Sourceforge rocks. That’s all there is to it. There are so many neat software packages there, it’s criminal. My camera of choice is still the little Canon PowerShot Digital Elph and many times, the lens isn’t wide enough to adequately capture the subject. I have to resort to the panorama function where I take a series of photos and then rely on software to put them back together.

The included Canon PhotoStitch software is a joke. I have no idea who would use it because it’s downright terrible at stitching photos together. I’ve been getting by with PanaVue ImageAssembler, but that still leaves a lot to be desired. It still has trouble overlaying images properly and it usually causes a wicked warping effect if there are more than 2 images involved.

In comes hugin. Despite being in a release candidate state, this is damn fine software. I was under the impression that I’d only be able to stitch together a series of horizontal photos, but hugin had no problem with a series of three vertical photos. I have some shots from inside The Globe in London that I’d previously given up on, but hugin put them together quite nicely.

hugin by itself leaves some pretty gnarly seams where the photos come together, but that’s where Enblend takes over. It takes care of blending the photos so the result is one photo with no seams.

I received a sobering bit of news this evening from one of my high school friends: our high school cross country coach passed away yesterday morning. There’s a brief writeup in the Press Telegram, a local paper in Long Beach, but it’s shocking that something like this happened to Coach Wright, an Ironman triathlete and one of the most physically fit people out there.

He was a fantastic coach and deeply committed to us crazy students, even though the team was pretty horrible when I was at Poly in the early ’90s. I still have fond memories of all the sophomoric pranks and stunts we pulled on him, to which he always responded with his paternal affability.

Coach Wright, you will be missed.

Another Saturday, another trip to Honda of Oakland. The diagnosis at the end of the day was that some of the headliner clips were broken, thus the maddening rattling noise coming from above the passenger visor. Their technicians were the last ones in there back in August so they must have busted the clips. Rather than trying to replace the clips, they are ordering a brand new headliner. Shotgun approach for sure, but hey, it’s covered under warranty. Hopefully by next Saturday the EP3 will be ready for further abuse.

The saga of the annoying rattle in the passenger headliner of the EP3 continues. Honda of Oakland ordered a new sun visor hoping that would get rid of the rattle. No dice. They really need to tear into the headliner like they did last time.

While I was there, I asked them to take a look at my squeaky clutch and got a new master cylinder assembly out of it. Now the clutch is nice and smooth again.

Total damage: ~$40 for the visor and ~$97 for the master cylinder plus labor. Good thing everything was under warranty.

We had dinner at Dona Tomas (5004 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland near 51st Street) and came away with mixed feelings. Don’t get me wrong, the food was good. But when was the last time you spent 70 bucks for two people on Mexican food?

The evening got off to a rocky start. We arrived around 6:30pm and were promptly seated in the Red Room. It was still early so only one other party was in the room. We sat around for a really long time until our annoyed looks finally drew us a server. Apparently they didn’t tell our server that our table was his. I’m not quite sure what was up with the complimentary chips and salsa because the chips were really hard (read: stale) and tough to eat. Tam was ready to kill for guacamole so we shared the Guacamole y Totopos and Quesadillas for appetizers and both got the Carnitas for our entree. The odd thing was the chips that came with the guacamole were thin, fresh, and really good. Why not serve those with the salsa instead? Go figure.

Thank goodness the Carnitas was really good, otherwise the evening would have been a loss. This wasn’t the greasy, fatty, kiss-of-death variety dredged out of a taco truck (don’t get me wrong, ain’t nothing wrong with that stuff) — we’re talking lean, slow-cooked, tender Niman Ranch pork goodness with the outside charred to a tasty crisp. They certainly weren’t fooling around with the portions either. About halfway through, I realized that two appetizers was a serious mistake. But I had a name to live up to. Jeff: 1. Carnitas: 0.

The other oddity of the evening was instead of refried beans, Tam’s plate came with mashed sweet potatoes. We’re guessing someone in the kitchen made a mistake because they look similar and dished the wrong thing on her plate. But rather than tossing it and starting with a clean plate, they served it to us anyway and gave her a side of beans.

By the time we were done eating around 8:00pm, the place was absolutely packed. And this was a Thursday. I’d say it’s okay to go and experience once, but because it’s not a good value, I don’t think we’ll be coming back.

We’ve been subscribers to the community supported agriculture at Terra Firma Farms since early summer and have been fairly happy. Our only gripe was that the contents of the weekly boxes were fixed, which gets you into a bind if you’re not a big fan of what they were growing in abundance. Oh, and when mellons were in season, it was a pain to lug the box around from the pickup locations.

Enter Organic Express. They were flyering in our neighborhood and we noticed that they not only deliver, but also allow you to customize the contents of your box week to week. Sign us up! We received our first Organic Express box today and are very happy with what we’ve seen so far.

Furthering my innate ability of being a magnet for general disaster, a truck somehow takes out our phone and cable lines this morning. We live across the street from the Piedmont Grocery and get a lot of delivery trucks in the morning. We’ve never had a problem until now.

I was on the couch when I hear the expensive sound and our entire apartment shakes. My first thought is, damn, someone hit our house with a car. Then I remember our house is raised off the street so that’s not possible, even with monster trucks. My second thought it, dang, our upstairs neighbor knocked over something big…like refrigerator big. I peer out the window and notice a Harris Ranch delivery truck tangled up in a wire. And then I notice a snapped cable dangling from our roof. Apparently the trailer snagged the cable that was suspended across the street and snapped it clean in half. But not before managing to pull our phone boxes off our wall and doing lord knows what to the internal wiring.

To compound things, our Comcast cable “service” went out sometime yesterday and the Sprint PCS network has been down around my office for the past two days. Somehow I don’t think Comcast is going to care about our service being down and the Sprint techs said they’d address their problem within 51 hours. I have a strange feeling SBC is going to need longer than that to fix this one. So beware…I may be coming to a neighborhood near you!

Tam had her first ultrasound today. She told me I shouldn’t bother coming since we wouldn’t be able to see much. Well that worked out well.

You could see practically everything: spine, head, brain, nose, fingers, and toes. Apparently it was moving its arm and legs around and reacting to all the poking and prodding. Based on the length of the fetus, they’ve estimated that it’s 11 weeks, 6 days old. Heart rate today: 174 bpm.

We had our first doctors’ visit today and it’s a live one! Our doctor gave an estimated due date of May 28, which puts the kid at about 10 weeks along already…a week more than what we were guessing. We had a chance for first contact too — listening to its fast heartbeat. The kid’s thumping along at something like 140 bpm which caught me off guard. I figured if I feel like I’m going to keel over after a few hours on the bike at that heart rate, something was up. But apparently it’s perfectly normal.

For whatever reason, the sound reminded me of that scene in The Hunt for Red October where the Americans were listening to the sped up sonar recording of Red October’s caterpillar drive. So congratulations, we’re having a fictional Russian nuclear ballistic submarine! Next up: ultrasound on Friday.