Day 194 - Magnetic Awesomeness

A colleague got this "magnetic desk toy" a while ago, and keeps building awesome things with it, like this "magnetic atom"... so cool.

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Day 193 - Maccheroni

It's probably a pretty safe assumption that by now, 193 days into Project 365, I have driven away all readers who thoroughly dislike good food, so might as well proceed on the path of food madness!

This is fresh penne pasta with a "San Giovanniello" sauce that contains San Francisco-made prosciutto along with fresh, local, tomatoes, basil, and garlic. Mmmmmm.

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Day 192 - Waste, to go

Starbucks, fueling the throw-away society since 1971.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like my cappuccino as much as the next guy, but it greatly saddens me just how much trash your average to-go coffee place actually produces. The semi-proudly presented recycling subtext on the cups ("contains 10% post-consumer recycled fiber" or so) provides little consolation in the light of, well, 90% fresh tree (along with a plastic lid) being dropped into the nearest to-the-landfill trash can after a mere 15 minutes of caffeination.

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Day 191 - Caltrain

This is a Caltrain, as it is leaving Mountain View station, southbound.

Turns out, fisheye lenses are great for things like trains. However, I also realize this is hopelessly overexposed. I'm going to need to continue tweaking the settings until I know what my camera does with a fully manual lens it can't talk to.

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Day 190 - Flags

These three flags decorate my office: The US and German flags are easy to recognize, but what's the other one for? Glad you asked! It's the local flag of the German region of Baden. It's not a state by itself (anymore), but a region with a long, eventful heritage and, accordingly, a strong sense of pride among the locals.

Now, in general, plastering everything with flags in the US is deemed acceptable. Back home in Germany, I found the opposite to be true: After the Nazi government thoroughly overused flags in every conceivable way, in post-war Germany it commonly results in raised eyebrows when private people put up flags (except during the soccer world cup). However, local flags (be they state flags or regional) are shown off with much more pride and generally accepted as a declaration of heritage.

Of course, in my office, I get to make the rules so I can hoist whatever flags I like :)

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Day 189 - Important Business

Important business decisions are best made over a glass of Jameson + Ginger Ale1, and a cigar if one was so inclined2.

1) nope, until today I didn't know that was a valid drink, either! 2) I was not, but whatever floats your boat.

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Day 188 - Evening Sun

Today, my new fisheye lens arrived, and it seems it's capable of some fabulous pictures! This is today's sun, a few minutes before sunset. Note the nicely bent lines that are straight in real life...

The lens is actually fully manual, making it somewhat challenging to use, but I wouldn't have a photo project if I wasn't looking for a challenge ;)

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Day 187 - Bikeshed Turned Bikeshed

Part of Mozilla's conference rooms are named after Internet memes (did I mention we are nerds?). So, besides rooms like "Dancing Baby", "Win", and "All Your Base", we also have "Bikeshed", a reference to Parkinson's Law of Triviality (as Wikipedia helpfully suggests).

Appropriately, this room has been consistently used to park bikes for quite some time now. So this week, it was turned into an actual bikeshed. Out with table and screen, in with bike racks. Nice!

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Day 186 - Flowers for the Missus

These are some beautiful sun flowers we found at the farmers' market. I really like how, besides the familiar yellow and brown, they are also red in the middle. Very pretty.

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Online whistleblower website WikiLeaks spoofed a MasterCard commercial as criticism to the credit card company allegedly blocking multiple millions of dollars in donations (press release).

At the same time, they also sued MasterCard and Visa in Denmark for their interfering with WikiLeaks' donations, which they call a "financial blockage".

Here's the viral video in all its glory:

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