Declan’s Blog

Gabe and I attended the Amateur-Professional Models and Photographers and More SD meetup run by the energetic, friendly Britt. We met at Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach right at sunset.

The models were running late, so Britt got down on the sand and helped us set up our lighting and shots. I quickly figured out that coming straight from work was a bad idea… My dress pants and shoes are now full of sand. I also got a great workout squatting and kneeling to get the best angles.

That’s Ashley, the first model who showed up. I was able to get a little sunset action, but it was pretty cloudy:

Gabe enjoyed the whole experience:

Marisa showed up next:

Then Angel came a bit later:

There were about 10 photographers:

The models would pose and move their eyes from one lens to another. I learned a lot about how to give direction by listening to the other photogs. Britt was also very helpful in how to talk to the models and help them give you the best shot.

I had a great time, well worth the $15 Britt charges for the event. She is one of the most friendly people I’ve met and loves helping. She gathered some of us after the shoot and we headed to Pizza Port for a couple beers and she talked even more about the craft. Lots of fun!

Click here for lots more pictures on Flickr!

Elaine and i just finished up trying out the Taste of Adams and had a few reflections:

When we started researching the event, there were 2 different dates referenced on web sites. In fact, the Blind Lady mailed out that they had confused the date too.

The tickets cost $25 each, but Mercedes found a $5 off deal. Still, the ordering site added a $2.50 processing fee, so that kinda sucked. For what we got, we think it was over priced by about $10.

Parking was about the same as normal for Adams, so about 5 mins of hunting side streets. The ticket booth was quick, with laser zappers that read the 2D barcodes nicely. Then we got a necklace badge with numbers that some of the vendors punched, I guess so you didnt come back for another whole bite of soy chorizo burrito.

We started at Blind Lady – a slice of nicely spicy margherita pizza. Then we hit Mariposa ice cream and they were very generous with two scoops of whatever they had. The Mexican chocolate was great! Next was Tams Thai which had a line too long to wait for so we skipped it. Next was Gold Donuts. They gave you a piece of a donut or fritter, or 3 donut holes for yer card punch. That was actually a pretty nice portion and fulfills my donut needs for the next year.

Then we met up with our buddies Kay Marie and Gerardo, and headed back in the other direction. Country Kabob Greek had some steam tables on the sidewalk with a tiny piece of pita with really spicy yogurt, and a bite of yummy spanikopita. Portions too small, but very tasty.

Lestats had iced coffee and brownie bites. Elaine liked the coffee, I never touch the stuff. The brownie was fine – kinda dry. Then we ran back across the street to TAO Thai and had some nice spicy tofu and a great chicken in some sweet sauce with mixed wild rice. No skimping on the portions here! They even had a mini dessert with mochi and bean curd. Right next door was Viva Pops! where they make their own Popsicles. The blood orange was yummy, and the girls said the chocolate banana was great too.

Elaine really liked El Zarape – rice, beans, carne, and chicken. Then a nice margarita shot! Well be back! Then we walked all that off and stopped into Incredible Cheesecake where I think they gave us a wafer thin hint of a smell of a taste of some cheese cake. Really chintzy.

Next was Jaynes Gastropub, who did the best job of all of the venues to treat us as more than a bother. We were seated and served bangers and mash. The portion was tiny, but we liked the service and the friendly people. We stayed a bit and ordered some beers to keep our strength up. Senior Mango was next, and I had a berry smoothy that was a nice size. None of the others had been inside AC Lounge before, so we popped in and were greeted very warmly by the bartender. They were serving half off drinks, but we were worried about running out of time, so we pressed on.

We skipped Twiggs because of time and tried Cafe 21. They had some dried out hash on dried out bread crumbs on a tray. Quite meh. Then we jumped on the trolley, which was a really nice part of the event, and went to the Farm House Cafe and had ricotta pancakes in a butter sauce with oranges. Very rich and tasty!

The trolley driver was cool and let us take our food on board so we didnt have to wait another 10 mins for the next bus. One of my main goals was to get to Ponces, someplace Ive heard great things about, so we rode the trolley all the way to the other end of Adams to Kensington. This was about 2:40, so we had 20 mins until the end of the event.

We tried out the Kensington Cafe, which had really nice people staffing sidewalk steam tables, but served up a minuscule bite of the aforementioned soy chorizo. Double meh. Burger Lounge had a 5 minute wait while they whipped up some more food, so we skipped it and hit Bleu Boheme. My old buddy JenBen was hosting and directed us back to a gentleman serving escargot in a rich sauce. Id never had them, and they were kinda like mussels or salty, chewy mushrooms with a slightly grainy texture. Oh, and they were snails… So that was different. I liked the place and the vibe tho.

Finally, with 10 minutes to spare, I get to try out Ponces!!! But no, theyre rejecting people at the door saying they ran out of food. WTF? How the hell do you run out of food? Youre a restaurant! The snails didnt leave a bad taste, but Ponces sure did. What a shitty way to treat people.

So, all in all, it was a nice event but many of the venues didnt do themselves any favors by being cheap on the offerings.

Elaine and I had dinner out at West Coast Tavern and liked it so much that I wrote a Yelp review.

Click here to read it.

I’m SO happy with how well this shot worked:

Hit this link to see a big version.

And hit this link to see a huge version!

This is actually 2 shots from the Balboa Park bridge over Rt. 163, toward downtown San Diego. I used Autostitch to put them into one shot.

More pix from that night here:

City Beat has a twitter article today, and Gabe (@gebl) is quoted.

“If you go to the standard technology meet-ups,” says Gabriel Lawrence, director of IT security at UCSD, the glow of the pool reflecting in his glasses, “it’s all a bunch of geeks standing around lecturing each other. But look at this: There’s all kinds of people here. There’s the technology people, so, if you want to talk tech and be like 1, 0, 1-1, 0, 1-1, you can. But then there’s marketing folks, there’s radio personalities, there’s newspaper media—I mean, everybody’s here. Eric Bidwell, a candidate for mayor, is here. I voted for him because I met him at a Tweetup. This is what it should be like—you get to meet lots of people, there’s lots of ideas and it’s a fun environment.”

I wonder how drunk one needs to be to speak in binary…

I take a lot of pictures. I’m an amateur with a decent camera, so some of them are ok. I’ve never seriously pursued getting any of them published, but I’ve thought about it.

So I was pretty thrilled to get this email a few months ago:

:: Schmap: San Diego Photo Short-list
Hi Declan,
I am writing to let you know that one of your photos has
been short-listed for inclusion in the fifth edition of our
Schmap San Diego Guide, to be published late July 2008.

http://www.schmap.com/shortlist/p=35034345554N01/c=SH20282878

Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can:
i) See which of your photos has been short-listed.
ii) Submit or withdraw your photo from our final selection
phase.
iii) Learn how we credit photos in our Schmap Guides.
iv) Browse online or download the fourth edition of our
Schmap San Diego Guide.
While we offer no payment for publication, many
photographers are pleased to submit their photos, as Schmap
Guides give their work recognition and wide exposure, and
are free of charge to readers. Photos are published at a
maximum width of 150 pixels, are clearly attributed, and
link to high-resolution originals at Flickr.
Our submission deadline is Wednesday, 2 July. If you happen
to be reading this message after this date, please still
click on the link above (our Schmap Guides are updated
frequently – photos submitted after this deadline will be
considered for later releases).
Best regards,
Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

The link went to a permissions page to use the photo that didn’t seem bad. I Googled around to see if anyone else had dealt with them and looked at their site – and it all looked ok. So I said sure. Hey, I’ve got an ego…

A few weeks later I get this in the mail:

:: Schmap San Diego Fifth Edition: Photo Inclusion
Hi Declan,
I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo
has been selected for inclusion in the newly released fifth
edition of our Schmap San Diego Guide:
Downtown San Diego

http://www.schmap.com/sandiego/tours_tour2/p=2028D01/i=2028D01_29.jpg

If you like the guide and have a website, blog or personal
page, then please also check out the customizable
widgetized versions of our Schmap San Diego Guide, complete
with your published photo:

http://www.schmap.com/guidewidgets/p=35034345554N01/c=SH20281996

Thanks so much for letting us include your photo – please
enjoy the guide!
Best regards,
Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

Pretty cool! Indeed, if you go to http://www.schmap.com/sandiego/tours_tour2/p=2028D01/i=2028D01_29.jpg you will see some text about San Diego with my picture up at the top left.

I still had the feeling that this was too good to be true. The picture is an ok San Diego skyline, but it’s not great. There’s too much water for the frame size and the proportions are kinda dinky. Yep, them are pro terms… The main thing that was bugging me is that the URL they gave me had a specific URL in it.

So, I went to the root Schmap site and surfed to the San Diego map, explicitly NOT using their URL. As I suspected, I couldn’t find my picture at all.

I’m guessing that Schmap plays on the desire to have one’s picture noticed so that the photographer will link to their site, thus elevating their page rank. Rather than a promotion of my picture, they are using my desire to have my picture used to further their site with that widget.

Scam might be too harsh of a term… This is a form of mutual promotion, but it feels less than honest on Schmap’s part not to include the photo in a general search for San Diego.

We tried a new place for lunch yesterday called Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot (address: 4718 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, San Diego, CA 92117). It was very niiiice!

Phelan (@imagium), a BarCampSD buddy, had requested a while back that when we declare a BarLunch on Twitter that we pick somewhere in the Kearny Mesa area, closer to him so he could join us. Being a good manager, I put the work back on him and he suggested this great new place.

Here’s Phelan and surprise guest luncher Erika!

Paige was there too, but we kept her under the table.

First, they bring out a big pot of soup (original, spicy, or a split pot with both) and set it to boil on a hot plate in the middle of the table:

Then they bring out a platter of thinly sliced meat, vegetables, tufu, noodles, string mushrooms, and monkey brains.

Ok, maybe not monkey brains – fish balls and meat balls.

Then you cook. Yer own lunch. Why do we have to pay if we’re doing all the work?

Mmm! It was very good! Gabe give’s it a thumbs up:

Even the boy liked it!

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: