today, my first time this year due to a cold I've had for weeks. The cold's not been too bad, but it just lingers. I had some coughing even today, but the weather was fantastic (high 50s, clear skies!), so I don't care. About 34 km, 1:20, felt really good.

I did a short phone interview the other day with a reporter who wrote this article.

Meh.

Finished reading E. E. Cummings' memoir The Enormous Room about his time in a French prison during World War I. I'd never read anything but his poems. This was quite a good piece of writing, and you can find it from Dover for only three bucks. It's got a good bit of french in it, so if you are like me and only know a few french words, keep a dictionary nearby.

It is available to be read electronically at the awesome Gutenberg Project.

I'd be happy to pass my copy on to anyone who would like it.

This is perhaps my favorite passage:

Lily was a German girl, who looked unbelievably old, wore white, or once
white dresses, had a sort of drawling scream in her throat besides a
thick deadly cough, and floundered leanly under the eyes of men. Upon the
skinny neck of Lily a face had been set for all the world to look upon
and be afraid. The face itself was made of flesh green and almost
putrescent. In each cheek a bloody spot. Which was not rouge, but the
flower which consumption plants in the cheek of its favourite. A face
vulgar and vast and heavy-featured, about which a smile was always
flopping uselessly. Occasionally Lily grinned, showing several
monstrously decayed and perfectly yellow teeth, which teeth usually were
smoking a cigarette. Her bluish hands were very interestingly dead; the
fingers were nervous, they lived in cringing bags of freckled skin, they
might almost be alive.

She was perhaps eighteen years old.

The beautiful final paragraph is more cummings-like than the rest of the book:

The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward
into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel
edges, leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises
of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men
and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and
strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride
firmly into immortal sunlight....