jason's travel & photography blog » Daily Life

Creative Offering: Vote through July

jason — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:38:48 +0000

April and I have co-founded a charity to change the way the world gives. Creative Offering allows anyone to donate their time, talent, or services to charity … and the charity will come and find you! Imagine, you can donate what you’re passionate about and what you want to do. Not only do you get to feel GREAT for doing what you love, but you can get testimonials, portfolio/resume items, new potential clients, huge PR opportunities, and even contests for those who give the most!

1 toilet per 60,000 people

jason — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:48:20 +0000

So I’m browsing the Google News pages, and I see something about a festival in Kerala in India — where we’re recently visited (here, and here). It’s an interesting article by the BBC about a women’s festival there with 3 million attendees. The paragraph that utterly shocked me was this one:

It is an elaborate logistical feat: almost 3,000 police, 600 of them women, were on duty around the clock. Two hundred priests positioned themselves at different points to sprinkle holy water on the pongala. Fifty portable toilets were also provided.

Now, I don’t know about you … but if I were the Beeb I might be a little surprised that 3 million people had a whole 50 portable toilets to use. I did a little math. That’s one toilet per 60,000 people. That means that if you use the toilet only once per day, you have approximately 1.5 seconds to use it to keep it on schedule. And did they really call 50 toilets “an elaborate logistical feat”? Seriously?!?

14000 pageviews last month

jason — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:18:23 +0000

I started this blog for my friends and family to look at and now, somehow or another, I get about 14,000 pageviews a month. Thanks for looking.

You’ll notice that I don’t post often — usually only when I have something interesting to say (unlike today). I try and post photos of travel, and these get picked up by google pretty often. For some reason, Gum Wall Seattle is searched all the time, as is The Bachelors Ball (1, 2), and LOTS of hits on how to create the effect from that movie 300 (here, and here). I oddly see quite a few searches for “punk violin” — which seems very random, but comes up almost daily. Other popular searches cover Honduras and El Salvador, the Honey Cone, and the houseboats in India (and here).

Apparently Tripbase liked some of the travel photos, and sent me a pretty graphic for the site. Thanks, Tripbase.

Tripbase Travel Photography Award

Reflections upon the year

jason — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:38:41 +0000

The amazing Wednesday spent in India at an Ayurvedic resort was coincidentally one year from the day that April and I first kissed. As I ponder the last year, I can only be astounded at how different my life is in such a short time period: after 37 years of missing some elusive connection in my life, I am almost instantly married (not technically, but emotionally). We have hosted an outrageous overnight “fancy dress” vampire party at the illustrious Bachelor’s Ball. We have been to Galas and Entrepreneurs’ Organizations events, artwalks and amazing dinners, travelled to Seattle — twice!, visited my grandparents in Reno, had an incredible engagement at Crystal Cove, enjoyed an engagement luau party, had “honeymoon zero” in The Mexican Riviera, awoke to a massive iguana in our face, travelled the backwaters of India, visited the poorest of Indian villages, and have fallen more deeply in love than I ever thought possible. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve debated politics, we’ve still yet to have an argument. We’ve moved in together and begun building our home together. I can barely remember the emptiness that occupied much of my 37-years, and I already cannot imagine my life without her in it. All that and much more, in less than one year. It shows that truly, anything is possible.

New Website Up

jason — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:01:24 +0000

The Calendar Factory has expanded to include many things that we’ve been doing for years: magazine design, magazine ads; books; and calendars. We’ve launched The 28 Page Agency’s website recently. It will be updated and changed regularly (we’re already working on a complete redesign) … feel free to stop by!

Biggest Ponzi Scheme Ever?

jason — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:44:26 +0000

So, I read in the news today about “Bernard Madoff, who pleaded guilty today to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history…”

I’m confused. Isn’t the biggest Ponzi scheme in history the US Social Security System?

(Ponzi Scheme, from Wikipedia: “pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned. … other English-speaking countries do not distinguish colloquially between this scheme and pyramid schemes…. The perpetuation of the high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going. The system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments.”)

Vegas – Honey Cone

jason — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:40:57 +0000

Was in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and I had an opportunity to shoot the 1970’s hit band Honey Cone … I had a great location, and so here are a few fun shots from the night.

Intrivolting: Seattle

jason — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:55:27 +0000

Intrivolting (Intriguing + Revolting): the only word I could come up with to describe Seattle’s gum wall … a wall with thousands if not millions of pieces of gum stuck upon it.

As you might surmise, I just returned from a trip to Seattle. A very quick weekend up and back on the relatively new airline Virgin America (more to come on that next post), here are a few pictures from the Aquarium:

Bad grammar … or kids from space?

jason — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:27:51 +0000

I love bad grammar.

”… Utah Students From Space.” Classic.

Closest Full Moon

jason — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:55:27 +0000

A week or so ago the full moon was the closest to our planet that it’s been in many years — meaning that it looked about 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than normal. Sure enough, I walked outside, and — rather than seeing the moon itself, I saw an amazingly bright reflection of it in my neighbors window. It was stunning, and also a different angle on the moon than normal, so I quickly grabbed my tripod to take a few shots. (Probably looked like I was trying to peer in the neighbor’s window.) The windows are double-paned and tinted, so the moon reflected in multitude of different ways, and even moving an inch or two changed the whole look. Here’s how it looked from Orange County, California…

Christmas 2008 Pictures

jason — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:21:59 +0000

My 20-month old nephew and mom’s new puppy made for fun pictures this Christmas…

Christmas 2008 Picture Gallery

Here are a few of my favorites…

Kym

jason — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:18:41 +0000

I know, I know … I haven’t been posting much lately. The blog was mostly for travel- and photography-related posts, neither of which I’ve been doing lately.

But every once in a while I do edit some photos I took months ago. Here’s a new one of Kym looking out my window …

Found Photos – Thanksgiving

jason — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:02:26 +0000

Just a few photos recently found of a long-past Thanksgiving (approximately 4 days ago, I think) … mostly my little nephew Branson, now 20-months old (and who said my name for the first time that day):

My mom, when my grandmother passed away, found some very old silverware hidden in the wall of her house. Turns out silverware was most likely coin silver that had been in our family since sometime before 1885. Until Thanksgiving 2008, no one had eaten with it for at least 30-40 years. Definitely an interesting touch …

Taking their own product?

jason — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:06:13 +0000

So, I saw this advertisement in our local rag, The OC Weekly, and snapped a bad iPhone pic of it:

Not only am I particularly amused by the contents of bullets #1 and #3, but also by the fact that even those don’t match. Was someone taking too much of their own product???

World’s Oldest iPhone

jason — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:23:45 +0000

I’ve been telling people that I had the world’s oldest iPhone … iPhone Number One, as far as I can tell. But I finally figured out how to PROVE it, now that there are screenshots available on the phone. See here (absolutely no Photoshop was used on this image.) :

So … according to my calculations, this iPhone was made on August 28th, 2001. Yes, 2001.

I wonder if this voids the one-year warranty?