Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Dirty Laundry


Just a crack of late afternoon sunlight was coming in through the window and hit our laundry basket. I never imagined using dirty underwear as a subject....

Saturday, July 26, 2008

In case you need one...

Take Sierra Highway down to Sylmar, at the top of the Pass next to the telephone pole and bags of dead animals.  Can't miss it.

It looks like  Sierra Highway is also being used as a dump, I saw at least 5 plastic trash bags with parts of dead animals poking out, along with toilets, boxes and other trash.  Beautiful....  And the aroma, Magnifique!

Mobil Blogging

At top of Newhall Pass

Hard part over...

Off to great start

Ready to leave and Chris gets a flat in the driveway....

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Cogswell Dam

Finally downloaded my pictures from my ride to Cogswell dam from San Gabriel Dam.  We rode past the dam down a service road for a few miles before heading back, climbed a total of 1263 ft during the ride, the hardest part was a 450 ft climb the last mile before the dam.  The area was beautiful, again, hard to believe it is in LA.
Century plant before the dam.
Panorama of the Cogswell reservoir, I don't know what the level has been at recently, but it looks pretty low...


Bridge over the spillway and a shot down the spillway.

Need a lock?  I guess it is easier to have 15 different locks all with their own key than to keep track of 15 copies of the same key...

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Camera Return

My Camera arrived back after being shipped out for repair.  Unfortunately it doesn't appear as though it had been repaired...  The image below was taken before the repair, and the reason for the repair was the stuck pixels in the sensor.  This is a 30 second exposure, the pixels are visible clearly after 5 seconds.
Below is a picture I took tonight, and most of the pixels are still there, a few of them are gone, but many are still there.


It isn't standard thermal noise because these pixels are constant, it is the same pixels in each picture...  There is no time for another repair before my trip, I leave in two weeks for Taiwan and India, I was hoping to have it fixed before the trip....

Dark Knight

Saw The Dark Knight tonight, excellent.  Heath Ledger did an amazing job.  I saw it at the Arclight in Hollywood, they had the Bat Pod out in front.  


I only had my iPhone to take a picture with, so the quality is poor, no nearly as good as the sunset in Griffith Park.  Also at Arclight tonight was the premiere of of some new surfing movie that Edward Norton was narrating, while it was busy, the red carpet was pretty small and I didn't catch the name of the film.  Ironically, there was just as many people looking at the costumes from Mama Mia as there were watching the red carpet...  There were more people getting pictures of the Joker's costume and Batman's suit...

Monday, July 21, 2008

Griffith Park

Went on another ride up around griffith park today after work.  Of course it is semi clear on the day that I don't have my camera with me, but the iPhone comes in handy when there is nothing else.
As we were coming through the tunnel near the observatory, we almost hit a mother dear.  A few seconds later a fawn came bounding across followed by another doe.  While I have seen many deer, it was surprising to me to see this in LA.  I know Griffith Park is large, but I didn't think there was that much wildlife, especially in the busier part of the park between the observatory and the Greek theater.  Two weeks ago on a similar ride, I passed a coyote on the rode, just walking down the street.  I'm guessing it is from the fire last year that pushed them out to were it is busy.  It is just nice to see that among all of the smog and people, there is still some wildlife left in LA.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Lazy Sunday

Well, I finally got around to creating a blog.  Here it is, isn't it amazing and insightful?  I didn't think so either, but it is Sunday and nobody else seems like doing anything, the dogs don't even feel like chasing the cats!

A day of relaxing is a nice change though, yesterday I rode 27.5 miles on my bike, up and around griffith park, climbed 2538 feet.  It was a good ride, went over the top to Los Feliz, met up with Chris, then rode back to the top.  Instead of coming back down again, we took the road that heads off to the east.  Unfortunately it is closed off, most likely due to the fire last year and the rains afterwards.  The road had washed away in a few places and there was dirt and sand covering the rest.  About three quarters of the way down we saw a security guard, and while our sense of adventure was willing us to continue, are lack of wanting to receive a ticket was stronger and we ended up turning around and heading back up the hill.  We then took an alternate trail down to the old Zoo and then headed home.  Las weekend we went around the San Gabriel Dam, I'll post those pictures and ride later.