You're thinking, "What the heck is that?" and rightly so. Zeke and I went for a long hike this morning and checked out some of our favorite raspberry spots. Zeke likes berries. He really likes it if you pick them for him. In a pinch he'll use his little front nibbler teeth and try to pluck off a few by himself. It works best if you point out which ones are ripe otherwise it's tug-o-war between dog and green berry.

Nice day for a walk with cool, breezy weather. After the berry patches we hiked up one of the hills and sort of wandered around lost for a while. The sun couldn't quite make it through the clouds which gave the woods an ominous, shadowy cast. The blustery wind made for an eiry atmosphere as swaying trees groaned and creaked. The distant thump of acorns and falling branches triggered the ol' neck hairs. Even the rustle of my pack seemed unexpected and sinister.

The one thing that saved me, if you can call it that, is the song You Sexy Thing, by Hot Chocolate which kept running through my head. Don't ask me how or why it surfaced. A Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath song might have fed the anxiety but it is hard to stay spooked when you've got silly pop pap looping in your head.

Towards the end of the hike we came across a butterfly sitting on a rock flexing its wings. It seemed oblivious, which is a good thing since my first snapshot accidentally triggered the flash and probably stunned it. Also good because there's no manual focus on the digital camera and it took a half a dozen shots before everything fell into place.

I have a trick for taking closeups that others might find useful. When you press the button down halfway on this camera (in automatic mode) it sets up the white balance, locks in the focus, sets exposure time, and is then ready to capture when you press the rest of the way. For closeups I'll often do this initial lock-in while pointing at my arm or pants leg from the same distance since the camera has an easier time locking focus on a large surface. Then, while keeping the button partially depressed, move the lens to the subject which is now easy to keep in focus. This has the added side-effect (good or bad) that the white balance is set to whatever you did the lock-in on. So the final photo might have a flesh tone hue or if you locked in on your Levis it will have a blue tint. Makes for some interesting compositions.

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An interesting trail of information starting at O'Reilly's article on Flash for Embedded devices, which leads to Flash enabled mobile devices featuring, among many others, location based movie trailers, and somewhere in all of this we wind up on 802.11 Planet's story about wireless RS-232 which, among other things, means your GPS can now feed data to your computer without the umbilical cord.

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