Donnie’s Blog

A couple of nights ago I was turning off the lights, and I was freaked out by this gimongous moth that had landed on the screen door. I have seen some large moths before, but this was probably the largest. Of course I had to document this amazing creature, so I snapped off a bunch of photos using my macro lens. The detail is just amazing.

While I was out there I discovered why we have frogs in our pond this year. So I took a few photos of the frogs too. Again, the detail is awesome, especially the frogs’ black and golden eyes.

I think I am getting the hang of how to photograph insects at night. If they are willing to put up with the flash (and not all are willing), I try to close the aperture as much as possible to maximize the depth of field. With the macro lens the depth of field can be as small as only a couple millimeters. So, I switch the camera into full-manual mode, bump the flash up a few stops, close the aperture down as much as possible, and try a reasonably fast shutter speed to compensate for the lack of a tripod. I am pretty pleased with these photos; I think they are some of my best yet.

Today I tried roasting my own coffee beans. This all started a few months ago when Slashdot had a poll about what people drink in the morning, and all the coffee snobs basically said, “You really don’t know what a real cup of coffee tastes like until you try fresh-roasted beans.” This piqued my curiosity, so I bought some green coffee beans from the Red Door Cafe at Caltech, and I tried roasting them on the stove.

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Now that the term is over and summer is here, I am getting to catch up on a few maintenance tasks here and there. One of the things I did was to get my photo gallery software back up and running.

I also have a ton of backlogged photos that I need to post, so hopefully I will get everything onto my website soon. To kick it all off, here are some photos of praying mantises that were hanging out in my back yard. These photos are from last year. I just saw my first mantis for this year, so I expect to take more photos soon!

Phew, I think that is just about over…

On Sunday I threw the new hard disk and power supply into my server, and thankfully everything started right up. However, transferring the operating system to the new disk turned out to be significantly trickier. In the end I decided to go ahead and install Mandriva 2007 Spring since I was hoping to do that sometime soon anyway. It turned out to be a good choice (at least so far…), since some of the essential packages are much better integrated into the distribution. Setting up Postfix with TLS went surprisingly quickly, for example.

Of course, while I am juggling all this, I am also trying to get third term grades wrapped up, and consult, so I am stressed out! But I think it will get better now that this admin hassle is out of the way. Hopefully my server will survive the pwn3d-timeout and I will get to stop thinking about all this stuff for a bit.