A few days ago I experienced something which I’m still scratching my head over… massive hardware failure across several independent systems. It started when my external hard drive which houses my backups died. The next day, my laptop died, and the day after that, my netbook started running extremely slowly, failed to boot once or twice, blue screened once, and has been showing all sorts of other symptoms (sporadically though, it works fine at other times).
An arrangement of Greensleeves for Harp and Cello.
When looking for a new DSLR there is much more to consider than simply the image quality. Canon recently unveiled the Rebel T2i and one of the main features they are trying to advertise from day 1 is not the exceptional image quality, but the fact that it shoots 1080p HD video (an advertising position which has not changed from the original T1i, which I recently purchased).
Can a portable still-camera’s video really useful for the amateur photographer looking to get into videography though? I decided to test the T1i’s video and see if it really performs as well as claimed. I think the results speak for themselves:
From myself and my good friend Zeus (I figured fireworks were overdone): Have a happy new year and—unlike previous years—a wonderful decade!
This post was written for Blog Action Day 2009.
The internet shrank the world more than any other innovation of the twentieth century: tightening social and economic ties between businesses, cultures, and nations more thoroughly than the genesis of commercial flight, or the threat of atomic war.
Map of the internet dated Jan 15, 2005 courtesy of the Opte ProjectToday the internet is a staple of modern life. Broadband connections–once reserved for large corporations, research centers, and institutes of higher education–are now common place, and the fastest transcontinental networks can transmit tens of gigabits per second; a speed which will most likely become outdated within the next decade. It has opened new, and often exclusive, windows for business ventures of all sizes and has (in short) become an integral part of the functional corpus of our society.
In a previous post I discussed using Twitter and FeedBurner to create collaborative podcasts. This post will also detail a way you can expand the reach of your tweets using FeedBurner: we’ll be creating a custom Twitter “widget” for your blog or website using FeedBurner’s “BuzzBoost” feature.
The first thing we need to do is get our tweets into FeedBurner. This can be accomplished by simply burning a feed of the following format:
Me holding a beautiful (injured) female juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk (B. jamaicensis)I’ve finished up my internship with the Georgia DNR at Amicalola Falls and am back at my parents for a few days before I move back to Atlanta this weekend. As much as I loved working with the park – especially our wonderful birds of prey – and as much as I loved my little cabin in the woods, I can’t wait to get back to the city. I’ve learned so much from the good people of Amicalola this Summer, and gotten so much first hand experience with Raptors that I’m sure taking my falconry permit test will be no problem. This post is not so much a reflection or farewell as it is just to publically thank the wonderful staff at Amicalola and encourage anyone near the Dawson Georgia area (A short ride down GA400 from Atlanta) to see this beautiful park and all of its wonderful critters!
They say that raising a child is a full time job, and I’ve found that’s true… especially when it comes to birds. Yesterday a family brought a baby bird (We think a Cardinal, but it’s really still a UFO at this age) to the park saying they had found it in a parking lot and wondered if we’d look after it.
While we have a wildlife rehabilitator who works at the park and specializes in birds (raptors specifically, but other birds are fine too) we would normally put down a nestling this small and continue the circle of life by feeding him to one of the snakes or our opossum, but our rehabber saw this as a good opportunity to give me some first hand experience and we kept him.
After reading about Rick Klau’s implementation of a collaborative podcast using del.icio.us I decided to do the same thing using Twitter. A quick read over the Twitter API and I had it set up and running. For those of you who don’t want to read Rick’s post, I’ll start from scratch and describe the idea and how I set it up.
The idea is simple, anytime someone mentions me (@SamWhited) on Twitter and includes a link to a media file (an MP3 for instance) the media file is automatically downloaded and synced to my Zune in the form of a podcast. Twitter makes it easy to re-tweet songs as well which is an added bonus.
As I mentioned previously, I recently became a resource management intern with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources at Amicalola Falls State Park. The park is beautiful and I love my job so far. While I officially work in resource management I also work with programming and outdoor education, especially with Amicalola’s rehabilitated birds of prey and their reptile collection.
The raptors and other birds are possibly my favorite thing about the park so far; from Owl-Capone (the Barred Owl from Owlcatraz) to Fabio the American Black Vulture (more Stork than raptor), I thoroughly enjoy working with them on, and off the glove. The snakes are also lots of fun and people passing through the visitors center love to touch the snakes and learn about the various species native to Georgia (my favorite being the Eastern King Snake, Elvis even though he sometimes thinks my thumb is a tasty snack).
