Tag Archives: animals

Mating mosquitos

September 18th, 2012

This happened outside our home-pub this past June.

Well, first the boy mosquito gets all dressed up and takes a bouquet of flowers to meet the girl mosquito. She, too, has gotten all dolled up. She wears pearls and lipstick. The happy couple flies away to a nice location to feed off someone who has just been drinking a fine Chardonet. After that, they…

OK, that’s not really what mosquito mating entails. Actually…

Riveting stuff.

Chicadee

April 23rd, 2012

Taken on March 13, 2012 in Jermyn, PA.

Sadly the only photos I’ve been publishing are through Instagram of late. I haven’t had the time to post process any images but I heroically opened Aperture and managed to throw this one together. Hopefully I’ll find a little more time for photography and processing over the summer.

This little guy is sitting on the broken branch of a pine tree just outside our sunroom’s window that I hang a few bird feeders on. He had a particular penchant for sunflower seeds that I had on a plate laid on the ground.

Instagram is a network, not a camera

March 23rd, 2012

Derek Steen, friend and co-worker, on Twitter.

First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster…

— Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012

A chickadee looking for food.I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him here.

Oh, and if I Twitter would allow Google to properly index my tweets I’d be able to call up a tweet from at least a year ago wherein I called people out for cheating on Instagram by uploading photos that were not taken with an iPhone. I’ll be installing Tweet Nest later to see if I can rectify this issue.

So, yes, at one point I was angry with Instagram users for sharing their DSLR photos on the app. But something has changed lately and I knew it was coming.

Two days ago Instagram and Hipstimatic (another camera app for iPhone) let it leak through FastCompany that Hipstimatic photos were going to be sharable on the Instagram network. Here is what their CEO Kevin Systrom was quoted as saying.

“It’s a step in the direction that we’re testing out. We’ve been very careful about making sure that Instagram photos are about what’s happening right now in your life, and we want to allow for more of those photos to end up on Instagram regardless of where they’re taken.”

They’d like Instagram photos to be about what’s happening right now in your life. Certainly the name lends to this sort of network – and I’d hate to draw the correlation to Twitter’s own motto – but suffice to say – they are beginning to view themselves more as a network of people sharing photos than they do as a camera application.

So, while before I thought it was going against the creator’s grain to share just any old photo via Instagram, I now think this will be their direct intent. Sure, my last few bird photos on Instagram were not about what’s happening right now because I took those photos over the course of the last two weeks – but I’m willing to bend the rules a little from time-to-time.

I’m cdevroe on Instagram by the way.

Birds of the same species sing different tunes in the city than in the country

December 28th, 2011

This makes sense. Sabri Ben-Achour for NPR reports that birds sing different tunes in cities than they do in the country. The buildings, noise and other factors in city life make it hard for birds to hear each other unless they sing at different pitches than the surrounding noise. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you read the part where this may very well affect the species as a whole.

So if birds from the city can’t flirt with birds from the country anymore, “those birds are actually going to be less likely to mate with each other,” he says. “I mean, literally they’re going to stop being able to speak the same language.”

I hope that doesn’t happen. Keep tweeting birds!

/via Jason Fried on Twitter.

 

Inside the mind of the octopus

December 1st, 2011

An incredibly interesting read about the mind of the octopus.

“The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.”

/via the 8-legged Justin Blanton.

Writing helps you think

July 12th, 2011

This isn’t news to anyone. But I thought that Meagan Fischer had an interesting way of stating this in a recent post.

“For me, that’s the real beauty of writing. Ideas can be noisy, heavy things. Trying to ignore them is like trying to ignore a bored cat. It will sit on your chest while you’re resting. It will paw at you while you work. It will purr, it will scratch, but it will not go away until it is acknowledged. Writing is how I acknowledge an idea, so it will finally go to sleep.”

See, I’m not the only one that uses cats to illustrate an idea.

What is your string?

July 11th, 2011

My cat Pickles goes crazy when he sees string. Whether it be the pull-string for our window shades, a loose string from a piece of clothing – just about any string he’ll go bonkers for. So much so, in fact, that he’ll nearly injure himself and others to get the string. Nothing else matters in all the world except him getting that string.

This lead me to ask myself a question; what is my string? In other words, what do I get excited about? What would I rather be working on or doing than anything else? What would I sacrifice just about anything to be able to do?

Once you answer those questions and figure out what your string is you should immediately start to plan how you can spend more time doing it.

I know a lot of business books say “Do what you love!” but that isn’t the point of this post. I don’t think you have to make money at something that you love doing in order to enjoy it. In fact, I’d wager that for most things we enjoy in life money can actually lessen the joy of doing it. Especially if it becomes your main way of making a living. When you have to make money doing something it isn’t nearly as enjoyable as doing it simply because you want to. My cat gets nothing out of chasing the string. Actually, in most cases he doesn’t even get the string!

I’m still in the process of truly figuring out what my string is but when I figure it out I’m going to try do spend more time doing that activity. Maybe you could do the same.