One aspect in assessing the quality of a new carry camera is how well it performs in low light at speed or speeding, depending on one’s point-of-view. The City’s construction project to ruin Lead and Coal gave me some photo ops during rush hour.  Lead and Coal were multi-lane, oneway streets with the traffic lights truly timed to the speed limit. They were designed in the late 50’s or early 60’s to get traffic in and out of downtown quickly and efficiently, back when city planner’s believed downtown would remain the prime central business district in Albuquerque.  Lead and Coal were great, because they were about the only streets in Albuquerque that you could drive the speed limit and get all the lights green, making it very quick to catch the major north/south streets when driving east on Coal or west on Lead. But the central planners and traffic engineers apparently couldn’t stand the thought of traffic moving efficiently, so they redesigned Lead and Coal to make the more bike and pedestrian “Friendly”.  I can appreciate bike friendly, having ridden tens of thousands of miles on my bike, but from the portions of Coal that are close to being finished that I drove on recently, the street now seems extremely hostile to cars. After I got on Coal at University heading east, I ended up turning off of it and drove through the neighborhoods to get to San Mateo. I was not the only one driving the neighborhoods to avoid Lead and Coal that day. Maybe once all the construction is complete, traffic will move a little better, but they will never again move traffic as efficiently as they once did.

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t have much time to put my new camera through the paces today, but got my first “drive by” on the way home, tested the macro setting on Double Delight with a shy crab spider, and a normal shot of Cecile Brunner when I got home tonight. The roses are in low light, and all the photos are jpegs, because I didn’t have time to convert the RAW files. The camera is so new that my Adobe products don’t recognize its RAW format, so I’m shooting RAW + JPEG until I get a RAW file update. I’m happy with the results so far.

 

 

I got my new camera, and one of the first photos I took with it is dedicated to a fellow photographer, Giuseppe Grimaldi, who lives in Rome, Italy, and does wonderful street photography. You can see some of his work here: http://giugrim.pixu.com/ and http://500px.com/giugrim. The staff of Cafe Giuseppe next door to our office was gracious enough to pose for the first real photo.  If you are downtown, be sure to stop by Cafe Giuseppe and take a break with a cup of espresso or soda and a light snack. They are on Gold between 3rd and 2nd Streets.

Patrician Design is two doors east of our office at 216 Gold Ave, SW. They got new Internet service today so I went over and set up their new modem and got it connected. Everything went smoothly, until they discovered email wouldn’t go out. The outgoing smtp server was timing out, and once I found the host, a call to their tech support provided me with the updated port info we needed, and their email was whole again. I learned from Patti that it was Liz’s birthday today, so she ended up as the third photo by the new camera. Patrician Design carries a large variety of gifts, beauty products, jewelry and original artwork, with a staff of lovely, knowledgeable women ready to help you choose just the right thing http://www.patriciandesign.com/.

The changes in google maps API is causing me a lot of trouble. So far, I will have to re-code all the mapping applications I developed for a project we are doing for the State of New Mexico, if we continue with google maps.  We have deadline next week, so these mapping issues couldn’t have come at a worse time. Fortunately, I never billed the State for the mapping component of the project because I have a great distrust of google, and suspected that they would start charging for their services or change something. I didn’t expect them to just stop supporting the code-base I am using altogether, but it’s not the first time they have done such a thing. I started writing new apps today with their new code base as a stop gap measure, and we are changing mapping strategies for next weeks deadline, but for the time being I’m not going to rewrite all the apps — google might just change the rules of the game again. We are investigating other options such as OpenStreetMap, and then we would drop google maps.

When this woman passed us holding her shoe out of the window on our way home tonight, I told Laurie that must be one stinky shoe. I said it kind of summed up my day as everything seemed to be against me today. Google maps changed their API and map keys, so some of the mapping applications I’ve developed over the past few months wouldn’t load for clients, returning a map key error instead of a map. I spent most of the afternoon trying to track down the issues, only to discover that google has taken down all of the help and reference pages to the javascript maps keys I got from them a few months ago. They have different map key system for android developers, and javascript maps, like I’m using, are now using libraries that I have to figure out how to access. This is the way I normally like to write all our own code, but web-mapping has proved to be very difficult to develop and maintain.

The deadbolt to the backdoor of the office broke, and then as I was walking to the car this afternoon, a tech from AirPro stopped me to tell me that two of the swamp coolers on the  office have rusted out and need to be replaced. Little did I know how much today would stink until I got home and got a chat session going with Amazon.com’s customer service because the new camera that was supposed to be delivered today, wasn’t.

I settled with the insurance company on my carry camera that got damaged in the car accident, and they sent me a check. I ordered a Fujifilm X-Pro 1 with a 35mm ƒ/1.4 lens to replace my broken carry camera. I’ve been carrying a full-sized camera since the accident, which actually works well, it’s just very large.  The new camera was to be delivered to the office. The UPS tracking site said it went out for delivery at 7:45 am this morning and was to be delivered by 3:00 pm. UPS made a delivery to the office at their usual noonish time, but delivered nothing for me. While I was chatting with amazon customer service about 6:15 pm, the tech said she just got a message my camera was delivered and signed for by ZINGAR. I called UPS and discovered it was delivered to a residence at 220 Girard NE, instead of the office at 220 Gold Ave SW. The UPS rep transferred me to the UPS investigation unit, but the investigator told me that since the package was from Amazon.com I needed to call Amazon to start an investigation.

I called Amazon, and the rep asked me to hold while he called UPS. After ten minutes he came back on, apologized for the wait, and asked me to hold again while he called the “highway patrol.” After another 15 minutes, he came back on, apologized again, and asked me to stay on the line while he finished with UPS’s investigation unit. Another 20 minutes went by before the Amazon rep came back on and explained that I have to wait until May 2nd to see if UPS and the police are able to recover the package and deliver it to me. If I don’t get the package delivered by the end of the day on May 2nd, then Amazon will either replace the order or give me a full refund.

I think the UPS delivery guy and ZINGAR have a little scam going on.  220 Girard NE is across the street from the UNM dorms in the student ghetto. An honest person wouldn’t sign for a package that didn’t have his name and address on it.

 

One of the benefits of getting up at 3:00 AM to irrigate is that the clouds and stars can be delightful. The white iris bloomed this morning and on my way into town to work on one of the servers this afternoon I got the photo of the couple with their horse and buggy out for a joy ride on the ditch bank.

 

 

Double Delight produced an amazingly nice rose for a first bloom. A bumblebee came buzzing around the irises while I was out photographing them — the first bumblebee I’ve seen this year.  Puck was up on the roof spying on us through the leaves while we were walking the garden this afternoon.

We got quite a bit done today. After I got the drippers started first thing this morning, I loaded the truck with half of the aluminum roofing I took off the house on the other end of the property a few weeks ago, and took it to the scrap metal yard. I dropped by Lowe’s on the way home and got supplies to repair the fence and finish setting up the swamp cooler. I got the swamp cooler overhauled, repaired the fence, cut a bunch of dead canes out of the rose bushes, tied back and staked up some of the out-of-control roses around the deck, and trimmed the trumpet vine along the walk.  Laurie weeded some of the rose beds, driveway and parking area.

 

My right knee has been really stiff and painful for the last couple of days. I’m thinking it’s the weather since I can’t remember doing anything to make it hurt. This is the first weekend in weeks that we don’t have some event to attend or volunteer job to report to; therefore, I am planning to get a lot of work done in the yard and around the house if my knee lets me.

We don’t remember seeing the golden iris before. It was probably frozen before it bloomed last year, so we didn’t get to see the color. It’s quite stunning in the afternoon light. It even had Rosnecrantz looking at it with a wide-eyed stare.

I’m rereading “1066 and All That”, and I just finished “Test Paper I”. Some questions were quite challenging; for example, “Discuss, in Latin or Gothic (but not both), whether the Northumbrian Bishops were more schismatical that the Cumbrian Abbots.”   Then there were a few easy questions, such as, “Which came first, A.D. or B.C.? (Be careful.)”, and “How angry would you be if it was suggested (I) That the XIth Chap. of the Consolations of Boethius was an interpolated palimpsest? (2) That an eisteddfod was an agricultural implement?”  And finally, “Would you say that Ethelread the Unready was directly responsible for the French Revolution? If so, what would you say?”  If you don’t know the answers to these questions and would like to find out what they are, find a copy of “1066 and All That” by W.C Sellar & R.J. Yeatman.  The library might have it; if not, it’s available on Amazon.

 

 

The purple and yellow irises bloomed this morning. It looked like other colors were on the verge of blooming, but with the “hurricane winds” we had this afternoon, I didn’t check to see if the other irises had bloomed when I got home this evening.

 

All the photos tonight a drive-bys. Since my carry camera is broken, I’m carrying a full-sized camera which makes drive-bys a little more challenging.

 

 

 

One upshot to the Village closing the south end of Corrales Road for the sewer extension is that I drive down different roads and find new photo ops. I never paid much attention to this big tree on Coronado Road until this evening with the low sun behind it. Lady banks is in full bloom now, and I added another shot of water droplets on an iris bud.