My website, blog and portfolio…

Today I was driving back home after spending a day at my grandmothers house doing laundry when I approached the light on Duval from Seventh Ave. If you know the light then you know that something is seriously wrong with it. I know that it’s triggered by the car somehow, but how to get it to trigger I don’t know. Some days I can sit at this light for a good 15 minutes waiting for it to change.

So, I’m at this light thinking to myself, “Oh great..It’s going to be a 10 minute wait again.” when I got the idea to pull up just a bit farther to the 2nd solid line. So I got closer to the line and waited. I watched the light on the Duval side, it hit red, then a car approached the light and it hit green again. “#@%%” I cuss at the light.

Then I decide that I should roll back a bit and see if I can trigger the light. I let off the break and someone pulls up right behind me. This normally wouldn’t be a problem except this guy pulled up within 4 feet from my car. For those of you that are safe drivers you know that this is stupid and not safe. You should be able to see the car’s tires in front of you on the pavement when you’re stopped at a light.

So I’m stuck here waiting at the light listening to Markus Schulz. The light turns red again on the Duval side and I look up and get excited, then BAM another car approaches on Duval and the light turns green again. “Oh boy”, I think to myself, “this is stupid”. So I wait yet again for it to change.

Meanwhile, I’m laughing at myself at the ridiculousness of the traffic lights. So, I wait and laugh quietly. The light changes again, yet another Duval driver triggers it to change back. At this point I’m about to get out of my car and start taking shots at the light with soldering irons, solder and other misc electronic stuff that I keep in my car. So I wait it out two more “close calls” and the light finally changes for good!

After this frustrating incident I decided to google a bit for information on traffic lights and how they are triggered and I found this wikiHow posting on How To Trigger Green Traffic Lights. They explain how traffic lights are triggered by an inductive-loop. They work much like metal detectors work and they don’t work with all metals.

The site suggests several different methods to triggering the light. Some methods they suggest for changing the light involve getting out of your car and hitting the “walk” button on the side of the road, others suggest proper placement of car within the inductive loop, but the coolest method is to use magnets. They suggest that you attach a series of neodymium magnets to the bottom of your car based on the configuration of the inductive-loop that you get stuck on.

I’m considering doing this to my car even if it doesn’t work it could be kind of fun rolling around town picking up nails from under my car. I’ll update the page with my findings after I’ve attached the magnets to my car.

Here are the pictures I took last week at a little park off Thomasville Rd called Guyte McCord Park.

This park is an excellent place to take photos. The patrons seem to be an older crowd that enjoys watching birds and wildlife.The park has lots of plant and animal life (mostly birds) and contains a large center lake in that can be circled on foot. Near Cline St on the east end of the park there is a small shelter with a bench under it for sitting. Within this shelter one can find a small box with full of pictures, poems, writings, notes, and all sorts of interesting things. I think there may even be a bird guide in the box!

I saw this guy as I got near the bench on the east side of the park. I took this picture using the following: 55-200mm, ISO 800, f/4.5. Some areas are under exposed in this picture, especially around the eyes of this bird. In the upper left corner of the image the sky is very over exposed. I have other shots of this bird and I was torn between them and this one. Some of my other shots have a better composition where the bird is not the complete center of attention but the colors are not too good, so I settled with this image instead. You can see the tree, clouds with the red of the bird being a good contrast to the green of the leaves on the tree.

Here is the sheltered bench where the majority of the park patrons stayed. From here you can watch birds fly from over the lake onto treetops. Attached to the shelter there is a box where you can find a folder and a couple of books. The folder contains paper where you can take notes, write poems or leave messages for people. I have left one message there, but I have not checked to see if anyone replied. I can’t even remember what I wrote! There maybe a book on wildlife or birds as well. I couldn’t decide how I wanted to shoot this one, since a picture of just the front of the shelter seemed boring. I eventually settled on getting most of the roof and leaving out the bits on the left side of the shelter. I turned the camera sideways so that I’m getting an image that is taller then wide. I like the assortment of moss and fern growing on top of the roof.

While walking near the lake shore frogs would scare into the water at my presence with a screech and a splash. This gave me the idea to take a shot at the frogs, which ended up being a failure since not scaring them when I approached quickly became an impossibility. Since getting the frogs was a failure I looked up and spotted this water plant near the shore and took a picture of it. You can see the branches of the trees on shore around the plant in the foreground and in the middle ground there’s a translucent piece of grass growing out of the water. I like the blue against the green in the image, it gives off an interesting feel.

On the north side of the lake you can find a canopy covered path. The lake is on the left and a nice wooded area to the right where the near by neighbors live. This is a picture of one of the trees along the path, taken using my 55-200mm lens. I leaned right up against the tree a justed the shutter for a long exposure and took a shot.

As you have probably noticed, I’ve decided to go along with wordpress for the site instead of designing a blog from scratch. Writing a blog is a difficult task and I don’t have the patience or time for it, so here it is, wordpress at it’s best.

As far as theme, I’m using the wordpress (wp) old default theme. I don’t care much for the new theme, it looks like all of the other wp sites out there , so I’ve switched it over to the old school theme. Eventually I’ll talor the theme to my liking, but until then (sorry web designers) I’m going to keep it at default.