State of the Blog

My original aim in starting this blog was to post a picture each day of something that I found nifty, preferably a photo I shot myself. As you may have noticed, I haven’t kept up with that in the past week or two. You see, my classes started up again, with a vengeance, and I simply don’t have the time to do it properly. And so, the photo portion of this blog is on hiatus indefinitely.

Pity.

I shall go ahead and post any observations that come to mind, just because I can.

Chrome

Those of you that grew up in the mid-80s may remember a gosh-awful Garfield animated TV episode that involved islanders who chanted “Chrome… chrome …. chrome … Be-bop-a-loo-la…”. I’m sorry, but this is the sequence that comes to mind every time I hear that word.

Sort of like those that can’t help but follow the word “phenomenon” with “do-doo-d’doodoo”.

Either way, I went ahead and downloaded Google Chrome, because otherwise they’d revoke my nerd license and I’m already on iffy grounds with my MBA classes.

First impressions, it’s small, minimal, and almost seems built around the rather nifty address bar (“it slices, it dices, it figures out what you mean!”). I know that more than that has been done (see (*gasp*) the documentation, now with extra comic book goodness), but looking at it, it’s the real estate usage that I notice.

One feature that I do rather like is its ability to “Create application shortcut”. Now all this does is to do the moral equivalent of create a desktop bookmark to the webpage where the page doesn’t have the address bar, but rather takes up (almost) the entire screen. But realize this: with some pages, you may not notice that it is, indeed, a web page unless it had the surrounding “in a browser” clutter.

Google may not have quite designed an O/S, but this does seem like a step towards a virtual O/S.

Ubiquity

After playing with chrome, I began to miss my kitchen sinkFirefox. I saw one commenter state that he felt sorry for the programmers of Ubiquity, considering the timing of Chrome.

My response was a rather intelligent-sounding “yeah, I hear ya.”

Followed by “wait, what?”.

So, I Googled it (I’ll comment on the verbing of company names later), and found out that it was an interesting way of making Firefox (and the web) more flexible. In a nutshell, it’s a way of allowing you to type commands to Firefox and potentially make use of the result within another page. Keyboard shortcuts on steroids, perhaps. The great cosmic power of the command line in an itty bitty living space. Hrm.

Oh, go look it up and geek out.

Anywho, expect more updates, but with less regularity (and no prune jokes!).

The Texas State Fair grounds has (have? No, it’s one location.) several good examples of Art Deco architecture. The Hall of State above is a good example.

This one surprised me, as I rarely see two (or more) wasps working together unless it’s a major haul. To be honest, though, the near one didn’t really move much as I approached while the other one was actively … doing whatever wasps do on flowers. Harvesting nectar, perhaps? I was wondering if there was such a thing as a lazy insect (after I confirmed that it wasn’t dead).

I think it might be a monarch, but I like it, either way…

Dead trees are good subject matter. Lone trees are good. Live trees are good. Sunrise is good lighting.

So therefore, this should be an Amazing! picture.

It’s nice, I suppose.

(I never have been good at marketing.)

Nice, sunny day, and the bagworm remains in its bag. I also call it moody due to the lighting, but this is more a matter of “learn to use the flash”, which I have been prone to avoid like the plague.

Interesting tidbit: Apparently the females stay in their bag and lay eggs there, while the male moth is a normal flying moth.

I’m tempted to call this one “Hey everybody! Watch this!”

Another 7/4 photo from the lake. I’m rather happy with how it turned out, since I was dealing with low lighting conditions.

This tiny butterfly was found at Lake Lavon.

Ok, I admit it, I like perspective, I’m fascinated with nice skies (more than a solid blue or solid grey, that is), and I’m a typical tourist at times.

I’m back. Long week, and as you can see from this shot, apparently we were there between semesters, as the campus was dead (excepting the construction going on).

The fountains (which I have a couple of nice shots of) were off, and so were a tad less dramatic than they might be, but it was a nice campus, overall.