How lucky are we to live in a world where the following exists:

Well, that's nice: the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in in Mexico City is apparently going to use this picture of mine of Rwanda as part of their permanent exhibition:


I took that with a disposable camera on a creaky-even-by-African-standards-but-mercifully-half-empty bus from Kigali to Ruhengeri. The other passengers around me watched carefully as I waited for the right moment, and applauded when I pushed the button, which presumably means I timed it right. I hope the museum cleans up (or crops) that lens artifact to the right. And that they don't try to blow it up large: the scan didn't have that many DPI, and Lord only knows where the negative is now.

While I'm at it, other shots of mine that have appeared somewhere or other:


St. Petersburg canal. enRoute magazine paid me a hunnert bucks and ran it a couple of years ago.


Habitat '67. Appeared in the Westport Arts Centre in Westport, CT, and on the back page of Multi-Family Executive magazine, and in Ambiente y Color Magazine in Puerto Rico. (Plus its 30 kviews on Flickr.)


The Qingzang Railway across Tibet. Appeared in the newsletter of the company that built the train, which was kinda gratifying.


Durres, Albania. Used by the Global Heritage Fund, which tries to save endangered world heritage sites.


San Francisco Bay near Oakland. Shot of the day at the Nature Conservancy's web site sometime this year.


Lake Kivu, Rwanda/Congo. Used (without any permission request or attribution other than "Flickr", I might add) by Global Envision, some kind of free-market NGO or something.


Windsor Station, Montreal. Used in Schmap Montreal.


Used in some NowPublic article or other.


Qingzang Railway, again. Used in some NowPublic article or other.


...I think that's pretty much it.

This year is the first time Dan and I are spending Christmas alone together in our new home. Now, we usually don't buy each other presents since we're typically traveling and spending lots of money in the process.

Seeing as how we're going to be waking up together in our home on Christmas morning, it's important that we have presents to open from Santa. So, I stepped way outside of the norm, and selfishly went shopping for "Us" yesterday. Now, I know what we're getting, and Dan knows what we're getting. But we're going to wrap the gifts and open them on Christmas anyway.

Except for one gift, THE NEW CAMERA. We're just going to wrap the empty box... oh... and my new Sorels... yea, only the box gets wrapped, also.

Anyways! All of this just so I can show you the amazing photos that I took last night with the new camera.

I've NEVER seen icicles quite like these ones. The snow/melt has formed these amazing monster teeth that bend in under the overhang towards the house. Plus the Christmas lights reflecting off of the snow is simply fantastic. Love!



Though this pic is blurry it shows how dramatic the curvature of the icicle is


Rainbow!


annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd... one more gratuitous photo of my love, the Christmas tree

You can't make a book available on a Kindle¹ for free. Minimum price is $0.99. Amazon occasionally makes books free for awhile at a publisher's request, but only they can do so.

Also, if you self-publish to Amazon, your royalty rate is a whopping² 35%, compared to the 50% that publishers get for non-exclusive ebook deals, and 70% for exclusive.

I am not appalled by either of these things, but I am somewhat surprised by both. As in, I think both are bad business decisions by Amazon; they should be trying to establish/cement the Kindle's status as the ebook platform of choice, not nickel-and-diming, or at least not yet.

(What brought this up? Well, I've finished the rewrite of Beasts of New York, which made me wonder about making the CC-released version 1.0 available for Kindle, especially as somebody else has produced a rather nice PDF version of it, with a cover and a decent layout. (But they probably didn't fix the typos, alas.) Also, the US and UK electronic rights to Dark Places have reverted back to me, and I'm planning to CC-release it as well sometime next year, although I'd be more enthusiastic about that if I could find a name online publication willing to serialize it.)

¹By which I mean publishing via Amazon's Digital Publishing interface and thus making a book searchable on Amazon and instantly downloadable via Whispernet; obviously Kindles can read PDFs etc, but it's far less convenient.

²Sarcasm.

It is safe to say that the Watts Event has not gone unnoticed by media both traditional and non-. And I am gladdened by this.

But I would particularly like to point people to papersky's take on it all:

One of the things that's making me angry about the Peter Watts thing, beyond the fact that it's happened at all, is the way so many people in comments at BoingBoing and at Whatever and all over are saying that it must be his fault, that he must have done something to provoke it, that it wouldn't have happened if he'd been polite and done what he was told and if he had, in effect, cringed more.

This may well be the case.

But is that the world you want to live in?

When I was growing up, in the Cold War, we talked about the Free World. In the Free World you didn't have to present papers endlessly, you didn't have to cringe before authority, everyone was equal before the law, people didn't disappear. The Free World was better than the Soviet world that was the enemy in those days. Not fearing the police and the army and the border guards is part of that freedom. They are public servants, they are people doing a potentially dangerous job and they deserve respect, and so do we deserve respectful treatment from them. There might be circumstances in which they have to kill people, in which that's appropriate behaviour, but it should never be appropriate for them to behave as if they have arbitrary power and expect reactions of fear and cringing.

More here: Is this the kind of world you want?

Just one more reason why I should focus my energies on working at home.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/12/14/ottawa-highway-416-closed.html

(The area where this happened is essentially the first stretch of highway on my would-be commute into Ottawa)

Crashes involving more than 60 vehicles prompted police to shut down Highway 416 northbound at Roger Stevens Drive in Ottawa's south end.

"It's a big mess right now," Const. Guy Prevost said around 9:30 a.m. Monday. "It was foggy and the roads were icy."

Some of the vehicles had collided, while others were stranded in ditches at multiple locations along the side of the highway.

There were at least two separate, distinguishable pileups, each involving dozens of vehicles, CBC's Steve Fischer reported from the scene.

The northbound lanes were expected to be closed between Roger Stevens Drive and Bankfield Road for most of the day as police worked to gather information about the collisions.

No major injuries were reported.

Motorists were asked to avoid the area and expect delays.

One witness posting on the CBC website reported that the fog was so thick that visibility was less than six metres.

She said about 14 cars had collided in front of hers, and about four ambulances and several fire trucks had converged at the scene. A truck that collided with a car near the front of the pileup had ended up in a ditch, she reported.

"The car's front end was no more," she wrote.

Highway 416 connects Ottawa to Highway 401.

Here's your digital Christmas card. Treasure it always.



(psst... looks better on a white background...)

Have you seen the snow?!?!!??!?!?!??!!!! My goodness, and this is only the beginning.

We bought the last snowblower at the Home Hardware today. Delivery = tomorrow.

Peter Watts blogs about due process, if by due process you mean being punched, pepper-sprayed, jailed, and then abandoned in a blizzard, for the crime of repeating a question.

Oh, US Customs, you sure do know how to show us Canadians a good time.

Captured tonight on Toronto's Queen Street West:



More cowbell!