Mokka mit Schlag

You be the judge:

vanity devona war a search engine, The name
war ihnen bdtsfoe the association with
ltuhouna Matute and because someone
thought that mark enyiw should hur
two 0’s in the name (44100, 60-ogb).
Ate the tin opined about 603 of the
company was owned by the chinen
government. We meres didfczur out
what they were up to, or what. they
thought they won up to; but by
the time thy finals shutdown
they had burned through an
100 avian dollars in ayuht.
Read the rest of this entry »

Surely I’ve seen a Winter Wren before now? Well, yes I have. Many times and on more than one continent. However, the American Ornithological Union has just split the species into 3, Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus) in the Pacific Northwest, Winter Wren (Troglodytes hyemalis), back here in New York, and Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) in Eurasia. In fact, I’ve seen all three, Troglodytes hyemalis from New York and other locations, Troglodytes pacificus in the Bay Area in California, and Troglodytes troglodytes from Europe. I’m not sure which I saw first, Eastern or European. It may actually have been the European species back when I first started getting serious about this.

The new Mac Pros are finally available to order. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but I think this is what I’m going to get:

• One 3.33GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere”
• 3GB (3x1GB)
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
• ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
• One 18x SuperDrive
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Apple Wireless Keyboard (French) & User’s Guide

Read the rest of this entry »

A new Mac Pro is long overdue, and I need one. Lightroom’s too slow on my vintage 2007 MacBook, and more importantly Warcraft is only giving me about 5 FPS. :-) If the new machine is fast enough, maybe I could even use Parallels/VMWare/Bootcamp instead of my Windows 7 desktop PC (which clocks 60 FPS in WoW without breathing hard). Maybe Apple will release new models tomorrow? If it does, I want to compare it to today’s prices, so if I bought today behind door #1 we have:
Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday morning Janet Schumacher and I drove out to Cupsogue Beach County Park on the south shore of Long Island to look for the Hudsonian Godwit that had been reported there since the previous weekend. I first saw it at low tide around 9:15 AM on the first sandbar in the bay, visible from just past the trailer parking area. However the bill looked a little off and I wasn’t sure before the bird took off. Could have been a Dowitcher in intermediate plumage. Then, after walking a mile out to the point and back again, we relocated it at exactly the same spot and got much better looks at it, including a few (bad) photographs.

At least I hope that’s the bird. (Lower right foreground) It was easier to see through the scope which gives you much several times more magnification than my 400mm lens (roughly equivalent to a pair of binoculars). To get this much I had to scan along the sandbar snapping away and then blow up the photos later at home.

Read the rest of this entry »

Suppose I edit a raw file in Photoshop with levels as follows:

What are the Lightroom equivalents of these values? Is there a mathematical formula that converts from Photoshop’s black, white, and midpoint slider values to Lightroom’s Exposure, Blacks, Recovery, Fill Light, Brightness, and Contrast sliders?