So K’s possums got a big brother recently: The whole family. Note the little sores on the small one? That’s where their whiskers are coming in. Here’s the biggest one by himself. He needs a bit more enrichment, so he gets to hang out with us on occassion. I didn’t quite capture the possum tongue, but he was licking me. Very cute 🙂

Browsing the New York Times website, I ran across the blog of Stanley Fish. Fish, if you’ve never heard of him (lucky you), is an academic star. He is an English professor specializing in deconstruction. In other words, he is not interested in truth; he is only interested in being right by proving that nothing is true. The blog posts which caught my eye were a series describing Fish’s analysis of three recent books on atheism. Those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchen. Sparing you the arguments, Fish concludes in his first post, The Three Atheists, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchen are not contributing anything new. Unfortunately, he does not come to this conclusion by examining the what the books say, but only by applying some of the key principles of the books to religious arguments that he knows have already been made within the context of religion and then assuming he knows how the authors would respond. This is a neat trick that allows him to suggest that there is nothing new in the books without actually engaging in the arguments the books make. ...

you think LOL Possums is a good idea: I’ll take some more pictures tomorrow, including a few of their new-ish, big brother. All of these guys are going back to their regular care taker Monday. They’ve been cute to have around, but I don’t think K is looking for more.

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it. I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need a few hundred more feet of pipe to run it out to all of the trees, but this is a good start. ...

K is taking care of some baby possums for the next week. They are about 16 grams (1/2 oz) each. Obligatory pictures included…

Just a couple of minor updates: my keyboard came in yesterday and it’s everything that I hoped it would be. I feel sorry for the folk in my office suite. It is a bit loud I cropped some of the photos using the original sized images, so all that’s left are captions and fixing the lens smudge

Okay, I’ve made some updates to my Yellowstone pictures Changelog: I’ve added my favorites (which had been stuck in another directory and didn’t get in the first release) I’ve cleaned up the brightness on the first 8 shots (the camera had set itself to an exposure compensation of -0.7 for some reason) I’ve fixed the gallery problem that etselec noted To do: Fix the stupid lens smudge in some of the wide angle shots near the end of the trip Add some minimal captions Go back to the original, larger shots and crop out tight images on some of the birds (like the sandhill cranes with their chicks and the peregrine falcons)

I was in a longish meeting today when it occurred to me that it is a military truism that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Moreover, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo noted, “we have met the enemy and he is us. This suggests that no plan survives first contact with its creators. Most of my meetings bear this out.

When we came back from Yellowstone this year, I had about 1,800 pictures to go through. I’ve finally selected the best 200 or so. Some of them need a bit of cleanup in terms of brightness and in a few cases, getting rid of a mark that was on the back of a lens which shows up when the camera is stopped down. Using the open source principle of release early and often, I’ve put these images online in their current form. I’ve also got a few more that I put in my “best category that I haven’t done yet, but will tonight. ...

Last year, I mentioned High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, where you combine multiple pictures taken at different exposures to create a single picture where all of image is properly exposed. I didn’t do much with it at the time because, a) it’s not really possible when you shoot slide film, and b) there didn’t seem to be a good hdr program for linux. a) was resolved when I went digital in November ...