Author Archives: John

Top Ten Search Terms

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search enginesOne of the more interesting statistics that my hosting company provides for my website is the search terms that people use to find it. The top ten for July so far are:

    1 905 29.27% hawaiian flowers
    2 49 1.58% mexico
    3 47 1.52% bayport alameda
    4 32 1.03% safari
    5 31 1.00% parrot
    6 29 0.94% magic
    7 21 0.68% beer bottles
    8 20 0.65% vxworks
    9 17 0.55% detention centre
    10 17 0.55% generation 5 ipod

Almost one third of the searches that terminate at my site are looking for Hawaiian flowers? I need to change the subject matter I post about I guess 🙂

Gizmo Update

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Gizmo ProjectI have been using the Gizmo Project client on my Mac for several weeks now and mostly I am impressed. I did get a Plantronics DSP500 USB headset which is both comfortable and clear. That made a big difference compared to using just headphones and the built-in microphone (using both built-in microphone and speakers is a bad idea – too much echo for the person on the other end of the line who gets to hear everything they say repeated back on the line).

Mostly, I have been making trans-atlantic calls with it and have found it to be very stable for a beta release. There have been a couple of updates (including one that restored the ability to record calls on the Mac). The only real problem I have had is with their ecommerce backend. It has been down a couple of times now so the client believes that you have no credit and won’t let you make call-out calls (i.e. calls to the PSTN). It also won’t let me buy $20 of credit at the moment. Couple that with the fact that during the beta you can only buy one block of time each week, and it could be annoying, but in fact the $10 lasted over two weeks.

I am also working with VoIP at work at the moment – porting the open source VoIP PBX software Asterisk to run on one of our wireless access points. You can read all about this work on the Devicescape blog, including a mini-review of a Wi-Fi VoIP handset from ZyXEL.

Phase 31 Update (Cove)

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Once again, thanks to Carl for the numbers. As those who are on the Bayport MSN group will know, we are once again considering Bayport (in fact I would have liked to be at today’s lottery, but once again travel plans got in the way of that). I am going to get all the paperwork updated though so that we are back on the pre-approved list for the next ones (plan to bike over in a minute to sort that out). The master plan has been updated too.

How was this morning’s lottery for those that went? Is the turnout still as high?

Alert Ducklings

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This is the final shot of the ducklings from Saturday. These were resting next to their mother – the calm one. She actually had her head tucked under her wing all the time I sat on the opposite shore of the lagoon and snapped shots of her offspring. This was one of the earlier shots I took; the ducklings were reacting to the sound of the shutter from the previous shots (except for the one that is too cool to even look around, letalone stretch!).

Duckling On Dry Land

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Another shot taken Saturday morning on my ‘duck shoot’ here at my apartment complex in Alameda. This was one of the set where the mother was less than happy about me being anywhere in sight (letalone near enough to take photos). She kept her little fleet of ducklings, five in all, moving away from me most of the time, occasionally vocalising her opinion of me with the hisses that they use to warn off predators.

Eventually, she seemed to accept that I wasn’t a threat, and even let the ducklings come onto the shore in front of me. This shot was taken earlier on though, when she had them mountaineering over some artifical rocks that mask the pumps for the fountains to get away from the evil human with the odd black object that makes noises.

Cactus Flower

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A shot of a cactus flower taken on my last trip to Oakland Zoo. This cactus is alongside the camel enclosure and had several of these budding blooms.

Since I had the long lens (75-300mm) on the camera, this was taken from further away than I would normally have done, using a tripod and a focal length of around 200mm.

Ian Marsman

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While looking around inside Flickr some more I discovered a collection of amazing macro photos by Ian Marsman.

In addition to his Flickr photo collection, he also has a blog dedicated to technology and photography where he talks about some of the photos he takes.

If you have any other suggestions for Flickr people to check out let me know. You can also see some of my photos up there now too (though most, if not all, of the shots there have appeared here or in my gallery already).