Category Archives: Photos

Curves in Detroit

Edison steam engine

Harley-Davidson police bike

The first is a steam engine which formed part of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, and which, along with the rest of the laboratory, as been transplanted to the Greenfield Village museum, just down the road from Rose’s parents’ house.

The second was gleaming in the bright sunshine, just outside a Mexican restaurant where we had lunch on Monday.

Woody Woodpecker

We’ve had a colourful visitor in our garden over the last couple of days.

woodpecker

Click for more pictures

Win95 on the wing

Ever wondered why your bags take so long to come through the baggage claim at Heathrow? Well, now we know!

Windows on the carousel

I took this a couple of days ago while waiting for mine. The screen proudly announced that this carousel came with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, that’s good to know.

Keen Screen

You probably thought your monitor/TV was pretty cool. But I think you’ll agree that it was only because you hadn’t seen these…

Cool Monitors

Softly, softly

I saw a ‘stealth boat’ today for the first time.

Stealth Boat

If you’re a Bond villain and need to pinch one of these for your daily commute, this one can be found in San Diego harbour. If you look very carefully.

Getting the big picture

I saw my first 100 Mpixel display today, on a visit to Calit2 at UCSD.

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It’s 55 standard displays, with a bank of Linux machines to drive them. So the pixels are the same size as on your normal display, but you need to walk around to examine the whole image. Very cool.

Click the picture for a couple more images.

Springtime

Cambridge is blossoming. And I can’t stop taking photos…

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Spring is everywhere

Spring in Cambridge

Tafelberg

Apologies for those of you who didn’t sign up to this blog so you could see my holiday snaps! I’ll be back at work soon…

I climbed Table Mountain today. It’s not too strenuous a climb, really, but the temperature (around 90F today) made it more of a challenge. There was almost no shade on the way up; this photo is from one of the few spots which was out of the noonday sun:

Platteklip Gorge

I met this chap on the top. He seemed remarkably unconcerned by the proximity of humans.

A lizard on Table Mountain

Light through trees

On the slopes of Table Mountain…

Light through trees

Splish!

A fountain at Montecasino, which is Johannesburg’s (somewhat mild) answer to Las Vegas. Pretty fountain, though.

Montecasino fountain

Contrasts continued

Yesterday I visited Soweto. Among the shanty-town-type areas this was one of the more palatial residences:

A house in Soweto

We visited one of the smaller one-room houses and met this man and his wife:

Soweto family

He said it was a good house because it was very close to the water pipe:

Stand pipe

There was one bed, which most of the family shared, and he slept on a straw mat on the floor.

Beside the straw mat on the floor was his mobile phone, with headphones plugged in so he could listen to MP3 files.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser