This tree inspires me. It is the last of its kind at this field (and on the entire campus, I believe). The bark is looking threadbare. The summers here are harsh with no sprinkler system in sight. However, spring is in the air. And the tree has just sprouted new leaves.

— This time it will thrive.

Gravitt has been playing around with making comics at Bit Strips. And one of the characters looks suspiciously like me. So here is my attempt at getting revenge…

I am beginning to think that my riding bike is a death-trap. I took a spill this morning. The roads were slightly damp. No problem. Until I came to an area of new construction and the road was covered with mud. Now my tires are covered in mud, but still no problem. And then I approached an intersection. Once I made the right-hand turn over the concrete, I went down. Fortunately, my hip took the worst of it. A good Samaritan asked me if I was alright. It was all that I could do to nod my head yes. It took me a while to walk that one off.

I was going to get back on that horse and continue the ride. But the rear of my bike felt squirrelly. And I wussed out and turned around.

The hand-sized welt turned into a nice bruise.

They are really tearing up the IBM site. IBM has all but disappeared from the West side of Burnet. Apparently, with all of the new buildings that are being built, they need to beef up the run-off of water. So they are expanding an already huge collection pond to be huger.

There is another building going up close to the new road that they put in to access the Domain.

Man my truck is getting old. And I think it is older than me in truck years the way I drive it. The only problem is that I don’t know what to buy next.

Look out there, a ghostly Tux is floating above the parking lot! I wonder if it going to attack us after destroying New York city?

I went to test drive a Smart Car today and noticed this small church. I must be out of touch. Do people worship water now?

I love magnets on the refrigerator. People love to play with the poetry ones. I wonder who left those words of wisdom?

P.S. Is anyone else tempted to add some hands to this picture?

Based on Tim and Mary’s recommendation, I went to Monument Cafe in south Georgetown. The building itself looks nice, almost retro, but the parking lot is horrendous. They really need to fix it up and pave it. It make for an interesting contrast.

The food was pretty good. They had a good selection of local and organically grown vegetables. But, in my opinion, they were a little overcooked. I like them al dente and these were just bordering on mushy. The blackened salmon was a tad overcooked as well. The cherry fried pie was excellent.

I will definitely eat here again. Their menu changes frequently and it all sounds good.

I bought a new lens recently, a Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8. It has two unique abilities: being able to rotate (or tilt) the focus plane and being able to shift the view of the lens. For example, look at the following two pictures (ignoring color differences):

Both pictures are with an aperture of f/2.8 which has only a fraction of the picture in focus. In the first picture, the focal plane has been tilted to align with the paper sheet. And in the second picture, with a normal lens, the focal plane is vertical and only intersects partially with the paper sheet. If you have to use a normal lens, you would have to stop the aperture down to get the entire paper sheet into focus. But this requires exponentially more light and also introduces diffraction fuzziness.

But that is not all that this lens can do. It can also shift the lens’ view without moving the camera. I took the following picture with the help of the shift feature.

From where the camera was positioned, the entire spread of cards was not in the frame. How do you get around this? By shifting the lens around.

The camera cannot be raised any higher without hitting the ceiling or fan. But you can shift the lens up to 11 mm towards the top of the camera or towards the bottom of the camera. You can also rotate the lens around in 30 degree increments. This will allow you to get all of the parts of the picture. And you can easily stitch the pictures (there were five in this case) together in photoshop.

The shift aspect of this lens is also used to help remove perspective distortion in buildings. It can also move the lens out of a mirror or reflection in the picture as well.