Day 167 - Takin' it Easy

Lizzy, taking it easy after a long day of sleeping, napping, eating, and sniffing.

I think this photo is kind of cool since it looks like a Sepia effect or something but it's just the automatic white balance failing on a brown background and black-and-white dog in the foreground. If I had to guess, I'd say white-balance detection is the automation that fails me the most when taking photos. Unsurprisingly, it is probably the hardest property for the camera to get right, whenever no proper reference point (read: true white) is present in the frame. Interesting problem!

June 15, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 166 - Hello!

Today I found some "hello my name is" tags at the office (did I mention those are awesome?), so I just had to take this picture. (Pssst: Thanks to Tara, I'll also use it somewhere else next week... :) )

June 14, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 165 - Full Moon

Today, the full moon was visible very nicely over the Silicon Valley. The photo makes it look a little darker than it was, but I decided to keep exposure times short, so one could see the surface of the moon.

June 13, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 164 - A Silicon Valley Panorama

Another parental "guest photo": A Silicon Valley panorama, as seen from the hills on the east side of the valley, looking west. (Obviously, clicking on it and zooming in makes sense).

Update, June 14: This is the same photo, retaken with a tripod and stitched together. Woah!

Enjoy the view (and the Northern Californian sunshine)!

June 12, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 163 - Cherry Picking

It is cherry season. Consequently the fruit displays are full of them, like here at the Mountain View Farmers' Market. The customers are carefully picking the right ones to take home.

June 11, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 162 - Grandma's Potato Dumplings, Part 1

Oh hey, readers! Did I mention I like food?

This is the first step to my grandma's potato dumplings with pork roast and sauerkraut: The roast. It was supposed to be about 2 pounds of bone-in pork neck meat, but acquiring it was somehow challenging while Dittmer's in Mountain View is closed. So we went for the pork butt, at a massive 6 pounds, hah!

It's simmering with approximately a metric ton of cut-up onions (coincidentally a process made famous by Ray Charles with his performance of Crying Time).

Tomorrow, they'll join the star of the stage, the dumplings. Excitement ensues :)

June 10, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 161 - Mozilla Billboard

This is one of the billboards Mozilla has recently put up in San Francisco (here: on 3rd and Market). I like how they point people (who have probably already heard about Firefox) at Mozilla's non-profit status (which they might not have heard about).

If you want to learn more about Mozilla's mission for the betterment of the Web, check out mozilla.org, the website of the Mozilla Foundation.

June 09, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 160 - Mail Box Potpourri

Today's picture is a guest contribution, taken by my dad outside of Woodside, CA. The locals' mail boxes look like the exhibit of a mail box store -- almost none are alike.

June 08, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 159 - Moonscape

Know how the moon is made of cheese? Wrong. It's actually blueberry cobbler. It's a tasty, tasty moon.

June 07, 2011Fred Wenzel

Day 158 - Bowling Pin

This is a commemorative bowling pin the webdev team acquired during one of our on-site team meetings. I did get to sign on it, though I must admit that due to my horrendous bowling skills this might just have been pity from my team mates ;)