Brad Kelly photographs a pink explosion in Somerville.

Copyright Brad Kelly. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

Our newest candidate for mayor is John Laing of Hyde Park, who quickly found his newest supporter in Mister Malcolm the Dorchester Dancer.

Ed. note: If Laing wins, he will not only be Boston's first black mayor, he will be the first mayor to have graduated Brandeis.

A somewhat stationary yet still roving UHub photographer noticed T workers dealing with a couple of Red Line cars that slipped off the rails in the Cabot yard around lunchtime:

All these T workers have just been standing around for the past 90 minutes while one guy saws away on something between the 2 cars. Do they think they're going to pick it up?

A T spokesman said the workers know what they're doing and figured out how to get the cars back on the tracks. He added that because the two cars were in the yard, they were not carrying any passengers and did not delay any service.

The mayor's office announced today city government will be moving from its current legacy applications - such as Microsoft Exchange and Outlook - to Google Apps.

In addition to making legally required e-mail retention easier, the move will save money and free city MIS from the task of maintaining creaky legacy applications, by handing the thing over to Google:

"By bringing city government into the cloud, Boston continues to modernize our technology while saving taxpayer dollars and freeing up city workers to focus on the vital work of helping people. Our technology experts will now be able to focus on moving the city forward, rather than maintaining servers," Mayor Menino said. "I applaud the vision of our technology leadership and the efforts of all those involved in this process."

In addition to Gmail, the move, expected to happen this summer, will give city workers access to Google Hangout, Google Docs and Google Drive. The city has hired San Francisco-based Appirio to manage the transition and to oversee ongoing support and security for the new system.

The city claims 75,000 e-mail users, although roughly 57,000 of those are Boston public-school students who have addresses on city systems.

Just another morning on Memorial Drive, Adam Shutes reports.

The Jamaica Plain Gazette reports on a gathering of nine mayoral candidates at a forum sponsored by the West Roxbury Courthouse Neighborhood Association.

The candidates were mostly non-specific in their answers regarding plans for improving the city, sticking to generalities like "bringing people together," "broadening opportunities" and "improving schools," though Arroyo brought up his proposed "Invest in Boston" bill, which would invest Boston’s money in banks that invest in Boston to help promote economic development.

Maybe they were right.

Ars Technica explains the current state of the technology:

Despite advances in the technology, systems are only as good as the data they're given to work with. Real life isn't like anything you may have seen on NCIS or Hawaii Five-0. Simply put, facial recognition isn't an instantaneous, magical process. Video from a gas station surveillance camera or a police CCTV camera on some lamppost cannot suddenly be turned into a high-resolution image of a suspect's face that can then be thrown against a drivers' license photo database to spit out an instant match.

Not yet.

Via Howard Castro.

The view from inside 1010 Mass. Ave.

One floor of the city office building at 1010 Massachusetts Ave. was evacuated this afternoon after a worker in the Fire Prevention office opened an envelope "containing a powder substance," the Boston Fire Department reports.

Workers on other floors of the six-story building were told to stay in their offices after the 1 p.m. incident. Mass. Ave. in front of the building was shut down.

The building houses a number of city departments, including Inspectional Services, the Boston Public Health Commission and the Parks and Recreation Department.

Boston Police are being brought into the investigation.