Blinky Lights and Shiny Objects

I play Minecraft .  One of the things you can do in Minecraft is farm resources.  I finished building a greenhouse around an island last night.  Here is a screenshot of a view of the greenhouse taken from the glassed-in second story of my home base.  That is where I grow wheat and pumpkins . The sugar cane plants along the shore line are also part of my cultivation project.  Unlike my gardening skills in real life, I'm getting significant virtual return on these plots.

I wouldn't usually bring a large, expensive camera on a trip that is mainly about relaxing and sand.  But, now I've got this older DSLR that just sits around most of the time and wouldn't get $200 on eBay if I tried to sell it.  I took it to Cozumel for our vacation, and at the very least I loved having a real viewfinder to look through on those sunny days.  I only brought a few lenses, none in my "first tier" class, but more than serviceable in the Caribbean light.  I even treated the post-processing more casually than usual, simply clicking the "Perfectly Clear" box in Bibble 5 and adjusting very few other parameters.  Here are some of my favorite pictures:

I figured out what lens I was going to get to cover the telephoto range.  LensRentals.com sells used lenses after they've been rented out for 20 weeks or so.  I bought a used copy of Sony's constant f2.8 aperture 70-200 zoom from them, which retails for $1800, for much less than that.  I am so happy with this lens!  I used it on a tripod to shoot a wedding ceremony, and with the in-body image stabilization on my camera I am also able to hand-hold it for walk-around shots like the one above. The only problem is that now I want to upgrade all of my lenses to glass this nice.  No one ever said photography was a cheap hobby. 

I met Scott in 1996, at the nerd camp "Operation Catapult" held at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.  We both ended up attending RHIT for college, and we both moved to the Chicago area after graduating.  Scott has been a wonderful friend, the sort who you don't see all the time because they are always booked solid but you know that they would clear their calendar to help you.  In 2008, he took time off from his career to hike the Appalachian Trail, a long-planned adventure that didn't end the way he expected.  He wasn't able to finish the trail due to an injury, but he did meet Audrey. Audrey and Scott are now married, and starting off on crossing the country in an orthogonal direction to their mountain hike.  You can get all of the details at Cross Country Audrey and follow along with them as they bike from California to Maine.  The trip is being undertaken to raise money for an organization that helps people who have been diagnosed with multiple sc...

I would like to request that whoever is teaching the medical community that gallbladder problems are only for the over-forty set, to please stop it.  After my previous post, I got tired enough of severe abdominal pain after eating that I decided to keep bothering my doctor until he figured it out and fixed it. Symptoms, for at least ten years previous, include occasional sharp stabbing aching pain in my torso, near enough to my stomach that I was told it was "just gas".  Pain started 20 minutes to 45 minutes after eating a rich meal, and lasted a few hours, then went away completely.  Sometimes the next few meals would also cause pain, even if they were not rich or fatty.  I'd told my doctors, and nurses, and family, but no one could figure out what was really wrong.  They would test my thyroid again, even though I'd already had it tested and everything was normal.  They would suggest it was a food sensitivity, or an allergy to a preservative, and I had t...