Blogging Through Interesting Times

I’ve lived in NYC for a while. I don’t want to go all “I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”, but I have seen ships on fire. I’ve seen shooting – the movie variety and the regular kind, two hurricanes (one weak), an earthquake (not a strong one), a major blackout, and 9-11.

I always wanted to own a house in Breezy Point. I also always wanted to work in the Twin Towers. In hindsight, it’s probably good that I never achieved these things. On the other hand I spent 5 years working in the rebuilt WTC 7. I hope Breezy Point will be rebuilt soon too.

Who Is Ozzy Osbourne? Or Bloggers, Objectivists and Ozzy Fans, Oh My

I really hate the fact that livejournal does not provide visitor logs. I am very interested in my readership, but too lazy to put up some tracker pixels. Well, I have been looking at the image logs and found some very interesting things.

For instance, it appears that my photography has a very broad appeal. This “Sara Beth” blogger who used this blackout photo I took (without giving me any credit) appears to be a fan of Ayn Rand.

Sara Beth, Ayn highly disapproved of using copyrighted material without giving credit of any sort.

But then there’s “El Chupacabra” who posted this image (also with no credit to me) in the Ozzfest 2004 section over at siN’s Metal Forums with this heartwarming quote: “Each time I look at that Incubus pick, the metal is just sucked out of me. lol”
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This could be a good photo cover for Atlas Shrugged, but instead it turns on Ozzy fans. Go figure.

In case you missed them, blackout photos are here and here.

Hmm, I think I should try to sell at leas one of my photos to a respectable publication of some sort. I wonder what it takes to do that. Hmmm, maybe I should invest in this.

The Great Blackout Of 2003

For the first few hours I was pretty busy trying to find my wife and photography wasn’t on my mind. After talking to a doorman at the building where she works I realized that she couldn’t find me she took a bus to Brooklyn, I tried to relax a bit and took some pictures since there wasn’t much else I could do. I did not do anything except cropping and adding a border to these photos.

“Fair, Balanced and Hot”:

At this point I missed an amazing shot of cooks from a Japanese restaurants carrying home whole plates of sashimi ingredients, but got this:

Live entertainment in front of the Newscorp building.

I haven’t seen so much drinking in the streets and smelled so much pot smoke in my entire life.

Give my regards to power grid engineers.

Atlas Shrugged.

Unsuccessfully trying to catch a bus to Brooklyn in total darkness. The battery in my camera died and I missed absolutely amazing shots of a religious Jew reading Torah with a flashlight and of a police Segway. Stupid as I was, I was taking pictures without recharging my camera for about a month.

Later I joined some of my coworkers back at the office. Executives shared contents of their fridge (I didn’t even know it existed) and stores of promotional items. We found blankets, t-shirts and, amazingly, TV Guide branded flashlight radios. Who knew those could be useful? The radios in the flashlights didn’t work, but we found TV Guide branded radios that did. We had a little slumber party. I shared my antacid tablets with TV Guide president. In the morning we got home via car service provided by the company. Woo hoo!

I think I should go on a little survival shopping spree. I definitely need a high quality police scanner and maybe long range walkie-talkies. A red Photon light was very useful, I should get a few more of those. Need to stock up on batteries. Oh, and I definitely need to buy some black bakelite phones. Those worthless piece of crap wireless phones don’t work in a blackout of course.