iPhone Panorama of the Bay Bridge to Alcatraz, with the Ferry Building in front.

Click the image to zoom all 4500 pixels, or view the same in my patent-pending SquishVision. Revel in all 450×450 pixels of awkward fake fisheye lensing.

I was in Hawaii last week. Very nice, but ridiculously humid.  The fan was my friend.

Lots of palm trees.

I rather enjoyed drinking kona coffee and/or Mehano Volcano Red Ale underneath these palms, or in a chair where the ocean stopped the lava.

But I wouldn’t want to be around during an eruption — the vastness of lava fields are sobering.

(via Dennis Flanagan, USDA Soil Erosion Lab).

And these USGS timelapse videos are nuts. Yet people build subdivisions right next to the calderas.  WTF? (Click to play)

If you’re between the volcano and the sea, you just pack up your things and get out the way.

Amber Oakleys make a decent iPhone filter, but they do not encourage steady holding of iPhones while making animated GIFs of our friend the ocean.

I do like how I caught the rays of the sun — click on the animated GIF to get the individual frames in something higher than 8-bit color.

And my first Gobba Gobba Hey! Mmmmm.

UPDATE: Mission Local reported on this way back in September  — it’s like that it’s by ‘Swoon’, a Brooklyn artist, to commemorate a woman from Mexico who was killed.

Kassa, the owner of a convenience store on the southwest corner of Hampshire and 24th streets, said it was at least five months ago–but certainly after Christmas–that a young woman and man appeared at his door and asked to use his store’s eastern brick wall. “She told me she was a visiting artist from New York and she wanted to put up a piece to memorialize a girl from Mexico who was killed”….The artist showed an almost identical piece last spring at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Behold the árbol de cráneo.

UPDATE: Here’s a shot of the woman before it was defaced:

As far as I can tell it’s cut from about six sheets of paper. No two skulls are alike.

“Dude!”  “Dude.”

Clockwise close-ups.

But art has a price.  While I was taking these, Pal’s ran out of the lamb AND chicken.  The asparagus/egg was pretty damn tasty though, and the asparagus season is just about over so it probably worked out for the best.

I rode over to Potrero del Sol and watched the Mission’s finest at work while eating my finely crafted sandwich.

Then Anthony’s Cookies on the way home. All in all, a pretty damn good lunch.

SFO-LAS, 9 April, about 11:30 AM.

Snow covered range just east of Bishop, CA, near the CA-NV state line. Not sure of the name of the range — Intermountain West? If so, White Mountain Peak seems the tallest of the bunch.

6 x 8-way QuadCamera shots stitched together using GIFfun. 3-5 seconds between shot.

(Oh, and Apple is now refusing to let the developer upgrade QuadCamera.  Thanks for nothing, Apple iPhone app approval people.  I use this every day. What is your issue with cool photographic apps?)

Mars-lander style photography on the toffee to make up for Allan’s lack of picture.

NASA fly-by:

(cookies & creme top, toffee middle, chocolate chip bottom)

Scientific timelapse of cookie vivisection here. (Technically challenging — I only had 3 seconds between bites.)

The cookies in their lovely white box barely made it out of the store — here are the 6.8 survivors.  Before this picture was taken, there was an upper layer of half a dozen chocolate chip cookies, so you can guess they were rather tasty.  The toffee was epic,  and as far as the cookies and cream, well I must say I will be ordering more of those next time around.

We here at the S.C.R.I. (Scientific Cookie Research Institute) conducted a photographic analysis to determine the defensive capabilities of Anthony’s cookies.  (NB: We had set aside an archetypal chocolate chip cookie in the name of science, but upon the initiation of our experiment this evening we discovered to our horror that a research assistant (Burrito Justicia) had consumed this protected specimen earlier in the day. Fortunately we had a backup toffee cookie. Basic scientific research protocols are being reviewed by staff members at the institute.)

Sadly, stop-motion photography determined that Anthony’s cookies have no survival skills whatsoever and are easily consumed by a typical human within seconds:

High-speed 16-bit photography reveals the completely passive nature of the cookie while under attack.

The Institute encourages further scientific research by the public on this topic in the cookies’ native habitat on Valencia.

The hula girl was hooping while practically standing still. Amazing.  The boy failed miserably at first, but then figured it out (while using far more hip action).

Got several ovations from the suntanning Doloresos.

I love the torilla maker at La Palma.

I am sure he wakes up in the middle of the night screaming, “¿Cómo detener esta máquina loca?”

This could be a great plot device for a telenovela — a couple of unemployed hipster gringos go work in a tortilla factory.  Their carpal tunnel syndrome causes them to quickly fall behind and they start hiding tortillas in their hoodies. As they grow increasingly overwhelmed they start stuffing them in their mouths, but they realize they aren’t organic, so out of utter desperation they jam them into their Timbuktu bags.  However, there is a happy ending as their MacBooks keep the tortillas nice and warm on the way home.

24th St BART cement art, NE entrance. Click to enlarge.

BART stairs horizontal 360, aka if Escher designed a BART entrance…

I believe Ryan’s Queen-like falsetto is tightly correlated to his hair. That’s just the way things are done on the islands in the Straight of Georgia.

Seriously though, check out their two albums.  Looks like new one next year sometime.  Here’s to hoping they return before that, and are the main act next time they play Cafe Du Nord. I want MMM (More Mother Mother).

Sam Roberts was good, but let’s face it, he’s no Mother Mother.  Good lighting meant I got to play around with Panorama and QuadCamera.

Sam moves around stage a lot.

The timing worked out perfectly on this QuadCamera shot.

Animated GIFs after the break: