Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

The Bulletin

A new front in the junk mail war has opened.

I struggle from day to day trying to keep loose trash out of my yard. It’s not as bad in the new house as in the old, where the wind swept all of the trash into our lawn to roost, but the other yards in our neighborhood are so immaculate that one piece of rubbish in our lawn looks like a bright red boil on the face of a supermodel. That is why I am a bit concerned about this new Bulletin epidemic.

Lion's Teeth Evolution

We have an experiment in evolution in our own back yard – a vivid and undeniable example of natural selection at work.

Dandelions. The plague of the suburban lawn. Dandelions sound like a cute little plant, and they’re really not all that bad looking taken as just the flower. Indeed, their method of distributing seeds gets my vote as pretty darn ingenious.

Something Fishy

Berta’s sister’s family was in town for the weekend, and on Saturday we packed up everyone and trekked over to Adventure Aquarium in Camden.

They’re making some changes at the aquarium, or at least they have since the last time we visited. We had to enter through a different entrance, and there was a lot of construction. Still, the aquarium was in plenty good enough condition to make the trip worthwhile.

Graphs and Filters

Two things that are on my mind at the moment:

I would like a good set of filters for digital photo enhancement. I just want the colors to “pop” a little more in the photos I take than what they do. It seems like the colors are true, I just want to enhance them a bit.

Also, it would be keen if there were some simple color-correcting filters I could apply. I’ve got some photos where the white balance was off, and they look quite blue. I would love to be able to correct those.

Although I do have Photoshop, I would like an actual filter so that I could use it from Irfanview, as opposed to a set of actions, which I can only use when loading the bloated full Photoshop application. When all I need to do is adjust color, I don’t need the full power of Photoshop, if you see what I mean.

Piquante

I like hot food. In high school, we liked to play D&D on the weekends, and during those games is when I built up my tolerance for hot things.

We would routinely have salsa and chips with our games. We started out with some mild salsa, found a liking for it, and eventually got hotter and hotter brands. At the time the best brand available was Chi-Chi’s Hot salsa. We ate it continuously.