Stage 1 Tour of California

February 16, 2009, 1:52 pm

Stage winner Mancebo

Stage 1 of the Tour of California finished Sunday in Santa Rosa with three circuit laps, giving more opportunities to take photos. Even though it was raining, I decided to drive to Santa Rosa for the experience of a pro bike race and to try some action photography.

The experience was good, memorable, and wet. The action photography—well, not so good. Conditions were poor. Even at ASA 800 I could not shoot faster than 1/160 second at f2.8, so I had a lot of shots with both motion blur and depth of field blur. Plus, I’m sure my technique was awful. I stood next another amateur shooting with a Canon 300mm f2.8 and I was envious.

Francisco Mancebo broke away from the peleton early on and held on to win the stage and take the yellow jersey.

Lance Armstrong

On one of the final circuits Lance Armstrong was leading the Astana team. I’ve never understood bike racing tactics, but I’m not sure the Astana team was pushing hard. It could be better tactics to let another team be the leader and have to expend all the energy setting the pace on the next stage at the front of the peleton.

More photos are below in the gallery.


Links
—Amgen Tour of California 2009 stage 1

February 16th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Outdoors | Leave a comment

The time is 1234567890

February 13, 2009, 3:31 pm

Here’s a geeky thing on this Friday, the 13th. This computer’s internal clock (based on Unix epoch time) just hit 1234567890. It does the same thing on my desktop running OS-X.

    RP:~ phil$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009

Unix time is defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. Those who think it’s cool to watch the odometer in your car reach 99,999 might enjoy this tidbit. Otherwise, have a nice day!

February 13th, 2009 | Category: Computing | Leave a comment

Leftover toys from 1945

February 11, 2009, 3:12 pm

My toys

The year is 1945 (or so I guess). The war is in its final stages in Europe. Dad is at an airfield in Belgium keeping B-26s flying. He hasn’t seen me except for a couple of days right after I was born. Mom and I live with her parents—Grandma and Grandpa. All my toys are wooden—normal for war-era toys—except for the tricycle. How did I manage that?

Note the wooden truck in the foreground and the upside down stuffed animal next to me. When I scanned this negative I thought they looked familiar.


Still my toys

It turns out I still have those toys, thanks to Mom carefully hanging on to them. They are not playthings anymore, though. We display them on a wall-shelf.

February 11th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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