The kids and I went out for brunch for Father’s Day.

Here’s a picture from the American Tobacco District from earlier this evening, before the security guards asked me to leave. Here are some other pictures I took this evening at American Tobacco and at Durham’s Bus Station.

Grace and Peter are looking tired after their first day back to school.

I have always been a fan of Carrboro’s Family 4th of July Celebration. This year, like most others, we arrived early at the Weaver Street lawn, decorated our rides, a scooter in Grace’s case, and lined up for the parade. Here’s a short video of the parade.

The parade ends at the Carrboro Town Hall and Farmer’s Market with lots of free games and fun. Grace wanted to be at the front of the parade so she could get to the fun before the lines got too long. She went on the bouncy obstacle course first and then she climbed the climbing wall. She also tried her hand at the “Ring the Bell.”

Here’s a link to more pictures on Flickr.

The Bain Project was a site specific artwork created in the deserted and decommissioned waterworks plant south of downtown Raleigh. In the late 1930s, as Raleigh was growing, the city built a new plant to handle the water needs of the area. Here’s a link to historic information about the Bain Waterworks. This artwork project combined found objects in the plant, organic materials like branches and grass with a deteriorating industrial building. I was more interested in photographing the aging machinery and peeling paint than in the artwork, but some it made interesting photographs.

Here are the rest of my photos on Flickr and here are photos from other local photographers.

One of the most creative endeavors was a musical piece played by creating sounds on the building itself. A plant buzzer sounded, and a corps of white-coated employees marched down the main aisle and took their positions in the water holding tanks. They proceeded to shake, shudder and pound out the sounds of a working plant. Here’s some video of the piece.

An iphone application that I downloaded but haven’t used was the Amazon.com app. I recently opened it up and took a look at it. I was especially interested in the Amazon Remembers feature. You take pictures, using your iphone, of things you would like to remember, through the application. And if Amazon offers a similar product, they will let you know.

One of the things I like to do when I test applications or services is to do things with them that the developers did not intend. So in this case, I took a photo of my son Peter. He is not someone I would soon forget, but I would like to remember him, nevertheless.

Soon after uploading the photo, Amazon sent me an email with a link for a boys size basketball t-shirt. The results also show up in the application. I was pretty impressed. I did not pay attention to the shirt he had on, but it was a basketball related shirt. My first question was how did they know to recommend a boys size? How could they tell he was a boy?

After I received the email, I read more about the service and discovered that a community of real people review the photos and make recommendations from Amazon’s products. Now it made perfect sense how they knew to send a boys sized shirt.

One problem I have with the service relates to what the application does with the photos. The photos are not saved to my iphone photo album. It only lives in the Amazon application and on the Amazon website. As someone who obsessively keeps all my photos, especially ones of my kids, I have no way to access this photo. Other applications, like Brightkite, save photos to my iphone album as well uploading it to the places I indicated.

The other problem I have would actually improve the accuracy of the recommendations. There is no way to tag a photo or note what item you are interested in. This would not have helped in my example, because there is no telling what the response would have been if I tagged my photo 11 year old boy. That is not part of Amazon’s current product offerings.

Even with these shortcomings, this is a great way for Amazon to continue to chip away at brick and mortar businesses. If the email comes quickly enough, as others have in further tests, this is a way for consumers to price shop on things they don’t need immediately. Snap a photo in the store and know Amazon’s price before you leave the aisle. If you have used it on this free app, it’s worth a try.

I was on a Skype call with @waynesutton tonight and we started talking about Fail, a common social media term when something doesn’t quick go right. The best example is the Twitter Fail Whale. When the popular social network goes down, a graphic appears on screen showing a whale carried by birds. Anyway, I suggested to Wayne that he hold up his Fail sign.

Why does he have a Fail sign? He does a video podcast with Kipp Bodnar called Talk Social News, and Wayne holds up various signs throughout the show. I suggested that they get sponsors for their signs, but no one has bitten yet. If you want to sponsor the Fail sign, or any other sign on the Talk Social News podcast, send an email to contact@talksocialnews.com. Do I get a kickback if they sell a sponsorship based on this post? We will certainly talk about it.

This past weekend was the Durham Art Walk, which featured a gallery showing in the recently renovated Golden Belt complex. I had been to this site on the Eastern edge of downtown a week before, but everything was closed on a Sunday. Upon my return visit, I was pleased to find not just the gallery space, but about 35 artist studios with working artists. The complex also features living spaces and office space.

The people inhabiting this space are definitely on the bleeding edge of downtown revitalization. They are in a bubble totally unconnected to rest of the area. There is not even a grocery store anywhere nearby. For a complete history of the complex, go to Endangered Durham, one of my favorite sites about the history of Durham.

Both of my kids play baseball and it is baseball season in the local rec leagues. It is such a change from basketball season, which is completely weather independent, to baseball which occurs in the shower season hear in North Carolina. We have to get used to checking the weather on practice afternoons and checking our email on game days. Above is Grace playing catcher in a recent game.

For the kids’ Spring Break this year, we went to Florida and had a jam-packed week. We were busy, but with plenty of time to relax. Our schedule included swimming, a kids museum called the Imaginarium, an amusement park, a little bit of shopping, a boat ride to the beach, mini-golf, lots of eating, Passover Seder and the kids’ favorite activity: riding in the golf cart.

Peter in a hurricane simulator with 45 mph winds, which is really a tropical storm simulator.


Grace with her head in an alligator’s mouth. She does look a little nervous.


Laughing on the Dragon Coaster. The kids rode this 10 times.


Grace on the beach with a bucket and shovel.

Here’s a link to all my photos from the trip.