Brian Hampson - Life and Other Things

Last night, I was just sitting around watching the Red Wings (the Hockey team - not the bird) beat Dallas when out the window appears a first time bird for me. It was large..certainly larger than the Chickadees and Sparrows; about the size of a crow.

"Quick dear! Grab the camera!!", I call/whisper.

Slowly I get the camera up to the glass of the door and I squeeze off a few shots, cursing the late evening light. As I open the door ever so slowly the bird freezes and then flies off. Gone.

I run upstairs to the PC, download the shots and process them. I check out my bird book… It turns out that I saw a Band Tailed Pigeon. Definitely prettier than the rock pigeons we always see.

Here he is with a bit of noise… Like I said it was darker than I would have liked:

Shot with the Canon 40D and 100-300mm 4.5-5.6 lens.

Thursday, I was down at Burnaby Lake after dinner with Mrs. D.  It was pretty late and the little sparrows were out and singing, the blackbirds were settling down and there were a lot less ducks and geese than during the early evening times.  Surprisingly, I saw a duck that I could swear was a mandarin duck.  Mrs. D saw it too, but doesn’t know her ducks well enough to confirm.  This would have been my first ever sighting of one of these lovely birds.  No camera… no picture.

Well, I wasn’t going to let that stop me.  On Friday, as soon as I got home I zipped down to the lake again with the hope of seeing my Mandarin again.  There he was!  He was even hopping up on the shore to eat some seeds!! Excitement.  Get the camera, shoot a few pics! Got him!  Here he is:

I also finally managed a Red Winged Blackbird in flight:

This little Savannah sparrow was a first time for me too:

This male cowbird was kind enough to pose for me and give me that nice creamy bokeh for a background:

Of course the bird scenery is dominated by goslings and ducklings now, so here are some shots of Geese and Goslings:

Mom is never far behind:

Looking after the little ones can be pretty tiring:

All that sitting and sleeping… Naturally a bird’s gotta stretch:

I happened to turn around from my stretching goose to catch this squadron coming in for a landing to roost for the evening:

Then we have the "Gene Simmons Fan Club":

Spring is SUCH a great time to get out and take pictures.  Everything is starting fresh and growing up!

All pictures taken with the Canon 40D and the 100-300mm 4.5-5.6 lens.

Back after we finished camp, I promised I’d get a log posted.

This is the log of the camp as written by one of our 11 year old Scouts:

This bike camp is fun. I had a lot of fun with my bike.  We went uphill and downhill.  Even though the uphills were hard it was still good excercise.  The downhill riding was very exciting.  I like going down hills you can go very fast.

Bike camp is fun.  We made a campfire that I also really enjoyed.  We sat around the fire and sang songs and played.  I really enjoyed looking at the stars in the sky at night.  The stars are beautiful.  The hike on Sunday was good.  I learned a lot and saw old rocks that can easily break.  It was very cool.  There were little crabs under the rocks that were very interesting and funny to watch as they scurried around.  The seas and the beaches were beautiful.  The beach isn’t made of sand at all, but rather millions of cracked shells.  The path along the hike was very hard to walk on at some places, but I liked it.

I really enjoyed this bike camp, even though it was short.  It was my first time to go to camp on my bike.  I was surprised how hard the uphills were and how exciting the downhills were. I will definitely go to the next biking camp because I love it.

Count me as NOT impressed!

I’ve talked about Foldershare before and mentioned how good it is.

That just changed.   MS have forced an "upgrade" to a new version.  Win2K NOT supported

Well shucks - great way to kill off a product guys.

There is so little code that should require XP only… Come on, this is ridiculous.

Apparently I’ve got to go look into some nice little open source tool called Unison