I have been using the blue donkey logo more recently, for example he is my avatar for both the GizmoProject Forums and the Bayport Alameda Forums. So, I thought it only appropriate that he appear somewhere here on the blog. If you don’t see him in the title bar above try a full reload (normally hold down the shift key while refreshing the page).
Pointe & Cove Releases + E-Waste Drop Off
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.
Japan Restaurant Card
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
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.
Bayport Halloween
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.
Blue Angels
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.
Conservatory of Flowers
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.
Bayport Graphs
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.
Maui: Nohu Pinao
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…
Maui: Whitespine Surgeonfish
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!