Sometimes you think of people when you least expect it.  Rue Porter passed away a month ago and today I experience a flashback of the plumbing training he passed along to me.  For the last 2 weekends my intentions were to replace a cracked toilet in the master bathroom, but batch processing failures at my employer and lots of overtime had prevented the chore be accomplished until today. 

I went to the good ole’ Home Depot with the family and set out to select our new toilet.  Fortunately, for us this weekend was the big Bathroom Savings event.  There was a choice of about 40 different commodes and I could see a glazed look in my wife’s eyes.  Suddenly, I remembered the words of Rue… you can’t go wrong with American Standard. This narrowed our selection down to two models.  We ended up going with one with the biggest flush capacity.  With the industry’s largest flush valve and trapway, we are going to have a very fast and powerful flush…I can’t wait until the kids stress test out the flushing capabilities…ability to flush 200 sheets of toilet paper is what American Standard touts.

In my category scheme, this post falls under Management.

Unless you work for a web development company your decision on how or where to setup a web site just got a lot harder.  The core factors at the heart of the build or buy choices lie in what features are required to do business and range from the necessities to ultimate luxuries.  In my conversation with a non-profit organization their concerns rely in the realms of communication, social networking and branding.  In today’s Internet world some of the easiest and cheapest freebie web applications address all of these concerns.  Here’s a list of items discussed during that conversation that I will elaborate on in the upcoming weeks.

• MySpace, FaceBook and Yahoo Groups
• Updateable web site without programming and uploading
• Cost
• Technology that you know versus that which you don’t
• Email capabilities
• Use an out of the box solution or develop custom software
• Custom URL or use location shared via a parent organization

I look forward to doing a deep dive into each of the topics and meeting people who are interested in these topics.  Please, leave your insight in the comments of this web site.

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!