First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

To help out, here is a link to their new game for the iPhone – Pickin’ Time.

After going outside it appears there are, and this isn’t an actual head count just a best guess, hundreds of thousands of lady bugs swarming around our apartment building alone. Due to other friends reporting the same in their area I’m calling it a plague.

After climbing a tree at Lehigh University in an attempt to capture a cicada I ended up finding several skins left on a tree at about eye level. Go figure. There is tons of information on Cicadas on Wikipedia. Worth perusing.

This little guy was hanging out on our eggplant.

This little guy put a pretty good suckin’ on my hand before I figured out he was in the house. So I trapped him under my magnifying glass for a few hours before using my junk-store-salvaged microscope to look at him up close and personal.

While in Salter Path, North Carolina on vacation we saw this grasshopper, which was already dead, being carried away by countless ants.  You can’t tell from this photo alone but there was a line of thousands upon thousands of ants leading from the grasshopper back to the ant hill.

The speed at which the ants were carrying the grasshopper was impressive.  At once point the ants came upon an obstacle and managed to turn the grasshopper all the way around in order to get around it.  They did this in a matter of seconds.

Nature always amazes me.

My love of insects on this blog continues. But we’re going to take a break from moths today.

One of my friends needed some help moving a refrigerator and while doing so we found this Cross Orbweaver spider (Araneus diadematus) hanging in a web off the front of a house.  The photos included in this post don’t really do this spider’s size too much justice, but for Pennsylvania this is a fairly big spider.

This Cross Orbweaver spider was energetic, so getting a really good shot of it proved to be a pretty big challenge.  With the help of two friends; one manning a stick to move the spider around, while the other handed me lenses on-demand, I was able to get about 6 quality shots of this spider. I’ve included two of them here.

This appears to be a female Cross Orbweaver spider.  They range from 6 to 15mm in length, and live in many areas of the United States and Canada.  From what I’ve researched they enjoy creating their webs on structures like homes and really like to be under unnatural lighting to catch their prey.  This one proved that theory by being attached to the front of a house near a porch light.

The silk that this spider weaves is unique. It is extremely sticky when touched, almost like hot taffy, and is very strong and light.  When we were moving the spider from the ground to the fence, or just suspending him in the air, he’d shoot out his silk in such a way that many different strands would float into the air and he was able to keep himself afloat this way.  It was amazing.

The web that they weave, which you can read about and see on this site, is very sporadic and random in its design.  I’m looking forward to doing some research on how and why they spin these types of webs when I get a few minutes to do so.

Insects!

In short, if you pull open a remote Library that you’d like to grab a few photos from, and use iPhoto’s built in calendar feature to filter that Library to a specific year/month – you will find it is impossible to drag those photos onto your local Library.

To restore the sharing ability, after having selected 142 photos in my case, I had to disable the calendar feature (by clicking the small X in the calendar) clicking on the main shared Library in the source, reselecting all of the photos I wanted, and dragging them onto my local Library.

Ugh. I might switch to Aperature sooner than later. But not until after I put it through the ringer to be sure that the main problems I’ve had with iPhoto do not exist also in Aperature.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, software, applications, sharing, bugs[/tags]