Declan's Blog

I can’t decide whether this is cool or obnoxious:

Five planes flying at high altitude in formation dot matrix printing the sky is geeky cool. Reading about insurance companies and bad radio djs in the sky is kind obnoxious.

From www.skytypers.com:

Five aircraft flying at 10,000 FT. emitting biodegradable vapor "PUFFS" in a dot matrix pattern. These puffs are regulated by an onboard computer that controls the sequencing of the vapor to form the letters in the sky.
The average time to skytype a character, "The size of the empire state building," is only four seconds! The hang time for a eight mile long (25-30 characters) skyboard is three to seven minutes. That's a lot longer than a fifteen second TV commercial... or the average sign on the road read at 55 mph in 7 seconds!

Twice. Twice the stupid dog fights with a skunk in the backyard.

For the record, peroxide, baking soda, and vinegar take out about 80% of the stink. For the record, 20% skunk stink is still almost unbearable.

Stupid dog.

Here’s a very cool video about KPBS and the fire map they created during the October 2007 wildfires:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7y4MlYNBTI[/youtube]

At a conference recently, Casey Bisson introduced me to the Lensbabies camera lens.

I soon ordered one, and it came in yesterday. I took it out with the beer crowd tonight and got some fun shots:

Here’s Cooper, looking way cooler than he oughta, thanks to my lens:

Schell wasn’t amused that Gabe and I were taking so many pictures:

He mocks what he doesn’t understand…

I like that the lens accurately captures a person’s level of drunkenness:

and ugliness:

Man, I’m getting old…

I like how this one looks like Holly is thinking of 3 bright things:

I can pretty much assure you that there isn’t a lot bright going on here:

Huh? Wha?

We weren’t outside for 2 minutes before Patrick started trying to attract the ladies with his sultry poses:

This is the look Gabe gives you when you try to explain why you are too old to go out to the Casbah with him:

And here’s his look when he’s had too much… pesto:

I tried to capture the blue Little Italy sign:

But this abstract is cooler, I think:

Here are the rest of the pictures:

Last Sunday, we went to see our buddy Victoria from the libraries play in her drumming group called San Diego Taikos. We were late, as usual, so we missed part of the opening act, the Super Sonic Samba School. We got a standing spot a bit at the back of the World Beat Center by Balboa part, a little left of the stage, hence the pole in some of the pictures:

Samba group:

Here’s Victoria, on the right:

Some comic relief:

Victoria works the abs:

Lots more pictures 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 🙂

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.

A week after BarcampLA4, San Diego help BarCampSD2! It was hosted again at TTR in Mira Mesa. We had nearly 100 attendees.

What’s BarCampSD?

BarCamp San Diego 2 is an ad-hoc gathering of technical professionals, internet enthusiasts, and others in the San Diego area who wish to share and learn in an open environment.

Here are my pictures: