Our yard this year is like an Eddie Izzard routine. Covered in bees! And mosquitoes, but none of them were available to pose. Look at that big fat pollen pod!

This week I screwed on the macro doohickeys jdorff got me for Christmas a couple of years ago to take pictures of my newly sprouting seeds. Today I left them on and took pictures of everything in sight. :-D

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In case you were wondering who's winning the battle.



yellow=pirate green=monkey red=ninja blue=robot

This is the D50 scsuehle bought me about a year and a half ago--a refurb through Amazon with the 18-55 lens for about $550. Now it's $1000. What!? Is discontinuing it driving up the price of the remaining ones instead of making people discount them to get rid of them?


I just noticed the "total shutter releases for camera" line in a photo's EXIF data the other day. I don't know why I didn't remember seeing it before. I'm at around 15,500. That divides out to about 32 pictures per day for the last 16 months. Probably more accurately, about 215 pictures per weekend.

If you want to keep up with the madcap exploits of rtpddrummon's weather balloon/camera/intergalactic space station project conveniently here on eljay, auryn29a made the feed.

project_warped

The thing that I remember most about the movie Minority Report was the advertising. "Hello Mr. Yukkamoto, and welcome back to the Gap!" Signs on the street recognized you and shouted personalized ads. It was creepy and part of the movie's point.

Leave it to Apple to make it come true. From CNN:

Apple also announced a partnership with Starbucks: Starting in October, the coffee chain's icon will light up on the Touch whenever a user nears a shop that has Wi-Fi access. Users can then download the song that's playing in that Starbucks shop or get a list of the 10 most recent songs played.

As in Chicago Manual of Style, not complementary metal–oxide semiconductor. Ben and Scott, feel free to skip to the next entry. ;-)

The Chicago Manual answers questions each month, and it's one of my favorite mailing lists. (Nerd!) This month had one of the best answers ever, and apparently I missed an equally awesome one last month.

Q. Contracts often employ defined terms in quotes and parentheses, e.g., ABC Corp. (the “Seller”) shall sell ten widgets to XYZ Corp. (the “Buyer”). When drafting such a contract, I always put a period after the close parenthesis if it is the end of the sentence, such as in the above example. But it’s like listening to nails on a chalkboard to me to have a period essentially (ignoring the parenthetical) follow the period employed in an abbreviation. What do you recommend?

A. Yoga?

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Q. My fashion expert daughter insists that denim does not go with “almost anything,” as I say it does. What is your opinion? Does denim match almost anything, including other colors and other fabrics, e.g., silk?

A. Finally, a real style question! If only we Chicago manuscript editors were a little more fashion-forward . . .

Here's a random question for ya --

When it comes to shuffling off to Buffalo, which came first, the step or the song?

Helen Duncan was arrested during World War II after holding a seance where she claimed the spirit of a sailor from HMS Barham told her his ship had been sunk. Problem was, the Barham’s sinking was then still a military secret, and authorities feared Duncan might reveal details about the impending D-Day invasion, presumably also obtained from supernatural sources. She was tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and sentenced to nine months in jail. Although the act was repealed in 1951, the UK has refused to grant Duncan a posthumous pardon.

Collection of comics about Katamari