Dawn and I were going to buy a LCD together for Christmas this year, but Tom surprised us with one when I was visiting in Atlanta. That led to quite a bit of deliberation about what to buy each other for Christmas and our birthdays. (Dawn's birthday is also in January.)

What to buy, what to buy...? When Dawn and I go shooting, we always feel like we'd like to have an extra pistol. To be fair, Dawn has many extra pistols including a .38 Special that makes quite a bang when we fire it. But we don't (or didn't) have a 2nd .22 target pistol. Usually we alternate between Dawn's rifle, a Clark custom 10/22 Ruger, and her Ruger .22 Mark II pistol. But then we're in separate rooms and end up renting something if we want to bring Carly along for example.

Well, I've had my eye on a Browning Buck Mark ever since I shot one up in Atlanta with Tom. I liked the feel a little better than the Mark II, though the Mark II is an absolute pleasure to shoot. But did we want a 2nd Mark II?

The don't make the Mark II anymore. Now you're looking a Mark III unless you want something used. Dawn and I spent a LOT of time at the store holding different Brownings and Rugers trying to decide what we preferred. The Mark III feels different than the Mark II, though there is a variant that is very similar. ( And there are plenty of variants of the Buck Mark as well.)

But to make a long store short, this is my new (and first) gun.

I was going to get the variant with a wooden handle and with a fiber optic site (the same that I shot in Atlanta), but when I held this lighter composite model with rubberized grip, it was beside myself. The gun is just wonderful to hold, and this is what Dawn bought for my Christmas/birthday present. ("Thank you Dawn!")

We had such a hard time though deciding between this gun and the other variation, that Dawn decided she wanted the other for herself. We'd been talking about the idea of matching guns for Christmas, but this opportunity for an impulse "coordinating guns" purchase was too much for her to pass up.

Her gun does not have the scope as shown above, but it is the only photo I could find. I absolutely love both of these guns in their own way. Dawn just walked in and said she's going put the rubberized grip on hers as well, which makes me a little sad because the wood really gives this gun a lot of character. But there is no doubt that the rubber grips feel really nice. Her's has the fiber optic site, and is about a pound heavier than mine.

The second Buck ark is not what I bought for her present, however. She decided it was time to own a .9mm gun. Dawn is a Ruger girl and so is now a proud owner of the Ruger P95.


We can't actually get the guns until next week because of the 3-day waiting period, and that is just driving us insane.

We're going to wait until later in the year to buy some targeting scopes for the Buck Marks. We don't want to go overboard on our shopping! But I can't wait to try them out.

Tom and I were on a crazy puzzle-game rampage this Christmas week, so I thought I'd blog a little about Luminosity. I don't remember how I stumbled across this site, but I've had a lot of fun with it last year. And I notice that when I was play through all the games on a regular basis, I'm more productive in general, and my mood is better overall.

I should clarify by saying I'm more productive when I don't pull an all-nighter trying to get to the next level on some game, like I did with the final level "Bird Watching". And Tom apparently blew several hours trying to improve his speed scores yesterday when he should have been working!

It's very addictive. In fact, I find it as enjoyable as playing Warcraft in a way. Tom thinks it's because the quick reward system is similar, and I agree. Although, this is also much more fulfilling. (Unless you're running a large guild for leadership experience.)

Beyond the instant gratification though, Tom and I are very competitive. And now he's trying to catch up to some of my scores!

I've read that a score over 1600 BPI puts you in the 99.9th percentile for that game. So if you're competitive too, here's my Color Match score. I think I still have some room to improve, so hopefully I'll break that 1600 mark.


These games are just like physical exercise though and require that you work out each day to improve. I've noticed that having not played on the site for a couple months that I'm having trouble playing the levels I attained previously. My highest score on the last level of birdwatching is 20500 and right now that seems utterly impossible to duplicate. My BPI for that game is only 1212 however, so someone out there has eagle eyes like Dawn. (When we're kayaking Dawn will sometimes whisper something similar to "Look at that small dark bird covered in mud in the shadows under that bush on the other side of the river!" My response is always "Um, where again?")

Like the piano, improving also requires starting slow. And as my old piano teacher could tell you, I'm not very good at slow! I'd get a lot better, faster if I could learn that discipline.

Anyway, I recommend the site. There is a free trail that doesn't require a credit card or validating your email address. If you like the site, it's only $10 a month; and if you play there regularly I think you'll really notice the positive effects.

I just stumbled across an awesome puzzle game called Auditorium. I played through the first three levels. Sadly, the other levels are unavailable until they release the full version.

But if you like puzzle games at all, this is worth trying.

I'm a sucker for the pretty music and lights -- I think I bought the PS3 just to play Flow.

I was just telling Dawn about Obama's choice of Rick Warner to lead the inaugural.

...Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage, which Warren strongly supported. In fact, he has compared same-sex nuptials to approving polygamy and pedophilia.

Dawn looked down out Pumpkin sitting on the floor next to us and said, "Pumpkin it'd be just you and me... if only you were a kitten." (The Mormons actually go on to say that homosexuality inevitably leads to bestiality.)

That cracked me up and I had to share. People like Warren with their ridiculous and hateful bullshit make me want to scream. If there is a hell, he'll be there. And I won't feel sorry for him.

One of my bigger problems at the moment is a tremendous backlog of pictures that I need to edit. I've gotten better at culling my pictures immediately after a trip, but editing and printing is another matter.

For lack of a decent laptop, I'm trying to get a little photography work done before heading up to Atlanta for a week. In the midst of that, I stumbled across this picture, which I did edit, from our vacation out to Utah last summer.

I'm really hoping to put up a gallery on photo.net soon. If you've never been to photo.net there are a plethora of breathtaking pictures and amazing photographers there.

 

 

 

 

Not much for a blog post tonight -- I'm busy working, have a TON of work left to do and Dawn and I are leaving for our road trip tomorrow.

But I'm taking a 5m break and am writing to say that the last episodes of BSG are just a month away. Who is the 5th Cylon? Can they keep the end from being cheesy? Will they go down in history as one of the better sci-fi series to date? The only thing I know for sure is I can't wait!

Someone made a great YouTube video that pretty well sums up how I feel about the Nikon D3x. I was just telling Dawn today that I might want to switch over to Canon in a few years. Here's the rub: When I update, regardless of whether it is Nikon or Canon, I'm going to have to buy new full-framed lenses. (The D200 and D300s uses DX lenses.) Basically that means I'm starting over. And if I'm starting over, I have the luxury of again asking myself "Nikon or Canon?"

I won't be upgrading for quite a while mind you. The equipment I have now is more than adequate. In fact, it's fantastic. And if I ever need to shoot low-light in a cathedral for example, I'll easily rent a couple D3s for the weekend.

But I'll be thinking about some new gear when the next generation of cameras arrives. (That is, if they do more than just add the ability to shoot movies. I'm going to be looking for greater dynamic range and more pixels of course.) And if Nikon hasn't wowed me by then with their new professional models, and by producing some long overdue lenses, Canon may get a new customer.

More and more I'm very impressed with restaurants (and other businesses) that get it right. And on the other hand, I feel terrible for the restaurants that don't. Mom and I had dinner at a new seafood restaurant tonight that just didn't get it right.

Walking in, I thought the atmosphere was very nice. But it went down hill from there. Mom is drinking a lot of sparkling water now, like Dawn and I. Especially with a little lemon or lime, it's a great replacement for soda. And it has a little kick that still water doesn't have, of course, and is nice when you're having dinner. They didn't have sparkling water. "Oh well. Just a bottled water then..." They don't carry bottled water. Mom went through a few options before she just settled on "a glass of coke."

That wasn't the worst part of the experience by far, but it bugs me when restaurants don't have sparkling or bottled water. I know some people think bottled water is dumb, but it beats the hell out of soda, and I don't drink alcohol. And though I'm sure some tap water is just fine, I've had plenty that tastes like dishwater. Just give me my damn bottled water.

I was annoyed too that Mom had to order soda, especially when she is trying hard to lose weight right now. But we come to the second topic that I think the restaurant missed on. The menu it was very hard to order anything on the menu that wasn't friend, or included a lot of carbs. This is a big miss in my book, because lots of people are watching their weight these days.

I should say here that the theme of the restaurant was a good one: sustainable seafood. They don't serve any seafood that isn't farm raised or sustainably fished. Let's just say there was a lot of shellfish on the menu. And trout. And a certain type of salmon from Alaska.

I decided to try the diver scallops. No carbs really, and when prepared well, I enjoy scallops quite a bit. --I had every reason to expect the food here would be exceptional. And to be fair, apart from the fact they weren't cooked all the way, they were quite good.

Mom saw me questioning the first scallop I guess when we started dinner. It tasted fine to me, had no bad smell of any sort, but it was a little cool in the center. I was confused because the top was charred (is that the right description?) nicely. But I guess that was done independently of the basic cooking.

Despite not really liking scallops, Mom reached over and helped herself to a bit and immediately made me send it back. We were sitting right by the open kitchen, and was able to watch as the head chef examined the dinner when the server brought it back. Sure enough, the head chef/owner acted displeased toward the cook who prepared the dinner and stood over him as he prepared a new plate.

The owner brought out the new plate, apologized, and sure enough it was very tasty. But it's hard to completely enjoy your dinner after having just been served partially cooked seafood. In fact, I was feeling a little funny on the right home wondering if I would be waking up on death's door in the middle of the night. (A quick search on Google reveals however that you can in fact eat completely raw scallops if they're fresh and good.)

Additionally, Mom's shrimp was overcooked. And the service was really just average.

Though very new, you can't afford to provide guests with anything other than a perfect experience in the restaurant industry. We won't be back. We won't recommend it. And that just kills me. It's a locally owned business, which I love to support. I love the idea of a sustainable seafood restaurant. And having a new trendy place in this small town is nice.

I suppose we could give it another try later, but it doesn't really work that way with restaurants. And I have more and more respect for restaurants that get it right from the very start and then keep it together later.

I think you have to click on this to make it bigger. Anyway, I don't think this is supposed to happen!

I've been just terrible at updating the blog. It's much easier to post good YouTube clips.

But you know as I sit here, supposedly working, but actually distracted (as I often am), I'm drinking tea. --And that does deserves a good YouTube video, because it's really not enough to blog about.

"Drinkin' tea, Drinkin' tea, What it do is magic!"

(Mostly it makes me tinkle a lot...)

Since my family never twitters any more, I'm posting this helpful and instructional video:

I grabbed one of the free promotional keys for Zone Alarm Pro 11 yesterday -- it's good for a year and normally costs a wee $20. (It doesn't include an anti-virus function.)

I won't use it; there is more than enough good freeware nowadays. But if you think you might want it, let me know and I'll email it to you. First come first serve, as it were.

I've long thought that the depiction of aliens in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was a little narrow. Never mind that the premise of little anthropomorphic aliens riding their neon-light, pimped-out interstellar steamboat across the galaxy requires a healthy suspension of disbelief. I imagine that a technologically advanced civilization be emotionally advanced or interesting as well. That is to say, I maybe envision a really smart James Brown getting off the mothership. . .

In a similar vein, I think it's important that our future overlords be able to dance. I'm glad that the "Keepon" is having a nice go at it.

I've had this video bookmarked for awhile. Reading and thinking about same-sex marriages in CA reminded me of this video and what the country did to President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

Sometimes I think we're just nowhere.

Mom spotted this shot.

Uploading a picture from my Key West trip with Mom. This shot is still a little rough actually, but I'll clean up a high rez image later; Mom is going to kill me if I don't get some things posted soon.

We were heading out of the park after a spending a few hours in the water and sun, when Mom surprised me by showing this great view of the bridge before we left. She wasn't planning on getting out or staying, but I gave her my best puppy dog eyes asking, "Would you mind terribly if I took some pictures?"

I said "Thank you!" before she could really answer, and then I was off shooting.

Thank you really though Mom. It was a great trip. :-)

Not having recently posted to the blog is bugging me. And I don't really have time to post tonight, so I'm posting this video instead from the second Ghost in the Shell movie. None of the follow-ups to the first movie even come close to matching the brilliance of the first. However, the lighting in this video is dramatic and brilliant, and I want to share it here.

I love how Japanese animators often mimic photo-realistic lighting and effects in their works. I remember the first time I saw a Japanese Anime that incorporated depth of field into the animation, as though you were really watching a film and not an animation. I was blown away; these aren't the cartoons I remember as a kid.

Around 2:14 when the poem continues "...flowers in bloom..." I love how the light begins to wash over the temple. The dynamic range is awesome. The light is bright enough that there are "blown" washed-out highlights everywhere. At the same time, while you have deep, deep shadows of pure black, there are enough midtones that light feels right. If you somehow saw this during a parade, it would be a very special moment, and that feeling comes across in the animation.

Last but not least, the imagery is pretty cool. I like the idea of gods who descend to Earth, forgetting their godhood while they go about leading their lives -- though I might be reading a whole lot of optimism into a rather depressing song:

Through day and night, the moon not coming,
In grief, Nue will sing.
When I look back,
flowers will fall away.
The heart of solace, having withered.
In a new world, Gods will descend,
the dawn will break, and Nue will sing
Flowers in bloom, pray to Gods.
Lamenting over their being in this world of life,
their dreams having faded away, flowers grieve and fall.

Never mind that though. I love the music. I love the lighting. And I sometimes listen to it more than once.

I've been very, very, very, very, very, very bad. I've been playing the new Warhammer Online, like, a lot. The game has all the appeal, and addictiveness that Warcraft had.

I added a new Warhammer photo set on Flickr where I'll post some screenshots now and again. For anyone that cares, the Age of Conan pictures are there too. And eventually I'm going to put up all the old Warcraft shots.

The first two Warhammer shots aren't great -- just a quick couple ones to show off my current main: a Magus named "Zarathustra." My Warcraft main, Mirrors, will make a return as a Zealot, but a girl only has so much time.

The game isn't nearly as nearly pretty as Age of Conan. And I miss Damascus. But what it lacks in pretty, it makes up for in gameplay and mechanics.

In other news, Mom and I are going to Key West this weekend. I'm looking forward to some relaxing time in the Keys. I'm not sure what Mom has in mind, but I'd like to kick back with some books and do a whole lot of nothing.

Last but not least, in case you somehow manged not to see it yet, I'm posting the Large Hadron Rap video. It just begs to be shared. They get all the science right, except for the fact that the Higgs particle will be found right away. More importantly though, it's really catchy. I won't say exactly how many times in a row I've watched it.

Expect more blogging while I'm in the Keys! --I can't play Warhammer while I'm down there.

Well, Spore is just loads of fun. It came in the mail yesterday and I managed to get to space colonization level by the time I went to bed at four in the morning. I'm happy to report that my race of "Bumbles" is doing very well, though they had a little trouble in the civilization stage. (I had to bribe a couple of nations heavily before conquering them in order to recover from early mistakes.)

I'll publish my Bumble creature to the Spore community as soon as I get around to firing up the game again. (I need to finish making choices for my logo.) My EA handle is, surprisingly, "Icaruspassion."

By the way, the game is impossibly cute. It's really cute. I'd read before getting it, that the game play is pretty simple. And that's true. More than anything, Spore is for people that want to spend hours customizing not only their creatures, but their entire civilization. In the civilization stage, imagine a Real Time Strategy game where you've custom designed all your buildings. Of course, you can chose pre-made buildings and vehicles from Maxis, or from other player creations that have been published, but the real fun is designing your own.

You can even design your own national anthem.

And the tools you use for design are very, very easy to use. More than anything, that is the real power of the game. The only thing I would have liked to see are some better textures for buildings.

It's perhaps a little sad that a game that took over five years to create can be beaten in a full day. However, the game isn't about winning, it's about creating a community. And I suspect we'll see some really neat things come out of the Spore community.

--Still sitting here pondering away on colors and the meaning of life. I have iTunes' new visualizer going on my other monitor. Up until this very moment I've been lukewarm about it. The effects are good, but the "AI" remains a little dim witted sometimes. And for some songs it just doesn't jive at all.

Well, I stumbled (virtually speaking) across "Arjuna: into the another world" in my library and gave that a turn. Wow. This album is making the new visualizer do things I haven't seen it do yet. Very, very nice. The algorithms seems to work very well with this music -- nice transitions and such.

Doesn't look like you can buy it anymore, so I have a copy if anyone wants it. Dawn calls is "space alien whale music," but it's actually pretty good. This YouTube clip has a couple of the main themes; I especially like the one toward the end of the clip. The whole album is different though from song to song. Very diverse, fantastic album. The amine itself, well it's no Haibane-Renmei, but I'm game for anything that doesn't have shooting mech robots.

(Check out the "part two" clip for the type of music Dawn is talking about.)

Well, I went browsing around the Internet as I do when I need a break from whatever it is I do -- in this case trying to decide what colors I might like for the logo. And I found this video which includes a perfect rendition of Pumpkin.

Here's a shot of her in front of my old monitor for comparison...


I love you Pumpkin. :p

Tom, I just learned that we actually did build the collider in Texas. However, it destroyed 99.9999 percent of the planet... and human race. We used all of our remaining resources to research, and then build, a time travel device that would send a single traveler back in time.

That mission was successful, and the LHC is now in Geneva, and smaller. However, not having the collider in Texas deprived us of vital information and another traveling is coming back from a different future to teach us how to use the collider in Texas properly.

So before you know, the LHC will be ours, and America will be one again top-dog in the world of physics.

By the way, if the time travel has you confused, check out this old Steven Colbert, Tek Jensen
video.

If you remember the movie Goonies (link: worst trailer ever), maybe you remember Data's invention: "Bully Blinders." Secretly, I've always thought it was the coolest invention.

Well, there is a flashlight on the market called "The Torch," and supposedly is the world's most powerful flashlight. How powerful you ask? Powerful enough to set paper on fire and scramble eggs. And... powerful enough to blind bullies!

The future. It's a beautiful thing. Maybe I should order one and start carrying it around instead of my pepper spray!

Michelle has a little baby bun baking in her oven! Congratulations!!!

MSNBC reports that the 2003 safety report that was updated in June has been published.

That's all well and good. I was most interested though in a comment a reader made on the site after the article:

Honestly, i don't think it matters.
If it works out and we discover the mother of all particles, yay for us.

If it doesn't and destroys the world, then we'll be dead and it wouldn't really matter, would it?

What a weary society we are sometimes. I think it's the straw that breaks the camel's back. That is, I don't want to die from nuclear war, or global warming, etc. But if we die while trying to probe the mysteries of the universe, well, maybe I feel the same way.

Phasers to full power Mr. Sulu!

So here I am, up way too late, trying to dig up some political truth.

Politics is tough. I know it was a fiction show, but I have a lot more respect for the process after watching the entire run of West Wing. (Fantastic show, but you have to watch from the very beginning.) There is a lot more to politics than the generalization spewed by pundits, or people who get all their information solely from said pundits. When people add 300 page amendments to 700 page bills, there is no black and white truth when someone votes for or against a bill.

Here's an example of the mess: Jumpstart our Business Strength (JOBS) Act, 05/11/2004. Tons of energy tax breaks that McCain argues against. That's bad right? Read that whole speach.

I hear tons about how McCain votes against renewable energy. But he and Lieberman actually introduced The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2005. Republicans weren't for it; but he introduced and fought for it. Obama co-sponsored. McCain was a little more verbose and detailed in his introduction.

So whose the climate bad-guy and whose the good-guy? Neither.

These are just a couple examples, of course. But I'm coming to the idea that Dawn may be right (as she often is) that no matter who wins this year, things will be fine, albeit in their own way.

I'm not quite that optimistic; I think there are chances for massive failure on both sides.

Giuliani said, "Change is not a destination, and hope is not a strategy." But both candidates seem to want to change. And probably there is a little hope for each.

I might rename the blog, "OMG we're going to die." Or I might just stop reading articles titled "Another Ice Shelf Collapses."

"The most important thing to note about it in the big picture, these patches of unusual shelf ice have been there for 4,500 years, and they are choosing this year to break up and drift away," said Ted Scambos, an ice shelf scientist with the National Snow and Data Center who was not directly involved with Mueller's research. "That tells us that the events going on in the arctic are very unusual, at least in the space of the last few thousand years."

Seriously though, I told myself I was going to stop reading articles like this when I found an page on Wikipedia titled "Holocene extinction event" some years ago. --Basically it suggests that we're in the midst of the largest mass extinction event to date. Hooray.

A more credible article states, "As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. (See "The Sixth Extinction", Niles Eldredge> and "How Will the Sixth Extinction Affect Evolution of Species," Norman Myers and Andrew Knoll.)

This seems to have been a topic several years ago. I haven't read much more on it recently. But really, you shouldn't measure extinction in species-per-hour. Of course, maybe they just have no idea what they're talking about. But here are the credentials of one scientist:

"Norman Myers is a Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and has acted as scientific consultant and policy adviser to the White House, U.S. Departments of State and Defense, NASA, the World Bank, seven United Nations agencies, and the European Commission. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Art and Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of Arts. Dr. Myers is the originator of the biodiversity “hotspots” strategy, which has generated over $300 million for conservation activities."

Anyway, I told myself I wasn't going to read any more -- and that includes the wave of articles that comes out from the BBC about global warming. Every day it's something new. Ah heck. Let's journey over to the "Science" section and take a look tonight...

Not too bad tonight:

The Good
Sea level rise by 2100 'below 2m'
Germany leads 'clean coal' pilot

The Bad
Warming boosts strongest storms [[I think we knew this one.]]
More fish off the 'green' menu
Major ice-shelf loss for Canada

But anyway, you get the picture. I wasn't going to read any more, but I did. It's just hard to tune out some of those catchier headlines.

You know, I really don't like Palin. I know why McCain brought her on, but she's kind of a poop, and it is making it much hard for me to vote for him. That being said, she had some good things say about Alaska's place in an national energy policy:

"Alaska should be a leader in this plan because we have the conventional, the non-renewable supplies, the petroleum. We have them up here. Again, the hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of clean natural gas, the buildings of barrels of oil. We have the renewables also. We have the largest tides on the continent, we have the geothermal, we have the winds. We have all these alternative renewable source that all can be tapped into as we work collectively and comprehensively on an energy pan. We need to be doing everything, and people need to be realistic also."

I don't know how far you can send electricity without losing it all to attenuation, but Alaksa could be a powerhouse for alternative energy production.

But never mind all that, I need to read more Gizmodo and less, er, science news. Gizmodo makes me happy.

So this is what 300 million dollars gets you. What are they trying to convey? Spend more and get less?

Thanks to Nik for this link and clip. The Daily Show has been a little hit or miss lately, but this is brilliant. It's nice to see someone compile the hypocrisy of the conservative propaganda machine.



I love it when Nancy Pfotenhauer almost says "from a feminist perspective." Funny line they have to toe now.

Anyway, I miss Hillary.

Man, I'm watching streaming video of Palin at the RNC. She has every bit of Obama's charisma. And she's going to whip the conservative American's into a churning frizzy. Every moderate vote that McCain is going to lose, or may lose by putting her on the ticket will be made up two fold with ultra-conservatives.

I hate this election. We had two candidates who spent their life working for the country: Hillary and McCain. Now the election is going to be about two candidates with little experience and tons of charisma.

I don't like Palin. The more I learn about her, the worse it gets. I want to like her, but I don't.

I don't trust Obama. He's like an excited puppy telling everyone want they want to hear. And people love him for it. But there is almost nothing before his run for president to judge him by, and on some instinctual level I just don't trust him. I want like him, but I don't.

I'm not the only with Obama issues. Dawn and I had dinner with one of her friends this weekend. She's just like us: young, gay, professional. And when the talk turned to politics and Obama she said, "You know I just don't trust him." None of us can really put our finger on it, but there it is.

The notorious story of the him not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem came up as well. I'm not the type to support flag burning amendments or anything. But not putting your hand on your heart during the anthem? Seriously?



And Michelle Obama's gaffe, "I'm proud of my country for the first time," doesn't help either. She's not running for office, but it just pisses me off.

Of course, Mom and Tom are already voting one way, minds made up a long time ago. Most of my friends are voting the other way, minds made up a long time ago. But the folks I know locally are actually talking quite a bit about who will best lead.

Dawn and I came up with a triad to judge candidates by:

1) What they themselves really want to do.
2) What they're actually willing to do.
3) What they might be able to accomplish.

I have no idea what Obama really wants to do, is willing to fight for, or what he could accomplish. For example, he says he's for same-sex rights, but does he really care about the issue? More importantly, is he willing to fight for the issue? And last, can he actually make anything happen, get someone in Congress to sponsor a bill, rally folks around it, etcetera?

On the same topic, McCain voted "no" against the ridiculous protection of marriage amendment (as did Obama to be fair), he did it against his own party because he thought it was right, and he whenever someone tries to bring it up, he waives the idea of an amendment saying "it's a states issue." Going back to our triangle, I feel McCain cares, and I think he's willing to fight for it.

We don't have tough test like that to measure Obama with. I'd like to see him stand up for nuclear power -- something that would be unpopular, but I think in the national and global best interest. I'm really pro nuclear. I'm, like, crazy-girl pro nuclear. It's what we have available to us right now.

I like that nuclear is a central part of McCain's plan. (Though it's certainly not Palin's preference. --Did I mentioned I really don't like her on the issues?)

And what about Obama on health care? Hell, even http://www.alternet.org has an article criticizing Obama's plan.

So anyway, I didn't mean to write another political entry, but the Palin speech got me chatty. I hate this election. If McCain dies in office and Palin becomes president, it would be bad for the country and the world. If Obama gets elected, we might get our bag full of promised candy, but we might just end up with a bad tummy ache and tooth decay too.

I have a lot more work to do on my issues spreadsheet. And as far as voting record in this congress, it's hard to tell McCain and Obama apart unless it's about Iraq.

We really need a three party system, with a run-off election. The far-right can have a candidate, the far-left can have a candidate, and we can have a moderate like McCain without him having to suck up to the devil.

If you live and die by the Delicious bookmark manager like I do, you'll be happy to know there is a beta update for the Firefox 3 plugin at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/delicious-firefox-extension/ It's under the "files" section. You have to log into Yahoo and join the group to get the beta, which is a pain, but worth it.

If you don't use Delicious and you're drowning in bookmarks, I recommend it highly. Very highly. Tagging is awesome. Tagged clouds are awesome. Being able to sort by frequency is awesome. Having access to the same set of book marks on multiple computers is awesome. Instantly refined results from the search bar is awesome. And if you'd like to keep your 500 and still counting bookmarks private, you can click the little box that says "don't share" whenever you create a bookmark -- which is what I've done on all mine.

Right now I'm creating some links that are tagged with "news" so that I have a quick place to go to all my favorite news sources. I also have a tag called Election2008 for election research. I have another set tagged for work, which is amazing helpful. I even have a "toread" for things I want to go back to, but never will. And the great thing is, you really don't need to be conservative with your tags. Clouds keep the signal to noise ration pretty darn good.

I have 177 photography bookmarks, but if I want to just see the ones specific to "lighting" (let's see, I have 12) it's easy done! If I'm feeling froggy I can then sort those by, last added, site, last visited, most frequently visited. . .

Brilliant, brilliant product when used with the Firefox plug-in. (There is a plugin for IE too, if you're not a Firefox baby.)

The Large Hadron Collider!

Because I ended up in computers and did not become a scientist like I was supposed to be, I will be playing Spore when the LHC powers up this Sept. 10. But what a fun time to be alive!

There are conspiracist scientists though who believe the LHC will end the world. --Via the creation of micro black holes or strangelet particles. Maybe I should have had Spore overnighted instead of being sent via two-day shipping. That doesn't leave a lot of time to finish the game before the end!



And they've even sued to have the LHC shut down. Luckily, most scientists disagree. Michio Kaku talks about what they're hoping to find in this interview.



Time has an okay photo essay on the LHC, but The Boston Globe has the best shots I think. Neat stuff!

It's all good.

If you live in Florida, don't use Drain Doctors.

I used them a couple months ago for a backed up main, after having a good experience with them getting my water heater replaced. Unfortunately, they didn't do nearly as good with my clog.

I called at 3am in the morning, while pulling an all-nighter. The dispatcher asked me if it could wait until 8am, if he got someone out first thing. Reluctantly I agreed. But instead of getting someone out first thing in the morning, I got a phone call from the plumber asking if he could come out a couple hours later -- he had a job from the previous day to finish. I told him my problem, that I'd been waiting all night, that I needed to go to bed soon, and that it wasn't okay to delay. He did anyway.

When he finally came out, he cleared the line, but did not snake out my kitchen sink as I asked because "he was afraid my pipes would break" since they're quite old now. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I was prepared to replace them if so. But I was too tired to argue the point.

Today Dawn needed a plumber for her new renter. I recommended Drain Doctors, still thinking of my good experience with the water heater and because they have cameras on their snakes (not sure the exact term for this), which lets them see the quality of your pipes, breaks, etc. But like me, she had a bad experience. They charged her more than the going rate, more than Roto-Rooter has charged me. And they refused to give her a six month guarantee on the work.

Because of this, I determined to write a letter to their corporate office and give them a chance to respond. However, to my surprise, their website has NO general contact information. No address. No phone number for corporate offices. --Just a web form and dispatch number. I could research the address of their office well enough, but that's really the last straw. Instead, I'm writing this blog entry and advising anyone who asks not to use them.

Between Drain Doctors, Roto-Rooter, and a small local company, Roto-Rooter has been the best I've used so far. If I ever find someone better, I'll update the blog post.

*** Sorry Dawn! ***

Spore gets released this week. I've been waiting for this game since it was announced at E3 in 2005.

Since I quit WoW, I haven't found much time to play video games. That's a good thing, I suppose, but a bad thing too since I miss playing with Tom, Carl, and the gang. But I just might have to make time for Spore.

Of course, Warhammer comes out later this month too. And I suppose I'll have to at least dabble in that as I have in AoC. The Realm vs. Realm play should give it a little more staying power than AoC seems to have. And I know Carl shares my affinity for PvP. :-)

Still, the thing about MMOs is that they really aren't fun if you're not fully participating in a community. It's a horrible time sink; but it's the people that makes MMOs fun.

Sadly, nothing will ever compare to the two years that I ran the guild on WoW; maybe MMOs are dead to me forever.

So, Spore might be a nice single-player retreat when I need to get away from work. I just pre-ordered it on Amazon Prime, so we'll see!

This weekend has been pretty low key for us. Dawn had a lot of homework, and her renter's moved in this weekend -- so we haven't had much in the way of adventure. However, today we snuck out to Selby Garens.

Last October we bought an annual pass to Sunken Gardens that included free admission to a litney of other gardens as well. And sadly, we haven't been using it. But today we put that to rest and adventured out to a new place.

I have to say it's not as big as I thought it would be. But there were plenty of neat flowers and plants, and of course we brought a camera and some lenses.

I'm coming to the conclusion that natural light photography for plants isn't the way to go if you want commercial quality results. To get a good depth of field, you need a small aperture. But with the small aperture comes a longer shutter speed, and even if you use a tripod, you still content with wind moving the plants. Of course, you could try to clamp them down, but I think that would be a bridge too far for most places -- never mind that you could damage the plants, and I don't think it would be 100% effective.

So, that leaves us with bringing plants into a studio setting, or setting up several strobes outside. And both options are no-go's for touring various gardens, unless you've been hired or purchased a permit.

Still, I think there is value and aesthetic in "natural light" botanical photography. NLB Photography. I totally just made that up.

I've found that I've been desaturating my flower pictures. If you wait for nice light, or have a trusty photo-assistant block out as much ambient light as possible, you really get some crazy highly saturated pictures. I'd leave em as is but people are so keen nowadays on artificially adding saturation that I'm afraid they won't seem real or natural.








This guy was awesome. In the full-size picture, the details and moss are really neat. I wasn't sure I'd like the picture with the blown out background, but I think it works quite well.



I would like to have shot this next plant with some off-camera flash. This is the only one that I used flash on in this post. You can really tell with the hard shadows, but I think it actually gives it a little something too. Regardless, she was hanging out in the bright sunlight and needed the extra light. I took a 2nd shot with the background blown out, but it didn't look good at all.



I'm afraid something was wrong with this poor squirrel. I've never seen one lay down like this. He wasn't on his belly the whole time, in fact had hopped over the bridge and onto this rail, but he seemed to prefer being on his belly and sometimes crawling along. Dawn and I decided to head back the way we came after grabbing a shot.




Also in photography, my 17-55 lens is cracked. That would be the one I dropped on the cement and then briefly into a pool at my last wedding. --Just noticed it today. Admirably, it still takes pictures, and they seem to be fine. (I can't tell if may there is a bit more chromatic aberration than before.) Still, I'll have to send it in for repair this week.

And last but not least, in photos, things that trouble me: The weather.



Though, I do love the smell and feel of hurricane winds -- especially small, relatively harmless storms, class 1 or 2 hurricanes, or ones that just aren't going to hit me. Something about the temperature or humidity that reminds me of growing up, something that makes Florida home. (The big summer clouds and thunderstorms are like that for me too.)

Also troubling, from an article that I found while reading up on Gutav earlier: Blackwater. One part of me thinks this is just economics in action. And maybe my imagination is just running away from me, but the other part of me thinks that having a highly trained, well armed, private army for hire is a really bad idea -- and bad enough that it should be illegal.

I have a wicked bad headache from earlier today. I made the mistake of letting myself get a little dehydrated during the trip to the gardens, so it could be because of that. But man! It's 1am and it still hurts, though less so after some Advil and then aspirin. Hopefully it will be gone in the morning.

Brookings writes, based on information from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "The world may have only seven years to start reducing the annual buildup in greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise threatens global catastrophe within several decades."

Here's the watered down Washington Post article.

Too late to go back to school for engineering. Maybe I can become a lobbyist or something. :-/

This picture is how I feel about computers most days, especially doing anything at work where we actively strive to crush innovation and good ideas at every turn. Nothing specifically has happened to cause me to write this tonight, only that I came across this really, really, really cute video and I giggled hard at the particular scene above.

I have to say that not only is this video cute, it's really well done. There are great nuances in the facial expressions throughout the whole thing: a shift of the jaw after "do you know why you're here," and a twitch of an eyebrow after, "it looks like you're witting a letter!" Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

And if you didn't catch it on Twitter, the video below is also wonderful. Aside from the voice actress getting a little too close to the mic/loud after at the end of the robot bit, it's perfect. I showed it to Dawn and told her I imagined her like this as a little girl. I didn't get much of a response on that, so who knows. But what a cute video!







The voices aren't the same, but somehow the voice actress in this short reminds me of Kirsten Dunst in Kiki's Delivery Service. (Which she did an amazing job in.)

Well, it was too good to be true. A couple quiet years for hurricanes and then "blam!" I knew we were in trouble about a month ago when Dawn and I took a trip to the beach and the water was like a sauna. Maybe I'm making things up, and maybe I just tend to stay indoors during the summer, but I really don't remember feeling water like that.

I was just talking to Dawn on the phone and telling her that I feel about global warming the way I felt about nuclear war growing up. It scares the hell out of me.

And there isn't a whole lot I can do about it except be a single-issue voter this year for the candidate I think will have the strongest energy policy as president. And right now I think that's McCain. Obama didn't even have anything on his election site about energy until McCain started running his big ad on the subject. The Obama camp followed quickly with a 30 minute clip on their website of a (pretty lame) speech Obama had made on the campaign trail. It took 'em just under a week to get their own ad together.

I really, really, really want to like Obama. And I think we might make some headway with same-sex marriage and "don't ask, don't tell." But I think the country is being spoon-fed everything they want to hear after 8 horrendous years with Bush in office.

Dawn and I were talking about the race a couple days ago. "Is McCain too hawkish on Iran?" And what about his personality? I saw a video clip of McCain meeting the Dalai Lama where it looked like he wanted to gnaw off his own arm to get away. And if you can't make nice with the Dalai Lama who can you get along with? On the other hand, will Obama have the balls to stand up to countries like an aggressive Russia, or to Iran if they turn out to be the problem McCain thinks they are? And we've already seen Obama flip-flop on offshore drilling. --Funny how the game changes once you have to start getting things done (i.e. playing politics) instead of telling everyone what they want to hear.

Still, it's going to all come down to energy policy for me this year. McCain apparently wants to develop alternative energy and then sell the technology overseas. That's smart: One, we need the tech ourselves. Two, a new export would help our economy. Three, we need to keep the developing countries from repeating our own mistakes. I'd like to read or find out more about that.

Ironically however, it may be the big oil-producing countries that save us. They've already seen the writing on the wall (unlike our own oil companies, damn them all), and are developing alternative energy sources for the day when we need or are ready to move away from oil. We're all certain that we want to end our dependence on foreign oil. What about a new dependence on foreign alternative energy technologies?

I find it oddly reassuring. God knows the world has thrown enough money their way. If anyone has the funding to develop something, they do.

In the meantime, I'll just keep driving the Prius around, using the good light bulbs, and let Dawn turn out all the lights at night to save power. But I wish I could figure out a more active role to play in the fight against global warming.

--Had fun shooting with Mom and Tom last night. (Dawn and I have been meaning to go, but kayaking and beach-going have been calling too strongly!) I was shooting bullets through the same hole quite a bit last night! Not all the time, of course, but enough to get a little "woo hoo!" high after we left.

Dawn has an older Ruger Mark II that we shoot with, and that I enjoy a lot. I would have rented that last night, but guess what the people in front of us requested? What's worse is that they beat us into the door by just a hair. If only I'd put my shoes on a little faster when we were leaving!

The person behind the counter seemed to know Tom quite well however and got his personal Browning Buckmark 5.5 Target gun out of the car for me. How nice is that!?

I almost want to say that I liked the Browning a little better too. The one I used had florescent sights, which was quite nice. But more importantly, the handle was wood, which I prefer over the metal of the Ruger.

The one thing that I didn't like, and this is probably a deal-killer, is that it jammed on me twice. (I think that's the right term.) I read online later that it seems to be much more particular about ammo than the Ruger.

I've been thinking about buying my own little .22 for range shooting, so I have my eye open for this stuff right now. But then again, when Dawn and I are shooting we usually trade back and forth between her Clark Custom Ruger 10/22 rifle, and the pistol. (That rifle is fun on the 100m range!) So maybe it isn't a big deal, but it would be more fun I think if we were on the same range when we were shooting.

But if I had my own gun, I might not have an excuse to rent my .45 USP when we go to the range. It's really not as fun as a very accurate .22 target pistol, and the ammo cost will kill you, but sometimes it's just fun to say, "Yeah, I can shoot a 45!"

I'm so mad at the Chinese gymnastics team. Maybe I should be mad at China in general. As has been widely speculated and written, I don't think for a moment that the girls from China are 16. And the AP just found an old story that referred to one of the girls as being much younger than she should have been, if she is to be 16 presently. As I understand it though, the matter will not be further investigated officially.

And the scoring! Mom, Tom, and I watched a girl from the US and a girl from China perform back to back where they both received nearly identical scores, and the Chinese girl had 5 or 6 balance checks compared to only a single from the US girl. And the Chinese girl even stumbled at the very beginning getting onto the bar.

I thought for a while that the scoring was off -- but not knowing the sport and such it's hard to be too certain. And in the men's competition, the Chinese were performing harder routines. But tonight with the women, and with the two performances I'm referencing, there wasn't any doubt. And to drive it home, one of the announcers started her commentary on the Chinese score asking, "Should I be confused?" And the announcers went on to discuss the strange score.

This is a terrible disservice to all the girls that competed fairly. But you know, this is also a disservice to every Chinese athlete that won their gold medal fair and square. And it's an embarrassment to China. Whenever I think of China and the 2008 Olympics, I'm going to think about how they had to cheat in gymnastics; they blew their moment.

Of course, this isn't the worst thing the Chinese government has ever done. And to that point, I have to wonder when a nation of a billion people finally decide that they want a government of the people, when they finally decide that they've had enough and want a democracy, when they grow tired of the censorship designed to keep them suppressed, how hard will it be -- how hard will it be for one billion people -- to kick their government in the ass and replace it with something better?

This girl is still missing a tooth.

This is a quick blog entry so that I can vent and not have to throw my coffee cup through Mom's window. I hate, hate, HATE buying software and then being told that I can't use the software on more than one computer.

I bought a copy of "GoodSync" to help with my backups, and apparently they have their activation service locked down to a single copy/installation.

This is like buying a hammer in Home Depot and being told that you can only use it in one room, or in one house.

And I won't even go into the problems I had after paying Adobe $1000 for Photoshop and Lightroom.

Something has to change. We're in the dark ages of intellectual property law. Piracy is bad and people should be paid for their work. But right now you have pirates on the one side, software companies and people like the RIAA on the other side, arguing like Bill O'Reilly might argue with Amy Goodman -- with reasonable usage rights and common sense solutions nowhere to be found.

How hard would it be to include, say, five activiations for a software package being used at home by a single family? Would they be losing money? I can tell you that I'm sure as hell not going to buy a second copy of GoodSync. And in fact, they've lost my business; I'll never upgrade with them.

And really, how many people are running around pirating copies of GoodSync? What do they think they're selling? Photoshop? And even Photoshop grants you a licence for two computers.

Cables, cables everywhere, and none the right one, I think. (That's a poor play off "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." I'll try harder next time!)

Despite having an entire bin full of cables and adapters, I can't find the power adapter for my battery charger.

One of the main reasons I bought my label machine was to keep track of adapters and what piece of electronics they go with. (I used to use a permanent marker for this, but it was always hard to read.) But I haven't taken the time to label all my existing cables and adapters, and now I seem to have lost another one.

This is pet peeve of mine. How hard would it be to have a product reference on any given adapter? Of if companies insist on being so damn cheap, couldn't they list the adapter's product number on their specification page for any given piece of electronics? But that is asking for a lot when many manufacture's don't even put the power requirements on their devices. At least with this batter charger I'm know that I'm looking for an adapter that outputs 800mA.

Rather than buy an adapter with variable output settings, I decided to "brick" this charger and replace it with the Mercedes of battery charges: the Powerex MH-9000. (The BC-900 is cheaper, and was a close second, but I can't risk the thing catching on fire with as many hours as I'll be using it; and apparently several people have had a problem with this.)

Together with my rechargeable 2900 mAh batteries, I'm going to try to save some money on AA battery purchases. I was too afraid to use rechargeables during a wedding, but what I'm hearing on various forums is that the NiMH rechargeables actually perform better -- so I'm going to give it a whirl. And these particular batteries seem to be among the best.

Tom, I'm glad that you're bringing back TC! I definitely would like to help on it. And I saw the "Mirrors" preview when Dawn and I saw X-files. I definitely got a giggle out of it. Too bad we're not still playing Warcraft. I have to say I miss my character quite a bit!

Speaking of X-files, it was terrible. Neither Dawn or I had high expectations. And Dawn was even hoping for a cheesy, silly movie. But it failed on every level. It wasn't even an "X File" so to speak. Not aliens. Not a creature feature. More like a horror movie. Except, we never really find out why they were doing what they were doing. The side story was random and seemed like it was stuck on with Elmer's glue. I could write a whole review about how bad the movie was, but suffice it to say it's a disappointment.

The fence is looking GREAT. For the first time since I bought the house, I like looking out my back window. This is really going to open the door for Dawn and I to do a bit of landscaping in the backyard -- and even spend some time back there grilling or what not.

The photography biz is SLOW right now. I'm pretty discouraged at the moment. I need to do a better job pounding the pavement and digging up some work.

This is a mini-update I suppose. --Not really a long blog entry, but too much for a twitter.

I've been tired and sluggish all day. And I would have been more productive if I'd sat around and done nothing all day.

The day wasn't without big events though. I purchased the materials for my fence today with Dawn. I'm guessing there will be another few hundred to put in the gates, but I spent about $5000 to completely fence the back yard.

By this time next week, or sooner hopefully, I'll have a finished fence.

It's a ton of money that I really didn't want to spend. But I can now more or less quit worry about my neighbor now, and more importantly, can really start to enjoy the backyard. And to have something off my mind that has been weighing down on me since I first about the house five years ago, is quite nice.

As for yesterday, we had tons of fun kayaking. It wasn't as hot as our previous trip and there are plenty of good pictures. We can across an alligator that I named "Fear of God." Usually I err on the side of "too close" when I'm taking pictures of gators. Not this guy. I was hugging the bank of on the other side of the river and holding my breath the whole time. Dawn guesses that he was easily 12 foot. And he may well have been more. He was definitely bigger than our kayaks.

The pictures don't really do him justice, except if you zoom into his jawline -- which is huge and fat for lack of a better description. Usually gators are what I would describe as "lean and mean," even when they're big. This guy looked like he just sat around on the shore and ate whole trees.

Speaking of pictures, I'll post a few once I'm done going through them. Eventually, I'm going to have to resurrect my personal Flickr gallery or start using a wider Blogger template for the pictures though. They don't look very good "all smooshed up."

Well, Mom and Tom are on their way to PA for a mini vacation. Mom is showing Tom where she grew up. Hard to believe that we really have never been there as adults. (Not that I fully qualify as an adult most days of the week.)

I'm out of my zone today and celebrated by picking up Soul Calibur 4.

Here's a mini-review of my two latest video games. Haze really does kind of suck. I didn't want to say it. And I it's not just because I keep getting eating alive in multi-player games. I think it finally hit me when I got to the big "plot twist" in the story line. All I could say was, "Seriously?" Banal doesn't really cover it.

And then of course multiplayer is kind of bland, etc., etc. I went online to see what other people were saying and all of the reviews -- all of the reviews -- were terrible. No more impulse video game shopping for me! Check the reviews first!

In a similar vein I took a chance with Soul Calibur. Like Haze, everyone expected this to be a great game. Unlike Haze, it seems to be live up to the expectation so far. There are no "combo moves" in the game; I'm still getting a little used to that. And the manual is like a myster novel with no climax or resolution. But it's fun so far. I'll try multiplayer once I finally get a handle on how the moves actually work together.

Got assigned a change for work at 5pm this Friday afternoon. I don't know what bugs me more: the fact that so many things get scheduled at the very last minute, or that I really am just an SA now. If I ever had to switch jobs I don't know how I would explain the transition from what I did before this job to what I'm doing now. "Well, I was an effective leader in charge of budgets, a data center that I built, a national network of doctors' offices that I built, and had my own team of technicians. Then I moved up to applying service patches on Windows servers and dealing with filespace issues..."

Last but not least, I'm taking the plunge with my fence finally. Not having a fence in the back yard has bugged me the entire time I've owned my house. And the situation got worse when my neightbor put up a fence that was well over my property line. (I didn't realize how much until recently.) Long story short: he took it down, I'm putting something up, and it's going to cost a fortune to do the entire thing.

I'll feel very, very good having it finally done though.

Take a picture every day. Photography is like music, or anything else for that matter, if you don't do it everyday you're going to make stupid mistakes.

So just a few minutes ago, I'm looking out my front door, debating whether to go out on the porch and watch the rain. (Our rainforest weather is back!) I've got a mug of Earl Grey in one hand, I'm eating a banana in the other hand, and I'm pretty relaxed. Suddenly, the mail truck comes screaming down the down, pulls up to my box, drops off some mail. And she sails by every house that doesn't have a box on the side of the road. (In this neighborhood, many houses still have boxes attached to their houses.)

"Lazy mail people," I think to myself. I'm not a US Postal fan. I think FedEx and UPS should be allowed to deliver mail to houses so we can put those apathetic, good for nothing slackers out of business. But whatever. I have to just let that one go. But then, she does a 180 up the road, comes back down to drop off some mail across the street and drives up into my neighbor's yard. And I don't mean that she pulled up on the grass a little bit, she drove right into neighbor's front yard, down the driveway, and then went back the way she came -- like it was just a parking lot.

Now for whatever reason, she lingered in the yard a bit. I throw my banana onto the couch, the Earl Grey is set hastily atop of DVDs and video games, and I'm running into the office to get my camera.

After she drove off, I take a quick look at my pictures on the back of the camera. "Why are they so grainy?" ISO 6400, EV +7, and spot metering. When I'd last used the camera, I was doing some low-light experiments. I essentially missed the shot because I didn't set my camera back to some good defaults before storing it. If that had been real news, I'd be really sick to my stomach right now.

The shot is actually still usable, but although you can tell what she's doing, it's not as dramatic as when she first pull right into the lawn -- so it really doesn't matter anyway.

Interestingly, another across-the-street neighbor saw it too. She was waiting to talk to the mail person for whatever reason. I don't know what twist of fate brought two of us outside just when a postal person decided to "go postal." I don't think I'll bother to send the pictures to anyone, but maybe I should. Meh.

The opportunity here is a real-world reminder that my cameras need to be ready-to-go all the time. And usually, they are -- but now I'll make sure of it.

In other news, I was up all night working on prices (and maybe I watched some Daily Show). I'm just about there for the wedding prices. Dawn hopefully had a chance to look at my draft today; she's not home yet. I'll be glad to get it done, I'm letting everything fall by the wayside while I hyper-focus on this.

Carly came over last night and we played Haze all night. Or rather, I should say that I played Haze all night, because she and Dawn went to bed at a reasonable hour.

I could go on and on about what draws me into games so much. Beyond a general compulsion to play them period, and the general fun-factor they have, each genre is a little different. With FPS games, First Person Shooters, the compelling reason is that I hate to suck. And I am kind of bad at FPS games -- especially on a gaming pad; I'm a little better if I can use a keyboard and mouse.

But when a game ends and your kills are at, let's say, 9 total, and the leader has racked something like 43 kills, it's just hard to put down. Never mind the fact that the thing I almost lead the board with was "most times died."

Sure, I don't play FPS very much, and it was my first night, and I wasn't at the bottom at least. But I really hate not being good at something. I don't know if I'm getting older or if kids are getting much better. (Or maybe they're not spending enough time doing homework.)

Anyway, as the morning sun grew brighter and brighter this morning, I knew it was time for bed. Two hours later, work paged me.

The thing about being on-call 24/7 for a whole week is that it really don't matter when you go to bed. If you sleep at a normal hour, you'll be page in the middle of the night, and vice versa. And I expected to be paged this weekend, hence taking a day on Friday to spend with Dawn. But man, two hours of sleep. (It's really sad that it's so hard to find people to swap shifts with nowadays. Things have really changed at work.)

I had to bow out of any activities today because the work call ended up being a ridiculous all-day affair. (It's still going on.) I missed out on a trip to Pei Wei and a the video game store. --We thought that Soul Caliber 4 came out today.



Turns out that it comes out on Tuesday. Silly day to release a game. But they traded in some of the more crappy PS3 games that I've purchased like Warhawk, Folklore, and Viruta Fighter, and pre-ordered Soul Caliber 4. Pre-orders get a free Soul Caliber t-shirt, so come Tuesday, I'll be geekier than ever.

The good news is that I was able to nap a couple hours, so I'm not feeling morbidly bad. In fact, for now, I'm quite peppy. The wall of fatigue will hit me a truck in a few hours, but if I have to stay up all night and sleep working and sleep during the day -- well, throw me into that briar patch if you must.

Dawn and I had a really nice time on the Little Manatee River yesterday, although it was hot. I mean, it was really, really hot. Florida in July. No breeze. And no canopy for the most part. One thing that saved us from the heat a little was a big storm that rolled in toward the end of our trip. So we did have some nice clouds for the last hour or so.

The Little Manatee river has a pretty good flow to it also, so you really don't even have to paddle. We took both cars, so we just floated down river and enjoyed the scenery. Not much of a workout! But after Dawn's last month, I don't think she needs a work out.

Little Manatee is quite different from what Dawn and I have seen so far. The river banks, especially where we put in, are very high. In that respect, it almost didn't seem like Florida. And the other thing that was different was the reddish tint to much of the water -- especially where it was shallow and the sun was shining openly. The red contrast to the green foliage was quite nice, and I found myself wishing that I'd brought a wide angle lens to capture it.

Speaking of pictures, a hot summer day at noon really isn't the best time to look for nature pictures. For one thing, the wildlife tends to be most active in the morning and in the evening when it's cooler. Second, the bright sun can make some bird shots just impossible -- the bright feathers "blow out," and there isn't anything to you can do. And of course, the bright, contrasty sunlight doesn't make for great pictures in general.

We found a couple families of turtles in the shade, however. I've seen plenty of turtles sunning themselves, but I've never seen a whole group like we saw yesterday.



I felt bad taking their picture, because we ended up scaring just about everything we came across. (Not supposed to do that.) But I don't think we could have gotten around most of them at all without scaring them. The wildlife on this river was generally much more cautious that what we've encountered in the past. You can really tell that the Little Manatee doesn't get as much "traffic" as other rivers.



Dawn caught sight of this flower fairy. I think that's what you call them. She was really busy with this flower, like a little hairstylist with wings.



Tack-sharp at 600mm from a moving Kayak. Baby.



Of course, we saw a few gators as always. Like everything else, they were very shy and usually got in the water well before we were passing. Towards the very end of our trip however, we came across a little guy that was really interesting in that he was covered in dirt and weeds. Usually the alligators are pretty clean when they're sunning themselves, but the water around this guy wasn't exactly clear.



I'm posting a crop to better show what I'm taking about; a small jpg on Blogger really doesn't do it justice. Later Dawn was doing young alligator-impersonations: "Mom says I should clean better than I do. But she's not here right now, and I'm tired..."



Back to work for me! Dawn just called and she's on the way home with Carly. Have to get the guest room ready and there is furniture to be moved.