Mokka mit Schlag

I’ve installed WP Super Cache. It’s supposed to be transparent, but holler if you notice any problems.

Last weekend I saw moths everywhere I went in Staten Island and Brooklyn. This weekend I couldn’t find a single one so we return to William R. Mason Regional Park in California for Hodges#5451.2, Parapediasia torquatella:

Read the rest of this entry »

I walked around the lake in Prospect Park today, looking to see if any of the old four banded geese were still around. No such luck. They may have moved on. However I did find a fifth banded goose from the sames series, NA49:

It has been hanging out since at least January of this year.

After some more experimentation with my Tamron 28-300 Di VC, I think I finally understand what this lens is and what to do with it. It is a closeup lens, not a telephoto lens. That is, it takes really good pictures fairly close (within a few meters) and pretty crappy ones far away. For example look at this nice close-up of a juvenile American coot taken at 300mm:

Santee Lakes, San Diego County, 2009-08-23
1/800 s, f/6.3, ISO 400, handheld

It’s pretty good, especially around the body where you can easily make out the individual feathers. In fact, if anything, it’s over-sharp; though that’s probably just a combination of me over-sharpening it in Lightroom and the JPEG conversion. The original full-size photo is even better than this.

Now compare to this shot of a far-away coot taken with the same lens. You’d expect the subject to be smaller, but it’ worse than that: very, very fuzzy and unsharp, even with a much faster shutter speed:
Read the rest of this entry »

September 1996-September 2009
We will miss you.

It really is time to switch to a more reliable host. Last night as I was at the vet with my cat (sadly, for the last time) Pair Networks turned off The Cafes with little to no notice. They sent a form e-mail with no useful information:

Due to problems it was causing on the server, we were forced to disable the
following script located in your account:

/usr/www/users/elharo/cafe

For future reference, please take a look at our script usage policies:

http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/resource.html
http://www.pair.com/pair/policies/cgiresource.html

Please take a few moments to look over your script for any obvious problems
before using “chmod 755” (via ssh) or using your FTP client to reenable
the executable permissions of the script.

If you have any questions about this script, please contact our friendly
support specialists at support@pair.com or 412-381-7247 (option 2).

The message is inaccurate. /usr/www/users/elharo/cafe isn’t a script. It’s the complete web site.

I’ve turned the site back on, but since they didn’t tell me what the problem actually was, I have no way of knowing if the problem is still there or not. I posted a new article on Friday, and it hit Hacker News yesterday, so there’s been a spike in traffic but still in the 10,000 hits a day range, nothing serious.
Read the rest of this entry »