Saturday, August 14, 2010

More pics

A couple more pics from my latest hike.

Moon and Venus just after sunset. It turns out Mars and Saturn were also very close to Venus this night, and if it had been darker, I could have gotten all three planets and the Moon in a single shot. I didn't know this until playing with Starry Night Pro a couple of nights later, but by this time the moon had moved quite far from the planet grouping. If I had known I would have hung around to get a shot of it, since it is a very rare opportunity. I didn't have a tripod so I shot this in shutter priority mode at 1/60 s, ISO 320 and F 2.6


One of several tarantulas I found wandering the trail today.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Some hiking pics

Just came back from a local hike I do often, and I brought back some pics. They are in reverse order from when they were taken. Last is first.


Started much too late and got back after dark, but I did get this pic from it.


I had never seen deer on this trail before so it was a surprise to turn a corner and see a group of 5 heading up the trail that I was heading down. 3 scattered into the surrounding bush, but these two stayed on the trail and posed for a shot.


This young buck was one who scattered into the bushes. Unfortunately it looks like I shot too quickly and failed to get the focus right.



There are many caves in the area, and a few plants that look a bit alien.


Some mildly interesting rock formations


More caves in the hillsides.


A wide shot of the surrounding area.


Saturday, February 20, 2010

Goodbye Facebook

Ok, I just can't take it any more. Not one more trophy for being the bestest friend ever. Not one more invite to play the mind numbing games of Farmville or Mafia Wars and not one more piece of earth shattering news such as "I'm eating a turkey sandwich, YUM!". If anyone wanted proof of the inanity that now passes for popular human culture, Facebook would be enough. Like a colony of millions of mindless ants building tunnels to nowhere, people make connections to others, not to make any kind of meaningful dialog, but instead, just for the sake of making the connections themselves. simply to increase their number of friends, because this is the only measure of self worth some people have. Like ants briefly pausing to exchange pheromones, before moving on to the next one in line to repeat the same thing.

People might say well it's still good to keep contact with distant family and friends, but it's all an illusion folks. People you didn't contact outside of FB, you still don't talk to on FB, but worse is that people that you used to talk to outside FB, with an email or a phone call from time to time, you might not do so now because, of course, you're already on each other's friends list, and you know what TV show they watched last night. Surely a phone call would be overkill.

Anyway I'm glad I'm gone. I feel clean and free again, but then it always feels good to get some distance on the herd.