Category Archives: SNIPPETS
My next car window graphic
The coolest car window graphic I’ve ever seen. I saw it in the San Diego Zoo parking lot today.
I’m Zoey the Cool Cat,
and I approve this post.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Civil unioned, domestic partnered, common lawed, or married?
Long-time readers might remember that Jim and I met on May 26, 1994 (we do celebrate that day), moved in together on November 1, 1995, got domestic partnered in California on July 31, 2004, and got married in California on October 30, 2008.
Some people, mostly homophobic conservative religious republicans, might wonder why we got married when we were already domestic partnered. The reason is because they are different, especially when it comes to recognition by the public, “the public” being defined here as businesses.
A great example is what happened to me this morning. The car blew a 120A fuse yesterday, but if a 120A fuse blows, there’s something seriously wrong. Thus, the car had to go to Pep Boys to be checked out.
Meanwhile, I went to rent a car from Enterprise, which has a secret location about a mile from me. I have done lots of business with them over the years but this morning was totally different, unexpected, and pleasant.
As the Enterprise representative was confirming that none of my information has changed, he saw that I had a wedding ring on but that I didn’t have a traditional spouse listed as a reference or anything. He saw that Jim was listed and asked me who Jim was. I proudly said “He’s my husband.” The Enterprise rep asked me if I was “legally married” to Jim and I said, “Yes,” at which point he told me that Jim would automatically be listed as an alternate driver. When I said Jim wouldn’t be driving the car he said, “That’s okay. He’ll still be listed as an alternate driver in case there’s an emergency and you’re not able to drive.”
“Oh. That’s pretty nice. Thank you.”
He explained that Enterprise’s policy is to list spouses as alternative drivers, but spouses are still defined as “married” only and does not include domestic partnerships, civil unions, or even “common law marriages.”
So there you have it. Just one more reason why GLBTQ people want to get married. Not to mention it’s just easier to say — civil unioned, domestic partnered, common lawed, or married? Married, please.
Thank you to Minnesota, Delaware, and Rhode Island for being the most recent three states to pass marriage equality in the past couple of weeks.
Marriage equality laws currently exist in these places:
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Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Uruguay.
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United States: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Delaware, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
A little of this, some of that
I have such a backlog of blogging topics that I’m going to combine a few into this Snippets post.
First, here’s a 9-second flash video taken at the historic Santa Fe Depot in downtown San Diego at the very end of our train travels for National Train Day this past Saturday:
I’m presuming that the blue blinking light told the Amtrak engineer where to stop his train.
Notice that there is no sound in the video? Yahoooooooooooo! I bought Corel VideoStudio Pro X6 yesterday and the first thing I did was learn how to delete the audio. Next I’ll be learning how to insert my own audio.
Next, a recent La Mesa Patch had a story about KB Homes clearing out an 11-acre forest of 74 mature trees, many with nesting birds in them, in order to build a small subdivision of 31 homes, each home ranging in size from 3,106 square feet to 3,755 square feet. Plans indicate that 422 trees “of specimen size” are to planted. With 31 homes of 3,106 square feet or more, I just don’t see how 422 trees of any size can be planted there. Here are a couple of pictures of the development, to be called La Mesa Meadows. I think the “Meadows” part indicates that a meadow was destroyed to build the homes because there certainly won’t be any meadow there when they finish.
Next, I think I figured out how to upload videos to YouTube much faster than what I have been doing. My Canon 550D takes videos in the MOV file format. The blinking light video above was 45.8 MB in the MOV format, but after deleting the audio track and saving as an MP4 file, it was only 4.5 MB and took only a minute to upload to YouTube. I’m gettin’ the hang of this video stuff!
The following 10-second flash video is of arriving passengers at Los Angeles Union Station on National Train Day 2013. The MOV file was 53.8 MB; the MP4 file is 5.31 MB.
Many of the train stations for the Los Angeles Metro are attractions in and of themself. We couldn’t decide which station we liked the most, but I know I’ll be going back to L.A. many times just to ride the Metro and investigate all the stations. Here is a video I created of one of the Metro stations in Hollywood. I combined three flash videos into this one 23-second video:
Lastly, these short flash videos lend themselves quite nicely to something that is difficult to capture with pictures. Water fountains come to mind, especially tall water fountains. Thus, a 9-second flash video of a water fountain at one of the train stations:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Look! Up in the air! It’s a silk floss tree!
When I was a young boy, I was always tripping. Didn’t matter what I was walking on or what kind of shoes I had on, or no shoes. If I walked more than ten steps, I was going to trip. I had bruised knees, torn jeans (my wise old grandmother despised torn jeans), bloody elbows and hands….
My youngest uncle (still living at home and going to college) used to blame my tripping on my feet…. feet and tripping…. Hmmm. Logical…. He was reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” at the time, and one of the illustrations in the book was of Ichabod Crane, a tall, gangly man with huge feet. He took to calling me Ichabod Crane because of my tall (6’3″), skinny body (150 pounds), and my huge feet (size 11). What my uncle did to me might be considered verbal abuse in today’s world, but I survived.
My wise old grandmother blamed my tripping on me not looking at where I was going. She would always say, “Pick up your feet! Get your nose out of the air! Look down to see what you’re about to step on! It might be a rattlesnake!”
Alas, I have solved the tripping problem by picking up my feet and looking down to see what I was about to step on.
However, when I’m out and about, like at the Zoo or SeaWorld, I do like to look up often to see what’s above me, what’s sitting in the tree and about to poop on me. The fun part about doing that is that if you stand there long enough looking up, people will gather round you and look up, too. They don’t want to miss anything! If only I could train a bird to sit up there and wait until everyone is looking up and then, when I look down, let go….!
The other day I was at SeaWorld. I looked up and saw a huge (probably size 11) cotton ball hanging in the tree:
That’s a seed pod of the silk floss tree (Ceiba speciosa). I was quite familiar with the silk floss tree’s flowers but had never seen its seed pods, especially bursting open with cotton like that.
I stood there gazing upward and took a few more pictures of the seed pods in different stages of growth:
By the time I finished snapping my pictures, I had a crowd of about 15 or 20 people standing around me looking up to see what kind of animal (at SeaWorld!) was up in the tree that I was taking pictures of. One lady asked me and I told her, “Just the tree and the huge seed pods.” At that point, everyone left in disappointment. Folks, it’s okay to appreciate flora at a fauna park, or fauna at a botanical garden!
Here is the flower of the silk floss tree:
The flowers look similar to some orchids, and I have heard it called an orchid tree although I could find no sources that use that name. Maybe it’s just a San Diego thing.
The silk floss tree is native to South America. It is drought resistant (which explains why we have lots of them here in San Diego) but grows very rapidly, even in spurts, when water is plentiful. The trunk of the tree has huge (probably size 11) thorns on it which store water for those droughts:
At the entrance to the San Diego Zoo, just to the left of Flamingo Lagoon, is a huge (way bigger than size 11) silk floss tree that looks really strange during the winter when there are no leaves or flowers, just a tree full of seed pods, looking like this:
If you really want to have some fun with people and this tree, skip Flamingo Lagoon and go stand under this tree and look up. In the afternoon when the Zoo is really busy, you can get a hundred or more people standing around you looking up. It’s a lot of fun!
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
The end of my budding forgery career
A few days ago I commented on someone’s blog that I still had my stuffed dog that I got in 1966 or so.
Looks like this:
Back in 1968 or so, that stuffed dog had a zipper on its belly so one could take out the stuffing and actually wash the dog. Yours truly found a different use for it.
Long-time readers will remember that I was a juvenile delinquent when my wise old grandmother adopted me. She gave me love and discipline, and ultimately straightened me out. However, before she did….
All of the businesses in my hometown of Kingsville, Texas, had parcel post openings in the alley doors. I was just skinny enough to fit through most of them, including the one at the post office.
One night I slipped into the post office, rummaged through all the mailboxes, and stole lots of boxes of checks. I went around forging checks and cashing them at the stores. Ultimately I think I had something like $1,800. Remembering that my wise old grandmother had a savings account at the Missouri Pacific Railroad Credit Union, I went down to open a savings account. Since I was under age, it required my wise old grandmother’s signature. No problem. I simply forged it, opened my account, and deposited $1,800 in it. I hid the savings account booklet — you remember those, don’t you?! — in the tummy of my little stuffed dog.
Each month I would go down to the Credit Union and let them put the interest amount in my account booklet. I was watching my money grow. So proud…………
One night I was looking at my savings booklet and my uncle saw the light in my room, came in, and saw me with the savings booklet with $1,800+ in it. That was the end of my savings account, and that was the end of my little stuffed dog with the zipper in its tummy. My wise old grandmother made a complete new tummy, without a zipper, and turned me in to the authorities, which solved a lot of their open forgery cases.
Fortunately, when my dad died, some of the life insurance proceeds went to set up a trust account for the children to get them through college. The trustee just happened to be the Kleberg County judge, and he helped my wise old grandmother work through the system so that I wasn’t taken away and put into some juvenile detention facility somewhere. That’s when I learned that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
And my budding forgery career? Came to an end very quickly.
Before Zoey the Cool Cat would give her approval for this post, she thought that a cat should be in it so that the dog didn’t get all the glory. So here’s a flash video of Zoey the Cool Cat doing what she does best, looking very queenly in her favorite late afternoon/early evening spot:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Lean and mean
The menu on my blog was getting bulky, excessively bulky.
Now it’s lean and mean.
Although it initially looks like I’ve deleted twenty menu items, I have not.
They simply have been moved.
Now there are some submenu items.
For example, I created a menu item called “Mother and Father Nature” and under that are the submenu items Fauna, Flora, and Friday Flower Fiesta.
That’s it!
If your favorites seem to be missing, click on a menu item and you should find them as submenu items.
And now, since I cannot in good conscious have a post that is nothing but text (after all, this blog is Russel Ray Photos, not Russel Ray Text), I leave you with a couple of what I am now calling Flash Video, i.e., a video that is about ten seconds in length.
In the first one, watch how these two geese step over the curb:
In this second one, these two geese are unfazed by a jogger:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Pay close attention
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading someone’s blog and s/he was talking about these short six- to ten-second videos that were becoming popular.
Knowing that people have short attention spans, and knowing that Google pays money for popular videos (defined as lots of views), I thought to myself, “Self, you should see if you can have fun doing these short videos.”
Well, self has taken action.
It’s quite interesting and fun to try to create a 10-second video that is more than a 10-second piece of
On my afternoon walk I took eighteen of these short videos. I think the following, of a Canada Goose at Lake Murray Park, is the cutest. It’s a long flight from Canada (note that the Canada Goose actually is resident in all 50 U.S. states), so it has settled down for an afternoon nap.
Or has it?
Pay close attention!
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Thy name shall be Russell
A couple of weeks ago Google sent me an email informing me that they were holding money for me.
Phishing spam.
Nope.
They really were.
Back in November 2011 when I set up my YouTube account, I monetized my videos. What that means is that if you watch one of my videos, after a few seconds you’ll see an advertisement. They always irritated me, but I always just clicked on the X to close the advertisement.
What I never could understand is why Apple, or IBM, or General Electric, or any of the Big Boys would monetize their videos.
Now I understand.
I don’t have a lot of videos on YouTube but the amount of money that had been collecting in my account since November 2011 certainly encourages me to upload a lot more videos.
Now I also understand why the Big Boys surf YouTube looking for stuff of theirs that has been used illicitly. It’s called copyright infringement, and if it’s sufficiently valuable, and popular, and it’s been monetized by the illicit uploader, it can pull in a lot of money!
I won’t tell you how much Google is sending me, but it will buy a few gallons of gasoline to get me to the store to buy lots and lots of cans of cat food for Zoey the Cool Cat, after which I will be able to stop by On The Border for about a dozen weeks and have nice Mexican fiestas accompanied by Grandé Raspberry Swirl margaritas. I might even be able to buy a new car. Well, maybe not. But it’s a nice windfall!
My most popular video has 118,551 views. With what I’ve told you, imagine if a monetized video gets, say, a million views! We’re talking rich!
Don’t be surprised if you see a lot more videos on my blog, beginning today.
Following is a short video of a steam tractor from the 1890s plugging along at the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum in Vista. Notice its name!
I have always loved complicated machinery and the Museum has so much equipment in working order and traversing around their 55 acres of land, including a garden railroad for the young’uns to ride and a model railroad exhibit.
The annual Antique Engine & Tractor show is coming up soon, June 15, 16, 22, & 23. Except for working railroad museums, the Antique Gas & Steam Engine Museum has to be one of my favorites, definitely my favorite non-railroad museum. Head on out with the family and have some fun!
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Michael Jordan, spam emails, orchids, and ice plant
Let’s get several things out of the way with this one SNIPPETS post.
First, happy birthday to Michael Jordan, 50 years old today, and the 22nd best player of all time, behind a couple of Boston Celtics: Danny Ainge, Ray Allen, Tiny Archibald, Larry Bird, Bob Cousy, Dave Cowens, Kevin Garnett, John Havlicek, Tommy Heinsohn, Dennis Johnson, K. C. Jones, Sam Jones, Cedric Maxwell, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, Bill Russell, Paul Silas, Bill Walton, and Jo Jo White. Alright, so I’m a little biased.
Second, one day in mid-January, I got over 500 emails of which more than half were spam emails. I decided to start an experiment to see if the unsubscribe, opt out, and report spam links on those emails did any good. I started unsubscribing, opting out, and reporting spam emails as, well, spam. Last night, I had just four spam emails when I went to take a catnap with 
Zoey the Cool Cat. At 6:00 this morning, when I checked emails, I had not a single spam email. Zip, zero, nada! I’m thinking that these unsubscribe, opt out, and report spam links actually do work. Interestingly, we live in a world of instant gratification but after clicking on many of the unsubscribe and opt out links, I was told of my success in unsubscribing and opting out but that it could take “up to 10 days.” Wow. And to think our computers are more powerful than the computers that put man on the moon back in 1969. Ten days is the best they can do?
Third, if you are in the San Diego area, now is the time to head on down to Balboa Park and check out the Botanic Building. It is full of orchids. I’ll be there this afternoon taking billions and billions and billions of pictures.
Lastly, although the East County mountains are supposed to get snow on Tuesday down to 2,000 feet, spring is springing throughout most of San Diego. The ice plants on the freeways are starting to put on their displays which should last from now through mid-May. The deep purple ones are at their peak from now to early March:
The pink ones will be blooming in April and May. This is a picture from last year:
I don’t know where “ice plant” got its name, but here in San Diego they are used along freeways and on steep hillsides. The plant is full of water yet surprisingly requires little water to grow and look beautiful. Planting ice plant, then, is a great way to protect one’s home from wildfires; when the fire reaches the ice plant, it goes no farther. Their tangled mass of roots are also good at holding together steep hillsides, especially during our four-week rainy season. Here are a few more pictures of houses using ice plants as fire defense, hillside holder-together, and sheer beauty:
The pink and purple ice plants are the most popular, or perhaps the most common. There are also orange, yellow, and white ice plants, but they are rare, especially plants en masse.
Ice plants are everywhere this time of year. Take a drive and you’ll see them. However, two of the best places to see masses of the pink ice plant in a month or so are State Highway 125 from Grossmont College to State Highway 52, and Interstate 5 at Cannon Road in Carlsbad.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
I got hammered on Valentine’s Day
We might have to define “hammered” because I’m pretty sure you and I are thinking different things. Remember that I’m way past my college days, so I don’t get hammered in the traditional sense.
Rather, my WordPress blog got hammered yesterday by the search engines. By 7:00 a.m. yesterday, my blog had 649 views. That would put it well on its way to over a thousand for the day if things kept going linearly. By the end of the day it had 1,583 views, 1,460 from the United States.
I didn’t just get real popular all of a sudden. Rather, certain pictures and phrases got popular with the search engines. The phrases was “Mexican family crossing sign” and here’s the picture that got indexed on the first page of Google images for that phrase:
As you can see from the following screen shots of my WordPress statistics, the search engines were having a field day yesterday hammering me:
It’s always fun to get on the first page of Google, and there are two ways to do that: (1) Pay Google to put you there, or (2) Do it yourself, what is called “organic” placement.
The best organic tactic is to blog. The more you blog, the more chances you have to get up there. Google, and the other search engines as well, love fresh content, especially daily.
If you haven’t noticed yet, I do at least one blog each day. My purpose is to get things near the top of Google searches, such as Jim’s real estate pages and my home inspector pages; see the links at the bottom of each blog post here.
My theory, although not actually mine, is that photographs are very popular, much more popular than home inspections or real estate. So I use this photography blog to provide valuable links to the two blogs/web sites that pay my bills.
If you need help in getting your blog or website to the top of Google, I recommend reading the blog of Nestor and Katerina Gasset. They are in real estate, and if there is a group of people who really need to understand Google’s algorithms for search placement, it’s Realtors. Check them out, and if you choose to leave a comment, make sure you tell them that Russel Ray sent you their way.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
