Remember, Remember The Fifth Of November Gunpowder, Treason and plot We see no reason Why gunpowder Treason Should ever be forgot This year is the 400th anniversary of the failed plot by Catholic terrorists including Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the state opening by King James I. Betrayed when an anonymous letter of warning was sent to a Catholic parliamentarian, warning him not to attend that day.

For the second time this week, it looks like we are going to have more than 1” of rain in a day here in Hillsboro, it’s the lead story on local news and no doubt the hot topic at the water cooler. Now I know that I’m not a local, but this is Oregon! My local nature reserve is the Jackson Bottom Wetlands, that’s a bit of a hint as to the local weather.

It never ceases to amaze me how low a standard American’s set for protection of their own privacy. On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department issued a ruling that from October 2006, all Americans passports will carry embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. This system has been highly criticized due to the ease with which potential criminals could potentially steal your personal information from a distance using RFID scanners. However, personally the most disturbing aspect of this story is the way that the American media have ignored the issue.

BBC News is reporting that McDonald’s is planning to printing nutritional facts on the packaging of its burgers and fries. I assume that this is McDonalds response to critics such as Morgan Spurlock who allege that fast food suppliers such as McDonalds are contributing towards rising levels of obesity and other health problems. As far as I’m concerned, this is great news. Not that I’m a big McDonalds fan, but if the nutritional content of food becomes a selling point, then restaurants might just start to make healthier decisions when preparing their menus.

www.orblogs.com has disappeared this morning with attempts to reach it give a ‘No web site is configured at this address.’ message. I really hope this is just a glitch, I’ve come to depend on them for my regular local fix. UPDATE: It’s back now (about 8:30AM) - I guess it was just a glitch. Of course, now it’s too late - I’ve already finished my morning coffee, and I’m busy working (from home for at least a part of this morning).

Starbucks is killing me. Killing me with sweet kindness but still killing me. Let me explain. I’ve been trying to loose weight for a few months now, and it’s all gone sideways since Labor Day. Looking back, I’ve had two big problems: * I got out of the habit of religiously counting calories. It's like hitting snooze on the alarm clock, when I've had a few bad diet days, it's just too easy to 'forget' to weight myself.

[ ](http://www.ikea.com) Yes, it's true - according to [KGW News](http://www.kgw.com/business/stories/kgw_102005_biz_ikea_opening.11271ce6d.html), [Ikea](http://www.ikea.com/) is coming to Portland. As someone who has regularly shopped at Ikea for many years (both in the UK and then in California), I am so happy that Swedish style has finally arrived in Portland. However, I am double happy that the chosen site is on the other side of Portland from me, Ikea stores have a reputation for fanatical fans, amazing crowds and creating long term traffic chaos at every site (see [Wikipedia](http://en.

‘Googlehunting’ seems to be the latest craze going round the Oregon blogs (Tabitha,Rebecca Marie) and it seems such a great idea that I just had to have a go. All you need to do is go to Goggle, click on the images link and type in her answers to the questions below, then post the first picture that came up for each category as well as your favorite picture. The questions (or more like categories) are:

[ ](/u/2007/03/11/colors.jpg) I have dropped behind on my photo MEME entries recently, it's just been too dark when I get home from work to take anything outdoors, so when I had to work from home today I made the time to step into the garden and at least take a few autumn pictures whilst the sun lasted. Whilst I don't always appreciate the rain in Oregon, it does make for the most spectacular autumns :-) [!

[ ](http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=141&modelid=10514) Winter is coming, and with it most of the opportunity for my outdoor photography are going to disappear, so I've been thinking a lot recently about what I can do indoors. We really don't have space in our home to setup a real studio (none of the rooms are large enough), but I'd still like to try a little shooting. Since I'm basically starting from scratch, I've been thinking about getting the Canon 580EX Speedlite flash, and seeing how far I can get with just one flash and some reflectors in these small spaces, with the intention of maybe adding slave units later down the line.