Birdwards

A couple robins outside

I still haven’t quite figured out how to focus my zoom lens on birds. As you can see above, they’re still slightly out of focus. I just want to take clear pictures of birds without actually understanding the functions of this 8 year old camera. That’s the kind of laziness I’ve come to expect and rely on in this modern life.

I found a decent deal for the Pixelbook with pen on eBay and I swooped in on it. I’m most excited to try it out as a development environment. I’ll post my thoughts when it arrives in the next couple weeks. eBay lacks the near-instant gratification of other online sites, leaving me to pine after dumb purchases and build up overblown expectations for a week or two instead of the now standard two day turnaround.

It gets dark here very early now, and there are a lot fewer streetlights than I expected for a city this size. I have a few clip-on LED lights that I wear and attach to the stroller when I walk to pick up my son from preschool. I’ve noticed more than few bikers wearing those LED enabled helmets, and they really increase visibility. I’m not ready to drop $179 on a bike helmet; I’m sentimentally attached to my current helmet. Instead, I’ll 3D print some brackets to attach to my helmet a discarded bike light I found.

Starting Habits at 35

I tell myself not to wait for holidays or birthdays to establish resolutions, even though a lot of people do. My opinion is if you really want to start something, just start it, right? I turned 35 yesterday, and despite that opinion, I’d decided it was finally time to start a routine of writing a blog post every day. The good news is that I failed to start writing yesterday, so my resolution’s starting today, which is just your average Thursday.

On the advice of my friend Nader, I recently bought a zoom lens for my camera. I have a Nikon 1 V1, which is an 8 year old compact camera with a 1″ sensor. It’s more than a few rungs down from a DSLR, but it suits me because I don’t know what all the buttons do on one of those things.

I’ve never really had a zoom lens, so I was excited to snap some photos of birds on a recent trip to Florida. On my return home, I passed this one over to Nader for inspection.

A heron in front of water rippled by the wind

Nader’s plugged into the social media scene, and he quickly suggested a tweak to appeal to more followers.

A bird in front of rippled water. There's a filter applied that vastly increases the contrast.

I’m not really on social media, but I have a pretty good idea of what the kids are into these days. I ran with Nader’s iteration and made this:

A bird wearing an "I voted sticker" and sunglasses, with accompanying air horns and labels proclaiming my social media brilliance.

Maybe a little on the nose, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the kids want. Nader said he’d follow that account.