Declan's Blog

To: adam@oldtownpizza.com

Hi – last night, four friends and I had pizza at your restaurant. The
food was great, but when we went to pay our bill, we were all shocked
by the behavior of the gentleman working the cash register.

We are here for a conference, so we requested serparate checks for
expense reports. We were told that we can only split 2 ways. Hmm,
well… Inconvenient, but ok we are imposing a bit. We all went up to
the counter and paid with 5 credit cards, which worked out to about
$12 each.

We each started putting $14 on our cards, and I asked the guy if he
can take a tip out of that. He said, “I hope you make it worth it
because I’m not even supposed to do this.” So, that was rotten enough
behavior. I was so disgusted that I went to wait outside for my
friends to finish paying.

When they came out,they were all shaking their heads at further
comments from your guy. Our last guy’s total was only $7, he’d been in
the bathroom and missed the earlier discussion, sone another of our
guys said “put on $14 so they get a tip.”. Your guy said, “that isn’t
even 20%.”. All of our guys were shocked and one said, “this is for
counter service. We came up to order and got our own beer.” We then
all gathered outside wondered what kind of place treats customers like
that.

Your pizza place was listed as a recommendation on our conference
paperwork. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be.

Declan Fleming

No reply so far 😉

I’m up in Or-EE-Gone for code4lib2008

I walked around the city and took a few pictures:

I got to have dinner with Dave Pearson and Greg Tao, a couple of my old students. Real old now… 😉

More here:

Beautiful, sunny San Diego was clouded over for most of the eclipse, but I was able to get a few decent shots.

This is at full eclipse, just starting to reemerge. You can see a lot of red from the sun’s light refracting through the Earth’s atmosphere:

Here the moon is over exposed where the sun is hitting it, but there is still some red left. Also some blasted clouds!

I cropped this one up a bit. Here the moon is almost fully reemerged:

Here are the rest of the images I picked out for now. I may have more tomorrow:

Gabe and I got a rare treat last night. One of my bosses let us up on top of the 8 floor Geisel Library building.

Our initial goal was to shoot the snowy Eastern mountains, but they were mostly obscured by haze – probably from the snow melting all day:

But heck, we’re on top of one of the highest points in La Jolla, so we took tons of pictures. Here are some I really liked (please forgive the dirty lens 🙁 I didn’t notice until I looked at the pictures on a larger screen.):

This is Nancy, the Security boss who made sure I didn’t push Gabe over the ledge. I really like the fading sunset light on her face, and the blurred out neon and street light behind her. I should probably bump the exposure up a bit, but I’m not gonna.

This one shows some of the roof, the lengthening shadows, and a view off into the horizon:

This is the Price Center, lit up for the night, with La Jolla landmarks in the background:

I liked the way the lighted soccer field’s light was glowing in the late sunlight:

The building with the words is an art installation called “Virtues and Vices” on the UCSD Campus that’s part of the Stuart Collection.

The sunset itself:

I was even able to feed my Moon photo obsession. This is with the Tamron lens, not the telescope, so it’s not as clear as my pictures from a couple days ago, but I really like the darkening blue sky background.

Here’s Gabe, safely far from the edge.

Nancy noticed the sunset setting this building ablaze:

You can see my house in this one!

Well, if you had a magnifying glass. That mountain in the distance is Black Mountain, which is less than a mile from our house. I like this shot also because it shows a lot of green. Normally San Diego is pretty brown – we ARE a desert after all. But unseasonably long rains have really got the vegetation going. We’ll look back on this fondly as it all burns off in four years… 😉

Here is the whole set of pictures. Hit the flickr link to see larger versions of any of these:

Thanks to Nancy and Maureen for the roof access!!!

We live is a very mountainous area, but we hardly ever notice them because we’re so close to sea level and they wash into the horizon. Last night was one of those rare nights when them Easterly mountains jump out because of an oddly close snow storm:

I cobbled together a panorama to give you some idea of what it looked like spread out before me. If you click the picture, it will take you to the GIANT version of the panorama.:

Sorry about the different exposure levels. I was running through a field of squelching mud to make it to a ridge line before the sun went away, and not using my normal camera.

Here are all of the images:

Here’s the mud 🙂

After years of thinking about doing it, I finally hooked my Rebel XT to my telescope, a Meade ETX 60AT.

Here is the Moon from last night:

Compare this to the best shot I could get with a Tamron 28-300 lens:

I’m pretty happy with the results so far. Really looking forward to the 2/20 eclipse!

This is a really big image panorama of a hill off of Artesian Road north of Penasquitos in San Diego:

It’s really hard to see the bird unless you click the small photo above, then go to All Sizes and see the original, or just click here.

I was actually shooting the hawk, trying to get a nice image, and realized later that it made an interesting panorama. I used Autostitch to put it together. It’s a wonderful piece of free software.

Here are all of the photos in the set. I was mainly trying to capture all the green we’ve got here now after unusually heavy winter rains.

This week we yap about geeky projects we have going at home. And Ubercaster fails once again! Thankfully, Dan had an IBM PC XT running a backup recording.