I’m working up to writing a long post about the book I just finished, but in the meantime, here’s a quietly hypnotic video of someone hand-feeding hummingbirds:
Categories
Tag: internet
Categories
New stuff coming soon
I’m being an absolute dynamo of behind the scenes activity, wrestling with HTML, php and CSS for your reading pleasure. Sort of. Anyway, in the absence of any other new posts, have a video of Seu Jorge:
If you haven’t seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, you should. It’s a very good film.
I saw this in the cinema the other day when I went to see Helvetica, and I thought it was worth sharing:
I’m itching to do yet another site redesign—I have a pretty good idea of what I want and a working test version of it, allowing for a bit of tweaking—but I think it makes sense to wait until the release of WordPress 2.3 so I don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues. I’m considering losing the theme switcher, as well; since I make no effort to make changes to the site backwards-compatible, it’s probably better that way. And it’ll make it easier to rework things for my ultra-minimalist new look.
Of course the whole thing is increasingly irrelevant, since a growing proportion of my (diminishing number of) readers are now accessing HF through feed readers and may never see the design at all. But I enjoy the process.
I’m also intending to start a photoblog. I’ve always liked the idea of photography but found the results slightly disappointing. As a birder I know well the importance of good optical equipment; the difference between a cheap pair of binoculars and an expensive pair can be profound. I never bought a film SLR camera because I didn’t think I would get the use out of it to justify it; now with digital, knowing I can go out and shoot 50 or 60 and discard them all, it seems like a good moment to make a serious attempt to take some good photographs. So the photoblog will be part of that attempt; recording my learning process. But I can’t decide on a name for it. I could keep up the G.M. Hopkins theme and go for something like ‘Plough Down Sillion’ or ‘Shook Foil’ or ‘Finches’ Wings’, but I think I fancy a change. Hmmm. We’ll see.
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Moths and meteorites
With National Moth Night and the Perseids, it should have been a good weekend for night-time stuff.
I didn’t have a lot of luck on either front. Really of course you need a moth trap to count moths effectively. I had a go at treacling—spreading a mix of treacle, brown sugar and rum on tree trunks to attract the moths—but nothing came. In the end my total count was three species; Jersey Tiger, seen earlier in the day, a Marbled Beauty attracted to the porch light, and a Double-striped Pug which came into my bedroom. Still, Jersey Tiger was one of the target species for NMN this year, so that’s good.
One thing becomes apparent walking around the garden at night; lots and lots of slugs.
And here’s some hot slug-on-slug action.
I didn’t try very hard with the meteorites, I must admit. And didn’t see any. But little white flashes of light appearing in the sky because the orbit of our planet is rolling through the dust trail of a long-gone comet seems like a good enough reason to post this:
I was having a go at photographing the juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes to the birdfeeder, but it’s kind of tricky. My success rate when digiscoping is never that high at the best of times; and as you can see, it’s not temperamentally inclined to stay still:
Still, the motion blur can be a fun effect:
And it makes it all the more gratifying when one of the pictures comes out just right.
