American in Spain

For whatever reason, cramped space, climate change, low rainfall (aka. negligent watering), etc., the cactus is flowering late this year. In anticipation of the flowers, I took my photography up to the next level by purchasing a real professional tripod. One of the problems I saw in the Cactus Cam videos from 2007 was that, since the cactus was outside, the wind and varying sunlight made the video flicker and jump like the early days of cinema. I want to show smooth growth and flower blooming. With this in mind, I moved the cactus indoors, right inside the window ledge he’s used to occupying, and set up the tripod with my expensive DSLR trained on our prickly subject. This is a huge improvement over the 320×240 resolution my 7-year-old webcam was giving us last year.
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It’s not much, but over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed several visitors coming to my blog, particularly from Germany and Austria, searching for things like “What does ‘a por ellos‘ mean?” and “What does ‘podemos‘ mean?” The answers to those questions are, indeed, here on my blog, here and here respectively. These two phrases that people are searching for are the two main Spanish soccer chants. Obviously the Spanish soccer team got some attention lately, particularly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It’s just neat when current events affect my traffic. I’m already starting to get hits for next week’s San Fermin festival.
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Not even humor is safe from analysis by those pesky evolutionary biologists. Apparently sarcasm is an evolutionary survival skill. Well that explains a lot!

It’s easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.

- Meredith F. Small

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Those of you that follow my blog regularly know that I have somewhat of a fascination with timelapse videos and that I live in a town with a huge tidal basin that fills and empties with water twice a day in one of the locations on Earth with the largest difference between low and high tide. So naturally I’ve been dying to somehow make a timelapse video of the changing tides.

Unfortunately, the only way I have to make a timelapse video without having a computer plugged in is to fake it by taking a regular speed video and speeding it up later. And my camera will only take videos up to 67 minutes long for some reason. This resulted in a 1.86 GiB movie file, which, when converted to DV format to use in iMovie was well over 17 GiB. Yikes!
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On Saturday, Marga and her mother went to Bilbao to shop for dresses for cousin Andoni’s upcoming September wedding. I was specifically not invited, much to my delight. It was a beautiful day, so I took several long walks around town. In the evening, I went out to the little lighthouse, where I had been the day before, to take some photographs and sit and read. I took some wonderful panorama photos of the port and the tidal basin around it, as well as a cool timelapse video that I will share in my next post.
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