I'm due to be in La Honda tomorrow and Sunday to meet an old friend I haven't seen in over ten years who's displaying his two Ducatis at a motorcycle show of some kind. The Ducati is one of the worlds really nasty motorcycles, nasty in the “I'm bad” sense. Be good to get out of the house.

A case of red clam sauce arrived from Amazon today. I now have red clam sauce to go with my spaghetti. A case of red clam sauce and some tea light holders, two of them designed to be hung on a hook from the ceiling, two of them in the shape of little metal frogs holding onto the tea light with their front, um, paws. (Hands? Front froggy appendages?) Silly stuff - I don't fire up the votive candles of which I have many very often - but it's something I've done in the past when I've been feeling better and seeing the urge to pop a couple of bucks on something this stupid is a good sign. You'll notice we're looking for good signs around here. Any old good signs: paws, hands, froggy appendages.

What makes the picture up top look so funky?

It's the low light and the photographer. One of the reasons I ordered a color balancing kit for my equipment. That and the fact it's a couple of stops underexposed which tends to add noise and push the color into the red end of the spectrum. Here's another example shot with the same settings, but correct for the light, another shot on BART in the tunnel leaving the Oakland 12th Street station, again with correct settings. I've told myself in the past I should look into this stuff, see if I can't make it better, and now I seem to be making moves with the calibration equipment in that direction. Did I mention the soon to be released Nikon D3 seems to get much better color in these low light situations? I didn't?