This photo has suddenly become my daily most viewed photo for the past 10 days or so.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Pope John Mole IV is becoming somewhat of an internet celebrity”] [/caption]

Yesterday it had 32 views.  It had 30 a couple of days before that.  As of 2100 on 21 Oct, it has 22 views.  [Almost] All of the views have been coming from Google and Yahoo image searches.  I wish flickr told me what search terms were leading to this little guy.  I’d try a few really quick.  “Pope John Paul” (no quotes) does not bring it up on the first page.  “Pope John Mole” and “Pope Mole” (again, both without quotes) do bring it up as the first search result.  But why would someone be searching with those terms?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  The image already has 1814 views for all time.

Heard about Jeffrey Friedl’s lens focal length plot plugin for Lightroom and decided to check it out.  Here’s what it produced from my entire library.

[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]

Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide.  Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results.  I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with.  The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.

Three years ago I was discussing photography with a fellow photographer, pictured below.  We were discussing places for good photography in the DC-Baltimore vicinity and he mentioned Shenandoah Valley.  He also showed me some photos of deer he had gotten there.  He was pretty impressed with how close he got to the deer (although - spoiler - I eventually got closer).  I was impressed with the deer photos and his description of Shenandoah Valley.  I resolved to visit it.

It’s been nearly a month since I put up the bird feeders in our house and I have been enjoying them nearly every day since then.  In fact, the only negative has been the cost of bird food.  But, as my mother-in-law put it, I get the benefits of having birds without the hassle of having them as pets.  At first we had a few birds visiting the feeders each day.  Now, during the busy bird breakfast hours, we get multiple birds at once.  Interestingly, on the whole, the birds to not fight with each other.  Rather, if there are more birds than spots at the feeder, they will queue up on nearby branches.  I was very surprised by this behaviour because I thought they would surely fight over this nearly infinite food source.

While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing.  I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes.  The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in the following idea - what about a subscription model for authors.  Right now it sucks to be an author in that your pay is very irregular.  I know that my paycheck will be the same week to week.  But authors get an advance for a book and then some royalties depending upon how well a book sells.  So they can’t really plan their finances easily because they don’t know ahead of time how many books they will sell.  But, with digital distribution, it might be easier to sell the author’s readers on a subscription model.

Wow, it was a lot warmer this time of year last year.  Right now it’s in the 40s-50s outside.  Couldn’t dress like this now.

See the photojojo page on the web.

Enjoy your day off government (and other) employees!

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Or protest it, if you want”] [/caption]

I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real.  This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy.  Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user.  Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game.  This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet.  So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem.  This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time!  Even in games where it doesn’t make sense!  (Like Rock Band)

Things have changed a bit since last time, so I decided to once again cover what flickr thinks my 20 most interesting photos are.

Tetris is the first video game I was unable to shut off on command.  Players of Sid Meier’s Civilization are familiar with the problem of “one more turn”, similar to the bookworm’s “one more page”.  Tetris was my first “one more turn” game.  I first played Tetris when I was five or six and received my Gameboy for my birthday or Christmas.

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“237” caption=“Tetris on Gameboy, the definitive version in my eyes”] [/caption]