Champagne, ready to celebrate the arrival of 2012. In the background: This year's Times Square New Year's Eve "Ball".
Woah, I can't believe it! Project 365 is coming to a close! (Oh hey! This picture is intentionally similar to Day 1. Full circle!)
Happy New Year!
The penultimate photo (!) of Project 365 is an HDR panorama of Milpitas Civic Center. Milpitas City Hall is the big building to the right, and on the left you see the community center with the Christmas tree in front of it.
Make sure to check out the full-size picture. As an added bonus, you'll see the same kid running through the photo twice -- a neat "time lapse" effect of stitching multiple exposures together.
The flag of Santa Clara County at Mountain View City Hall was flown at half-staff today. Why, the Interwebs wouldn't tell me. Anyone know? Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is too far back, and besides it'd be the wrong one of the flags. Hmmm!
Look at the spiffy new reception area the contractors turned our prior mail room into! As far as I can tell, looks like it's done! Of course, there's all sorts of Mozilla decoration missing, but since Project 365 is nearing its end, I didn't think I could wait that long ;)
Turns out, flowers are not a lot easier to google for than bird names... but, anyway, this one seems to be an Asiatic Lily. Pretty!
Living near a chocolate store does come in handy when getting snacks for a long Christmas weekend. Nom nom nom. These bags are almost empty...
Christmas dinner: Everyone was having a jolly good time, except Donald, who felt it was "awfully warm in here".
This is Tara, unwrapping my Christmas present to her: A framed original painting of Place Bellecour, Lyon, France. We got the painting well over a year ago when we last went there to visit, but never got around to having it framed (and, thus, never hung it up). Sneaky Fred snuck it out of the house and had it framed, (apparently) much to the delight of the Missus. Mission accomplished.
The nutcracker is just hanging out on the tree, eagerly waiting for Christmas morning (or rather, Christmas Eve, when us Germans open their presents). I like nutcrackers (even the bigger kind whose mouth actually opens) -- though ironically, they are completely useless for their actual job, and I have yet to see one that wouldn't break if you tried cracking a hazelnut or walnut with it...
This year, Time magazine named "The Protester" its "Person of the Year". Inside, they cover several key people in the 2011 protests around the world, among them linguistics teacher and blogger Lina Ben Mhenni ("A Tunisian Girl"). In the picture, she's carrying her "sword" -- the laptop she uses to write her influential blog. To my delight, she decorated it with a Firefox sticker, along with various others about privacy and political activism.
Hat-tip to Lina: Thank you for standing up for civil rights in your country and everywhere in the world.
