May, 2009

Purple and white Bleeding Heart (Dicentra) flowers. Can’t help but think of the logo for “Hairspray” when I see these.

Fern “fiddlehead” unfurling.

White Bleeding Heart flowers close-up.

Labels: Bleeding Heart, Fern, fiddlehead, garden

I picked up a netbook today: an Acer Aspire One. I felt a little bit guilty about buying something which is powered by our main CPU rival, but I haven’t been able to find one made by AMD as yet and, well, this was on sale.

My plan is to use it for writing while commuting. You will likely will see more written blog entries as a result.

One word of warning for those contemplating getting one of these: it takes a good half-hour or more for it to set itself up with Windows XP before you can actually do anything with it. Didn’t get a lot of time to spend with it, though I did manage to install a few programs I expect to want, such as OpenOffice, Winamp, a movie codec pack and Stellarium to start.

Thought about going with a Linux-based version, but in the end I like convenience, and venerable Windows XP still delivers. (I have two machines that came with Vista, and much prefer the older OS, if only because it doesn’t get in my way and is as top-heavy as the new OS).

A couple of other observations: I hate the fact that somebody decided that it would be a good idea to sacrifice a double-width Shift key for a single-key sized version adjacent to the little-used pipette/forward-slash key (I wonder if I can easily remap it?). Also, am amazed that Microsoft or Acer didn’t reduce the multi-level nav-bar for Internet Explorer, as the default config takes up well over a third of the display. I ditched that almost immediately for a lightly customized Firefox browser.

Needing to take a picture of the day, I chose my new “toy”.

Here’s a close-up of its vast keyboard. 😉

QA

Close-up of the screen (displaying Stellarium) using the macro lens.

Labels: Acer Aspire, macro, netbook, Stellarium

The trilliums (trillia?) in our front garden have finally bloomed. Here’s a close-up of one of them using the macro lens.

Being squawked at by a red-winged blackbird down at Woodbine Park. Unfortunately the bird is not in as sharp a focus as I would have liked, but the expressions is great.

It’s warm enough now that our dog Yo-Bob can go fetch balls thrown into the pond by Woodbine Park. I bought a throwing-stick for dog-balls today and we got him good and tired having him chase the ball all over the park.

Labels: red-winged blackbird, trillium, woodbine park, Yo-Bob

Another pic from Annie’s soccer class. Best pic of the bunch, where unfortunately she gets faked-out by the boy beside her, while another boy in goal looks on.

Labels: Annie. soccer