On a lighter note, I was going through my photos from the past month and I thought this was possibly of interest to the geek crowd:
The guy above is Charles O’Rear, the guy who took the “Bliss” photograph of the fields and sky that is the default desktop wallpaper for Windows XP. I happened to bump into him at a course on wine tasting that I was doing in Napa Valley with my girlfriend a few weekends ago. He was photographing for a new book he’s working on about wines. The tasting itself was kind of neat. You were poured wines, then you had to guess what the flavors were in them, and then you got to go to the table full of “essences”, pictured below, and smell the items you had guessed to see if you got it right. It was quite fun actually, and a nice break from engineering chumbys.
It’s always fun to meet the Maker behind something so familiar.