It’s pretty widely understood that photography doesn’t do a very good job of representing objective reality. Choices of cropping, exposure, color balance, saturation, etc, all can be used to project a specific narrative. That being said, I (for the most part) try to do minimal processing beyond those adjustments on most pictures I share.

However, I do digitally alter some photographs for aesthetic purposes. I try to be up front about it when I do (for example, see this picture).

This picture, taken at Descanso Gardens on April 11, 2026, and without any post-processing at all tells a bunch of lies.

What lies does it tell? It hides the crowds, for one thing. The field is flattened, making the roses appear to be almost a hedge. Here’s a more honest view of the scene:

So, by standing over where the guy in the pale blue shirt is taking a picture, and holding my camera low to the ground, I could capture that image above. Then, because I let the camera determine the exposure, the original image underexposed the foreground in order to preserve the cloud details. The color balance was for cloudy skies, and I wanted it to look sunnier. So I punched up the shadow exposure, tweaked the color temperature a tiny bit, and increased the vibrancy by a about 10% percent. Because the overall exposure was increased, I had to adjust highlight settings to pull the cloud detail back in.

Since I was already in fantasy land, I decided to improve it even further by getting rid of those unsightly power lines. Here’s the final result:

In southern California, with judicious planting, it can be flower season year ’round. But even so, Spring is special.

Wandered around the Ballona Creek estuary, and took some pictures, leading me to create a meme.

We used to have a lot of physical devices on our network^*. Servers, firewalls, file-shares, staging servers, development machines… all sitting on the network with their hard drives endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning!

System administrators are fond of referring to platter-based hard drives as “spinning rust,” partly as a reference to the ferro-magnetic iron crystals that store the actual data, but also to remind us that it’s always decaying and corroding. Over time, drives start generating errors or becoming unreliable. When we had physical devices that exhibited issues, we’d yank the hard drive and replace it. Over the years, we’d accumulated a pile of a dozen or more drives that were unreliable or bad but still contained data.

The data is not especially sensitive, but there could be stuff that could be abused or belongs to other parties. There may well be meeting notes, source code, sample data files, or there could be cached passwords or other credentials. It’s not worth just hoping it’d be OK to release to the world. So it’s a chore to render this data unreadable.

Pulling apart spinning platter hard disks is humbling. These are incredible little devices, with incredibly precise machining and elegant engineering. Going through a pile that spans a decade, you can actually see the improvements in technology: new vibration damping systems, different head-parking strategies, traps for dust, and more. I see these parts, and am inspired by the craftsmanship that goes into them.

So in the spirit of admiration, I offer these (hopefully unreadable) holiday memories.

^* Now, of course, we have few physical devices but all those same services are implemented on “the cloud.” This means that someone else has physical devices somewhere, with their hard drives (or SSDs) endlessly spinning, spinning, spinning (or trimming, trimming, trimming).