Month: June 2012

Some of the photos taken last Friday at the Rocking Frog Cafe on Belmont Street in the Sunnyside District of Portland.

Detail of the lovely “Countressa”, with some interesting names for sandwiches on the chalkboard.

 

Took another photo safari this afternoon. This time I took a walk in Mt. Tabor Park

…

I took a lot of shots of Mt. Hood (click for larger photo),

 
which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 miles in the distance

Although it appears that this photo was taken from a pristine mountain wilderness, it was actually taken well within Portland City Limits.

There are more photos from the Mt. Tabor neighborhood in THIS photo album.

Woke up early (for me) to a warm & sunny day, so I decided to hop on the 15-Belmont bus line heading East, just to see where it would take me. The route took me across the Morrison Street Bridge over the Willamette River, across the City Center (didn’t see it. must have blinked…), then North along NW 23rd Avenue. Since I’ve moved to Portland, I’ve notices a notable (and welcome) absence of Yuppies in Portland– even some of the upscale areas. Well, as soon as I started seeing Starbucks every three blocks or so, I knew I had arrived!

Another thing I’ve noticed is, although Portland is very nice– it isn’t fabulous! That’s actually one reason I like the place. There is a lot of *ahem* Civic Boosterism, bordering on the sort of chauvinism displayed by natives of Chicago, America’s “Second City” in relation to New York. Which is why I view THIS sort of sign

 
with dismay. …

I arrived at the top of the hill (on the 15 bus line, anyway) and began to walk back toward the downtown. What I found was a sort of catchy-all theme park of Yuppiedom. First were some apartments, which could have been somewhere in conservative upper-middle class Contra Costa County, California.

 
As I was walking along this stretch, two thirty-somethings (whatevers) were calling to each other across the street, talking about, what?
Golf, natch…
 

Then came the New Age block, complete with Holistic Health practitioners, Tibetan flags, tsotchkes. incense, jewelry, Aura Channelers, high-colonics (OK, I’m not sure I saw those last two. But I didn’t make those up: they DO exist…).

 
They even had the obligatory Jesus impersonator– long hair, tastefully-cropped full beard, serious face and even a flowing white garment of some sort, noodling major scales on a violin to the backing of (I’m assuming) sampled harp tracks run through a sequencer, controlled by a stomp-box which he controlled with one foot.

There was also this very cool house with portico and lush green foliage:

 

I walked through other neighborhoods as well. The complete photo album (still in progress) for this trek can be found HERE…

Bad Q. Blogger made his Portland social debut yesterday at the Hardcore HTML

PDX Web & Design Meetup
 

at Webtrends Corporate Headquarters

 

located on the 16th floor of the Pacific Center in Portland, Oregon

Nice view…

Until a couple / three years ago, I prided myself on my near-encyclopedic knowledge of the bleeding-edge of the HTML/XHTML (xhtml?) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards. The HTML standard, based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), while changing steadily, had not fundamentally changed in over a decade. Ever since the latter half of the 1990s, the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had been trying to extricate the web from the perversions of the standard that came about as a result of the battle for Cyberspace between competing Microsoft and Netscape proprietary browser implementations.

During the last couple years, while I’ve been busy with other matters, web standards and practices have taken a drastic turn, with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and, more recently, WordPress (which I have–for mostly arbitrary reasons— chosen as my CMS of choice); javascript libraries (such as jQuery), and most baffling of all (to me at least)– HTML5. I didn’t know where to start to get myself back on top of the Web Development game.

This meetup, Hardcore HTML (kudos to Eric Redmond for the presentation) delved into the history and semantic structure of the new HTML5 standard in a way that helped me understand the new standard, as well as the reasoning behing the changes.

All in all, one of the most… constructive evenings I’ve had in quite awhile.

Thanks Eric!

I’m starting a photo album for assorted photos of Portland.

Morrison Bridge over the Willamette River (click on image HERE to magnify)

Old photo, looking East on Hawthorne Blvd. toward Mt. Tabor, taken with my Huwaie POS 86 SUXX:

Same view (more or less) taken today with my brand new Canon SX150 IS:

 

It’s still just a point ‘n’ shoot, but it’s better than that stupid phone camera…