Concerning Turtles

During the quiet hours of the mornings or evenings, you can catch a glimpse of turtles basking near the lake on campus.

You can see ripples in the water as drops of rain start to fall.

It's sad that people throw insecticide cans into the lake. In real life, toxic waste does not turn turtles into mutant ninjas, it just kills them. Don't pollute, folks. It's not cool.

Up Close And Personal With A Kingfisher

I think this may be the closest I've ever gotten to a white-throated kingfisher. The midday sun makes for some pretty harsh lighting, but I like how the details on its feathers are visible in some of these shots.

Droid Adventures Part II

Our intrepid little droid returns again for a photo adventure.

Here's R2 on the sterile white floor of the Death Star.

Here he is again on the Death Star, in the detention level. To the observant reader, this set may look just like the background I used for Cybertron. I'm uncreative when it comes to backgrounds, so I recycle them. Observant readers who are also die-hard fans of Star Wars might also (correctly) point out that R2 never went to the detention block. Feel free to protest this oversight in the comments section.

This might be a tank of Bacta fluid. It's too small to be an actual Bacta tank, so I'll pretend it's backup Bacta storage.

This tunnel is supposed to represent the one in Cloud City where Luke enters. Again, R2 never got near it, and it's too small. But I thought it looked cool, so there it is.

Photoshop Express

Adobe takes a stab at the online photo sharing thing with its new Photoshop Express web offering. You can sign up for free and keep your photos organised, like Flickr or Picasa. They also let you edit your pictures inside a little Flash application in a limited way. However, it's got the Photoshop brahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnd attached to it so they hope you'll try their standalone software like Photoshop Elements, or perhaps even fork out your life savings to buy a full version of Photoshop CS.

I've signed up for an account, and it's not too bad for really basic editing. They give you tools like crop, rotate, levels correction, exposure and saturation. There are also things that you can find in Photoshop Elements like red-eye removal and some special effects.

I still prefer Flickr for organising photos, and the full-featured Photoshop for editing. However, this is handy when you're stuck somewhere without your copy Photoshop and you need to edit and upload pictures immediately.

Update: The fine print to Adobe's service states that you give them permission to do whatever they like with your photos, in perpetuity. This is rather alarming.

More Herons

Herons are plentiful at the lake on campus. There's an entire colony of black-crowned night herons, and also present are Chinese pond herons and little herons.

It's rather cute how this black-crowned night heron is resting on a branch.

This is a young black-crowned night heron, not fully rid of its juvenile flecks. Above it, a water monitor basks lazily on a branch.

The little heron waits for something to dart at in the water.

Chinese Pond Heron

Here's a heron I've only just noticed around our campus. I spied a Chinese pond heron (Ardeola bacchus) from my office, and sneakily took pictures of it from above. When sporting its breeding plumage, the Chinese pond heron has an attractive grey, brown and white pattern. During other times, it is greyish brown with white flecks.

Lian Tze's LaTeX Tutorials

My friend and colleague Lian Tze has written up some nicely done introductory documents on LaTeX. She also indexes a nice list of LaTeX-related links. Best of all, if you're a Universiti Sains Malaysia student who needs a LaTeX template for your Masters or PhD thesis you can grab it from her site. That's how I typeset my Masters thesis.

Droid Adventures Part I

R2-D2 is one of my favourite characters in Star Wars. I couldn't resist buying a little figure of him to use in Star Wars inspired photo shoots. The first two alludes to R2 rolling off on his own on Tatooine (before being captured by Jawas) and the last two is supposed to be R2 on the forest moon of Endor. These photos would work better if they were done in carefully built dioramas, but I don't have the patience to do that. So here he is, shot at different locations on campus.

Well, I'm not going that way. It's much too rocky.

What makes you think there are settlements over there?

And you said it was pretty here.

Wa-wait! Wait, come back! Artoo, stay with me.

Airspeed Velocity Of A Laden Raptor

This raptor (most probably a Brahminy kite) has something in its talons. Is it a branch or a fish? I'm guessing it's dinner.

Estimating the airspeed velocity of this laden bird is left as an exercise for the reader.

Return Of The Birds

The rainy days we've had this week has made the USM campus fresh and bird-filled again. Today was a great day to go shooting, as the weather was pleasantly cloudy. The birds are happy, and the naturally-diffuse lighting was splendid.

This dollarbird has returned to his favourite perching spot. This photo looks almost exactly like the one I took in November (but with the bird oriented the other way round).

The "little magpie robin that could" wanted to climb over the roof. Then he remembered he could fly.

The barbed wire does not stop birds from trespassing. Time for USM to adopt a new strategy, such as sending them strongly-worded letters of protest. Surely that will deter the white-throated kingfisher from poaching little fishes from our streams!