Tomorrow, Nov 1, I leave for south Texas for the annual Rio Grande Valley birding festival. The last three years, I’ve been honored to be a tour leader for the festival. It’s a pretty sweet deal too. In addition to a modest salary, they pay for my airfare, hotel room, food, and in the past have given a group of us young guys a rental car for use in the latter part of the day after the trips are over. The festival gets over 1000 particpants from all over the country (and usually some people from other countries like Canada, the UK). I’ve been very blessed and fortunate to be a part of the festival these last three years.

This year, the festival’s offering a “post-festival” trip to northeast Mexico with space for 60 participants. I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to help lead this trip as well. We’ll be staying in Cuidad Mante and birding areas around the small town of Gomez Farias along the Rio Sabino and El Cielo reserve.

Come to find out, they also needed at least a couple of guys to go down to NE Mexico before the festival and scout out the areas so that we’ll have a good chance of finding some of the birds that are likely to be high on people’s wishlist. Since my plane ticket’s already paid for, and since I’m under employed, I jumped at the chance. So, I’ll be going to NE Mexico for a week, coming back to south Texas for a week, and then going back down to Mexico for a third week. The first week’s a paid vacation, and the second two weeks I get a modest salary. Somehow, my one week festival trip turned into a three week trip.

This year’s festival isn’t without a note of sadness. A good friend of ours, Jason Starfire, passed away tragically this summer. For many of us, going to the festival and not seeing him there will be the first physical reminder that’s he no longer with us.

I’ve gone ahead and put up a gallery of pictures from last year’s festival, to give you an idea of the kinds of things I’ll be seeing. I will also be posting about my experiences and including lots of pictures while I’m down there. I’m looking forward to another great festival and some time in Mexico!

What do the Maxtor 5000DV external harddrive and the Sparking Violetear have in common? The answer should be nothing. One is a piece of junk, the other a beautiful hummingbird of South America.

Sparkling Violetears tend to be numerous, and very noisy. They give a metallic chipping with great vigor as they defend their territories in the forest. To my ear, I began to imagine this noise as sounding like a workcrew building a railroad, constantly hammering at the metal.

The similarity I discovered was that my external harddrive, when it utterly failed, sounded like a Sparkling Violetear. After googling, I tried sticking the harddrive in the freezer for a little while and then plugging it back in. (The cold can contract the parts, making it work again). The harddrive was extremely cold and at first, it just spun and nothing happened. When it finally warmed up enough, the sound it made sounded like an old dot-matrix printer. Coming from a harddrive, that’s not much better than a railroad workcrew.

Most of what was on this drive I have other places, but I lost some data. The moral of this story? If you’ve got an external harddrive for backup purposes, don’t put your only copy of data on it!

Family, friends, and complete strangers - I now have a blog. It’s actually been a lot of fun (and a little stressful) getting it all setup. For me (and my intended audience) to enjoy this, I wanted something more substantial than the many free blog services around the internet. I wanted multiple categories to allow people to sift through my posts to see things of greater interest to them. I wanted picture galleries where I could share what I capture with my camera as I travel places. And particularly, I wanted a solution that was skinnable, meaning I could give it my own design from top to bottom. I didn’t want something that placed limitations on me. For those that know me, you’ll know that I don’t particularly do things half-heartedly. And so in that spirit, I give you Ocellated.

The boring stuff on how I’ve set it up

Now, there are a couple of things I need to share about Ocellated before I go any further. Recognizing that not everyone will dedicate the five hours per day necessary to absorb and reflect upon the content posted at Ocellated (what’s wrong you people!), I’ve created a special category for those who wish to keep track of what’s going on in my (and my wife’s) life. It’s called The Digest. I’m going to try to put up one or two posts a week in this category that talk about what we’re doing, where we’ve been, where we’re going, etc. I’ll also include other posts, which I think would be of interest to family and friends. The point is, by clicking on this category in the navigation menu, you can see pertinent information about us, while bypassing all the other messages about various topics. [I actually scratched that idea almost as soon as I thought it up.]

Another thing that can be a huge help in keeping track of what’s going on at Ocellated is my RSS feeds. (See the Syndication link in the navigation). For those unfamiliar with RSS, on that page, I’ve linked to a post describing what it is and how you can get it. By using RSS, you can see what I’m posting about, without having to come to the site. This way, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everything that’s getting posted to the site, or (and this is the cool part) you can subscribe to only those categories that interest you.

So what is Ocellated?

Ocellated Antbird

I would imagine that many of you are wondering what Ocellated is and thinking I misspelled oscillated. I didn’t. Ocellated comes from the latin word ocellatus, which means little eyes. Basically, it’s a biology word that means spotted. One of the very cool birds I’ve seen in the tropics is Ocellated Antbird (pictured here), and so it seemed a good fit for my website. (Not to mention the domain name was available).

What is the purpose of Ocellated?

I guess there are a number of things I hope to achieve with this site. First and foremost, I’ve noticed that when good friends move away, there’s a tendancy to talk at best every few months, and when you do, the conversations are boring and stale. “Hey, what’s going on…” “Not much, really busy. Got a new job. School’s great.” And after a year with three or four conversations like this, the friendship has mostly died. Nathan and Melissa, some good friends of mine who moved away this past summer, set up a blog when they left. I’ve been amazed at how much reading their blog has been like talking with them, albeit in much shorter doses. Effectively, their blog has allowed them to share things with old friends that they wouldn’t have shared had we been having a brief conversation on the phone. Since we are likely moving in a few months, I hope that my site will serve the same purpose for the many deep friendships I’ve formed over my life. I also hope it will better connect me with distant friends I don’t talk with much.

I also want to use my blog to talk about issues that interest me. It will become apparent what those are by looking at the categories I post under. Issues of science, particularly evolutionary biology and ecology, issues of faith (and religion in general). I also have a deep interest in technology, and I’m sure there will be a healthy dose of that.

So sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and let the fun began. In the future, I’ll add a contact form for getting ahold of me, but for now, most everybody has my email address, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks for stopping by, leave a comment and say hi, and I hope you’ll come back often.

Having gone to the trouble to provide RSS feeds to various areas on my site (see the syndication link in the navigation menu), I wanted to give some help to those interested but confused as to what this technology is and what it does.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. Among other things, it’s a technology that allows you to get a list and summary of the content available from a website. What’s the big deal you ask? I can go out to that website and see the content myself! You’re right — you can. But what if you had 30 websites that you wanted to keep an eye on. Some you really liked, some you kind of liked, others just occasionally had things that interested you. And what if many of those website infrequently add new content? You’d be wasting an awful lot of time going to each individual site. Read the rest of this entry »