So there’s some pictures making their way around these crazy interwebs of a Washington State ferry making its way across Puget Sound during a pretty good windstorm.

To look at a map, you’d think that Puget Sound waters are usually pretty placid and calm. Well, they’re not always like that; it’s a big body of water and there’s long reaches where, if the wind is blowing from the right (or wrong!) direction, there can be pretty rough wave action. In addition, there’s rips and eddies and swirls where the tide is rushing in and out.

Washington State has the biggest public ferry fleet in the United States. They carry over 26 million passengers a year to over 20 ports of call. Some of the ferries carry as many 2,500 passengers and over 200 cars in a single load- and those (the Jumbo Mark IIs, such as the Puyallup, Tacoma, or http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/your_wsf/our_fleet/index.cfm?vessel_id=14) go back and forth on runs that take roughly 30 minutes one way, plus about 10 to 15 minutes for unloading and reloading for the next trip.

I love taking the ferries that leave from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island and coming back. The ferry terminal is just a few blocks from my place, so I can easily walk down there and jump aboard. My favorite time is in the evenings, during the “Golden Hour” when the sun is setting and it’s just gorgeous.

Here’s a shot of Indy looking over the rail (yes, they allow dogs on board the ferries, subject to some rules… that I think we broke) at downtown Seattle. As you can see, the city comes right smack to the water’s edge:

(click for full size)

Here’s a BIG shot, stitched together, of Seattle from Elliott Bay:

The ferries are the only link for many island communities. Even some areas that aren’t completely stuck are pretty dependent upon the ferries, as driving around the long way would mean commute times of triple or even more.

The ferry Cathlamet runs between Mukilteo and Clinton and is an example of this. It holds 1,200 passengers, 124 cars, is 328 feet in length and can do 16 knots. On days when it’s stormy, they do a bit less. On this day, I’m sure the passengers wished they’d stayed at the dock!

A talented photographer named Ross Fotheringham went down to the Mukilteo Lighthouse Park to take some pictures, and he got some amazing ones. You can see his original posts with the pictures in them here, but to save you the click- and to save that web host the bandwidth- I’ve taken the liberty of reposting these photos below, along with his comments. (He says in his comments it’s okay to repost so long as he gets full credit and believe me, I couldn’t come close to these pictures!)

But even better, you can check out his photos on his own web site- and who knows, if you email him he might sell a few to you. Check it out at http://www.pbase.com/trackside_photography

On all pictures, click on the photo to see it in bigger size. They’re all uncropped (by me, anyway- I don’t know if he cropped them, they look awesome to me so if he got them through the lens he did an excellent job framing them) and pretty clear, although if you want prints you should order them through his web site as you’ll get the clearest possible enlargements.

On Thursday October 18th Western Washington was hit with a 50+ MPH wind storm. Here are my pictures of the event.

After work I made my way down to the Mukilteo Lighthouse Park where I witness the Mukilteo to Clinton ferry taking a pounding.

These Issaquah 130 Class ferries are over 300 feet long and 78 feet wide and weight in at 2477 tons (4,954,000 lbs) unloaded……

I’ll start with some Rock & Roll.

Ok, here’s one for you Long Flume lovers…

During storms like this the crew plots a course which puts the ferry in the least vulnerable position, but at some point they have to change course, and when they did Puget Sound made up for lost time.

After this run the ferry system stopped running at full capacity and ran 1/2 empty for the rest of the night.

Each shot was taken 0.3 seconds apart hand held at 320mm’s.

I’m glad you guys liked them; I was amazed at what I saw through the lens. During the wind storm I like to go down to the Lighthouse Park in Mukilteo and watch the ferries, but I’ve never seen a ferry take a hit like that. After this run they added a 3rd ferry and ran them 1/2 empty.

I’m going to have Costco print up a few 20×30″.

Someone either PM’d me or posted that I should send these to the WS Ferry System. I tried to sell them a much tamer, but similar shot and they told me these kind of shots don’t promote rider ship. I couldn’t argue that one.

I bet they didn’t think it’d sell people on riding on the ferries- especially when, as he points out, it looks like that big wave smashing into the deck washed the cars backwards a bit.

Anyway, his photos are making the rounds in emails, but he’s not getting the credit he deserves, so while I wanted to show them to the folks reading here I also wanted to be sure that Ross gets the props.

…that John McCain is highly unlikely to win the Republican nomination for the Presidential election.

I say this as a fan of McCain. Oh, I wouldn’t vote for him; it could be Dennis Kucinich vs McCain and I’d still vote for the Democrat this time around, because the nation desperately needs a Dem to win.

But McCain is a true American hero. During the Vietnam war, his plane was hit by a rocket that misfired on the deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal. McCain was screwed; the rocket hit his fuel tank and he couldn’t take off and couldn’t eject. He also couldn’t sit in the plane, what with it being on fire and all. He jumped out, walked as far down his refueling probe as possible, and dropped down to run/roll to safety. Just a minute and a half after his plane was hit a bomb that had been loaded on his plane blew up, destroyed the plane, and would have killed McCain.

132 men wound up dying in that fire.

McCain could have wrangled himself a rotation to the States, but got himself reassigned to another carrier and a few months later, on a mission over northern Vietnam, was shot down. He was captured. Both of his arms were broken, along with a leg, in the ejection/crash. When taken prisoner, he was beaten pretty badly, and even bayonetted a couple of times.

McCain’s father was the head of the American Navy in the Pacific at the time. The North Vietnamese knew this made him valuable and offered to release him early for the PR coup they’d attain. He refused, saying that it should be “first in, first out” and that he would only go when every man who’d been captured before him was released. They tortured him pretty mercilessly, to the point where even now, decades later, he can’t raise his arms above his shoulders.

McCain wound up spending over 5 years in the Hanoi Hilton.

McCain’s politics are not all great for me, but he has tried (as much as possible) to be a man of honor and dignity. He has been willing to back off of things that were wrong; for example, he openly referred to his captors as “gooks”, insisting for years that he didn’t apply it to all Asians or Vietnamese, but only to those that had mistreated him so much during his POW days. Later, he recanted and apologized for it. It was probably at least partially motivated by political pressure, but nonetheless it was the right thing to do.

It’s been 40 years since he was captured, and while I wouldn’t vote for him or ask anyone else to, I’d say that the nation would be a lot better off had he won the nomination in 2000 and would still be better off if he could somehow win the nomination for 2008.

So less than four years ago, a guy named Mark Zuckerberg (who’s just 23 now) was a college student at Harvard. He created a new social networking site, originally for fellow Harvard students, called Facebook.

At some of the stuffier colleges, “facebooks” were common; they were basically like an annual, only they were put out as soon as possible in the school year. The idea was that you could see who your fellow students were, put faces with names… and of course you could also see their interests, what school (or prep academy) they had attended, and get an idea of where they might rank in their social status.

So Mark fires up Facebook and it’s off to the races. It grows at incredible rates, spreading first to colleges nationally, then they start allowing anyone to sign up. Last year, Yahoo, desperate to play catch-up with MySpace and trying to stay relevant, offered one billion dollars for Facebook. Zuckerberg says “no thanks”.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft bought a small stake in Facebook. They paid a lot. How small? 1.6%. How much?

Get this. $240 MILLION.

That values Facebook at roughly $15 BILLION dollars. That’s 15 times what Yahoo offered just a year ago!

Wow. I mean, WOW. Can you imagine going from being a college student- granted, one at Harvard, meaning with excellent prospects for jobs and income in life- to being a multi-billionaire, in just a year or three?

Now, this is partially because both Microsoft and Google- the two giants in the online world- wanted a hunk of Facebook badly. It’s probably not really worth that much money. After all, it’s a free site to join.

But still, that’s ridiculous dough.

I swear I need to start converting some of my goofier ideas into reality. You never know when one of them is going to stick!

So I’m back in college. I’m taking Math 085. Yes, you read that right- it’s a “zero” level course, because it’s basically a high school algebra class.

Back when I was originally in high school, I tested pretty well (660) on the SAT. (That was in the late 80s.) It was a great score and I could have taken a precalc class in college had I wanted to, which I didn’t.

Now? Now I’m back several levels lower. When you go to take a class at Seatle Central Community College (my school of choice right now) they give you a computerized evaluation test for math and language skills. The test throws questions at you until either you test to the top level, or until you start missing too many questions.

In English, I did fine, which is why I took English 101 a quarter or two ago. In math, not so much- but at least I wasn’t in the lowest level class.

Going back to school while working and after having been gone for so long is weird, but I’m having a decent time. I think I’m scoring well in my class except that I hate doing the outlines of the textbook; my instructor is excellent and I learn far more by simply going to class and paying attention than from reading the text.

Hopefully this doesn’t wind up being a waste of time and leads to something good in the future!