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Hawaii
Song-A-Not-So-Weekly #49 - Two Sides
Twittering Now
Weddings, Fish, Atlanta, & Coke
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June 27, 2008

Hawaii

Hawaii Sunset - Kona, HI - 1993, from Flickr user ConceptJunkie.  (CC licensed)

Well, tomorrow Kristin and I leave for Hawaii for two weeks. We're going for her old roommate's wedding, and then staying a while to see the place (and climb mountains). It's going to be great, but I'm a little stressed out about it right now. We are staying on Oahu for the first week, and then jumping to the big island for the second week, and that leg of the trip doesn't have any firm plans at this point. We have a pretty good idea of what we'll do there and when, but as far as actual tickets or reservations.... I'll feel better once those plans are firmed up a bit.

We've got some ambitious goals for this trip. The first week won't have too much going on aside from the usual pre-wedding planning, beach-bumming, museum-going, and sight-seeing -- Not to trivialize those things. I can't imagine they will be anything less than spectacular.

But I think the 2nd week will be where it really starts getting crazy. The big island has practically all ecological environments in the world, in a very small amount of space. It's got desert, rainforest, mountains, snow, coral reefs... We plan on seeing a LOT of those. It also is home to the world's largest mountain, which we hope to climb. It's not the tallest, mind you, but from the base of the sea floor to the summit, it dwarfs mount everest by quite a bit, I think. Luckily, most of it being beneath the sea makes our jobs much easier, and it actually only qualifies as a pretty hardcore day hike. Kristin and I have bought more outdoor gear than I ever thought I would in preparation for it... As a very nerdy computer programming bookworm, I still don't really know how I feel about that. I think its good. I like being active, but all the accouterments that come with still confuse me. There was a lot of "what is this? why do I need that?" going on while we were walking around various outdoors stores...

This trip will be heavily documented, to say the least. Kristin and I are now the proud owners of a very nice Nikon outfit. I don't plan on bringing a computer along, so I stocked up on CF cards before we left, and we've got 10 gigs now. We'll weed out the bad shots as we go, and hopefully that will be enough. Kristin's dad also got me a few photographic toys for my birthday. He got me a Holga - a cheap, fun, unique medium format camera that takes really cool pictures. I've only got one roll of film for that right now, so we'll have to conserve. But that should offer a whole new perspective on the trip. On top of that, Kristin's dad also got us a pinhole attachment for the Nikon. Which is really crazy. Pinhole cameras do not use lenses. They "focus" the light by making it pass through a very small hole in an opaque medium of some sort. Light is weird, and this works, and you don't have "focus" or "depth of field" like you would with a traditional lens. The pics (I think) tend to be a bit softer, and you have to use super-long exposures on them (the pinhole only lets a small amount of light through), but they're a really interesting idea that I haven't explored yet.

We'll be screwing around with the lo-fi panorama technique that I was working on in Mexico and Paris. We want to get a good one like this that we can print and mount on gatorboard and hang in our living room. The beauty of the lo-fi collage is that you can get HUGE prints from stitched-together 10.2 megapixel images. HUGE.

I'm also curious to see what kind of stuff the Holga kicks out. Medium-format film can theoretically be blown up larger than 35mm, but when you're shooting something like a Holga, image quality is typically pretty far back in your mind. You're just worried about getting something fun and unique instead. We're shooting 120-size t-max at 100 speed.

We should have internet the first week and then off-and-on the 2nd week, so I will probably post a few blogs on the run down there, hopefully I'll be able to upload some photos while I'm down there, too.

If anyone has ever been to Hawaii and has travel tips, leave them in the comments. Or if you want me to take a particular kind of picture or something, leave it in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Posted by pedalboy at 1:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 23, 2008

Song-A-Not-So-Weekly #49 - Two Sides

Hey guys. The songs in between "What Now" (#43) and this one are mostly really short ideas - so you're not missing much. You may see a few of them pop up here - I apparently won't be keeping stuff in sequence much. Oh well. Here's a new one.

Two Sides
(C) 2008 Matthew Good

I take care of myself
before I think of somebody else.
It's not that I'm a greedy man,
despite the mounting evidence.

It's just that I don't trust
my fellow man enough.
It makes me wonder which came first
the water rights, or the thirst.


In every song I sing
The narrator embodies me.
But he's not who I am,
he's a much better man than me.

Cuz I'm not full of love
and I'm not full of charity.
I mostly deal in fear,
and paranoid anxiety.


Every now and then,
despite who I've become,
I lend someone a hand who needs it.


There two sides
to my life,
and they struggle
For my attention.

You'll know
my true love
by the last kiss
of the evening.

---

A lot of the songs for song-a-week haven't necessarily been autobiographical. It's kind of hard (not to mention egotistical) to write some new "profound" thing about yourself once a week. So I had to fictionalize a bit. But this time, it's definitely me singing.

When I got my first job and started making and spending more money than I ever had before, I started doing some reading on what the heck you're actually supposed to do with this crap. And when you talk about investing, the ideas of fear and greed come up. They are generally presented as opposites. I think its Buffet who is referencing Graham who always says "Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy." But when you are not used to a bunch of responsibility, or an actual awareness of the limited nature of any and all resources, and you rather suddenly experience both, fear and greed are synonymous. That's what I'm talking about in this song. Hope you like it anyway.

Posted by pedalboy at 7:33 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 19, 2008

Twittering Now

I broke down and decided to start twittering. I'll be looking into ways to coordinate all my "status"-type apps, so if anyone has any suggestions for a WinXP/Windows Mobile 5 user who prefers desktop apps to webapps for this sort of thing, let me know. In the mean time, fellow twitterers who like me can follow me @:

http://twitter.com/matthewgood

That is all for now.

Posted by pedalboy at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 16, 2008

Weddings, Fish, Atlanta, & Coke

It's about that time again, where I recap the past few weeks of my life in a hurried and cursory manner, but this time, I've got PICTURES.

First up, Chase (college roomie) and Caitlin (college buddy) got hitched in Greenville.

Congrats, Chase and Caitlin!
[click to see the full album]

As you will note, the wedding was otherwise well-photographed, so I laid low and served as meta-photographer.

Then last weekend, we went to Atlanta for a weekend trip. We checked out the Georgia Aquarium:

Georgia Aquarium
[click for the full gallery]
[also, we love fish]

We then went to the Atlanta Zoo:

[photos not available yet - I was too busy to upload them yet...]

Apparently, there is a whole World of Coke:

World of Coke??
[click for the full gallery]

Who knew? We discovered it online, and were sortof confused/intruiged, so we decided to check it out. It. Was. Really. Cool. Very much had a Willy-Wonka-Meets-Jurrassic-Park feel to it.

And now for a few random highlights...

Kristin peering up into the tank.  The aquarium did a good job of making you feel like you were part of the exhibit.  Very cool.  I have since edited this photo to take out the random arm on the left side of the shot.

I'm checkin out the fishes.

An overhead river exhibit.  REALLY NEAT.

The underwater tunnel.  Note the moving walkway - it makes you feel like you are floating slowly.

BABY whale shark.  The biggies get HUGE.

Very cool gallery of really great coke paintings by this guy Steve Penley

The Tasting Room!!

Kristin ponders the Coke Bottle.

---

There you have it! A few pretty good weekends there.

Posted by pedalboy at 1:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack