Sunset at the range

As seen just before night fire on 8 August, at the A-3 range complex.

The Navy’s Blue Angels were the main event, and put on a great show as usual. My favorite part is the “tactical surprise” or sneak pass (done by the Thunderbirds as well), where the crowd follows the four-ship flight, only to be ambushed by one of the solo planes, approaching right at the edge of the speed of sound. (This video gives you an idea – flying that fast, you can’t hear it coming).

But the real show-stealer was the F-22 Raptor, a plane whose performance is so extreme that it might as well be science fiction. It did maneuvers matched only by the little aerobatics planes: things like flipping over in midair (!); full performance turns inside the space of the airfield; standing the craft virtually on its tail and flying forward at only 90 knots; and a vertical climb that ended in a dead stop in midair, followed by sliding backwards before flipping into a dive.

It’s mind-boggling to write about it and even more so to see it.

Pictures here!

I’m on a quest for a good web-based, database-driven photo gallery solution, and they seem to be in short supply. For years I’ve just been generating galleries locally using whatever software I had available (for a long time, BreezeBrowser, then later, Adobe Lightroom). The problem with this approach is that every time I wanted to rearrange galleries or change their appearance, I’d have to go back and re-generate all the pages and re-upload them. With a web-based solution, I could change the appearance easily with stylesheets (the way I can with WordPress and this blog).

I tried Zenphoto for a while, but didn’t like it (too hard to adjust the themes). Now I’m using Piwigo, which seems OK, though not exactly what I want. All these PHP-based gallery things are made by Europeans, which means they have all kinds of weird Engrish and bizarre user interface conventions that make no sense to my simplistic American mind.

I guess I’m stuck with it, though, since I don’t want to use Flickr or Photobucket or Picasa or whatever – I’m paying for all this web space, so I’m damn well gonna use it!

Clouds over Bloomington

Dramatic clouds over the armory, taken on 14 June 2010.

Photos here. Note the tragically misspelled biking sign – “peddle” to new heights? Really? Did no one catch that? Obviously not…also note the continued sightings of the rare jackalope – in its natural habitat!

A crowd of waxwings drinking up

Today an invasion of Cedar Waxwings descended upon the neighborhood – apparently our birdbath was prime drinking water, despite our proximity to the river. (Click picture for bigger version.)

SGT O looks over the capitol

San Francisco and BT Collins/Sacramento.