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I’ve been wanting to go to the zoo for several years now (starting back in Utah) and just never got around to it. So Friday night I decided that we’d go to the Kansas City Zoo on Saturday morning… Weather was supposed to be in the upper 60’s and overcast the whole day so figured it would probably be one of the last nice weekends before the summer heat came.

The zoo is layed out kind of in continents. You have baboons in one area, chimps in another gorillas in another, so it’s kinda weird not being able to see all the similar kind of animals at once, but also kinda interesting to see what is from where.

Overall it was a fun day, with a LOT of walking. I won’t go over each little detail but there were two that were really cool. First was a bird show that we went to watch while waiting for the second thing. I know, bird show shmird show… which was kinda what I thought going into it. During the show they asked for two adult volunteers and if they had a camera all the better. So I held mine up and got picked. We were told to go sit on these chairs. Then they bring out this big ole owl that they are going to send to a stand that is inches behind us. Luckily my camera has video, so I switched to that thinking it would be cooler to get the full action instead of one shot at a picture that I would probably miss. I wasn’t mistaken… this huge owl comes flying at us and lands basically on our heads. Having it come right at the camera is pretty sweet. Then they sent it off to another stand across the crowd, and then back to us, before going back up to the stage.

The second part was the best. They have a cage full of lorikeets that they allow 25 or so people into feed every hour. They give you a small plastic container of nectar (which is the majority of their diet) and you just hold it in your hand. You walk into the cage and they just come right up and land on your hand to start eating. There were some people that had 4 on each arm, Kaylene (my wife) had one keep landing on her head. The most I got was 3 on one arm, but had several on my shoulders a couple times. We hung out for like 20 minutes just having these beautiful rainbow colored birds flying all around and landing on us just to check things out. It was such a cool experience and worth the price of admission itself. It may be a worth a return trip to go do that again when it’s not overcast just to get some better shots with the brighter light.

The rest of the zoo was pretty cool, got some other cool shots. A large part of me wanting to go was to get some fun pictures and to play with the camera which I seem to be wanting to do more and more lately. They had a number of walk through bird aviaries which was nice to be able to get the pics without glass or wire between us. The kangaroos are just out in a field where they could walk up to you if they wanted (but naturally don’t).

Several times we had the whole “is a zoo cruel?” discussion as we would run into a particularly pathetic looking animal in a bland cage. It seems the “big ticket” animals get it pretty good, and a few others just get the shaft. We still don’t know how we feel about it, but it was just sad to see a few animals in a bad setting. While others seemed to be just fine, and you never know the back story of how maybe these particular specimens would have already died were it not for human intervention.

Anyway… good times were had and to anyone in the area, I highly recommend a visit for the lorikeet feeding alone. It was a blast and we will enjoy the pictures and video for some time.

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Can you say “Sweet!!”?? This case mod is definately one not to be shoved under your desk to gather dust. Make sure to click through all of the closeups as they are truely astounding. I think that I read that it was around 7 months of mod time.

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France sent me a cool link the other day to musicplasma : the music visual search engine. Basically you enter in you enter in a band/artist name and it create a list of bands/artists with similar style, and other genres that also are of similar tastes. No clue where he compiled the info that said what related to what, but for me it seemed pretty accurate and gave me an few other people to try and listen to.

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I found a comment in an article by Dave Shea over at mezzoblue.com to be a tad… well… idiotic. In this article (which is a followup to this artcile where he announced an overhaul of his site) he states the following:

…most issues discussed on this site are about building for the web. If you’re here to discuss that, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have a site of your own.

Now, I just barely got into the whole “blogging” thing myself (see the whopping 9 “articles” below this one??). If I commented on a blog prior to now, I definately wouldn’t link people to my work or hobby sites as they have no bearing whatsoever on the topic at hand. Of my community of coding friends, only one other one has a “what I’m coding these days” site, and even then he’s only put a few things on it. The rest have their hobby sites, and family sites… none of which I think would be appropriate to put as their link in a techno-blog comment.

Does that make them any less good at what they do? I don’t think so. As one comment following the article stated:

I have a few acquantences that I would consider experts far more than those listed on this site, and a few of them do not have a, now considered expert, weblog.

I will fully admit to not even looking at his list of experts yet, and so I will not say that my friends blow his out of the water… but they are some VERY smart guys, and I have learned more from them then I have from reading any blogs. So how is it that because they have decided to spend more time with their family, or are pulling extra hours at work, or whatever their case might be… and decided not to put extra time into creating a blog of their activities, they are less of a coding expert, and so their comments are worth less? Heck, I don’t even have time to write in my site either, I’m depriving myself of sleep to write this just cause I think it needs to be said… if for no other reason then to get it off my chest, but think that if I didn’t spew out this lame site a few weeks ago, my opinion could be considered worth something (althought I haven’t really proved that here yet… give me time).

This reminds of a guy that came to help our High School football team one year… I was a lineman, and so when my coach said they were bringing in a guru on the “line”, I was waiting for the incredible hulk to walk in. But in walked this old(er) man that weight in at 125 soaking wet… who couldn’t possibly have ever played as a lineman as he would have been broken like a twig. But my 300+ pound, ex-professional lineman, who could bench 400+ without breaking a sweat, coach… respected this man as an expert in the field. He taught us many amazing things, all from his love of the game and studying the details of what was needed in our specific part of the field. He had never played the position (that I know of) but was one heck of an expert.

Does this equate exactly to this situation… no, since as I said that my friends do code and are quite good at it. But just because they don’t put it all out their for the world to see, doesn’t mean they don’t know their stuff.

Anyway, for the 2.5 people who actually might visit here by accident… am I off base here? Or is it a pre-requisite to have a website to know what you are talking about and provide comments for others to see and not be thought less of? I mean no disrepect to the great and powerful Oz… I mean Dave Shea, and no his comment didn’t bring to pass this disertation all on it’s own, it’s something I have pondered on for quite a while… his comment was just the catalyst for me actually saying something about it. So apologies to Dave if this seems directed squarely at him, as it’s not. It’s more to the general feeling that his comment represents, in that people who don’t code 24/7 are less then those that do. Some have a gift, some have to work at it, and some do it just for the love of the game. But I don’t think anyone is less of a coder because they don’t have a site to tell the world of their coding escapades.

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Doesn’t really look all that spiffy does it? Well it probably won’t get much better any time soon. I love to code… it’s what I do professionaly, and what I do as a hobby, but I can’t “design” to save my life. I can code up most anything someone puts in front of me, but can’t come up with anything that looks remotely good on my own. It’s probably some left brain vs right brain thing… and I’m probably supposed to know which is which, but I don’t.

Anyway, so I may do minor tweaks here and there as I notice things, but I don’t ever expect it to be majorly cool looking, or get major overhauls. I just wanted a place to link to cool articles that I bump into every now and then, and a place to post my thoughts. Occasionaly I’ll write up something on some new code I wrote or other coding issues I’ve overcome, but I’ll probably be the only one reading them anyway.

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