I want to start using this site again. But instead of providing commentary on the culture wars surrounding evolution, I’m going to simply provide commentary on me. I’m going to use this site as a place to post write-ups and pictures from my various travels.

Hmmm. That sounds familiar.  Perhaps because I wrote almost exactly the same thing on March 29, 2007. I’ll quote myself.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So what’s different this time?

Nothing if I don’t keep posting. But after amassing lots of good pictures, having many excellent adventures, and a likely move within the year to start a doctorate, I really would enjoy a place to share these experiences.

A really cool new way to view pictures

One last word before I put up new pictures. You can now view pictures in the photo gallery using Cooliris. Never heard of it? Follow that link for a flash animation of how it works. It’s a free FireFox plugin (you’re using FireFox, right?) that allows you to view images from the web in a very compelling way. I often use it to search for images with Google and now it works with my own photo gallery.

Once you install Cooliris, visit any of my albums or pictures in the photo gallery and then launch the program. I recommend clicking on the first image to enlarge it, and then using the down arrow to go through the images one by one. This way, you can see the image titles with the images. (You can also view the images full screen or as a slide show, but the title disappear.)

To make the experience even better in Cooliris, I’m going to start uploading larger images in the albums. These larger images will only be visible when in Coolirs, and while you can still view older albums with this tool, the pictures get stretched and may look a little grainy.

Finally, if you’re on a slow connection, you might want to view images just on the website (and not with Cooliris) so they’ll download quickly.

It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.

This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”

Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So What Comes Next?

I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.

I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”

I can’t just leave you with nothing

So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.

• San Antonio Lakes, 12-27-06
• Marfa, TX 12-18 to 12-19-06
• Christmas Bird Counts 2006
• San Angelo State Park, 12-8 to 12-10-06
• OH Ivie Reservoir, 12-2-06
• Forth Worth Nature Center, 11-25-06
• San Angelo Birding, Nov. 2006
• S Tx Birding Festival 2006
• Davis Mountains and Lake Balmorhea, 10-2006

The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.

There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.

Believe me or not, one of the hardest things about running a website (or more specifically in my case a multi-faceted blog / photo gallery) is not learning how to use the software that creates the content but rather deciding how to organize that content.

The blog has taken care of itself. Wordpress is a sufficiently awesome tool to organize everything into categories. I was feeling a bit stifled however by the photo gallery. It wasn’t the software’s fault though, I just needed a place to put increasingly different types of pictures, and I wanted to better highlight certain pictures without having them buried deep within an album.

So, I’ve now taken to organizing content into the following main albums.

• Trips — a place to put up albums for trips (near or far) that I take. This album is essentially just how the whole gallery was working before. All the old albums with their pictures have been placed into here.
• The Scrapbook — This is a place to put up individual, good quality pictures that I’ve taken recently, which are worth sharing. I’ll be putting up a few good shots here and there on the blog, and every time I do, I’ll throw them in the Scrapbook. I’m also going to share more pictures when I’m too busy to blog.
• Nature — This album is further broken up into three subalbums — Birds, Butterflies, and Dragonflies. The idea here is to put up a photographic list of all the birds, butterflies, or dragonfly species I’ve managed to get shots of. A few of these pictures are good, most are simply decent, and I’m sure a few are wretched. Birds in particular have a number of species but too many poor quality shots. My old camera wasn’t really meant for bird photography… I will be swapping out pictures with better ones as I get them, and I’ll add pictures as I get shots of new species. I simply wanted a place to showcase some of the diversity of life, in the groups that I’m interested in. In the future, if I get enough material, I might even add other groups.
• The Bruce — I’m sure this needs little explanation. It’s an album to put pictures of the world’s coolest cat, all in one convenient place. When Friday cat blogging occurs, Bruce’s pictures will get included in this album.
• Some of my best — This album will showcase some of my favorite pictures, period. Currently the album contains a group of shots that I put up when I originally created the photo gallery. I will be removing some of these pictures and adding others. As the list grows, I aim to keep it around 100 pictures, and things may come and go as I get better shots or change my mind.

Finally, because of its design, the photo album can hold pictures that are slightly wider than the blog. So any time you see a picture I’ve taken on the blog, you can click on it and get taken through to the album to see a bigger version. (The only exception would be portrait pictures, which may sometimes appear in the same size in both the blog and the album).

I hope you enjoy these changes. You can definitely expect to see a few more pictures on Ocellated.