Dave’s Photo Blog

I had to get out of the house today with the kids. Even though it was threatening rain, we decided to take a walk in the woods. We often go to the Middlesex Fells Reservation and today we decided to walk around Wright’s Pond in Medford. This is a great little jewel of a pond hidden behind Elm Street near the Malden/Stoneham line. The road noise from Route 93 is a little loud in the fall and winter, but we still really enjoyed ourselves. Best of all, we ran into this little guy - an Eastern Painted Turtle. It was clearly used to people as we got up and close to it.

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How do you replace one railroad tie?

I mean, I knew this was going to happen because I’ve written about it before. But I have to admit, I didn’t expect them to just replace one tie in the middle of the track. I went to the West Medford commuter rail station last week with Alex a few times and I just had to scratch my head at this.

How do you replace one railroad tie?

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My most devoted readers know that I’ve spent over four years covering the sign in front of the New England Baptist Church. Since I’ve moved the web site around, that content is harder to get at. I’ve moved all the posts so that the permalinks work, but I don’t have the content imported here yet. This is, in fact, the 19th time I’ve written about the church. I first became interested back during the Democratic National Convention in 2004 when they posted a very similar message to the one above about John Kerry.

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And here we are. Just a few days after dumping on CNN for a poorly written headline, we have here ABC news exposed. This appeared on my mobile phone this morning. I understand that the folks who write the headlines are not those that write the articles, generally. I also can understand playing around with a headline to convey something catchy that still represents the article. In this case, there was some confusion about what Obama did, but whoever prepped this headline needs to learn a bit more about their publishing system. It’s embarrasing.

So what is it ABC? Was it a revision, a tweak or what? The article didn’t really clarify it for me. (snicker).

I was reading the headlines on my phone this evening when I came across this gem. The headline was Analysts: Powell endorsement more a rejection of GOP, McCain. Thinking that would be an interesting read, I checked it out. Can you guess what the first sentence was?

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 There’s this one building in downtown Boston that catches the light at sunset just so. Late this afternoon, I was driving around looking for a view so I could take some pictures. The clouds were looking interesting and I thought I might get a good sunset. The sunset turned out to be ho-hum, but I did manage to snag some nice shots of it lighting up this building.

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The results of the 2008 MCAS tests for the Thompson School have been reviewed with parents several times. At the start of the school year, principal Sherri Donovan discussed them in an orientation meeting. There have also been letters sent home to the parents from both principal Donovan and Interim Superintendent Kathleen Bodie. However, the information in those letters has been slightly different. Like many parents, I’ve looked up the data independently. Here it is.

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The Thompson Elementary School, in east Arlington, is one of two elementary schools that have not been rebuilt as part of Arlington’s school rebuilding project. Equally concerning, the school has now been designated for improvement under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act based on the 2008 MCAS data.

This is an important local story and one that I will be following very closely over the coming months for a very simple reason. My daughter attends the school and my son will as well when he gets to that age. Read more »

Yesterday I ran out to the store after dark and I noticed a house right near Mass Avenue in the Lake Street area of Arlington with a fantastic Halloween display. It was late, so I resolved to come back at dusk when the light would be better for some scary photographs. And I got them. And here they are.

These are much scarier in black and white than in color, but I’ve put a color nightscape in at the end so you can get a feel for what that looks like too.

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I get a lot of SPAM. I know, I know, everyone does, you say. But I own and host a few domains and that tends to make it worse. Today, I received an e-mail that stood out from the usual SPAM. You may get it too and while reading it is not a problem, you should absolutely not run the attached program.

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