Author: daniel

Paris in Black and White

About a year ago I went to France for the first time and took my camera.  Most of the shots below are taken with my Nokia 7+ but some are shot on my old Minolta on honest-to-god B&W film.  See if you can pick them.

Charles De Gaulle

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This is the first experience of Paris, and it's pretty wacky. I'm a fan of arty black-and-white French art films so felt very comfortable here.

Olive Backed Sunbirds

A couple of these have been hanging out on the washing line.

Olive Backed Sunbirds

I had a look in Birds of Thailand but wasn’t able to decide if these were sunbirds or spiderhunters. The trouble is that the sunbird males have a blue bib.

Sunbird or Spiderhunter?

It turns out we were looking at a pair of females. Confusion was cleared when a male turned up. He performed a brief courtship dance and flew off with one of the females. Then this appeared.

Sunbirds build a hanging nest out of spiderwebs and, in this case at least, plastic raffia.

The nest is complete now but I’ll need to take some more photographs. Sorry about the poor quality of the shots but I’m shooting through flyscreen and the birds don’t seem to want to work when it’s sunny.

Now the nest has finished they’ve gone off somewhere for what I read is a week. Probably fattening up before spending all day sitting on the eggs.

And we’re Back Again

So the little EEE died. The battery died years ago but it wouldn’t start without it and now it won’t turn on at all. This site is on some old hosting until I can find a better home for it. I don’t have any old machines that I can turn into a webserver — there was an old Compaq desktop at home but it fell off the wall when someone closed the door too hard. Anyway, stay turned.

And we’re back…

So I thought I was pretty fancy getting a .name domain in my own name back in the day and threw up this WordPress site. After a year or two I decided I didn’t want to pay USD57 for another year’s hosting. I’m a first-generation web developer, I know how to make web host. Now, six years later, I have finally got around to it.

Our glorious host is an old EEE portable that was lying around in the office. It used to run XP but now it’s on Ubuntu and running Nginx. It’s not much but it does do a shockingly well job of running WordPress, which is famously heavy on the processor. This Intel Atom’s twin cores seem to be doing the job OK for now, but I’d ask casual browsers to take turns accessing the site or I’ll have to take the EEE with the broken screen out of the closet and make it the MySQL server.

Love,

Dan