Month: January 2006

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program

I’m not one of the crazy Washingtonians who pulls his shirt off and dons shorts at the first sign of sunshine, but I was lulled into forgetting that it is still the middle of winter around here because the sunshine I missed yesterday was still around when I got up this morning. So, I grabbed my camera and headed for the waterfront to get more bird pictures. I wasn’t disappointed, either. I loved the shadows framing this Western Grebe

But I hadn’t been there more than twenty minutes when clouds blocked out the sun in the south. Though the blue sky in the north still provided plenty of sunlight, the shadows have virtually disappeared in this picture of a male Surf Scoter:

Before long I noticed that the shutter speed on my camera had dropped well below acceptable levels, and I had to turn the ISO up to 800 and finally 1600. Even at that level I lost much of the detail on this female Red-Breasted Merganzer:

By the time I got home at 11:00 the sky was slate grey, a fine rain blasted my face, and my fingers seemed to have gone numb. There’s no sign of snow in the future and many flowers have begun to bloom, but it’s still winter here in the Pacific Northwest. The seven-day forecast is for rain.

Not Just an Old Coot

An American Coot:

One of the main advantages of being an old coot is that I get to go out and play and take pictures of American Coots, and more, while you’re probably stuck inside at work.

Although today’s sunshine didn’t reach the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge until nearly 2:30, when I had to leave, it didn’t rain at all. Needless to say, after nearly a month of rain, and rain predicted for the next two days, it was a great day.

For awhile I thought I might have to settle for this close-up of a Bufflehead duck, which was all right with me because it’s probably the best shot I’ve ever taken of one because I’ve never managed to get this close before:

Still, my heart gave a leap when I discovered a family of four otters playing in the small creek that ran along the trail:

I did have a number of problems getting clear shots of them because of the underbrush between us, but I sat and watched them for nearly five minutes as they played and hammed it up for the camera.

One of them actually seemed to take pity on me and emerged from the creek to show just how handsome he really was:

I’ve been looking for these guys off and on for nearly six months now, but the wait made the final encounter even more special.

When Good Bots Go Bad

I guess I blew away iTune’s bot when I ordered Jeff Lorber and BB King right after ordering Van Morrison.

Now it’s spitting out weird recommendations, the weirdest being Kenny Chesney’s The Road and the Radio, which generates the error message “The item you requested is not currently in the U.S. store.â€? Since I’ve never heard of Kenny Chesney, I have not idea why he wouldn’t be in the American Store, unless he’s an Australian country western singer.

Equally bizarre is the soundtrack from Garden State, a movie I never heard of with a hodgepodge of groups I’ve never heard before and who, with the exception of Simon and Garfunkle, hope to never hear again.

It really went over the top recommending “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” featuring Jay-Z, with EXPLICIT lyrics, followed by Ray Charles’ “America the Beautiful.” I can only hope that the idiot that programmed Walmart’s bot hasn’t been hired by iTunes. I’m afraid one of us is schizoid, and, despite the two of me that look back from the bathroom mirror every morning, I don’t think it’s me.

If that weren’t bad enough, I went online to Amazon today, only to discover Leslie has apparently been using my browser again. Why is that women have so much trouble understanding boundaries, failing to realize that I expect to be greeted by books on zen, modern poetry, or expensive camera accessories, not pop-up books or tennis shoes?

It only takes one incident like this to make you realize just how dumb bots really are. After all, if it were a real person looking at what I’ve looked at/bought, they’d know immediately that these were aberrations and that somehow the woman of the house had managed to get her hands on the remote control.

In other words, they’d know immediately to throw this sample out. How likely is it that a man’s man is actually going to buy any of these things, other than possibly the Canon book? In other words, they wasted a perfect chance of making a quick buck off another sucker. I hate to imagine what might be awaiting me in my Gold Box.

Now, considering these bots were designed by experts for some of the savviest companies out there and they’re still about as dumb as Skye, my fixated Australian Shepherd, how smart do you think government bots designed by the lowest bidder are? What happens when bad data is dumped into NSA bots?

Were you really surprised FBI agents complained that NSA-provided information ended in an endless string of dead ends? I worry, of course, how comfortable neighbors felt when FBI agents interviewed them about their neighbors’ phone calls and books checked out from the local library. I do know I felt a little uncomfortable when my neighbor’s car was towed from his driveway at 2:00 a.m. in the morning by the police, even if it was back in the driveway by noon the next day. For a while, Skye wasn’t the only one running to the window to check out odd noises at night.

It’s one thing to have to look at a page full of pop-up books for a week or two until I have time to browse for more manly items; it’s something quite different to have your neighbors peeking through their curtains at you for the next year wondering if that’s bomb material you’re taking into your garage in those shopping bags.

It’s hard to imagine a better reason to make sure our government isn’t spying on us regularly without court supervision. Innocent or not, there is just too much that can go wrong when spying becomes widespread. You only need to take a look at what happened in East European communist countries during the cold war to see the danger of mass hysteria and the perceived need to spy on each other. Of course, many Americans would think that I’m paranoid, but judging from the phone calls The American Civil Liberties Union doesn’t think so. If you’re worried, you might want to take a look at their site.