previous

Resolutions Are For The Birds
January 01, 2007 - 1:32 p.m.

 next

I have made a few New Year's Resolutions...

  1. Walk at least an hour every day. Studying is not the most physical activity, and I have to set a schedule for myself. Will I be able to spend an hour every day when I'm end-of-term busy? Well, if I don't set the goal then I'll certainly not meet it.
  2. Take a bag lunch to Trinity. I used to do this, and took my lunch for a few days this last term. Then it all fell apart and I started buying slices of pizza. My poor lunch bag sat empty and unused in the office fridge for months. Bad news for the belt and the wallet.
  3. Say the Daily Office every day. I've been pretty good about this anyhow, especially when I can get to Trinity for corporate prayer, but it's very easy to spend Saturday in bed. I've been rigorous since before Christmas, though "Morning" and "Evening" Prayer are relative concepts...noon is morning and 3am is evening for me.

Having made the resolution to take a daily walk, I decided to put it into practice a day early. After composing yesterday's opus of depression (see also Iraq) I went for a walk in High Park, which is always a good way to feel better about the world. While there I managed to get pictures of a bird I'd never seen before (nor even knew existed), the Bufflehead. See my birdwatching page, under "Duck-like Birds".

That birdwatching page is becoming unmanageable...I also took a decent picture of a female Cardinal, but squeezing her in beside her mate is going to be a huge headache. The problem is that I've laid the blasted thing out in a table format and that means moving cells by cut-and-paste every time I want to add anything. What I need to do is make it a database and be able to call up birds in whatever order I want...which is well beyond my ability.

The other options is to take pictures in groups of three, all from the same portion of the family tree, so I can just add rows. Sadly I am unable to summon Grosbeaks and Crossbills at whim. If I could then birdwatching wouldn't really be all that big a challenge, eh?

I'm also looking at changing the layout of that page. It currently reflects the order and categories of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region). That's a good book, but Amy's parents recently gave me the Lone Pine Birds of Ontario Field Guide. This is more user-friendly for me since I'm not terribly interested in birds that never venture north of Florida. It's quickly becoming my first resource, so I'd like to lay out my page accordingly...besides, the categories are a bit more refined in the Ontario book.

On top of all that, I'm not happy with how small the pictures have to be to fit on the page. I'd like a thumbnail layout, where the viewer could click and enlarge the image. This I could do, but it would mean sifting through all my old pictures to find the sources of the little images I now have...

Are you bored yet?

Anyhow, I also took some non-bird pictures in the park. Some of them turned out very blah, very flat. I suppose that's what you get when everything is a shade of brown. Still, I posted the best in the photo album.

|