EPKPhoto's Tidbits

I just arrived at Dulles airport outside of DC for a day trip to northern VA. While in the air over the late evening ground below, I was reminded how inefficiently we use light outdoors. A great deal of the illumination from parking lots, roads, houses, and businesses is partially directed upwards, never to serve its purpose of lighting up the ground. The waste is clearly seen with all the specular lights giving a show for jetsetters. The occasional parking lot or road does it right: the ground is visibly illuminated, but the source of the light is not visible from above. It seems to me that we could save a lot of energy by better directing all of a lamp's output downwards. Simple reflectors on top of lamps would handle this effectively. This would not only allow for lower output lamps, but less light pollution, fewer negative effects on wildlife, and much better stargazing! So, could someone get on this, please?

I have been enjoying the past week off from classes and away from the craziness of an RIT quarter as we near Thanksgiving.  What has been making this break fun in addition to traveling with my girlfriend is playing with my family's new puppy!  That's right, we have a new puppy…a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  The little 9 week old is as cute as a button as you can see from her photo.  Her name is Lucy, and she came all the way from Missouri.  She has a lot of spunk, loves to follow us everywhere we go, and sleeps like a log after several minutes of play.  She has even shown a liking for tennis balls, even though they are about the size of her head.  I'll be sure to take many more photos and share them here.

What better way to celebrate the snow that was falling today in Rochester than by posting some photos of nice and sunny San Antonio?  That's what I'm doing, so go check out the photos I took while travelling to this year's NCHC conference in San Antonio.  None of the photos are of the actual conference, but we did get a very good response from our presentations.  The lot of us presented on aspects of RIT's Honors Program including orientation, colloquium, communications strategy, and communications tools and technology.

I made it back from San Antonio.  Rochester actually greeted me with somewhat decent weather for this time of year.  Unfortunately, it quickly degraded to the rainy mess we have here now.  Anyway, I just put my absentee ballot in for Virginia today.  It should make it back home well before the deadline of election day next week.  For those of you non-absentees, be sure to vote!  For the time being, look for some San Antonio photos to show up on the site soon.

I've been in San Antonio for the past day and a half at this year's NCHC conference. I'm presenting with the RIT Honors Program. We haven't seen much of the city other than the Riverwalk and the Alamo, but from what I've heard, that's all that matters. We're traveling back to frigid Rochester tonight, so I have to go enjoy this 80 degree weather some more! Attached is a photo from our hotel room.

Yet another year at RIT has come to an end.  After an adventurous time storing furniture in Rochester and loading my car to its brim, my Dad and I are on our way back home to Virginia.  Overall, my third year at RIT was an excellent one.  Now that summer is about to begin, I am ramping up for a 10 week experience working for the FBI.  In about a week, I will be moving again to Alexandria, VA.  From there I will be able to commute to FBI headquarters in DC and the FBI Laboratory in Quantico.  I am truly looking forward to this experience working for another goverment agency, which may eventually turn into a career.

I also have quite a few personal projects planned for the summer.  I want to make a couple of my web development projects publicly accessible, do some more remote work for NASA and the RIT Honors Program, experiment with all sorts of things on my Linux servers, and better develop my photo printing skills and choice of inkjet papers.

If you had not guessed, I returned safely from my 10 day spring break leadership trip to four cities in Europe.  I have been editing my photos from the trip as I have had the chance.  Sorry for the delay, but to say the least I've had a lot going on lately ;-).  As I finish them, I am posting the photos in this gallery: CIAS Honors in Europe.  Right now, the first 2 days worth are there for your viewing pleasure.  Eventually, I hope to leverage the functionality of my hand-coded gallery system to include tags or descriptions under most of the images to give you an idea of what we saw.  The trip was amazing, so keep checking back for new photos to be added!

This is a quick post since I'm about to head out the door.  I'm going to be traveling in Europe for the next 10 days.  If you need to reach me, it will probably have to wait.  I will return on March 10th, and that is the first time I can guarantee I'll be able to check email and voicemails.  This trip is sure to be a blast.  A group of us from the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences are going to Prague, Dresden, Krakow, and Budapest.  I'll be sure to take tons of photos and tell you all about the trip when I get back!  In the meantime, I'm going to be off the grid, so wish me luck 🙂

For the record, I'm back home in Virginia, and it was a somewhat humid and partly rainy day in the low 70s. That's quite a departure from the frozen tundra I left in Rochester (intentional exaggeration, of course 🙂 ). Christmas and my 21st birthday are just around the corner, so I'm looking forward to this week!

Another gallery on the site: photos from National Portfolio Day 2007 at RIT. This past Saturday a group of us CIAS Honors students sold concessions at the event that garners hundreds of visitors from high schools in the western New York for portfolio reviews. Our honors group was selling food, drinks, and candy to raise money for a trip to several cities in Europe this coming spring. We plan on visiting any alumni we can and studying culture and architecture in Prague, Krakow, and Budapest. In the meantime, it's exam week here at RIT. In just a few more days I'll be heading home for the Fall/Thanksgiving break. It has been a busy quarter, and I have plenty planned for the break…so not much will change 🙂