Rozworld’s WebLog

Rosalind has been talking about having fish as pets this summer, so we decided to put together the aquarium again. This is a multi-day process that insures everything that goes into the aquarium is clean for its inhabitants - both animal and botanical. The rock collection we have available for the aquarium includes rocks from 5 different U.S. States. They all blend into the environment seamlessly. I get most of the water from our dehumidifier, which works pretty well since I know the water is pure from condensation. This year I purchased some live native aquatic plants including Hornwort to give an added touch of realism. After we had everything ready we went down to the park to catch our pets. Within a couple hours we caught a bunch of pumpkinseeds, bluegills, and a green sunfish (these are shaped more like a largemouth bass). We picked out 2 bluegills, 2 pumpkinseeds and the green sunfish to be the occupants of the aquarium. The fish adjust quickly to their new surrounding. Last time I had bluegills they liked eating a pet store bought food called tubefex worms but this lot was rather indifferent. They liked red worms and wax worms but I prefer to get non-live food for them to eat on a daily basis. It’s just easier and cleaner to deal with. So I’m trying dried meal worms now. They seem to really love those. The fish get use to people coming into the room and will swim to front and wait to be feed. They are very smart fish. They have a definite pecking order. The green sunfish seems to be on top followed by the others by size. I really enjoy keeping fish. It will be sad to see them go back to the pond after the summer is over.

We finished planting our native flower and wild grass garden on the side of the house this last weekend. We got a lot a help from a neighbor friend of mine who owns an Organic Lawn and Garden business. Jay helped us pick out the plants and order them. In exchange for his help on this project I will be building him a website for his business and for the marketing of his “Compost Tea”, which is the latest in horticulture technology to aid in the microcosm of biology for healthy plant growth.

We like the fact that we’re not introducing any foreign plants into our yard and once it gets started growing, in a year or two, there will be very little maintenance. No more mowing on the side! Here are some of the plants we got into the ground, (all are found wild in Wisconsin) :

Ohio goldenrod
Prairie violet
Black-eyed susan
Rough blazing star
Showy goldenrod
Prairie alum root
Echinacea - purple coneflower
New England aster
Purple hyssop
Prairie coreopsis
Blue wild indigo
Rattlesnake master
Blue joint grass
Obedient plant
Little blue stem
Hummingbird summer sweet
Turtlehead flower

Before

After Planting

Close up.

With our digital photo collection approaching 10,000 files, I thought it was time to start looking at digital photo organizer software. So far I have tried the organizers from Canon and Adobe and they both have features that I find annoying, including white mattes around each thumbnail in Adobe’s software and Canon’s is slow and non-intuitive to navigate. The last organizer I tried was Picasa from Google, which is a free download from http://picasa.google.com. Once I tried Picasa, I really liked the user interface. It has very cool zoom in and edit features, the search is easily available, and you can turn tagged images into web pages for display on a website. I would highly recommend Picasa.

Jean and I have started a massive project to digitally scan in every film photo we have in the house. What has made this task a lot simpler is that we now have a great scanner. It’s an Epson perfection 4490 Photo scanner and it has the capability of scanning in negatives as well as slides and of course the photos themselves. The negative scans are actually better quality than the photo scans. However every little speck of dust shows up on the negative scan which makes a clean surface essential. We started with what we had with negative film since this is just a subset of the photos and then went to the photos themselves if we did not have the negatives. So far we have 1800+ photos archived and organized. I figure this is about two-thirds of our collection.

I noticed some while ago that people tend to take pictures of things that are special to them or of events that do not happen very often; birthday parties, vacations, friend and family get-togethers but mundane daily activities like going to work or washing dinner’s dishes are often left out as worthy compositional subjects. When you think about the total number of possible picture opportunities in your environment, you can see how skewed our choices are. For instance, what about taking a picture of every pebble in the drive way, or every blade of grass in your lawn, or how about every cloud that passes over head? These things are all unique in the world but they’re down right boring. If you showed someone a photo album full of these things they would think you were pretty nutty. Putting an album like this together is also time consuming and not very cost effective. People love to take pictures of other people; this is built into our psychology. We are social beings after all. The focus on other people extends to news, gossip, and blogs for that matter.

And now the down side: When you take a person’s portfolio of photographs taken over a lifetime you tend to get a bias view of what that person did over a lifetime. You can not accurately ask, “What did this person do with his or her life?” This is because you often see them smiling and doing interesting things.

With digital photography I can now take so many more pictures. The cost of taking those mundane scenes has fallen dramatically. I now like to take contextual photographs; Pictures that help tell the story of other primary photos. For every picture I take, I now keep in mind, “How does this picture fit in the larger context of things.”

The Carpet	A cloud
Some Moss	A parking lot