Saturday, March 25, 2006

Platform portraits

Went out with our friend John Pharr on his sailboat today, and took a liesurely tour of the nearest four oil platforms: Hillhouse, "A", "B" and "C". Naturally, I took along a camera and shot pictures. Here's the gallery.

The picture above is of Platform A. This became The Platform That Changed the World, when something went wrong on January 29, 1969, the sea floor tore open and massive quantitites of thick, sticky black oil escaped. Currents brought the sludge into the harbor and coated many miles of shoreline along the South Coast.

This was the first time we saw pictures of dead birds covered in ooze, and the first time a community mobilized to rescue animals and property. If it hadn't happened to one of the world's prettiest towns, we might never have had the Community Environmental Council, Earth Day, the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, or the moratorium on offshore oil drilling in California that continues thirty-six years later.

By the way, the rigs are not necessarily eyesores, for humans or for sea life. They have become landmarks that light up like distant Christmas trees at night (which at least some of us like, or find interesting), and valued artificial reefs as well. Check out the photo gallery here.

Quotes du jour

Don Marti: ...we can peer-produce documentation and UI. It's just HTML.

Mark Cuban: We will reach a point in the next few years where we are complaining about internet speed all the time. This wont be a corporate issue, it will be a home issue. We wont be able to do all the things we want to do on the net how and when we want to do it.

Eat my packet dust

Here's one reason I love my quiet little office here at UCSB.

I wanted to test how fast it took to upload this whole photoset, but it was over before I started clocking it.