Mokka mit Schlag

Speakeasy had yet another service outage while I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago and a smaller one this past weekend. Both times the problem was completely on their end, and the first and more serious one they didn’t notice until I told them about it a few hours into the outage. Now that they’ve been acquired by BestBuy I expect service will only get worse, so I’m looking for alternatives.

The two major providers in my area are Cablevision and Verizon, and they’re both about as trustworthy as a Republican who promises to cut government spending. However, it occurs to me that maybe I can counterbalance them against each other. Is there any device/software which will enable me to bind two separate and independent Internet connections? I’d like my network to use both Cablevision and Verizon or Speakeasy at the same time. If one goes down, the other would shoulder the full load. Otherwise traffic should be split between the two so I get the most bandwidth and lowest latency possible.

To make matters still more complex I want at least some static IPs to run public servers like this one, and I want full control of my local network: no silly rules about what devices I can or cannot connect or whom I can talk to at what speeds.

Of course, I’m not wedded to Cablevision and Verizon. I’d really rather not consider them at all; but I do need to at least have an alternative to Speakeasy ready for the next time it goes down. However if there are other options in Brooklyn, I’d be happy to consider them. RCN does not service this area though; and given my apartment’s non-existent view of any sky, neither is satellite. Possibly other wireless providers might work, but I need heavy bandwidth for web servers and downloading Linux CDs and such, so download-capped plans aren’t very plausible. Any suggestions?

Chase and Ben, ask your Dad what these two are doing.

Autumn Meadowhawk, Sympetrum vicinum, a.k.a. Yellow-Legged Meadowhawk
Ridgewood Reservoir, 2007-09-29

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I’m not sure why, but you don’t see so many pictures of the downtown Manhattan skyline taken from New Jersey. For some reason all the movies like to shoot from Brooklyn or the South instead.

I went back to Metrotech early this morning before work to see if the Connecticut Warbler was still around and it was (though once again the first sighting was a false alarm caused by a female Common Yellowthroat.) This time I brought my camera with me. The light wasn’t great, the bird was moving fast when it was visible, and I don’t have a clue about how to adjust the various wheels, knobs, and buttons to account for all this. Nonetheless I did manage one half-decent, clearly identifiable photo of the bird.

I can’t believe this actually works. Can the answer really be this simple and this cheap? Back when I was doing astronomy in grad school, some of my colleagues were spending huge amounts of time, money, and effort to create really fast adaptive optics systems that would bend mirrors just the right way to account for atmospheric noise. Instead can we really just take a bunch of pictures and paste them together in Photoshop?

Well maybe not quite that easy. The more technical release notes:

The camera works by recording the images produced by an adaptive optics front-end at high speed (20 frames per second or more). Software then checks each one to pick the sharpest ones. Many are still quite significantly smeared but a good percentage are unaffected. These are combined to produce the image that astronomers want. We call the technique “Lucky Imaging” because it depends on the chance fluctuations in the atmosphere sorting themselves out.

So they’re still using adaptive optics, but then applying this additional averaging filter to further improve the image. Apparently high speed cameras are also part of the equation so they can take more pictures closer together, which we couldn’t do 15 years ago. (Astronomical photography is harder than regular photography because you have so much less light to use.) Still if you could remove the need for adaptive optics completely, you’d really have something. Adaptive optics systems are still well beyond the reach of the amateur. Computers, CCDs, and Photoshop aren’t though.

I’ve gotten a lot of life birds in Prospect Park, Central Park, Jamaica Bay, and other sites around New York City; but despite working there for ten years, yesterday is the first time I got one in downtown Brooklyn, right in the middle of Metrotech. A Connecticut Warbler, the most elusive of our local warblers, was flitting around in some shrubbery right outside of Rogers Hall at Polytechnic University where I teach.

No pictures yet, but it looks a lot like a female Common Yellowthroat, one of which was also present just to confuse things. However the Connecticut Warbler has a more distinct eye ring and much more yellow all the way down its chest to the undertail coverts, not just on its throat. It usually has a hooded look to it, though that wasn’t as apparent on this individual, apparently a first winter female. Still the yellow was missing from the throat, exactly where you’d expect to find it on the Yellowthroat. This individual was also quite a bit fatter and rounder than the Yellowthroat.
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