Back once again to NYC for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #167 is:

Since I have family (in-laws) in NYC, I’ve tried, on occasion, to take my brothers to experience parts of NYC that we never got to see in the brief time my family rolled through before. On this trip, Dave got to ride a NYC subway for the first time.

A bird in this Top 200 Photo.

photo #168 is:

This is one of my best bird photos both from a subject standpoint and a technical standpoint. Birds are exceptionally hard to photograph. All animals are hard as they’re more unpredictable than humans, but birds are exceptionally frantic. It’s probably partly because they have a few predators and partly because they need to constantly eat because of their high metabolisms. So it’s hard to capture a bird tack sharp like this one. It’s made a little harder by the fact that my camera’s old so I can’t boost the ISO high enough to get a nice, fast shutter speed.

This Top 200 Photo was taken at the beach.

photo #169 is:

Alex would, at least in 2009, try and get right up in front of the camera if he noticed you taking a photo.  It could spoil the photo you were trying to get a candid shot of, but it certainly made for a dynamic spontaneity that’s harder to capture as kids get older and self-conscious of their image.

To technology for this entry in Top 200 Photos.

photo #170 is:

In 2008 Danielle was going to take a business trip and wanted a light laptop. Well, she was in luck because netbooks had just recently come out and we were able to get the EEE PC for around $300. We’ve been able to use it a lot for trips so we could watch different things or if we didn’t want the weight of my laptop. I’m not 100% sure it was worth all the money given how quickly the netbooks gained beefier hardware, but it was certainly fun to be part of the revolution in computing.

A political entry for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #171 is:

In the summer of 2006 Israel and Lebanon were engaged in an ever-escalating war. For the most part, I feel that violence is often not the best answer to violence. Especially wide-scale violence. It may be the case that some individuals deserve death for their actions - killing others, especially on a large scale - but retaliations on the country level tend to cause both sides to escalate. This photo/art piece is just meant to showcase how violence quickly gets out of hand.

Back to Cornell for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #172 is:

Slope Day is an annual day of debauchery at Cornell, taking place on the last day of classes. Slope Day has gone through quite a few evolutions. This photo was taken in 2002, my freshman year, which was the last year in which Slope Day was a free-for-all day of drinking. I’m not sure why Cornell went back to a structured festival the following year (as it apparently had done way back in the day), but I think it probably had to do with the emergence of digital cameras and nascent social networking sites that were giving the University a bad reputation. Additionally, a few Ithaca High School kids died of alcohol poisoning. While I feel this wasn’t Cornell’s responsibility since Slope Day was not an official school function, apparently they felt differently. I had mixed feelings about what it evolved to. On the one hand, they started inviting bands to come perform and they had carnival games and food. On the other hand, in order to keep non-College students from getting any alcohol, they fenced off the area which made it really annoying for those of us who had to get to class or lab on that day.

What’s black and white and #173? Today’s Top 200 Photos entry.

photo #173 is:

For about a year, we were obsessed with Tai Shan, the baby panda at The National Zoo. We went at least once a month to go photograph him and watch him act all cute. This triptych is from his first birthday. The giant pink Popsicle is his birthday “cake”.

Reflective Top 200 Photo.

photo #174 is:

This is a continuation of a series that was born of Danielle’s boredom in February 2006. It involves this mirror, black and white photography, and us.

A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices.  In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix.  She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix.  We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case.  I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu.  At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content.  I figured it’d resolve itself.  So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player.  Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix.  I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem.  I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site.  Neither could Danielle on her computer.  These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer.  Strangely, that one could log in.  That’s weird.  I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference.  So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then.  That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me.  (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either.  What was going on here?  Was Netflix blocking Linux?  Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.

A still life photo makes it for today’s Top 200 photos entry.

photo #175 is:

Danielle likes to create decorations that add to the ambiance of the house. This involves taking elements from different places and creating something that’s her own. Here she’s taken candles from a bunch of different stores and combined them with seashells we found on a trip to Florida. Some of her other creations might appear later as well.