Stupid Evil Computers

For future reference it takes about 4 hours to reinstall the basics of Windows XP, at least two more hours to install it the way I want it. I should never start reinstalling at 10 pm, because I won't be willing to stop until it's at least functional, which meant 2 am last night. I also lost a number of songs from iTunes, thankfully not any I paid for, but still. Over two hundred songs gone, I'll probably only replace a few of them though, I might be able to copy them off my ipod, but it gets so messy. At least iTunes had eaten my play lists recently, so I hadn't remade them yet. And I lost all those stupid cover art things, which only got downloaded the last time iTunes died, and some of my e-mail accounts still won't work anyway. grumble... At least I didn't lose any pics this time. --------------------------------------- Woo Hoo, fixed the Album Artwork thing, but still missing the Batman Forever Soundtrack...

Predators and how they balance the landscape

I just finished a book on the ecology of predators as controls keeping the herbivores in check. It had many good points, and while somewhat depressing, wasn't any worse than some of my other recent reads. Book was Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators by William Stolzenburg. It started with the basics of ecology and food webs and how everything is connected to something else. The author went on to discuss what happens when you remove the apex predator and the middle opportunists begin proliferating. Likely we can blame raccoons and the like for the decline of the Eastern US songbirds, as them not being in check keeps egg thieves more abundant than they once were. It covered the reintroduction of the Wolves to Yellowstone nicely, though not as detailed as Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas W. Smith & Gary Ferguson, which I read a few months ago. Both books detailed how the return of the wolf has positively affected the landscape of Yellowstone. Plants that were being grazed to the ground every year by deer and elk are now recovering, and beavers have returned to Yellowstone. Pronghorn antelope have been making a comeback due to Wolves not putting up with coyotes, who had devised ways to kill the much faster pronghorn. Anyway, both books were a good if slightly depressing read.

Bulbs Have Arrived...

The Early crop of Fall bulbs is now awaiting customers at your neighborhood plant or home improvement stores. Too bad they're rarely labeled correctly, and you get to wait months to figure out what they will actually look like. I mostly have this problem with daffodils. I buy specific varieties because I like what they're supposed to look like, and months later they aren't that variety at all... However every time I buy a bagged Astilbe it turns out to be white, even if I bought a pink variety. Same thing happens with Bleeding Hearts. This year I'm trying Bearded Irises. When I was in Washington DC in may it was that time of year, and they were blooming everywhere. So far I've bought 5 varieties to try out, Vita Fire, Color Tart, Full Tide, and Night Edition. I might return the Full Tide, as pics I've seen online look almost nothing like the pic on the package, another pet peeve of mine. I ended up potting these up rather than tossing them out into the garden yet. This year starting with the spring roots and bulbs I potted everything that was a perennial. I got bargain plants weeks after the sales, and potted them up to survive the winter and grow some actual roots. 5 or 6 astilbes, 3 or 4 day lily types, I tried to get more purple cornflowers, but only one of them is a cone flower. One of the others is a balloon flower judging by the actual flower I got on a little pathetic stem. I also got a number of nursery propagated wildflowers for $1 each. All the Christmas Ferns from that group came up, the other ferns didn't, but I dug them up a few weeks ago, and none had turned to mush, so likely they will come up next year. I also got a few trilliums, two trout lilies and a jack in the pulpit, which as far as I could tell might as well have been dirt, but I'll give them till next summer to do something. I also picked up some Dutch Iris bulbs this year, and I'm trying Iris reticulata again. Last year I had a few, but after they bloomed something carried them off. Never saw them again. Hopefully I'll place them better this year.

Summer of FunGUS

Everything's coming up mushrooms Article in Boston Globe on Saturday August 23, 2008 I've been wondering when I'd see some articles about this. Last year the only time I saw fungus was if I went out in the early morning after a rain the night before. Now any time I go anywhere, no matter time of day, or how many days it has been since it rained there are mushrooms everywhere. Quite fun.

Tower Hill

I wish I went more often. If it wasn't an hour drive in both directions I probably would. My Mass Hort membership gets me free entry to the Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston MA. It is totally worth the trip. I wish it opened a little earlier, but other than that wonderful place. It's even fun to visit very early in the year, due to the Orangerie, plenty of tropical plants to look over. Since it links to a wildlife pond and a few woodland trails it offers plenty of habitat for frogs, dragonflies and butterflies. Here are a few pics from the two times I've managed to go this year.

Common Whitetail Female (Plathemis lydia)

Common Whitetail Male (Plathemis lydia)

Space Issues

As of tonight I have a new working 500 GB hard drive, to supplement my full 120 GB one. Of course, I have to copy everything off the old badly partitioned drive, reformat it and reinstall my operating system again, but whatever. At least the old drive still works, I just didn't leave enough space for my programs and Windows. I should manage to keep everything but my pictures on the old 120. I decided that since I obviously wasn't going to stop taking pictures I might as well get the biggest drive I could afford that would work in my getting elderly dell. I bought a backup external 500 GB one last week sometime, so at least I have lots of copies of everything. Sometimes I imagine how irritating this would be if it was my first time doing it and laugh. Always buy the biggest fastest computer you can afford, they last a bit longer...And yes, flawed as it is I'm reinstalling XP again...

Peepers and Pickerels

A totally random finding while meandering around online. The IS (image stabilization) feature on my camera is what makes close up long shutter speed shots blurry, even on a tripod. Why you might ask? It "assumes" the camera is moving even if it isn't, so in correcting a shake that isn't there it adds blur to some photos. It's nice to know it isn't me moving the camera every time. Amazing what you find out when you read a bunch of camera forums while trying to decide how much money you might spend on a new camera. On to some pictures. Quite by accident I noticed another Spring Peeper a few days ago, this one was a little bigger and much less spooky. I took at least 20 pics of him, and he didn't move around much between them. I even gave up and left after a while, and on my way back he was still there. Today I went out looking for Pickerel Frogs. Last year I had luck early in the morning in the mowed patches of fields at Moose Hill. I found three more this morning, even though I felt I was a bit late. It was around 9 am, and most of the shade had already disappeared. I've only seen them at the edges of shade on the sides of mowed paths, where the grass is still a little long, and the shade is keeping it damp with dew. I've never seen one once the grass dried out for the morning. You also have to walk very slowly or they scare too much and off into the long grass they go. This afternoon I browsed Elm Bank, mostly hoping to check out Flora's 50% off sale, but I went down to the daylily gardens to see what dragonflies were about as well. I scared a number of darners just before seeing them, and they refused to land again while I was there, but I did notice this guy. My dragonfly books says he's a Prince Baskettail (Epitheca princeps). Of course I also got a pic from the easiest dragonfly to photograph, the Blue Dasher. They return faithfully to a few landing spots, and in my experience while not quite as "friendly" as the ruby meadowhawk types, they aren't too touchy about cameras up close. I suspect this one is an immature male.

Pond Crop

I'm quite excited I'm up to three white blooms, and two 'Attraction' blooms this year. Sadly this is my best year yet for water lilies. So yeah, there are going to be repetitive looking images going up, but they are different flowers...

Actual Gardening

At ten this morning I decided I wouldn't go hiking. Since it was supposed to rain for a few days straight, I figured I'd get some plants in the ground. Especially since yesterday I spent some money on some very nice plants, and didn't want to chance killing them through laziness. I'm a sucker for nectar plants, as I'm always trying to get butterfly pics, and it is infinitely easier if they show up in the backyard. To this end I have 3 types of milkweed, 4 types of bee balm, numerous kinds of mint, some phlox, 5 or 6 kinds of yarrow, a bunch of coneflowers, and 2 kinds of rudbeckia. I'm lacking host plants other than the milkweed, but I'm working on that. I bought a shorter kind of bee balm, a rudbeckia, and another swamp milkweed (which I totally recommend, as mine has been blooming nonstop since June.) The swamp milkweed actually came with a monarch Caterpillar... to add to this I saw a monarch fluttering about today laying eggs on my other milkweed. Hopefully, I'll be seeing some more soon enough. I also had my first experience with spray paint, which I'll likely never repeat. It is the stinkiest, and least efficient way to paint, unless you happen to be painting wicker like I was. With three coats, it still does not look done, but the chairs will at least be staying serviceable for another year or two, so I guess it was worth the irritation. I finished around 7:30. Though technically there were two shopping trips in there when I ran out of paint, and thought I should see what other plants could be found in a bargain area. I bought three Strawberry Seduction Yarrow plants for $1 each. And yes, their first bloom of the year was floppy, black, and dying, but all three were growing back from the roots quite happily. Judging from several I bought last year at the bargain price, they'll bounce back just fine. I also remember eyeing them when they first came in a $6 bucks each. Patience gets the plant, provided it isn't one you must have in which case that's what credit cards were made for. Now if only I could keep a butterfly bush alive through the winter I'd be buying the bargain ones of those too...

Repetitive Rain makes for Nice Clouds...

To go along with the constant storm clouds that keep drenching the state, I keep seeing amazing clouds when I'm driving. Of course, I never have my camera, which started my previous discussion about a smaller backup. I think I'm just going to buy an adapter and a polarizing filter, and start hauling my camera everywhere. The polarizing filter is to get the clouds and sky to match more with what I'm seeing when I'm out. I just wish there were easier places to get to for cloud pics if you want to avoid utility lines, and signs. Both natural places I know of require 45 minutes or so to get up to, and you don't really want to be stuck there if it starts to rain. Lighting would be a real problem. I mostly stop in parking lots, but then there's the electrical line problem. Ikea's upper level parking garage works for east clouds, but not really for sunsets. And I still have to crop out trees and light poles. I'll admit I did some light Photoshop tweaking to get the levels out of that medium gray color they like to add to cloud pics.

Cameras I have Known

Apparently my parents were really doting, as I have developed pictures I took when I was 3 or 4. Some little fixed focus camera with lots of pics of pigeons on electrical lines, and people without heads. I can tell in the family albums that I got my hands on my mother's cameras a number of times. First camera I really remember using was a Canon AE-1. Manual everything, so no quick pictures. It wasn't till college I took an actual class, with the same elderly camera. I upgraded to a Minolta Maxxum 5 the next year. Took a couple hundred pics with that before I got really tired of paying for developing. Apparently I still take out of focus pigeon shots. Then I bought a Canon A70 off eBay, my first digital. It was not the most up to date and only had 3.2 megapixels. Printed nice 4x6 and could be pushed to 5x7, 8x10 looked fuzzy. Next upgrade was to my current baby, a Canon S3 IS. I really like macro shots, and this one has a Super Macro setting that will focus on things touching the lens. I'm not a big fan of the flash which is manual, meaning you actually have to open it to have it go off at all. I'm talking myself out of upgrading to the S5 IS, even though it is mighty pretty, and they moved the buttons I keep hitting out of the way. Biggest and most important part of taking macro shots in the woods, a tripod you're willing to haul everywhere just in case. If you feel frustrated about shooting and keep coming back with slightly blurred shots, suck it up and haul the tripod. If it isn't in direct sunlight I almost always need a tripod to even get a chance at a good shot without raising the ISO, or opening up the aperture. Currently I'm trying to decide about spending money on a little backup camera I can carry around everywhere without hauling the big one, or just waiting and buying a better camera when I can afford it. I don't even want to guess about what I'll have to spend to get a really good macro camera. I really want to see the compound eyes on dragonflies, since I've figured out how to get fairly close to them already.

Why Computers Suck

Apparently I've filled an 80 GB partition with over 65 GB of pictures (and music I guess.) I knew I took a lot when the camera ran out of numbers and restarted at 1 earlier this year, but I didn't think it had gotten this bad. I looked yesterday while deciding on a backup drive and discovered I need a new primary, as 80 just isn't cutting it. I have 3 GB free... No wonder the scanner was whining. I'm also quite annoyed with finding an external drive that people agree on working. I ended up getting one that half of the users love, and the other half had it die within a month, so here's hoping. Thankfully I know of at least one that is nearing a year old with no problems. I needed it now, so hopefully it will last until I make up my mind about 350GB or 500GB for my new internal...and I was hoping to get a cheapish backup pocket camera. Sigh.

Frogs and Fungus

I saw my first Spring Peeper this summer, though my first guess was a young gray tree frog. It was not excited to see me at all, and since it was only an inch long, I didn't get any great pics out of it, just ones good enough to tell what it was. I did a little better with the wood frog I found on the otherside of the path a minute later. Same day got my first in focus hummingbird with only one chance. I heard a buzzing noise and turned just as it landed above me. It stared at me for a minute then buzzed off. I expect it was trying to figure out if my bright red shirt was edible... Looks like a female Ruby- Throated. Since it's been raining almost nonstop for a few weeks now, fungus is everwhere. I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what most of it is.