Darth Tater

Here was a nice birthday surprise. A friend at work gave me this evil Mr. Potato Head.

Geek Marketing

This afternoon someone left this geeky ad for SSL encryption tacked outside my cubicle. In case the text is too small to read in the above picture, it starts with "Evil Internet bandits are plotting to bring me down..."

Gotta love the way advertisers try to market to computer science people - throw in a cute woman, use a Japanese anime style, and add some over-the-top dialog and hey, we'll have a successful product!

Mmmm... eels!

Well, whatever this bird is, it seemed to like eating eels. If you click on the above picture, you can get a slighter larger image and should be able to see the eel wrapped around its beak.

Young Great Blue Heron?

It's a foggy morning and this little guy is doing some fishing outside my window. I'm pretty sure it's a young great blue heron. It seemed a little big to be an immature egret.

Zen Cereal

About a month ago someone had told me there was a Zen cereal, but I had to see it to believe it.

What is the flavor of Zen? No longer do you have to ponder such a question during hours of meditation. Zen is apparently cranberry and ginger.

The only question that remains is do you achieve enlightenment by eating it?

New bag

I recently added a new piece of equipment to my dojo. The bag weighs about 70 pounds and supposedly has an extra soft core, but it seems pretty hard when I kick it. Maybe it just needs to be broken in (or I need to strengthen my feet and legs). Hopefully this will be useful to help improve my kicks. The only drawback is hitting the bag makes a fairly loud slapping noise, so I need to use it at times during the day when it is less likely to disturb the neighbors.

Ho Hum

This is something I had never seen before - a hummingbird perched with its wings closed. It looks kinda odd without the wings constantly flapping. Every time I tried to take a picture of it flying, it would land before I could snap the picture.

Weird Camera Effect

While in New Hampshire a few weeks ago, the night sky was incredibly clear, so I was goofing around with taking pictures of stars using my camera's ability to take long exposures. For this picture, I thought I had done a 20 second exposure when in fact it was a 30 second exposure. So, I grab the camera while it was still taking a picture and got this wavy red light across the picture. It almost looks like the northern lights, so I decided to keep the picture. I think the red blur came from some lights in a nearby house that the camera must have gotten a short view of while I was moving it.

Not a Good Sign

After a 150 mile drive up to NH, I discovered that my new kayak's seat is removable. Somewhere on the side of the highway between Rhode Island and Wolfeboro New Hampshire is a Necky kayak seat.

Fortunately, there's a kayak shop in Wolfeboro and I was able to get a temporary replacement seat - one of those gel pads that is designed to go over a hard plastic seat.

[July 5th addendum]
On an brighter note, after I got home from my trip, I went back to the place where I bought my kayak and asked about buying a new seat. The woman who works there took down my name and said she'd call me back today to let me know the cost. When I got home tonight, there was a message on my answering machine. It turns out the company that makes the kayak (Necky) said this was considered a warranty repair, so they are shipping a new seat to me FREE OF CHARGE! Woohoo! What a great company!

Tyndall Effect

The moon was a nice red color while it was rising last night. Coincidentally, this morning I was reading a book on the history of science and came across an explanation of this effect. It's called the 'Tyndall effect' and is named after a British physicist John Tyndall (1820 - 1893). He explained why the sky is blue during the day and why the sun appears red when it sets. The sky is blue because large molecules in the atmosphere scatter the blue light from the sun. When the sun is setting, the light passes through more of the earth's atmosphere before it reaches your eye, so the shorter wavelength colors are filtered out more than the long wavelength color of red - making the sun appear red. If you are interested, this NASA web site has a pretty good explanation of the colors and how they relate to wavelengths: eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html

Tyndall is also famous for pointing out how variations in the amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can lead to climate changes - now known as the greenhouse effect.