I had a conference call at 3 PM today. It was hard to explain to the men on the other end of the call why gunshots kept drowning out our conversation.

You see, Mr Affleck and Ms. Lively have decided that Commercial and Foster Streets are the perfect place to film the action scenes for their upcoming movie, The Town.

So, as repayment, I took this expended blank (you can tell it's a blank by the creases at the top) 5.56 mm casing that I found on Foster Street. (I was going to steal a bag of pretzels from the snack table on the set, but I got dirty looks from key grips or gaffers or whatever they're called when I got too close.)

A few weeks ago, my neighbors, JT & Pat, and I were sharing a cocktail on the front stoop when we noticed this American Beauty parked out front:

Beautiful. We were even more exited when the owner (with a mysterious Boston accent regardless of the Florida tags) came out to move it. Here are Stephanie and Pat with the owner and his girlfriend:

And I couldn't leave out this one of Pat posing with the car. Lookin good Pat.

Here's the Full gallery. This thing gives customized a new meaning. A lot of TLC. What a beauty. Oh, and note that it has a 'club' on the steering wheel.

Years ago, before google maps, the in thing for cities to do was hire an artist to draw extremely detailed maps of your town. The Library of Congress has a great collection of these from Boston.

In the image above, you can clearly see depictions of buildings that must have once sat on the mysterious foundations I have in my backyard:

The images are absolutely amazing. They're GIGANTIC (this one was over 12,000 pixels wide) and incredibly detailed. I've pointed out some of the highlights in this image:

Here's a view of the same area today:

Below are the scaled full map with the detail highlighted and another view of the highlight (click to enlarge and then click on the expand icon in the lower right for the full effect). Or click here for a very large version (3.5MB).

Update. Even better. You can zoom in and out of the image in all of it's full scale, full resolution awsomeness here:

And here's one from 1905. Just six years later. The changes are so dramatic. Especially downtown.

Ever since I read about them, I've been obsessed with trying to create HDR photos - even though I don't really have the proper equipment to do it nor the photography expertise.

HDR images merge the data from two or more photos taken at different exposures to bring out crazy detail and contrast in both the foreground and background - especially when there is a bright background.

The problem I have is stabilizing the camera for all three shots and finding subjects that don't move so that all the images line up at the end.

Anyway, here are a couple I that turned out ok. The first three images are the originals, followed by the merged HDR (twice).

The first set is the sun coming up looking over the Boston Harbor (at East Boston/Chelsea) outside my front door; the second is the crazy pink building viewed from my "back yard".

This little guy showed up the other day. I named him Dominic. Since then I have spent the majority of my spare time watching opossum informational videos on YouTube. I have discovered the following:

• Opossums are very clean - cleaner than raccoons and other varmints
• Their internal body temperature is too low for them to carry rabies
• They eat the food that would normally support the rats that live in the north end
• They only live for 2 1/2 years
• They are the only marsupial that lives in North America
• And the way they waddle around in wicked cute

He comes around almost every day at about 6 o'clock or so. Sweet!

This is how I roll

Created by taking over 200 screen captures from Google Maps and importing them into Flash.

The original looks much better. I had trouble with the frame-rate on YouTube. It seems to miss every third screen capture or so.

Kinda cool. Looks like the Google photo-car drove by sometime in the summer of '06. St. Aggripinna Festival is gearing up and Martignetti's is still there (it's gross storefronts now).