Well, it looks like there’s four eggs in the nest box now. One more than last year. I guess Clara and Carlos are going to have a busy time feeding 4 chicks. I’m looking forward to a nest full of fuzzy young peregrines later this spring. The picture on the left is one I took of Clara a couple of weeks ago.

I didn’t make it to the falcon presentation at the library. Mary and I had gone hiking in the Marin Headlands with some friends. Afterwards we had lunch at a Brazilian restaurant in San Francisco. We did stop by the library on Sunday to see the photo exhibit. There are some really nice shots there, and mine doesn’t look too bad.

I’m still working on the Clean Tech company, but I haven’t updated my green blog in a while. I’ve been pretty busy putting together a demo version of the user interface for our energy management product. I’m learning a lot about AJAX web structure and have been using a JavaScript toolkit called Dojo. It’s pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll blog about it in more detail one of these days.

I’ve been playing around with web widgets and gadgets lately. Ron and I created a Google Gadget for the dishAdish “Best of” feature. Here’s what the gadget looks like:

You can add the Gadget to iGoogle or get the code by clicking on the Google button above.

I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for quite a while now, and I’ve been using Gallery for my photo gallery for a very long time. I finally got around to putting the two together. It’s not really that hard since there’s a WordPress plugin for just this function. It’s called WordPress Gallery2 Plugin (WPG2).

The main thing stopping me was the need to upgrade my Gallery installation so it would be compatible with the latest WPG2. This turned out to be fairly painless. I made a backup of my gallery database using phpMyAdmin. Then I downloaded and installed the latest Gallery release and ran through the web setup pages. It went off without a hitch. I installed a couple Gallery plugins to make things work better with WordPress, including ImageBlock and ImageFrame.

Next I installed the WPG2 plugin for WordPress. Basically, you just unzip it in the plugin folder and click on the WPG2 tab in the WordPress administrator page. Once again there was a simple web based setup and I was ready to go. Now you can see my gallery embedded in my blog layout by clicking on PHOTO GALLERY in the dark blue navigation bar near the top of the page. I also added a photo gallery navigator and random picture to the sidebar to the right. Another cool feature is it lets me add pictures to my blog postings directly from the gallery, and I can even enable neat effects like Lightbox pop-ups (click on picture on right).

The only down side so far is that loading my main page seems slower, but maybe it was that slow before. Hopefully all this new technology will improve my blogs more than not.

First of all, Happy New Year! I had planned to write a log blog about everything that happened in 2007, but I guess all you really need to do is look through my old posts…

The other day I was playing around with the My Maps feature on Google. It’s pretty cool. You can find an area of interest on the map and annotate it with various markers. I had made one a while ago for my trip to Africa. This time I marked a bunch of points of interest at Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Mary and I visit there just about every weekend looking for various types of raptors and other wildlife.

Sometime in November I mentioned that I had purchased a spotting scope for Mary’s birthday. I have also mentioned digiscoping before, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about digiscoping and what I’m doing.

There are two primary components needed for digiscoping, a digital camera (digi) and a spotting scope (scoping). After a lot of research, I ended up buying the Pentax PF-80ED-A with a 20-60x zoom eyepiece from Eagle Optics. You can read a bit about it on Eagle Optics’ blog entry: Spotting Scopes for Birding. For the digital camera, I have been using Mary’s Casio Exilim EX-S500. It’s not the best combination, but I’ve managed to get some decent results.

Some things to consider are the camera’s zoom (4x is supposed to be about the best) and the scopes eye relief (distance your eye or the camera lens can be from the scope eyepiece and still see the image). These factors combine to determine the amount of vignetting you will have in the picture (black ring around your image). You can see an extreme example of vignetting in the picture to the right, which was my first attempt at digiscoping with the Pentax and Casio setup. Zooming the camera to 4x and zooming the scope eyepiece to 40x pretty much eliminates the vignetting for me.

One of the main difficulties with digiscoping is getting the camera lens lined up with the scope eyepiece. So far I’ve been doing this mostly by hand, and occasionally set up a second tripod with the Casio, but lining up the two instruments on two separate scopes is not so easy, and it is definitely not very adjustable. I did manage to get a decent picture of a peregrine falcon atop a power line tower (picture on left). There are many mounts and adapters available to connect the camera to the scope, but none that I have found work with the huge eyepiece on the Pentax scope. I’ll have to figure something out to solve this problem.

It’s pretty fun stuff. Once I find a good adapter solution, it should be much easier to set up and track birds. So far I’ve captured a white-tailed kite, red-tailed hawk and a peregrine falcon.