My brother-in-law, Bryan Orr, is a great nature observer.  A week ago he was driving some clients to the KCI airport when he noticed a Bald Eagle near the river.  He was so excited he started checking everywhere near the Missouri River to see if he could find a nest or just a plain old good spot to sit and watch.  It didn’t take long until he found a really nice spot in downtown Kansas City, Missouri near the Broadway bridge to kick back and watch his Bald Eagles.  Funny thing, the first time he saw an eagle downtown it was walking around near the river and he thought it was a turkey…seriously a turkey, come on.  Before Bryan started telling other family members about the incident he went down on December 31st around 9:00 AM with his Mom’s camera to get some prints as proof that Bald Eagles really do inhabit the city.  But he couldn’t wait until they were developed (yeah, he still shoots film) and spilled his guts at the family New Year’s Eve party…truthfully, I wouldn’t been able to contain the secret either! As Bryan’s telling me about the whole series of events, I had to get in on that action, even if there was only a remote chance to see an eagle in the wild.  After begging his wife, Kim, to let us go on a New Years morning photo shoot, I was just hoping we’d get to see at least one eagle.  We arrived at our location (see below) about 10 minutes after 8:00 AM and I shot my first Bald Eagle at 8:17 AM according to the metadata in my first photo and continued to shoot until 8:55.  There were a total of 4 eagles present in less than an hour; two adults and two juveniles.  Bryan speculates the group is a family, but I’m not so sure of eagle habits to jump on board with the concept, yet.

The entire time I was shooting I kept thinking, “how lucky am I to live near Kansas City and able to see Bald Eagles.”  In fact I work within a few blocks away from the exact site I shot at. After the guys at work see these pics, we’ll be headed over to the bridge for a few more breaks!

In case you care to know, I shoot a Canon 40D and in this situation I shot an 85-300 telephoto, mostly on the 300 side.  I was so darn excited about seeing wild Bald Eagles that I didn’t feel comfortable using a manual mode, so I dialed in the ‘Sports’ mode and acted like a wild man snapping away.  One interesting note about the exposure time.  On most of the pictures the time is 1/400 though an about a third of the pictures I see the exposure time as 1/395.  The 40D is new so I’ll work on understanding the differences between the two times.  ISO was set low on most pictures at ISO 100. My 40D is still set on the auto ISO mode so this was selected automatically by the camera.  As I *learn* this camera more, I have 200 clicks on it after this shoot, I’ll find out the nuances, similar to my experience on Canon’s 10D.  The big difference is the amount of pixels as these photos were taken about 500 feet away and I still had enough pixels to generate nice web images, though I’d hate to try to get prints off of these pics as they are highly cropped.

If you’re interested in shooting the Eagles yourself, here’s the exact spot (see map below) that I snapped the photos in this post.  We parked in the lot and stood about 5 feet from the car to get these pics.  We’ve seen Bald Eagles in this exact location three out of three times around 8:00 to 10:00 AM.  Post in the comments when you plan on going and maybe you’ll see either Bryan or I there! 

Broadway Bridge, Kansas City, Missouri

Thanks for sharing your Eagle knowledge, Bryan… U R da’ man!

As the eyes of the world turn to the dazzling lights and new year anticipation here’s a set of techlinks that you’ll never regret aggregating. 

• If you want energy and enthusiasm in software development and a bit of everything else the man is…  Scott Hanselman.  Now, if I can just get him to accept my LinkedIn.com invitation.
• Now, when you broke the web site and the CFO threatens to call the CEO kind of situation, there’s really only one alternative… ‘If broken it is, fix it you should’  Tess Ferrandez in her series of posts on .NET debugging is a virtual, bug finding rock star.
• How many developers could write a meaningful post each and every day for 17 months?  Only one that I know of… Sara Ford.  Unfortunately, nothing lasts for ever and maybe I embellished the each and every day part… there are only 382 posts on how to improve your Visual Studio skills.  The posts eventually culminated in a book, Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity.

With so many new high quality bloggers the list could go on, but like the last day of 2008 it’s here and this article is done.  Drop the ball and enjoy your party.

My six (soon to be seven and thus the title of this post was generated) year old son wants to build, build and build some more.   We decided that a good from scratch project would be a bird feeder and started to research plans on the internet for bird feeders.  My wife ended up with two bird feeders as Christmas gifts (OK, I bought them for her :)

Here’s a list of mediocre plans

• http://mdc.mo.gov/nathis/woodwork/ww1/
• http://www.aces.edu/pubs/docs/Y/YANR-0008/
• http://www.freebirdfeederplans.com/Assembly_1.htm
• http://www.blackanddecker.com/ProjectCenter/ProjectDetail.aspx?DOC_ID=p_2_99_23589_23593.html
• http://www.northern.edu/natsource/DAKOTA1/Birdfe1.htm
• http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=howTo&p=Build/ScrapsForTheBirds.html

Here’s the short list

• http://www.am-wood.com/nov97/bird.html – Bird feeder table
• http://www.fiddlecreekfarms.com/store/scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=2145  - This is what I want and wish I could find plans for…

In our random searches we found a very interesting site that has Nest web cams from Cornell

http://watch.birds.cornell.edu/nest/home/index

If I were going to build my own Purple Martin house, I would use this web site ( http://www.mdc.mo.gov/nathis/woodwork/ww6/ )

Wow, lots of links in this post…I don’t know if I found the one we’ll build but I hope that this post helps out.

-Mike

As of this very day, December 20, 2008 the top two searches on http://www.Google.com for creating DVDs from a PowerPoint presentation involve the following two products:

E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter – The completely free way to make a DVD, but it has one serious flaw in most of my conversions.  Hold onto your hats for this one!  It overrides all of transitions and only has the capacity to set them to a single value.  If all your transitions are consistent then no worries.  But if you’ve spent a lot of time on customizing slide to slide transitions then look to the solution below…

Acoolsoft’s PPT2DVD -  This software package effectively handles custom animations and slide to slide transitions preserving them nicely in DVD format.  After designing the DVD layout it’s quite literally one step to put your existing PowerPoint Presentation into the PPT2DVD interface and another click to directly burn a DVD that’s playable in most of today’s DVD players.  The downside is that this solution is not free… I paid $79 for my copy via the vendors' web site, though I’ve seen it listed for as much as $129.

In summary when it comes to ease of use, a nice feature set and pure speed of solution, there’s only one way to go…spend the money on PPT2DVD and your project is well on it’s way to completion.

UPDATE:  I was asked why I needed this software... well, my Grandfather died and on short notice I created a nice memorial PowerPoint presentation, all the while thinking I'd be able to burn to a CD and disperse to fellow family members.  Oh, what a surprise, I worked about 7 hours and realized this option didn't exist and many of the family members most interested in viewing my creation do not have computers!  Frantic, I searched for a solution that could get what I needed done in less than 3 hours.  I tried the video converter listed first, but was disappointed that it blew away all my transition settings.  Next, was a free trial of the PPT2DVD software, which ultimately led to it's purchase.

In my current role as a team manager, I’ve paid particular attention to consistency across our application.  This currently means having consistent navigation and when you see a grid on one module that grid basically functions the same as other modules.  Another example occurring frequently in large web sites is multiple calendar controls each with slightly different look and feel.  In developing these applications over the years, I’ve noticed that applications that maintain a consistent look and feel are often perceived to be more user friendly (no one has to read the manual to use them), while having multiple features that are just a little bit different often creates a “clunky” feel.

With all of today’s various browsers the concept of consistency across browsers comes into play (pay attention, the real meat of the article starts now).  Shouldn’t someone using Internet Explorer have the same experience as a Firefox user?  I maintain that the experience shouldn’t be painful for one browser user while enjoyable for another.   One caveat, if you control the browser and version that users will be viewing the site (like an Line of Business intranet application) then all bets off.

What raised my ire to this cause?  Take a look at Today’s MSNBC site in the screen shots below.  I was wanting to look at the worst names in history (Harry Pitts seems to be winning).

Here’s a nice IE experience.  The only gotcha’ on this design is the scroll bar within scrollbars at some resolutions

The less than stellar FireFox experience involves minor overlapping of the navigation with the background DIV and makes the web site appear less than A1 quality.

The big ticket experience earned here?  It’s all in the quality… at the personal blog level, people tolerate lots of flaws, at the MSNBC.com level expectations are much higher.

Happy Programming.

I’m completely out of character today.  It’s been months since I’ve bought a Star Wars action figure and even more earth shattering is I cleared off a section of my shelves for my art materials.  My close friends know that this is completely out of character…maybe even a bit unbelievable.  For four years my budget for action figures has rivaled the budget for gas in the car.  Now, I’ve taken on an freebie Art project and volunteer Web Site.  This really started with the Strobist blogging about working for free…best inspiration I’ve had in awhile.

The winds of change have hit the Reynolds household and I’m back to focusing on Web Development and Art.  In the highest and lowest moments of my life Art has gotten me through, and when I needed to go a step farther the Web took me there.  Wow, I really love technology.  I knew I’d be back, just didn’t know when.  I’m glad it happened…thanks for waiting.

My first go around with blogging was quite an experience.  My gung-ho intentions and “doer” attitude led to the creation of my own blogging software.  I wouldn’t trade that experience for two Rubik’s cubes, but WOW it was a lot of work and I didn’t have near the features implemented that I truly needed.

Here’s a list of the three best features and why I picked them.

1.  Integration with Windows Live Writer.  This single feature mentioned by Scott Hanselman drove me away from maintaining my own code base and installing dasBlog.  Writing my own RSS feeds and aggregating data was fun, but tweaking that code into the API useable by Windows Live Writer was just daunting.  Frankly, I’d rather be exploring code and other concepts here on my Site Construx blog than conforming to an API that dozens of other platforms already use.  My next statement may be hard to believe, so hold onto your hat… Live Writer is a free download!

2.  Emailed daily summary of statics.  That’s right, every day I get a list of referrers and search engine stats emailed to me.  I created a rule to put them into a folder and at the end of each week I review what the views of Site Construx are really looking at and how they arrived here.  When the powers that be (user searches) and my desires to write coincide with a single topic a smile comes to my face, cause one day, I know I’m going to have an advertiser!

3.  Ease of upgrades.  I was worried that the upgrades would be painful.  In my limited experience (I’ve only done one upgrade) it was seamless.  Just drop the files into the main folder and Viola. 

dasBlog fits really well into my ASP.NET skill set and just gets me excited about all my blogging potential.  If you’re interested in installing dasBlog, the downloads can be found on CodePlex

An nameless coworker of mine sent me a link to http://www.typealyzer.com yesterday.  I’m not sure how serious an endeavor this is, but I quickly plugged in my favorite bloggers sites to see their personalities.

Analyzing Site Construx yields that I’m a doer, which I totally agree with.  The only problem I had with the analysis was the pen line drawing of the girl dribbling a basketball as representative of ‘The Doers’.  After some good natured ribbing by my coworker friends, I’m over that road block.  Overall I like the analysis and hope you have fun with the tool as well.

Let me just go on the record by saying I like Unit Tests.

But we are still in the early West stages of introducing them into the Software Development Industry.  I need to point no further than this article about running unit tests in Visual Studio.  After you get your VSMDI file generated and you check into source control, by default your going to experience some pain when the other developers on your team jump on the unit testing bandwagon.  The pain occurs in the multiple VSMDI generation, which WILL happen as more people look at your tests and write their own.

The solution is to not allow the original VSMDI file to be auto checked out.  Like all good things Microsoft has made, there are a series of steps to prevent this.  Too bad I didn’t come across them until our development team hit the road block.

The step by step solution is provided here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957358

Very few things published on the Internet inspire me.  I mean really inspire me…like goose bump, spine tingling, get off your duff inspire.  I just got inspired by a blog post of a photographer.  By know you know that I enjoy snapping a set of pictures in between coding a full day, eating and coding into the night.  But my nights are reserved for those truly worthy projects.  The kind that are driven by passionate mad men that movies are made about.  My latest pet project is Pack3084.com.  Being inspired by Cub Scouts will make your nights long, but your heart warm…

Back to the chase (inspiration that is).  The Strobist blog has an amazing case built on working for free.  Well, only for free when it’s the projects that won’t get done unless it is for free.  After all is said and done, we do have to eat and pay the mortgage, too.  After reading this post most of the concepts can be applied to the web development world…here’s a few to entice you to click through and read the entire article.

• Free Buys Access
• Free Removes Boundaries
• Free Buys You Near Total Control
• Free is Powerful Karma
• But I don’t want to be Branded as a Free Photographer Web Developer
• Why Now? Isn’t the Whole World Caving In?

If you’re still reading click through, click through and read now.

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/12/four-reasons-to-consider-working-for.html