Bumble Bee

I could post bees all week but it only means I'm not seeing butterflies other than cabbage whites.

Technorati Tags: bee, bumble bee

My RR photos

My Round Robin entry is posted here. Wanted to blog the single shots as I made a collage of all three. The lunar photo was the first time using my teleconverter on the moon.

Technorati Tags: photos

My Blogs According to Wordle

Neat, neat, neat. Wordle generates "word clouds" but unlike other tag cloud generators you have artistic control over the results. Pretty pictures with typography! Via-Steve Garfield.

Here are the wordles for my blogs.

(sometimes)blog


(sometimes)photoblog


My del.icio.us bookmarks


Wordle needs a page with an atom or rss feed so static pages won't work. I tried to make a wordle of my flickr tags but there is no feed on the flickr tag page. I oughta be able to get around that with a little time and copy and paste. I'd like a wordle of my flickr tags.

Technorati Tags: wordle, blogging, clouds, fun

McCain Hates Bloggers

Thanks McCain, really, thanks. I'll just add this little incident to my list of reasons of why I'm not voting for you.

1. You are too old. You best shot at the White House was in 2000.
   
2. You have no Iraq plan other than the one we are currently following.
   
3. You are weak on space science technology policy.
   
4. You list education last on your issues website.
   
5. You hate Bloggers.
   

I have other reasons as well but no need to list them all tonight.

Technorati Tags: McCain

New Monday Photo Shoot #27: Strange and Silly Signs

New Monday Photo Shoot #27: Show us a sign that's unusual in some way - even if you have to fake it!

From my recent wanderings. The bridges here are intense driving experiences. The term "one lane" is descriptive but the reality is it's a game of chicken while driving over water! Close passing with compact cars and thankfully I've not met anything large on a one lane bridge, yet.

Signs are a favorite subject of mine. One of my favorites from Houston is this one.

I've lots more signs on flickr. Check'm out.

Technorati Tags: meme, monday photo shoot, silly signs

Weekend Assignment #222: Phone Me

Weekend Assignment #222: What do you use a phone for? Do you strictly use it to make calls and pick up messages, or do you take advantage of other technology bundled with phones these days? Which features do you use all the time, which others would you use if they were available and cheap, and which would you not bother with even it they were free?

Meet my Motorola RAZR V3m! It's the replacement for my Sprint phone I had in Houston. Verizon rules the roost up here and I get good reception with them. Pretty much a phone. Has a nice camera too. I've a few great shots from it as well although I've yet to put them online. Good web capabilities but I really don't use that much. When I do, it's news and MLB.com. Not super happy with the app offerings from Verizon. The phone is BREW and I can't even read a e-book with Verizon's app offerings.

Now where the phone excels is the 1gb memory card. About once a week I'll swap in new movies, cartoons or shows to watch. Music too. I have earphones. I pretty much program my own entertainment rather than download it through the phone. Cheaper and I get exactly what I want.

Good screen for radar checking when the weather is changing. The battery life is longer than I expected. The web seems to use the most juice rather than watching a show or making calls. I'm pretty happy with the phone.

Extra Credit: Landline? What's that?

Technorati Tags: cell phones, weekend assignment

Whew - It's Almost Done!

In a marathon CSS and graphics session Steven nearly finished tweaking his blogs to perfection. Yay! My photoblog is looking much better and more colorful. This blog here is taking shape with a double-wide sidebar and fresh graphics. Still much to be done but I'm at good pause point.

Here I need to finish out the sidebar. I have three sidebars, one for each display state. The main sidebar, the single entry sidebar and the archive sidebar. Updated all the graphics so no I just need to figure out what additional content I can place into one of more of the sidebars. The single entry sidebar is most complete. Of course numerous padding and margin tweaks await me. I still cringe at what Blogger does with it's main post widget.

My photoblog has one issue and that's how (what's the best way) to add a margin around the text portion of the entry. I've dropped the tag display and successfully masked (cross browser) an annoying search box. The search box was useful but it was horribly placed in the wordpress template. Kept throwing off my other widgets at the base of my photoblog. Wordpress.com is interesting but there are annoyances. Since I don't plan on buying hosting I'm stuck with the less flexible wordpress for now.

I should be able to wrap up my remaining design tweaks tomorrow. A blog design is never done just put off for another day!

Technorati Tags: wordpress, blogger, css update

Stick a Fork in it - It's Done

I decided to make a few photographs after reading the critical examination of the Media Bloggers Association on Making Light. Two more horizontal photos on my flickr.

Read the piece and comments on Making Light as it's train wreck but an informative one. My own thought on the Media Blogger's Association is that the organization is little more than name alone. So that's what I went with for my photos!

I had intended to get more of long shadow this evening but I ended up with my short shadow afternoon test shots. I thought I had a white poster board for a long shadow but I could not find it.

Getting the fork to stand upright was the trick. Cork board is too dense so I went with a completely dry sponge under the printed paper. Forcing the fork through the paper created some crinkle issues so I poked the holes in the paper with an ice pick and then pushed the fork through into the sponge. Looks pretty clean that way.

A shiny upright fork and a crisp shadow. My only regret is that the logo I printed out was a little rough from up sizing. Not only was this easy, it came together quickly too.

I call it phoblography - The act of making photos about blog posts. Good fun.

Technorati Tags: photo, phoblography

Yawn Cat Image 9 of 27179

Hooray! Pickle cat's yawning gape is number 9 of 27,179 images on Yahoo image search.

Really.

Technorati Tags: amusement

Water Lily Sunday

IMG_3163 copy, originally uploaded by Steven2005.

Great day with the camera! On the other blog I've another photo of a water lily with dragonfly as well as links to more on flickr. Quick update here tonight as I'm beat from the day. Tons of butterfly photos today, the water lilies were just a bonus.

Have a great week ahead!

Happy Paraskavedekatriaphobia Day!

Really.

An irrational fear of the day of friday 13th.Even though it's a phobia most people describe it as a superstition.This afliction is also commonly reffered to as friggatriskaidekaphobia.

Technorati Tags: amusement

Yay! Something that Bites!

IMG_2671 copy, originally uploaded by Steven2005.

Other than ticks... Every time one of these starts feeding on me I think, "OK, it's not a mosquito." Then I try to photograph it. Several types too! Oh, yeah - Blood Sucking Flys!

Wow - Creationist Marketing

"Creative Marketing" just got religion with regard to creationists tactics.

Judge Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled last week that use of portions of the song “Imagine” in the film “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed” were protected as fair use.

What caught my attention was this gem:

Defendants obtained permission to include every song in the movie except Imagine. Defendants timed the films release to coincide with state “Academic Freedom” bills (which permit teachers to criticize the theory of evolution.)
via - Internet Cases

I wondered what the recent flurry of anti-evolution legislation was all about. It's been steady but the number of attempts seemed to be on rise from my followings of the pharyngula and Bad Astronomy blogs. I thought it was just far right republicans sensing their window of opportunity was closing but it was all a vain attempt to market a film.

So the film makers deliberately left themselves open to a lawsuit so they could garner legal publicity for a film which supported pending legislation which in turn excuses them from seeking proper permission to use copyrighted works?

Good thing I own a cat as I'm no stranger to watching a critter spin in tight circles for it's own amusement. If it were not such a frightening spin, I'd call it marketing genius. Dizzying.

Technorati Tags: marketing, creationists, expelled, musing

Sunday - Sunday

(continued) I felt the heat today. When I got to Longwood I went right to the spot in the Meadow I though would be best for butterflies and I was right! This is some kinda fritillary butterfly. Not too shy but not a butterfly that lingers long either. I was hard pressed to get each shot of this type.

A great weekend with the camera. Lots of shots but I've made good progress processing them this afternoon. I'm using Photoshop Elements 6 now instead of GIMP. Starting to develop a workflow. Not super happy with my color corrections from today. It was so bright today.

I'm really happy with the photo editing program of PSE 6 but the photo organizer leaves me a bit cold. I had no trouble with the organizer yesterday but this evening I fought it. I saved my edited images from today's shoot to native photoshop file format (PSD) with the intent of converting them to jpgs to upload later on. I had devil of a time getting organizer to see the photos I'd converted and then saved to a new location. Odd and then it failed to upload some images to Flickr. I'll give organizer another shot but given what I went through this evening I may stick with Canon's Zoombrowser for photo organization.

The heat really caught up to me today and I'm feeling it this evening. Best call it an early night.

Have a great week ahead!

Technorati Tags: update, sunday, pse6