It’s always a sure sign of winter when the mergansers return. These beautiful ducks grace our lake starting in late November. These shots were taken with a Celestron C90 telescope attached to my Nikon D50 camera. As usual, click on the image for a larger view.
Author: Tom
…in the fullness of time… Such a curious expression. One tends to hear it mostly in Biblical contexts, but there are other references in literature. According to UsingEnglish.com and Answers.com, the phrase means the following: If something happens in the fullness of time, it will happen when the time is right and appropriate. Fullness of … Read More “Veni Emmanuel” »
The holiday season is always a busy time of year. Not only are there dates for gatherings with friends and family to be juggled, but there are more musical perfomances than one could possibly attend. Every church is going to have their own program, as is every school performing ensemble. Tack onto that the various … Read More “Holiday Music Glut” »
It’s Friday night, which has become "date night" for Laura and I. We started with a wonderful dinner at Brick City Grille, then headed downtown for the First Friday art gallery tour. Our first stop turned out to be the best. We began with the West End Gallery. This small gallery has some of the … Read More “First Friday” »
Lots going on in the technology world this week. Here are three items that deserve a quick mention… 1. The latest virus outbreak required us to patch several glaring security holes in the Windows XP operating system. Therefore, as Microsoft rolled out Vista for the business community this week, I couldn’t help but wonder how … Read More “Technology Changes” »
OK, I’m ready to form a posse and hunt down, string up, then draw and quarter all would-be hackers and virus creators. We suffered from two separate attacks this week that nearly brought our operations to a standstill. First, there was the hacking. I don’t know if it was a mistake or intentional. If intentional, … Read More “Viral Madness” »
I usually hate Internet and e-mail memes. However, I found this one so funny I felt compelled to share. As with most of these memes, I have no idea who the original author might be…. Excerpts from a Dog’s Daily Diary: 8:00 am – Dog food! My favorite thing! 9:30 am – A car ride! … Read More “Pet Diaries” »
Last year at FETC I learned about the new browser Flock in one of the sessions by David Warlick. Warlick mentioned it again at EdTech this past fall, and I’m just now getting around to exploring its potential. Flock is based on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and has extensions especially tuned for Web 2.0. There … Read More “Flocking to Flock” »
I should have taken this as an omen. Yesterday as I approached my car, I took out my keys and my little thumb drive fell out of my pocket. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had not seen it fall and if I had sensitive school data on that drive. … Read More “Securing Student Data” »
It’s the last day of Thanksgiving freedom, so I decided that a bit more exploring was in order. I decided to visit the new Lake Conestee Nature Park recently created by Upstate Forever. It was challenging finding the public access at first. One map showed access points both behind the old Municipal Stadium and at … Read More “Lake Conestee” »