Happy New Years!
First of all, welcome to 2017. 2016 was an interesting year for me in many ways and a really positive experience, I hope the same can be said for all of my readers. I’m writing this from my apartment in Bogota, Colombia as I begin Month #8 of Remote Year - Darién.
When I think about last year and what sort of theme it represented in my life, I can only categorize it with the term “Discovery”. This last year I had started a new job, I had started remote working full-time for the first time, I had learned a new programming language, operating environment, and industry. In that mix, I also decided it’d be the perfect time to travel the world and meet a whole bunch of new people in places I’d never been before. In short, last year was largely about discovering the world, seeing things in a new light, and through that lens also discovering things about myself.
How’d I Pick fgallery Anyway?
Currently this site is being generated offline as a series of static images, HTML, CSS, and JS files that get served almost entirely out of cache through the CDN provided by Cloudflare. This is made possible by a piece of software called Hugo. Hugo takes a series of Markdown formatted text files, some HTML/CSS/JS templates, and a theme made of HTML/CSS/JS and generates this entire site each time I run the command hugo inside my site repository. This confers a lot of advantages over a more traditional approach such as using a CMS like Wordpress, such as:
Hello all! I’d greet you in Serbian, but the fact is I haven’t really learned any in my journey yet. The people in Belgrade speak English very well and start learning English in the equivalent of kindergarten, so it’s not really an issue here.
This is going to be a short introduction for a rather long post and then I’m going to get right into it. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks writing with pen and paper or sometimes with my phone or laptop whenever the mood strikes me. Some of this I’ve posted elsewhere before (mostly on Facebook), but it is now all collected here with annotations added at points and perhaps reworded or updated.
Dobrý den once again readers.
When I set out on this journey I originally intended to write at least one blog post a week. It seems its more difficult to keep with that schedule than I thought it was going to be. For those of you waiting for my next update, I apologize for the delay. Right now my schedule as I travel is pretty much filled with work during the week and I use the evenings in the weekend to write.
Dobrý den once again readers.
This post is going to be a bit different from my last. I’ve had a lot of different things go through my mind in the last 10 days. I would say that in general for everyone in my Remote Year group that this first month is a period of discovery. We’re learning more about who we are, what our tolerances are, and what we really care about in life. We’re also learning about each other and forming new relationships. This is exciting but can also be somewhat troubling. In this post I plan to cover some of these things as a series of short thought-blurbs/essays, but I also don’t want to make it too serious so I’ll be sharing some more photos I took around Prague. To head it off before someone takes my comments the wrong way, I don’t mean my thoughts below to be taken as a negative of my experience. I just think it’s important to be honest with myself and the world about who I am and maybe I will help put to words something that others in my group are feeling too.
Dobrý den readers.
It’s been a whirlwind the past 4 days, but also very cool. I’ve met and forgotten the names of so many people over the last 4 days. If you’re reading this and you’re one of the people I’ve met, I am apologizing heavily in advance for my bad memory for names. I’m sure I’ll ask your name many times during this first couple of months. I am going to heavily compress my stories, but I have a few surprising or interesting things I wanted to share that I thought were worth telling, and a handful of pictures. I hope everyone reading enjoys. :)
This will be pretty brief, but as many of you know I was in New York City last week on business all week. It was all around a blast. Just wanted to share a few brief photos from my week. Sorry about the quality, I took these with my phone rather than bringing my real camera along. Long story short while this was my 8th time in New York City, it was my first time visiting Brooklyn and it was my first time getting a chance to check out some of the city. Brooklyn had an epic food scene and was pretty awesome. All-around, I loved that after dark the city seemed to relax without losing even a little bit of its energy.
I apologize for how belated this trip report is. Several people have been clamoring for a more complete write-up of the trip than I gave on Facebook. We’ll start with the beer and end with some interesting photos and a story about one forlorn Camaro and a fragmented wild turkey.
Beer
During the course of my trip, myself and my buddy Jon Kelley managed to hit several breweries and get t-shirts from the tourism folks in Grand Rapids, which apparently styles itself as “Beer City”.
In October 2014 I moved from Texas to Longmont, CO in order to
experience the amazing beer culture in Colorado. While there, I fell in
love with the mountains and natural beauty of the state and rekindled my
interest in photography. These are just five of my favorite photos I
took while in Colorado. I hope you enjoy.
1. Reflections of a Mountain Morning
This photo was taken in Longmont, CO near at Golden Ponds Park and
Nature Area around 10AM one weekend morning. I had just received my
300mm f/4D telephoto lens and was trying to capture some photos of waterfowl
when I stumbled across this landscape reflection in the water. The
light seemed perfect, so I quickly swapped over to my 50mm f/1.8D and
took several exposures. When I felt like I had captured it right, I
took a nine exposure bracket which was later combined in Photoshop and
tonemapped in Photomatix Pro.