Pretty amazing pictures from the Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment are online now – and taken with a fairly normal point-and-shoot camera. This simply amazes me – and the pictures are better than I thought they would be. I would have imagined that the extreme cold would have destroyed the camera, or at least prevented it from taking pictures.

So, I’ve got a condition called dyschromatopsia – in other words, color blindness. I’ve got red-green problems, and I’m not sure if it’s protanomaly or deuteranopia, but it makes distinguishing color very difficult. The worst for me is trying to see the difference between some greens and browns – they look the same to me. For most of my life, I’ve tried getting by with just faking it – trying to not explicitly name colors, or just guess. For most of my life, I’ve had to argue with people about color.

Not to drag that old dead horse back out – I’ll say it once again: Chartreuse is not a color.

This morning, I was linked to a handy little web application that has 1,500 color names and an approximate representation of each. As I was looking through the list of names, I was thinking “these can’t be real colors”. And then I saw chartreuse again. The app helpfully tells me that this is chartreuse. What’s the big deal? Why is this so important, that this shade of green have it’s own special name? It’s not a real color! However, I kept looking at the list of names. 1,500 of them, actually. After spending some time, I’m sure they are made up. They are fake colors. They have to be. For example:

• #9B4703 – Oregon
• #9678B6 – Purple Mountain’s Majesty
• #290C5E – Violent Violet
• #E4D69B – Zombie

I guess I’m just not “with it” when it comes to colors. These must have made sense to someone, sometime – but to me, they seem just as fake.

Looks like it works – it all works. The automatic picture posting from the pixelpost install is working properly, as evidenced by the new picture on the main page, although I am not very happy with the thumbnails it is making. I really hope I don’t have to find some other way to manage them. That would really defeat a large part of the purpose of doing this.

So – the twins are here – a boy and a girl. Born September 2nd, which is two months after Mateo, who was two months after Patrick. I’m loving these birthdays – I’ll get to be a proper uncle once I’ve figured out an excuse to forget the dates. (Kidding, of course). We’ll get pictures soon – and when we do, they will be linked here.

• May 2nd – Patrick Hurley Dezendorf
• July 2nd – Mateo Moon Shoneman
• September 2nd – {Teach} and {Ramona} Shoneman

I will be taking Guru College offline tonight to install a new theme, and in fact, a new method of handling my personal blogging. Please bear with me when it’s offline – I think we’ll all enjoy the improvements.

http://www.robinlinphoto.com

1. From there click on the center tile where it says ‘enter here’
2. Scroll to the bottom and look for customer login
3. at username type in – charlotteandbreandan – all one word
4. and for password type in – june9 – all one word

I will return to posting in about a week – a slightly longer break than I suspected to be taking from photo work, but I should have expected it, having gotten married to a wonderful woman. We fly back to Dubai early next week, and once we have gotten a little settled, I’ll post again. For now, I’ll leave you with a picture taken by our amazing photographer Robin Lin.