Monthly Archives: February 2009

My Flickr experience until now

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I have posted a picture of a feral kitten that is living in our backyard, the last post I made here, plus it’s on my Flickr site. Most of my pictures there have no comments and very few views. I don’t have anybody I know IRL that goes to my Flickr site and I have put some of my cat and sky pictures into groups, and gotten a few comments or less on them, until I put that nice picture of the black feral kitten into a group and thus far I have had 9 comments, and that’s nothing to most I bet, but for my pictures, it’s dynamite, it’s over-the-top, it’s phenom stuff. The picture has had 38 views and has been in my stream since Feb. 19, 2009, that’s 4 days total thus far. That’s a record for any of my pictures. I have put some pictures into a couple of groups, and not had any “bites” from one or the other, but in this case, I have had bites in both I put this picture in, as well as some new groups asking to put the picture in them. Bestofcats is the group I first have used, and have tried to get my kitties noticed there, but have had not much success, only one or two comments, and no way there to garner more with a 3 or 4 comments thread promote your picture to get more comments to get a 5+ comments award … another cat group has such a thing for 4 or more comments to garner more for an award, and for those pictures I have gotten 3 comments on one picture before, but never for bestofcats, until today. :)

I hope to get more, am still waiting. We shall see if later tonight or tomorrow I can get more bestofcats comments.

My Flickr site is part of this blog, it’s the “My Photos (Albums)” PAGE. I use a plugin to put my Flickr photos here. You must have a Flickr account to comment on my Flickr photos, and you have to go to my actual Flickr page to input a comment for a photo, except for when I put one of those photos in a post on my blog, then you can comment here as a normal blog post will allow, but it’s not going to show up on Flickr, of course, in that case. FWIW

Feral male kitten

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Black Male Kitten 2

This black male feral kitten lives in our backyard. His mother showed up in 2008 with three kittens (they may have been born under our house.) She doesn’t stay here now, but comes back every so often, two kittens stayed here, and one we just haven’t seen at all, FWIW. They are still feral, but this one pictured is accepting taming by my 10-year-old girl lately.

–> Photo taken February 19, 2009 < –

This photo on flickr.

Astronomy

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I got something new last week. A Celestron PowerSeeker 127 EQ telescope. We haven’t done much with it yet, as it’s been Full moon and waning from there, but still too bright, or too overcast to see much.

We did see the moon right after rising (Feb. 11th 2009 between 9 & 10pm) just looking gently through the eyepiece, it was bright, but not too much so since it was still low in the sky. It was nice to see it so close, and will be nicer when it’s not so lit up in a few days.

I will want to upgrade some things, but for now I’m getting used to using it, and still need to make the starfinder sit still and be in the right spot to work for me.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of the planets soon, hopefully soon. I have had no luck getting anything in view at night except for that moon, and a distant weird look at some constellations which did not improve in the telescope (since the sky was still too light from everything, from the sunset not long before to the moon rise to my lack of experience with telescopes up to now.)

I’ve also looked online for things to support this newer look into my hobby of looking at the stars at night, and integrating it into the homeschooling I do with my children.

I’ve gotten some things to print out, and some video and audio to put on their Sansa Fuze players every week/month, as released.

Hubble unfiltered (video episodes) and SkyWatch (weekly audio highlights of astronomy news) and Tonights Sky (monthly video highlights of the northern hemisphere night sky) are free on this site: hubblesite.org portal page found here: http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/

The Evening Sky is a free monthly printable PDF on this site: skymaps.com found here: http://skymaps.com/downloads.html

I hope to get some things to connect my camera to the telescope for some great pictures. That’s something I”ll be able to use with the sky at night and on land during the day. :)

These days

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It’s been really cold the last couple of mornings. It’s been in the mid-teens upon waking, so it’s good to have enough firewood to really heat up the fireplace all day/evening. It’s what gets me happier to go through these still too dark days, even with sunny clear skies. Daylight is less than 11 hours a day, and my house isn’t very bright at any rate, and I don’t have a deck to go out on and get “what I need” standing in the morning Winter sun with my cup of coffee, as I used to do some years ago, before we tore out our horrible “french doors” to the deck, and walled that space up, to make room for the kitchen flipping it’s layout. We have a nice sliding door to put in on the other end, and no deck at all to stand on outside. Both projects are what I need done, a new deck, sliding door installed. Then I have my morning sun/coffee thing going again.

I haven’t been online a lot since many things happening here and there the past few years, but had a surge of more ability to get online when my last baby (June 2007) was small, but he’s been getting bigger, of course, and has been transitioning into a full fledged toddler for the past several months, which makes it fairly impossible to get onto any forums, to write posts there or on my blogs, to read much of anything. Not much ability to do much of anything on my computer, which is so needed, pictures, editing video as well, now that I have a nice video camera.

And then what just happened, well, awhile ago, the baby came to me and insisted on climbing all over me, so I had to shut my computer.

Now I’m back with it, but he’s close by again and liable to climb on me again if he notices that I am using my laptop.

Nice thing though is that I had an idea a few weeks ago to make my Thunderbird and Firefox programs start-up with windows, and then stay in the system tray, and whenever I used them I’d double-click the icon in the system tray and there would be the program, and clicking “x” or “_” would minimize to tray, thus, just doing either of them in the middle of my post would mean I could get back to it easily later. It’s made a lot of my browsing and emailing much easier, since I don’t have worry about load time and my computer is strong enough to endure being on like this just fine.

So I’m hoping to use my blogs more, and find something more valuable to do with them, if I can, write helpful things for other people more often. I used to do that on my blogs, and on some forums/email lists, but I don’t do the forum/email lists anymore, and haven’t had much time to consider things on my blogs, and have little inspiration for things to write at times, especially if I find the time to write. :rolleyes:

Something to add to this post would be instructions for how I did my Thunderbird and Firefox idea. I’ll try to get that written as a separate post, and I’ll refer link it right here. —> (when I get around to it, it’s now 2/5/2009 2:43pm Eastern Time)