The meaninglessness of privilege

Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.

Read the Article.

It's a small, small world

On Friday, my Macro ring arrived - its an adapter that allows a 35mm lens to be screwed backwards onto the existing camera lens. The reversed lens acts as a very high power diopter filter for macro photography.

Never mind.

Anyway, here are some pictures. For the butterfly pictures, I screwed together my 1967 Pentax's 135mm lens and 3x teleconverter and mounted them reversed onto the FZ1. For the fly pictures I used the 135mm lens by itself (since the lenses are reversed, shorter focal lengths yield higher magnification). The fly is less than half the size of a typical house fly.

I should mention that on Sunday, Yehudah and Mechel and I rode from Sloatsburg to Awosting and back. With our detours, it was around 22 miles.

Three Sundays ago, that is. Here's the map:

Ride Lance, ride!

Lance is well on his way to his 6th Tour victory. I was enjoying this Nike video until I saw the AMD logo on his jersey.

Oh well. No one's perfect.

Caviar and diamond-tipped canes

You know, I’m not wealthy like Al Franken or Michael Moore; I can’t go somewhere to give a speech and pocket 30 grand. I don’t begrudge them their success, but I do wish they would stop going purple because I get a tax cut and can afford to fix my daughter’s windows without dipping too far into savings. Okay? Deal?

Read the Bleat

Sunday Stuff

I started with the usual sorts of things - cleaning up the basement, mowing the lawn, putting the cardboard out for recycling, as so on. I asked Trish to help me move some bags of leaves that didn't quite make it out to the curb before winter. Since the bottoms were rotted out and the leaves mostly composted, Trish suggested we just throw them onto the compost pile. Out came the snowshovels. When I started to move the fourth bag, a cloud of yellow jackets came pouring out of the bag. I grabbed Mechel and ran. The yellow jackets didn't pursue us. So, I sprayed two cans of hornet/wasp killer into the two bags I saw the yellow jackets coming out of. Hopefully by tomorrow we'll be able to safely move the bags.

This afternoon, we went to Iona Island. A former Navy installation, it's now part of Harriman Park. We went there looking for birds, as the Audubon Society lists it as a "hot spot" in Rockland county. We saw lots of swallows, and one Heron fly by, but that's about it.

Trish and Mechel look out onto the marshlands
Barge on the Hudson	A commuter train on the other side of the Hudson

Quite the day!

Behold the zoom-age!

I tried out the new lens today. I drove out towards Piermont over lunch. On the way there, I saw the herons below in Sparkill creek. The rest of the pictures were taken on the Piermont Pier:

My camera now has a maximum zoom of 924mm. For a total cost of $425, the results are pretty impressive. Of course, with $2200 ($1200 camera + $1000 lens), you can do stuff like this.

Wow.

Place your tray in the upright position.....

....because we're about to crash this plane into a building. Annie Jacobsen of the Wall Street Journal describes a recent flight on which fourteen Syrian "musicians" went through a dry run for 9/11 part 2.

Read the article.

Update: Lileks picked up on the article today. "I tell you, something like this happens on a big scale – lots of planes dropping out of the sky, half the country is going to ask for detention camps. All because we didn't dare delay or inconvenience self-professed bands of Syrian "musicians" because it might suggest we were (gasp) dispositionally suspicious of a dozen Syrians clutching violin cases. Is profiling a good idea? Read the piece, put yourself on that plane before you answer the question."

Read the Bleat.

Update: here's a follow-up article.

Sunday Stuff

Cleaned the garage. Helped Trish clean the basement. Made a website for Tricia's daycare.

All in a days work.

Actually, making the website was pretty interesting. I used NetObjects Fusion 7 to create the site. I had received a complementary copy of NOF7 a while ago, so I thought I would give it a whirl. Making a website using a tool like NOF was very different than doing everything in HTML by hand like I've done so far. Some aspects were much faster, but occasionally I would get to a point where I couldn't get NOF to produce an effect that I could implement in HTML manually with 30 seconds of effort. After a steep-ish learning curve, though, I was able to get it to do my bidding (once I accepted the fact that I was not in control).

It's like that whole "I'll collect your garbage for you but you can't use pointers directly" thing that Java does. In that case, I say good riddance. In the case of NOF I'm not so sure.

A new lens for the camera!

My parents bought me a Raynox 2020Pro teleconverter for by birthday (thanks Mom and Dad!) I didn't realize I needed a special adapter ring to mount the lens to the camera, so today I took some pictures by holding the camera in one hand and the lens in the other. Shooting handheld at the equivelant of 900mm at 1/125th of a second didn't yield the sharpest image. Plus, I shot through our 60 year old living room window. Still, not to shabby eh?