One in 1,600,000.  That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family.  And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.

I’ve often remarked to my wife that it was odd we hadn’t seen any friends in New York.  And she always reminds me that New York has eight million people and the likelihood of anyone we know being in the same place as us is pretty slim.  I know this is true, but I strangely feel as if New York is a more intimate place.  I think it has to do with the fact that because there are eight million people there, you’re almost never walking alone on a street.  The city seems to be overflowing with people and it seems inevitable that you’d meet someone you know by chance.  But that’s just an example of how bad the human mind is at figuring out probability.  Katy was coming home from yoga and dinner with some friends.  And if the train tracks hadn’t been under construction, we would never have met up.

I’ve been wondering about a peculiar aspect of human motivation. Why do we require a present of some sort in exchange for a donation? Let’s take NPR for example. During membership drives a donation will net the donator a hat or tote bag or something like that. But why does there have to be a prize for donation? The point of donation is that you realize some organization or cause needs your money. So why waste some of that money to get a mug? And if you wanted a mug emblazoned with the NPR logo, you could just go to the NPR store and buy it. But getting gifts must entice more people to donate or organizations wouldn’t waste money on it when they could be using all the money to cover their costs.

Recently I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of people repeating some version of the mantra, “a great photographer can make a great photograph with any camera.”  They’ve then been following this up with, “therefore, why not just use an iPhone or point and shoot.  There’s no reason to buy an SLR anymore.”  Like everything else in life, the truth is gray rather than black and white.

Recently I was listening to Fresh Air’s interview with David Weigel.  The occasion was a book he had written about how the Republicans are shifting what their party is about.  Frankly, I’m a bit concerned.  The party seems to be less and less about small government and big business and more and more about courting religious fanatics.  Seriously, a lot of these people sound just as bad as the Mullahs in Iran.  There’s nothing wrong, of course, with courting religious voters.  For some people they don’t care if their government is going to have financial policies that will harm them as long as they try to make abortion illegal again.  But religious fanaticism is wrong whether it’s Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, or any other religion.

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards.  Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds.  So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder.  We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types.  Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage.  I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder.  I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work!  These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out.  So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set.  At the end of this post is the best shot I got.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the group portraits session.  Some of these (mostly when it’s a group photo) were me “stealing” a setup that the official photographer had already set up.  Many of the shots with one or two people are quick shots I grabbed while others were being shot by the official photographer.  This is one of the reasons why people who have photographer friends are so lucky.  I was able to capture tons of shots that the photographer couldn’t because she just couldn’t be in two places at once.

From the time I started listening to podcasts until about two months ago, I had been using Rhythmbox to manage my podcasts.  When I first started using a Linux music application, Banshee ran hideously slow on my computer.  (As did most mono-based products)  As time has passed I’ve acquired a more powerful Linux computer and the mono code has been made more efficient.  But it was too late, I was already ingrained into Rhythmbox and it had all my music rated.  So I continued to use it.  On Linux Outlaws they kept mentioning how much they loved gPodder.  I checked out an early version and I didn’t see the point.  But after upgrading to Fedora 11, I decided to check it out.  It is so much better for managing podcasts than Rhythmbox and that goes to the Unix ideal - have your program do only one thing and do it well.  Banshee, by the way, is the opposite of that.  It seems to be moving in a Windows Media Player direction, recently gaining the ability to play videos as well.  So, here’s a comparison of Rhythmbox and gPodder and you’ll be able to easily see why I switched.  First, here’s the podcast interface for Rhythmbox.

And so the ceremony began, starting with the couples approaching the aisle. I was able to get some great shots because I was using both my Rebel XT and Rebel XTi with the EF 28-105mm (and the lens hood to help mitigate lens flare) on one camera and the Tamron 55-200mm on the other.  This allowed me to get close up shots no mater where the subjects happened to be standing.