The Wheel

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

POTD: Lincoln's Craggy Face

From 2015 08 15 South Dakota

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It's a close-up of the face of Abraham Lincoln. According to a BBC story ("Abraham Lincoln: The enduring images"), Lincoln was the first president of the photographic era. Lincoln himself credited an iconic Matthew Brady photograph taken in early 1860 with making him president. It shows a clean-shaven, "sober, respectable, powerful intellectual who could become president." Four years later, another photograph tells a different story. "The Civil War was coming to an end and the enormous toll taken by four years of conflict is etched into the lines of Lincoln's craggy face." The granite of Mount Rushmore is the perfect medium to capture that Lincoln.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Yelp Reviews Get a New Useful Feature

You may like a Richardson restaurant for its food, but what do you know about its health inspection rating? Probably nothing. Not because Richardson doesn't conduct health inspections of restaurants, but because the city doesn't do much to make the ratings easily accessible to diners. That may be changing.

It's been a pet peeve of mine for years that Richardson promotes local restaurants with its "Dine Smart Dine Local" program, and Richardson publishes restaurant health inspection scores, but the city made no effort to tie the two together. The Wheel complained about it two years ago, and even pointed to a third party solution that promised to be cheaper and more useful than some in-house development by the city's IT department. That was two years ago. Nothing changed.

POTD: Go Tell It on the Mountain

From 2015 08 13 Mount Evans

Today's photo-of-the-day is from Mt. Evans. At 14,271-feet, it's one of Colorado's 53 "fourteeners." You can drive to the summit on the highest paved road in North America. Well, not actually the summit. To get to the tippy-top, you have to scramble up another boulder field.