Fairweather Zealot

Last weekend started early for me, as our company has ‘summer hours’ – meaning that assuming you put in your time, you get out of the office at 3 p.m. on Fridays between Memorial and Labor days. I happen to think it’s a great idea, and enthusiastically try to support it. I say ‘try’ because I’ve yet to actually leave at 3 – my record, so far, is 3:30 because I’m a sucker and things come up at 2:55 all the time.

When I got home, I really needed to get out and take some pictures. I’d been fairly cooped up all week at work, and needed some outside time. Shari wasn’t feeling well, so I ran out to some local ponds in search of dragonflies. The hunt wasn’t entirely successful as most of the local ponds had little more than Common Whitetails running around, although I did see some cool damselflies, including my first Citrine Forktail.

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Common Green Darner – female
Anax junius

Ever since I saw my first one of these huge dragonfly beauties (they measure about 3"/80mm in length), I’ve been trying to get a good shot. The closest I’ve had before this was a flight shot, which you couldn’t really tell what it was. It turns out that the reason is that they rarely perch at all, and their flight speeds reach upward of 55mph (about 85kph). No wonder they’re hard to get in flight.
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After working until 1 a.m. Friday night and then again Saturday from about 10:45 a.m. until nearly 3:30, I needed a break. I really wanted to get out birding, but it was a little late for that. We did have a bunch of nice birds in the yard, but it wasn’t until I went over to our rosebush to look for aphids that I started seeing a them and a bunch of other cool things. Continue reading

On our last day in Texas, we were a little bummed – the trip had been just too short. But we had planned it that way – I was still new at my job, so taking a lot of vacation wasn’t a great idea, and we wanted to skimp and save on costs where we could. In retrospect, both seemed short-sighted, LOL. Continue reading

We are having a small art exhibit at work, and I am submitting a few pictures to be displayed. I can have two pictures and I know that I am going to use my shot of the Amur Leopard as my first, but I’m trying to figure out what the second should be. Alternately, I could print smaller versions and combine them into an 8×10 collage. Continue reading

Red-Tailed Hawk
Buteo jamaicensis

Today, Shari and I took the dogs out to celebrate our being together for 6 years and well, because it was a beautiful day. Our trip to Tinicum was well-rewarded, because at the very beginning of the trail, two red-tailed hawks were perched within 20′ of the trail. Continue reading

A good weekend This weekend was pretty fun and mostly relaxing, despite the fact that I spent most of Saturday working. But it was for a good cause – my wife. She’s the admin of a photographer’s group on Flickr, and they wanted to put up a complimentary blog to go with the Flickr group itself. So, my wife was tasked with getting the blog up – which meant that I was tasked with helping her do it, ’cause I’m a nice guy and all. Anyway, she is very technically savvy and could have figured it out on her own, but she really didn’t have the time to figure out the a)content, b)new domain management software (from GoDaddy.com), c)WordPress interface, d) CSS AND e) PHP all this weekend. So, I offered/agreed to help her do it. All in all, it wasn’t so bad once we got through a few technical glitches:

1. GoDaddy.com getting the domain name wrong
2. GoDaddy.com setting it up on a Windows Server (not so good with WordPress)
3. GoDaddy.com actually turning on the MySQL database on the Linux server installation
4. Figuring out that the theme they wanted to use wasn’t compatible with WordPress 2.1 (unfortunately, the last update on the theme was before 2.1 “Ella” was released)
5. Determining that the previous one didn’t matter because the server they had wasn’t either
6. Installing WordPress 2.0.1 straight from their Toolbox utility

Once we had all of that squared away, it was just a matter of educating Shari on the differences between the POST categories and the LINK categories so that she could figure out how she wanted to have her content placed and to work. Once she determined that, I put in all of her categories, made the changes to the code to make sure that they displayed the way she wanted (the theme actually removed most of the ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality of WordPress for stylistic purposes, making the settings in Link Categories moot), added a few widgets, installed some much-needed plugins (including the all-important Spam Karma 2). She reviewed it and then I went to work in fixing some of the CSS stuff (clean code but not the most usable in my opinion – lots of px sizes, some places it could be condensed, added some CSS here and there, played with the images a bit and finally got it up and running by about 10p.m. All told, about 12 hours of work to make sure that everything worked the way that she wanted, making changes to fit her vision, etc. But in the end, she was very happy and I wasn’t feeling too shabby, either. Of course, I didn’t get as much done on the updates I wanted to do to my site, but c’est la vie. On Sunday, my reward was not having to work at all. Instead we went to Tinicum and FDR Park in Philly to go birding and do some photography. Well, Tinicum was more about the dogs getting out after a week of doing very little, but we still saw a couple cool things, including this heron . It was great to get out and get some exercise, let the dogs wander and run and frolic and burn off a lot of pent-up energy.

But it was FDR Park that was a lot more fun for us/me. I knew that we would have a lot of waterfowl there, and was hoping that I might get a shot at some of the more uncommon ones. I hadn’t, however, expected that the only open water on the pond to be right where we were going to be standing, bringing in a lot of species that we rarely or never get to see within only a short distance. Besides the boring Canada Geese (unfortunately, we didn’t find the supposed Cackling Geese in the flock), here are the highlights (click on the an lightbox icon () to see a larger image from the trip).

• Gadwall – my first really good look at this species; they are a lot more attractive than the book shows.
• Ring-necked Ducks – the best views I’ve gotten of the species.
• Redhead – my first sighting of this new addition to my lifelist.
• Ruddy Ducks – best view of them yet.
• American Wigeon – again, the closest I’ve ever been to them.
• Bufflehead – ditto.
• Greater Scaup – the first time I’ve seen a female, and by far my best view of the males.
• Mute swans
• Domestic goose – biggun’, too
• American Coots
• Mallards – which strangely, I never had any decent shots of the male before this.

Silly Stuff

• Farmer poisons eagles, an owl and a fox. – Total fine/prison possibility: $920,000 and 9 years in prison. But I’d be fine with him only serving 5 years and $100,000 to prove the point.
• Bad Usability Calendar 2007 – New and Improved – Now with AJAX!

Great Blue Heron
Ardea herodias

He just looked so … disappointed at what he found at Tinicum. Another birder mentioned that their local blue heron was found dead this morning. As frozen over as the lake was, I hope that this guy is finding some food.

Maybe I’ll stop by the fish market to throw him out some morsels…

See it on Flickr

It’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to get out and take any pictures. The weeks have been full, and the weekends have been pretty ucky – and when they weren’t we had things we had to do which meant that I still couldn’t get out to take pictures. So, finally, this weekend we were able to get down to Barnegat and Forsythe NWR and do some birding/photography. Continue reading

I just got this from the nice folks at the Calgary Zoo. They had asked if they could use my image from the Philly Zoo on one of their signs, which I of course agreed to. Here was the final product, on display now (as far as I know).

You can see the original image, which you’ll notice was flipped for use on the sign. Oh well, next time I’ll have to get both side profiles.