Tuesday marked the beginning of a new year, and that means new regulations. Yes, our friends in the government have stepped up their vigilance in the war against photography – er, I mean terror. Starting with the beginning of this year, they won’t allow you to bring spare lithium batteries on your plane. Naturally, they don’t say why. So if you’re flying out to do some photography, you’d better make sure it can all be done on one battery.

Last September, Scott Kelby wrote about his experience in Minneapolis/St. Paul where TSA agents made him remove his DSLR camera from his camera bag and place it on the scanning belt separately, the way that you have to with laptops. Then they dusted his camera bag for explosives! They claimed this was part of a new policy instated in August which few airports have actually implemented. (Sounds like bullshit to me.)

It all kind of makes you wonder if some property of the lithium batteries doesn’t react well to the new security scanners. I wouldn’t be surprised if the batteries had a characteristic that prevented the scanners from seeing behind them, making them some sort of camouflage for other forbidden materials. I may just have to find myself a lithium battery from somewhere and take it with me next time I fly, just to see if they actually even notice.

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. They’re counterproductive. You start something new on the first day of the year — lose weight, quit smoking, etc — and hope it will stick. In the majority of cases, the first time that new thing meets a setback, it gets marked as a complete failure, and the whole plan gets abandoned. Why waste the time?

It makes more sense to quantify progress and set target dates. For instance, instead of setting a vague goal of saying you want to “get in shape”, only to give up after you’ve had a week or two where you couldn’t get to the gym, why not set real, tangible goals with numbers and dates? Why not plan to lose 20 pounds by June 1? At least then, if you have a setback, there’s no reason to give up!

This year, I am setting real goals. Instead of imagining my life as I want it right now, and then giving up when I realize that’s impossible, I’ve put a lot of thought into where I expect to be in one year, and I will spend 2008 working toward reaching that place.

These are my goals for 2008:

1. Be 100% free of all credit card debt by November.
   After this year, I never want to carry another balance on any revolving credit account. Without debt, I will have financial freedom to do whatever I want. I have chosen November as my target because I also want to have a debt-free Christmas.
2. Move to the city by summer.
   I’m not a suburban kind of person. My heart is in the urban lifestyle. Living in the city will be better for my photography, as well as more convenient for commuting, traveling, and meeting new people. I have chosen summer as my target because there is so much happening in the city during summer.
3. Relocate my father by summer
   My father is one of the unfortunate victims of the high cost of medical care. His prescriptions alone cost more than his income. Without my help he would have to choose each month between a roof over his head, or being (somewhat) healthy, and eating isn’t much of an option. And this is in a poor, southern town in a $40,000 house! Bringing him to a city would give him access to better medical care as well as many aid programs that could reduce his costs and give him access to the care he needs, while also giving him the chance to spend his later years near family.
4. Form a corporation
   Making investments and building assets makes more sense when you have the protections of a corporation. I don’t have a specific target date for this goal because there are many other implications to consider, but I do know that I need to do it, rather than talk or think about it, so I’ve made it a goal for this year.
5. Add 100 lbs to my benchpress
   Specifically, I want to raise my benchpress 50 lbs by summer and another 50 lbs by Christmas, but these increases need to be marked by similar improvements in other strength training areas too, including squats, curls, deadlifts, etc. In other words, I want to increase all my weights, I have simply chosen the benchpress as the measure for reaching my goal.
6. Travel out of state at least once every month
   This is pretty self-explanatory. I want to travel out of the state, whether visiting friends I’ve left behind or going someplace I’ve never been, at least once every month this year. I also want at least one of those trips to be out of the country.

So there it is. Those are my goals for 2008. I look forward to writing about their completion!

Why are we still fooling ourselves into thinking all this security stuff actually matters?  It’s all just window dressing. Take for instance this story in the Chicago Tribune:

More than 20 workers were arrested today at O’Hare International Airport after authorities said employees at a suburban staffing agency used fraudulent security badges to gain access to unauthorized areas of the airport.

Twenty people? Surely we must have uncovered a major terrorist cell, and prevented a big attack, right? Read on:

According to criminal complaints unsealed today, Ideal Staffing managers told workers they needed identification to work at O’Hare, but that the documents did not need to be legitimate. Federal authorities allege more than 100 temporary workers employed by the agency were in possession of fraudulently obtained airport security badges, which allowed the workers to gain access to secure areas of the airport while loading pallets, freight and meals for companies doing business at O’Hare.

Look. When a staffing company tells its employees that they need badges but they don’t need to be legitimate, that’s a sign of just how impotent our national security window dressing actually is. Sure, it’s illegal, and they should be punished. But is terrorism legal? No. The point of national security isn’t to stop the people who are following the rules, it’s supposed to be there to catch the people who are breaking them!

This is the same as the gun control laws that only take guns away from good citizens while doing nothing to stop criminals. The security badges only stopped legitimate, law abiding citizens who follow the rules from being in areas where they don’t belong. Meanwhile the people with fake IDs – potential threats to our national security – were granted full access to the airport.

One afternoon as I was flipping through the channels — you know the routine, hundreds of channels and nothing is on — I landed on the Food Network. They were showing a program called Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, but the only reason I turned it on was because this episode would be featuring a place in Kenosha, WI.

Kenosha is the farthest you can travel north on Chicago’s commuter train system. Always interested in getting out and exploring the world around me, I wondered what there might be to see in Kenosha. I still didn’t know much, but at the very least, I now knew where in Kenosha to get a good breakfast: Frank’s Diner.

A little research online, and I discovered that Kenosha has a streetcar system running in a loop between the train station and Laka Michigan, with service to downtown stores as well as Kenosha’s free public museum along the way. Their five PCC streetcars are painted to represent the historic streetcars of Toronto, Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Johnstown. And it only costs a quarter to ride.

The train ride is about two hours each way between Kenosha and Chicago, which for me is apparently just about enough time to read a 170-page book. And since I didn’t eat before I left, there was no doubt that I was ready to find Frank’s Diner. And that’s the first thing I did.

It didn’t take much work to find it. Text “franks diner kenosha wi” to Google SMS (466453) and moments later you get a text message back telling you it’s at 508 58th street. The streetcar runs along 56th street, so a cord pull at 6th avenue put me two blocks away — where, apparently, there was a classic car show going on.

I was really hungry, so I went straight to Frank’s without dilly-dallying, and I’m glad I did because they locked the door while I was eating, so they’re apparently not open very late.

Well, either way, it didn’t bother me because I was in hog heaven with my “garbage plate”. Even the bread is made from scratch. Everything on the plate was delicious.

And so, belly full and face smiling, my mission was accomplished. Ways I found to spend an afternoon in Kenosha included: walking along the lake front, visiting the free museum, riding the streetcar, browsing in some really neat stores downtown, looking at the classic car show. And, of course, you can’t leave Wisconsin without getting a bratwurst.

Batsday photos on Flickr

I don’t believe they had this when I lived in Florida.

That’s a shame, too, because I’d have gone! What a great idea!

The frustration of my drive out of town was almost matched by my return trip. I-26 and I-40 moved at a snail’s pace Friday evening — in fact, it took me over an hour to go 8 miles through Asheville, NC. On the return trip, the highway was closed, starting from the Tennessee-North Corlina border, which promised to be far more frustrating. That is, until I found a detour along route 25, which turned out to be the most beautiful 60 miles I have ever driven. If it wasn’t such a winding path, I’d have snapped some photos from there. Nevertheless, the last 30 minutes of my drive were, as always, a beautiful thing. When you’ve got scenery like this to welcome you home, it’s hard to feel like you’ve had a bad trip.

Unfortunately, after leaving such a wonderful weekend behind me, it’s hard to feel good about coming home…

Rockafeller Center

I couldn’t have had a better vacation. It was an easy, low-traffic drive to New Jersey for the Christmas Eve party. That was followed by a party Christmas day in Staten Island. We left Staten Island for Manhattan and got there just in time to see the tree in Rockafeller Center before they shut it off until next year.

As if everything hadn’t already been nearly perfect, a fog dropped over NYC Christmas night, making for some of the most beautiful photos I’ve ever taken. The photos can’t compare to real life, though… NYC in the fog is breathtaking.

From NYC (America’s first capitol) we headed for Philadelphia (the second capitol) in hopes of seeing some American history, and we got to see some, but Philadelphia is a serious fucking slum and we decided to haul ass.

From one slum to another, we headed for Washington DC after a short stay overnight in Delaware. Our nation’s third capitol is certainly beautiful — that is, if you’re downtown… in the day time… and standing in the right place. Everything that’s not downtown is more slum. But all the landmarks are nice to look at. And from there, it was a relatively pleasant drive home.

The photographic value of water can not be overstated. Photography is all about light, and moisture (rain, fog, puddles, etc) affects light in endless interesting ways.

Sometimes all you need is the right subject. With a little attention to composition, no special photographic skill was necessary to take a few great photos of my vacation.