2 lanes of northbound traffic on IH-35 were shutdown this morning when someone crashed into a truck painting lane stripes. This caused severe paralysis. The onlookers going southbound brought that direction to a standstill as well.

I thought that I could just take surface streets south to 620 and past the problem. However, that proved problematic. My first mistake was taking Old Settlers road west. The only north/south road before IH-35 is Mays and that is only a couple of hundred feet away. Traffic was already backed up way before I could turn on Mays. Then there was construction on Mays and 79 that took away a couple of lanes. 79 going west was already stopped. And I missed the traffic light because people had blocked the intersection instead of waiting for the next light. Sigh. 620 was not that good either. But I finally made it to the highway and into work. Only 30 minutes late for my department meeting.

There is just no good solution for times like these. A fatal flaw in where I live, apparently.

The entrance to the Domain across the street from IBM finally opened up a couple of months ago. And I just got around to walking over to eat lunch at the Domain. Man, you can hardly tell that this was once an IBM site. As more time progresses, the visual clues will become less and less. There are still some mounds of grass covered dirt around. But I am sure that they will be gone eventually.

One annoying thing is the complete lack of sidewalks around here. Aren’t there building codes that demand that sidewalks be built?!

Someone kicked my Malibu light and broke it where it stakes into the ground. You can tell where they kicked it at the top since there is mud left on the light. Sigh. Well, at least I got more than a year’s worth of life out of it after they first beat the light up. That’s something positive…

Apparently, in this down economy, 19 condominiums at Eighth and Brazos in downtown Austin are going up for auction. Prices range from 120K to 600K. Man the cheaper places are tiny! The floors are finished concrete and all of the air ducts are exposed.

I walked to Taco Deli for lunch today. And on the way back I noticed this stenciled graffiti on the stop sign next to work.

I took my car in for repairs. My loaner looks almost exactly like my new car. Except it is underpowered and missing a lot of features that I now rely on (like not having to take the key out of my pocket, Sirius radio, and my Texas toll tag).

What is really annoying is that I had to wait a week to get my car back. They replaced the steering column switch cluster and SZL (whatever that was). Part of the process of the repair is to encode all modules. Which erases the Dinan software on the chip. They had to send the DME back to Dinan to re-install the software. Sigh. What poorly designed software. And when is BMW of Austin going to get a dedicated computer to do it themselves?

The regulator on the gas grill finally died on me. It was leaking around the thin metal plate at the top of the assembly. So, I tried an experiment. I put a lot of glue on the top and let it dry. However, when I turned on the gas, a pressure release valve blew out. Oh well. It was worth a try.

This thing was a real pain to replace. The brass nut would not unscrew no matter how hard I tried. Finally I gave up and got my neighbor to help me. It was pretty embarrassing just how easy it unscrewed when we tried it again. I went to Home Depot to replace it. Unfortunately, they were out of new, single hose regulators. Luckily, an employee took one off of a model on the floor and rang it up for me.

Unfortunately, bad luck seemed to come in threes fixing up the grill. The module which displays how much gas is left in the canister was not working. When I opened it up to replace the batteries, I noticed that they were badly corroded. Putting in new batteries didn’t fix it. So I took it apart. The circuit board was damaged from the corrosion. You can see where the chemical reaction was slowly consuming the circuit path. Ordering a new part was easy. And I replaced it.

The next problem was getting the grill to spark to ignite the gas. I kept messing around with the single battery with no luck. Finally I reversed the battery and tried it again. This time everything worked!

Interesting. This is the first time that I have had a straight flush before. Woot!

I finally got around to scratching an itch and tried to photograph water drops. My setup was as follows:

• set up the heavy-duty Manfrotto 3258 tripod with a Manfrotto 405 head on it
• put the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens + Canon Extender EF 1.4x + Canon Extension tube EF-25II
• put a light stand next to the tripod with a Canon EX580II on manual flash. Set the zoom to 105mm, and the power to 1/16 + 0.7
• attach Pocket Wizard Multimaxes to both flash and camera
• attach Canon timer remote controller TC-80N3
• set mirror lockup to enable:down with set
• turn live view on to 10x mag
• place a knife running across the dish where the water drop falls
• mess with both the zoom and focus to get the writing on the knife into sharp focus
• take picture — repeat ad infinitum (almost 200 pictures in total)

The extension tube both magnifies the picture and allows the lens to get much closer to the object in question. But the trade off for that is a razor thin depth of field. With an f-stop of 16, only millimeters were in focus.

Also, the timing of the shot is difficult. And I am limited to 320ms due to the high speed sync. Which makes one shot pictures like “coffee with a drop of milk” all the more impressive to view.

Spring weather means turbulent, chaotic, energy. I really need a panoramic head. These pictures stitched together in a flat “V” shape. And they had subtle lighting differences between snaps.

Update: Ahh! I was using the TS-E 45mm and, when I was putting the lens away, I noticed that the was some tilt being applied to the lens. Perhaps that was it. I must strive to return all of the settings on a lens back to default when I put it away. Live and learn…