Please help support its continuing mission by donating to the Walk for Food Allergy.
Update: FARE no longer runs the previously-annual fundraiser, but you can still learn more about food allergies (and contribute more generally, if you’re inclined) at foodallergy.org.
Last month I had the good fortune to watch Endeavour’s landing at LAX from the office building where I work. Today I had the opportunity to see the space shuttle up close while it stopped at a parking lot in Westchester.
When I got to work this morning, the shuttle had already left the airport hangar where it had spent the last month, and was sitting in a parking lot a mile or so away. I didn’t have time to go look at it, but I did have time to climb up to the top of the parking structure and look for it.
The first thing I spotted was the distinctive tail, and I walked along the top floor until I could see as much of the shuttle as possible. It looked out of place surrounded by trees and a Staples sign, though I couldn’t help thinking, “Space shuttle? Yeah, we’ve got that.” I took a few zoomed pictures with my camera, then one really grainy with my phone for the “now” impact, then headed into the office. Continue reading
I caught this view of the clouds lit up by the setting sun out of the corner of my eye on the way home tonight, and decided that I had to turn around and find someplace with a relatively unobstructed view. The beach would have been perfect, but also would have taken too long. In a pinch, I picked the top of a hill along an east-west street.
At first I was reminded of a dragon, but as I watched it, I started thinking it looked like a bird. I was going to call it “Sunset Phoenix” until I realized it would sound like a sunset in Phoenix, Arizona. Neat, I suppose…but not as intriguing as a fire dragon.
It’s astonishing how short the Internet’s attention span is these days.
Last Friday I made a point to post my photos of Endeavour’s final flight as quickly as possible. The shuttle’s carrier landed just before 1:00pm, and I put off grabbing lunch until I had uploaded my best pictures. My Flickr traffic jumped up by a factor of 5 that day…and was back to normal on Saturday.
A few years ago, I could post convention photos a week or more after the event and people would view them in significant numbers. If a convention ended on Sunday, I usually tried to put my pictures online by Monday or Tuesday, then add them to groups over the course of a week. These days, if the photos aren’t up during the con, no one seems to care. And even if they’re up, they’d better be labeled and submitted to groups immediately. Sure, there’s a bump, but by Tuesday, interest is already dropping off.
Sometimes it seems like even waiting until evening to transfer photos from the camera is too long. If it’s not pushed straight from your phone to Instagram within five minutes, your potential audience is already moving on to the next thing.
I used to review Flash comics at Speed Force, but it became clear that whenever I missed the day of release, I got half as many readers, and if I didn’t have the review up by the end of the weekend, only regular readers would even see it. And there wouldn’t be any discussion, because everyone had already hashed things out on other sites.
A while back, I wondered, “Is now better?” I guess I have the answer: “Yes, if you want people to actually see it.”
Update: If you’re looking for photos from Endeavour’s trip through the LA streets in October, I’ve got those too.
And that’s it. The final flight of the space shuttle has come to an end.
The last shuttle landing I saw was Discovery in 1988. My family went out to Edwards Air Force Base to watch it land. I posted a photo essay on the event last summer when the shuttle flights stopped.
The 1988 landing was a normal Shuttle landing. It landed under its own power, from orbit, and it was all business. We civilians camped out all night on a dry lake bed, kept outside a fence so far away from the landing strip we could barely see the shuttle without binoculars.
This time it was being carried by an airplane, from another airport. Safety wasn’t any more of an issue than a normal flight, so they landed at a regular airport. (Though it was escorted by military aircraft.) And since it was the last-ever shuttle flight, there was a bit of showmanship to the flight plan: Continue reading
