I hope you saw this. It was far more beautiful than my iPhone could capture.

I took a vacation day yesterday. Learfield generously gives us 3 weeks after you’ve been with the company for  (?) years. I struggle to use all of my days. I just don’t enjoy sitting on a beach or hiking in the mountains or pushing a gigantic RV across the country.

Fortunately, Barb is cool with this. We take some long-weekend trip for a specific purpose and that’s about it for me. For more traditional vacations, she and her sister take off. It works.

This year I’ve decided to take my vacation a day at a time. Maybe two. Yesterday I spent the entire day here at the Coffee Zone, surfing and reading. I was totally absorbed. A very relaxing day.

One of my first attempts at a website was KBOA830.com. That was about 13 years ago and I’ve moved it around several times since then. The impetus for the site was a bunch of photos from the late ’40s, given to me by one of the original employees of the station.

When flickr came along, I uploaded the photos there but the scans were low rez because I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve thought about rescanning but that’s one tedious chore.

A couple of months ago I boxed up 120 of the prints and sent them off to ScanCafe where they were “scanned by hand” for about 29 cents each. It took a while (I think the scanning is done in India) but the prints were safely returned along with a DVD of 300dpi images.

Turns out I can’t delete the lorez images yet because I’ve linked to them from the KBOA site. Once I get that all sorted out I can get rid of the duplicates.

If you have a box of prints (or 35m slides or negatives), send them to ScanCafe (or one fo the similar services) and get them digitized. And then put them online, because that is the only hope you have of giving them a life beyond your own.

Footnote: I never tire of looking at these images. The tower and the transmitters and the studios… all of the expensive stuff it took to communicate in 1947. If you had something to say to your community (forget the world) you had to build/buy/go to work for one of these entities (radio station, TV, newspaper). All changed now. And changing. I love it.

WWII Sea Forts – Red Sands, originally uploaded by Beamtwenty3.

World War 2 sea forts – Red Sands off the North Kent coast near Herne Bay/Whitstable UK. More info

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOoGjtSy7xY

I love the the “explore” features of flickr. I can drift off into a fugue state, reloading page after page of delightful photos. That experience has now been optimized for the iPhone and the iPad. Explore Flickr fills the screen with thumbnails of random (?) images. If you see one that interests you, you click and enlarge.

Depending on how the owner licensed the image, you can download it to your device. This is a pitiful little description of something you really must see to appreciate.

I shudder to think of the hours I’ve spent scanning photos. In the early days, I scanned one image at a time and was so clueless I scanned at very low resolution. A lot of those poor scans are still on line, but I just don’t have the time (or will) to re-scan.

So I sent about 120 prints off to ScanCafe. I believe the prints wind up somewhere in India where they are “scanned by hand.” Costs 29 cents an image. About $40 by the time I was done. I could not have scanned and cleaned them for that price.

When they’re done they send you a link to a web page where you can review and pick the images you want (or don’t). They they send you a DVD.

I’ll probably try another service, just to compare. Watch this space.

, originally uploaded by 米死米(MSM).

I’ve never hit the flickr “explore” link without finding something wonderful.

What It Is, originally uploaded by mshhoward.

” It was tough to stop wishing for something else and just enjoy what it was.”

Electrified Ash – Eyjafjallajökull – Iceland, originally uploaded by orvaratli.

Some amazing photos of this incredible event. I take great comfort in being reminded the planet is more powerful than puny humans.

More pix from this game here. Interview with the photographer here. And a really good cheerleader shot here.