Straw Boy

And pale photographer. I was trying to get the sunset reflected in the window, or my eyes. But I didn’t capture the image or the colours properly. Better luck next time.

I’m going to try to sell my house without the help of a real estate agent. I hope it goes smoothly. More details here.

deb has a few new paintings this month. Plus the two-part piece I composed last month wasn’t acceptable, so I reshot it with the two canvases clamped together:

As I was making a pot of tea, mama bluebird was busy working on her nest. There is a nice view from the kitchen window and I could not resist getting out the camera:

You can see a bit of grass sticking out from the bottom of the box. The floor is made from ½” wire mesh which provides good drainage/ventilation and encourages parasites in the nest to fall harmlessly to the ground. The bluebirds won’t build directly on top of the mesh so I put a thin piece of wood on top until the nest is started.

In fact when I removed the panel this morning, I found the nest almost complete. And no wonder considering the gigantic mouthfuls of grass she’s been dragging in there:

These pictures were taken using a 300mm telephoto. I don’t often get a chance to use this lens. It is very long, heavier than the camera, and almost impossible to steady - especially if there is a breeze. However it’s bright enough today to allow very fast shutter speeds, so a bit of movement is not a disaster.

Good thing for these regular photo shoots or my blog would hardly ever get updated. This month’s gallery features new paintings by Cedar, deb, and Sandy.

One of deb’s is another digital composition - a painting on two canvases which I photographed separately, then combined in Photoshop. The real paintings are more closely matched in colour, especially in the lower part, but it’s the best I could do.

I did another photo shoot for the Five Women today. Visit here for a selection of new paintings by deb and Greta.

Ten years ago the generous folks at mvps.org offered to host mail for me at SquirrelSoftware.com. The domain was never used for much else and has been allowed to expire.

My business is still called Squirrel Software Inc. - it’s a Canadian corporation of which I am the President, Director, and Employee. Rather poorly paid Employee the past couple of years… and the President’s not getting rich either.

Ten years ago SquirrelSoftware.com seemed like a good domain name, but after typing it and writing it and spelling it over the phone about a million times, the advantages of a short name become clear. Also spammers found the domain a long time ago, and even with filtering dozens of junk messages were arriving daily in most of the Squirrel mailboxes. No more!

For “A strawbale construction journal” there has been rather a shortage of strawbale & journal, and complete absence of construction. What can I say? A series of personal and professional crises may delay the project, but the dream is still alive.

In the meantime I’ll try to keep up with the journal part of it. Today’s item of note: I did another photo shoot for the Five Women - several new pieces by deb, Linda & Sandy - plus the Hunt Camp Collaboration. This is a composition of three 16″ x 20″ paintings which I assembled digitally. They will be installed in this arrangement but it’s much easier to photograph them separately.

This morning I read the news that Google Patent Search is now hosting the textual contents of all patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office since the 1790s. Some of this capability has been available directly from the USPTO for several years, but it’s quite a step forward.

Well, I am the “Inventor” of Patent #5,828,369 and had never seen it online before. So I searched for my name and presto! It was the very first item. Now I can’t say I’m especially proud of this piece of work - technology has probably made it irrelevant, and I find the whole patent process quite disagreeable.

But sometimes the world is a funny place. As it happens, today is the eleventh anniversary of the patent filing date. As a boy I always wanted to grow up to be an “Inventor” - am I there yet? Perhaps more of a tinkerer than an inventor. But according to Google, as of today, I am the only Inventor named Brett Foster.

It got me thinking - what other traces may I have left on the World Wide Web? A search for Brett Foster returns over 10,000 pages. There are many people with that name, including several programmers, several photographers, and several athletes. But a few of those pages actually refer to me and one is particularly relevant today.

I was credited as co-author of a research paper published in 1990 titled “A case study of caching strategies for a distributed full text retrieval system.” This shows up on many library sites as well as being a reference for papers published later. In fact I don’t remember writing much, but I probably did most of the programming.

Wondering what the heck a “distributed full text retrieval system” might be? Something like Google. Only back in those pre-Internet days it was a big deal to search the entire King James Bible. The world is a funny place all right.

A few more links for the curious:

• co-author of the Official Microsoft HTML Help Authoring Kit in 1997
• one of the first recipients of the Microsoft MVP Award in 1994
• freeware I made in 1991 is still published in Japan

What a funny word that is. Hiatus a big ole plate o’ baked beans. Hiatus, how you doing? Anyway, I’m back though not with much today. Been very busy and distracted, but research for the offgrid cooking series is complete and I’ll resume writing that soon.

Greta and deb have been busy too, I photographed a dozen new paintings today.