Do not tempt Fate, my bucko!

Indeed.

I'm hoping the webcam techie calls this morning and we can get on with finding out if this camera is going to work, get that out of the way. As you poke around the innards of these various computers you notice a number of other things that could be fixed or tweaked in a more perfect universe. Distracting that. Getting this camera to work is more than enough, no need to pile more on my plate, particularly with a holiday coming.

They seem to be having a fireworks display again this year in Jack London Square and what they describe as a very large Fourth of July parade across the way in Alameda that I'd never heard of before reading about it now. How big could it be and remain hidden all these years? I'll go to one or the other or both is my thought. Not sure where to find parking in Alameda, particularly if there's a really large crowd. All of this points to a good coming weekend here I'm thinkin’. Better watch my blood pressure.

Later. A bus ride downtown to get some air, a walk around the Chinatown area passing some of the food shops displaying fruits, vegetables and other interesting looking things in plastic bags printed in Chinese sitting on the sidewalks in wooden boxes. They looked good, their prices even better. A return trip maybe with a shopping bag. Stranger things have happened.

An ice cream cone at a table in a crowded Chinese Cultural Center before a bus back staying on beyond the apartment to get off and have a cup of coffee at my breakfast place, the sun out, but with a cool breeze, my morning waitress shaking her head in dismay. Doesn't this guy have a life? Maybe I need another hobby, I thought, sitting at an outside table watching the many and sundry people pass by. Maybe I need something more than bus trips and camera walks to keep my mind engaged. It tends to wander, after a while, the mind, and you can find it drifting into stranger and stranger territory.

I have a second webcam arriving tomorrow to see if it will go through setup without all this trouble. I suspect it will. The webcam techie will wait until I send him the results. Yes, I was planning on buying two of them (for esoteric reasons we don't have to go into here) and yes, this is an easy way to determine if this first unit I have in hand is defective, but no, I suspect there are better ways to resolve this thing, particularly without spending more money, and this is a lazy man's way of doing it.

Of course I'm blathering on, but it's a blathering on rooted in a good mood on a good day with the head in reasonable shape. I'm liking this image of an old guy sitting on a park bench next to a lake with a camera in his lap, nodding a bit, the breeze just cool enough to keep the sun in check, completely invisible to the passers by. Now if I could just make that camera invisible as well.

I find I've been enjoying walking around with the D3, yes, a big digital camera body, but with a small but very fast 50mm lens, the standard lens sold with every 35mm film camera ever made. You can wrap the strap around your wrist and carry in relatively unnoticed in your right hand, just raise the hand and shoot the picture, really easy, not all that threatening, particularly in a crowd.

The much larger zoom lenses make it more noticeable and, although they give a really nice flexibility for framing your shot, that flexibility is only worth so much and the smaller F1.4 50mm on a low light D3 will deliver a much better picture indoors. It gave me a hint why Musashi in his later years used a wooden sword rather than a steel sword. Simplicity, somehow. The essence of the thing. You don't need the bells and whistles. I have this strange thought I'll end up packing an old Kodak point and shoot and junk all the exotic stuff. (Just kidding. Sort of.)