Good Morning Internet

As I left Bal­ti­more and merged onto south­bound 95, a post-snow sun­set lit the clouds on fire. Even the plume from the Bal­ti­more smoke­stack par­tic­i­pated and turned pur­ple against the win­ter twi­light. I approached the air­port loop and watched planes ascend in sil­hou­ette. The light didn’t dim right away after the sun set, but instead shifted from vibrant gold and pink to deep orange. Traf­fic slowed as awestruck dri­vers gazed into the sky. It looked invit­ing, and I got excited about being in the air, a big deal for a guy whose whole body goes rigid dur­ing take-offs and landings.

We were for­tu­nate to miss the brunt of the storm over Christ­mas. Just east of us, other parts of Mary­land got nearly ten inches of snow. Had the winds blown dif­fer­ently or the storm tracked just a few miles west of where it went, we would have got­ten ham­mered, and my flight to Atlanta would have been can­celed. But I got lucky, and my flight only ran 33 min­utes late.

By the time I got my car sit­u­ated in long-term park­ing and shielded myself in a bus shel­ter from the razor-sharp gusts of icy wind, the hori­zon was blood red. Air­planes tax­ied, and the warm-colored light shim­mered on their alu­minum bod­ies. I was joined by a fam­ily head­ing home from the hol­i­days. The kids com­pared notes about new video games they got, and the exhausted-looking par­ents braced them­selves against the cold that still found its way into the shel­ter. When the bus arrived to take us to the ter­mi­nal, the show in the sky was over, hav­ing faded through pur­ples to navy blue to black.

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• Beau­ti­ful post-snow sun­rise over Baltimore

Josh and I went to see Tron: Legacy over the week­end. Despite its 49% rat­ing on Rot­ten Toma­toes at that point, I still thought it might be a fun 3D thrill ride.

Boy was I wrong. The movie opened with a title card that instructed us to keep our 3D glasses on for the whole movie, even though only cer­tain scenes were in 3D. It was if the film apol­o­gized to us before even get­ting started.

And then it was two hours of bor­ing. I don’t want to post spoil­ers here, even though I’d save you $13 and two hours, but the plot would be pretty dif­fi­cult to encap­su­late any­way. There were plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for smart, clever writ­ing, but it felt like they were made dull and con­fus­ing on pur­pose. To that end, I guess, it was faith­ful to the orig­i­nal. Oh, snap!

So then there’s this Daft Punk video, made with the same aes­thetic as the orig­i­nal Tron. There’s more awe­some packed into these three min­utes than all of the new movie, and who­ever directed it should have directed Legacy. Maybe then we could have seen the evo­lu­tion from the orig­i­nal 80s look to the rubber-and-leather sex­i­ness of the new com­puter world. Oh well.

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Early this morn­ing, I crawled out of bed and went to the front of my apart­ment to watch the win­ter sol­stice lunar eclipse. Thank­fully, I had the per­fect angle through my win­dow to watch the Earth’s shadow move across the face of the Moon with­out hav­ing to bun­dle up and face the cold like so many of my brave friends on Twitter.

I tried tak­ing some pho­tos, but the kit lens on my Canon T2i just wasn’t cut­ting it. My iPhone just laughed at me and spit out some blurry images. But I wasn’t wor­ried. I knew that the Internet’s bril­liant astropho­tog­ra­phers were snap­ping pho­tos with cam­era rigs far more impres­sive than mine. I decided to relax, put down the cam­era, and pick up the binoculars.

I think it was the most spec­tac­u­lar lunar eclipse I ever saw. The sky over Bal­ti­more was com­pletely clear, and the Moon turned a deep rusty orange that was stag­ger­ingly beau­ti­ful, even from the mid­dle of the city. Before we had sci­ence, peo­ple must have freaked right out when this kind of thing hap­pened. (Or slept through it.)

I was right about the tal­ented Inter­net pho­tog­ra­phers. Check out this time-lapse video of the eclipse by William Castle­man.

Win­ter Sol­stice Lunar Eclipse from William Castle­man on Vimeo.

[Win­ter Sol­stice Lunar Eclipse via Giz­modo]

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I can’t believe I haven’t posted these videos here yet. I blame the end-of-semester madness.

The Posies played an amaz­ing, short-ish show at the 9:30 Club. Granted, I got there fif­teen min­utes into the set after I raced down to DC directly from class in Bal­ti­more as quickly as I could. Check out these quick high­lights. If you ever have a chance to see them live, do your­self a favor and bask in some power pop greatness.

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I did it! After months of (barely) train­ing and wor­ry­ing too much, I made it across the fin­ish line and com­pleted my first met­ric Seag­ull Cen­tury on Sat­ur­day. That’s 100 kilo­me­ters, or 62 miles. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve done it and, shock­ingly, I think I logged my best time yet, com­ing in just a few min­utes over five hours.

Con­grats to my par­ents, who both also fin­ished the met­ric cen­tury, and beat my time, too!

The weather couldn’t have been bet­ter this past Sat­ur­day. It was a clear, warm day, with no seri­ous head­winds until the last 20 kilometers.

Along the way, I used Cycleme­ter on my iPhone to track my progress and post updates to Twit­ter. It’s an ridicu­lously cool app. It tracked my posi­tion via GPS and gave me reg­u­lar updates about my speed, time, and dis­tance through my head­phones. Plus, any time some­one replied to me on Twit­ter or Face­book, it read the mes­sage to me via friendly robotic voice. I was sure my bat­tery wouldn’t make it the whole way through the cen­tury, but I was hap­pily sur­prised to dis­cover I still had a few per­cent of bat­tery life after I crossed the fin­ish line. I’m not sure if that’s a tes­ta­ment to the improved bat­tery in the iPhone 4, some code magic in Cycleme­ter, or a com­bi­na­tion of the two, but I was really impressed.

More than once, I got hilar­i­ous tweet fed to my head­phones from peo­ple that cracked me up on my bike, undoubt­edly mak­ing me seem like some kind of nut to any­one cycling around me at the time.

At the risk of sound­ing com­pletely sappy, the real-time notes of encour­age­ment really helped moti­vate me. I was sur­prised so many of you were awake that early on a Sat­ur­day, and com­pletely hum­bled by your sweetness.

Cross­ing that fin­ish line felt great. I had a nice cool-down walk around Sal­is­bury Uni­ver­sity, my alma mater, and barely rec­og­nized some parts of cam­pus. That place has grown a lot in the past eight years.

After clean­ing up and sleep­ing hard after din­ner, I was sur­prised at how refreshed and ener­getic I felt Sun­day morning.

I’m feel­ing really moti­vated today. Who knows, if i can keep up this kind of men­tal momen­tum, maybe I can get myself into shape for the full 100-mile cen­tury next year.

In the mean­time, here are some pho­tos and videos from Seag­ull Cen­tury 2010!

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Here’s a quick video I put together from behind-the-scenes of the photo shoot for the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Bal­ti­more County’s new “Hero” cam­paign. I think it was a really clever idea and was exe­cuted beau­ti­fully. If you live in Mont­gomery County, be sure to check out the giant ads on the side of Mont­gomery Mall. I’m think­ing of tak­ing a road trip down there just to see it.

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It rained through the night as the rem­nants of Trop­i­cal Storm Nicole passed through the Bal­ti­more area. So here’s a lit­tle video zen I made for you, shot through my car’s wind­shield before I left for work.

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Here’s a short video I made for the last project in my “Cre­ativ­ity: Ways of See­ing” class, part of my Cre­ative Writ­ing and Pub­lish­ing Arts MFA at the Uni­ver­sity of Bal­ti­more. I made all the video and music. Part of the assign­ment was to make our project pub­lic, what­ever it is we did. So, here it is!

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