Another two releases tomorrow: one Cove and one Pointe. The top end of the Cove now exceeds the $1M mark; the same plan was just $810,548 back in phase 1.
After tomorrow’s lottery I also have to drop by the e-waste drop off day and dispose of a couple of old monitors and a dead DVD player. If you live on Alameda, and have some old electronics to dispose of, you can dispose of them between 10am and 2pm at no cost. Just remove any batteries as they’re not accepting those.
Picked this up last time I was in Tokyo and have been meaning to scan it ever since I got back. If you are heading out that way, and would like to check the place out, I scanned the back of the card too.
A flower, which I have not managed to identify yet, taken outside of the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. I took several shots on the same morning, but I was rushed so most are not as good as I would have liked, nor do they do the flowers justice.
Took an after dinner walk around parts of Bayport in Alameda looking for houses with halloween decorations. Nothing like the decorations I saw last year at Ingleside in San Francisco, but lots of houses had carved pumpkins and were feeding the trick or treat kids. The buried witch is from the house I am awarding nominating as best decorated in Bayport.
Not a great shot, but then I was sitting on a window sill with the 300mm lens at full zoom trying to catch these guys as they flew by during San Francisco’s fleet week air show. They are, for those that don’t know, the US Navy’s Blue Angels.
On the edge of Golden Gate Park is the Conservatory of Flowers. Didn’t go in as I was on my way to somewhere else and did not have a lot of time in the park the morning I took this shot.
I have been working on moving the graph generation from a spreadsheet on my laptop to something more automated, and also integrating the date information kindly provided by Jennifer and Carl into them. Now I have something I think will be the beginning of a more flexible graphing page where you will be able to select which plans and which date ranges or phase ranges you wish to graph. For the moment I have set it to only generate three graphs, one for each collection, but watch for the form based system with options for other graphs soon. You can see the graphs at a new URL: https://bluedonkey.org/bayport/, although I will probably continue to link to the graphs from here as well.
For those interested in what is going on behind the scenes here, I have entered all the data into a database on the webserver, and using a PHP script I can extract subsets of the data from the database and the plot these graphs using a package called JpGraph. JpGraph seems to be very powerful. I don’t think I am really scratching the surface of what it can do so far – expect more graphs to follow.
Also, if anybody has min & max prices for each plan in each release, I have slots for that in the database too. I might then see about plotting a vertical on each release point that covers the range of prices for that plan on that day.
Also known as the Scorpionfish, or even a Hawaiian Turkeyfish. This one is another resident of the Maui Ocean Center, but we really did see some of these in Kapalua Bay. In fact, we saw a lot of fish in Kapalua Bay – many more than we saw at the reefs off of Lanai’i during our snorkel trip there. Of course, we did actually see reef sharks and green sea turtles, the latter up close and personal, on the snorkel trip…
This whitespine surgeonfish is a resident of the Maui Ocean Center. There were also plenty of them in the water at Kapalua Bay, though they are a lot harder to photograph, especially with the 20D. I am looking at getting a waterproof housing for my girlfriend’s S500 as I think that would work much better than the disposable film cameras like the one we took on our snorkel trip.
By the way, the Ritz Camera store in Whalers Village was the cheapest place we found to buy the Fuji disposable film cameras on Maui if you are looking for one, and the photos we got were good, it is just difficult to swim and shoot through the small viewfinder at the same time!
Following the sugar museum, we decided to spend the afternoon at Maui’s aquarium: the Maui Ocean Center. While perhaps not as large as the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Maui Ocean Center is nonetheless impressive. In addition to a section full of tropical Hawaiian fish, there were green sea turtles, hammerhead sharks and a walk-through tube in a tank filled with sharks, stingrays, puffer fish and many others.
The turtles were only too happy to swim over and investigate any humans standing alongside their tank, as you can see from the photo (you can see another photo in my Flickr area).
While on the subject of turtles, I was looking for a smaller print of a turtle photo by Victoria McCormick that I saw in a few places on Maui, but I can’t even find that photo on her website. Instead, I bought one called Ocean Light by Monica & Michael Sweet which I liked almost as much. I also liked the one called Covered in Sand – picking just one was a difficult choice.
Finally, a word of warning to those visiting who are also members of the Pacific Whale Foundation: there is a 10% discount for members, but the staff on the ticket counter did not tell us this even when asked directly about it.
