I just started taking some courses from Lynda.com (for about 4 months now) and I'm really enjoying them. They have some really great instructors and some really good courses. I've been using Adobe Photoshop more seriously for a couple of years now and recently bought CS4. Deke McClelland of deke.com is my absolute favorite teacher of all time. He has a great sense of humor and an un-matched working knowledge of the software. He is the ultimate mask-master.

I found this in my RSS reader courtesy of Paul Boag. Slickmap is a template for making a simple flowchart out of unordered lists. It comes with a set of images necessary to make the connections between the flowchart and some other minor effects, a CSS starter file and a starter html file. They have a demo showing what it looks like linked from that page also (http://astuteo.com/slickmap/demo/).

I made a softbox the other night out of a cardboard box, some tissue paper, and some scotch tape. Its probably (definitely) not as sturdy as the ones that the pros use but its definitely just a fraction of the cost. I don't think that you will need many instructions if you look at the photos. The only tool I needed was my box cutter to cut a hole for my flash. Another necessity is a way to take the flash off-camera. I have a set of Cactus V4 triggers from http://www.gadgetinfinity.com/ that definitely do the trick.

Ok so its not a new product or anything but it is new to me. I got the straight up standard Mac Mini with the slower chip and smaller hard drive. I upgraded the Ram to 4GB though. Here are some pictures I took on the evening when I opened it up. The Mini DVI to VGA adapter I acquired from a friend didn't actually work so I had to pick one up at Best Buy the following day before I could actually get it to work. The one pin is bigger and has smaller pins above and below while the female end on the adapter has a smaller pin and no place for the other pins.

I got an e-mail today that said it got my information from Jigsaw. I followed up by googling them. I tried the “find out if my information is in Jigsaw” link but stopped short of clicking the link in my e-mail. This service claims to not be spam. I disagree. IMO this is spam and it should be stopped. This article at TechCrunch was quite informative.

I thought about titling this post “Microsoft's most despicable act to date”. I listened to Security Now number 199 the other day where Steve Gibson from GRC.com described a windows update that installs an add-on for Firefox that allows websites to run code on your computer. This is truly dispicable. Leo Laporte called it “unconscionable”.
How to remove the add-on
Show Notes from Security Now 199

This always bothered me so I'm sort of glad they changed it. Now instead of seeing messages from people I follow to people who I don'nt follow, they will be hidden. If I follow both people, I'll see the communication. The downside of course is that I may miss some threads. Occasionally I would follow up on these one-sided conversations by clicking on the name of the person being replied to in order to see what I had missed. http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html

I just saw that there is a new feature on eBird. It is the top 100. It ranks birders by number of species seen or by number of checklists submitted. I am currently ranked number 1 in my home state of MD for the 2514 MD checklists I've submitted (and 6th by species though I've only gotten to the first 332 of the 363 species I've actually seen in the state). My ranking by species of 98th in the ABA area is misrepresented too.

As a budding nature photographer, this story hit home. I guess you can never be too careful. This poor guy fell into a jetty while trying to photograph a Common Eider. The link below has the whole story, some decent photos, and a poem to go with all of it. Thanks to June Tveekrem for posting this to the best Birding List out there (MDOSPREY).
http://www.howardsview.com/Jetty/Jetty.html