Blogging

I've deprocastinated enough things this evening to feel I can play a little, so here are a couple of things I enjoyed reading lately, in lieu of actual content.

Dan Simmons is researching polar exploration.

C. J. Cherryh, in a recent progress report entry (scroll down to Feb 16th) muses on childhood past and firecrackers.

Bunny!

I spotted this little guy on campus at lunchtime, and managed to get this shot before something startled him back into the shrubbery. I was about ten feet away, zoomed to the max, and still had to crop this down a lot.

Too many toys

My new printer arrived today. It's considerably fancier and more complicated than the old one, though not that much more expensive. I'm not even going to try setting it up tonight.

The order included a mass-market paperback (Jane Lindskold's The Buried Pyramid) and a pack of 120 4x6 sheets of photo printing paper. These two objects were roughly the same size, but the printer paper was two or three times as heavy -- a nice demonstration that different papers have different density as well as greater mass per unit area.

I've been taking a lot of closeups on my lunchtime photo-walks. Partly it's the novelty -- I never had a camera that would do that before -- and partly it's the cluttered nature of the campus environment. Like most campuses that have been lived in for a hundred years or so, it has lots of nice buildings, each plunked down without any particular consideration for its neighbours, and lots of nice trees, most of which have buildings behind them. It's hard to get a clean shot of a building or a tree or even a flowerbed without encroachment from random other buildings and trees, not to mention bicycles and benches and fire hydrants and traffic signs and -- particularly on a fine lunch hour -- half a dozen random students. So I have lots of closeups of leaves and blossoms and bark. One of these days, if I really need a cat-vacuuming project, I might try making myself a custom mood icon set out of bark and flowers and cactus spines.