David Runneals put together a nice map with lots of info about the flooding in Ames, IA.
I managed to take quite a few photos around Ames and Nevada, you can find them in this set on Flickr. There are currently four panoramas that do a pretty good job of showing how much water there was on the East side of Ames.
The Ames Tribune has a PDF with some really cool aerial shots, it’s worth checking out.
I just got a new digital camera a couple weeks ago! It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D). I’m still pretty excited, my new Canon is a major upgrade from my old Olympus.
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My new Digital Rebel XT has been a pleasure to shoot with so far, but I still have a lot of things to learn, this is my first experience with SLR cameras. One thing I absolutely love about the camera is it’s ability to continuously shoot. It’s extremely nice for photographing fast moving children who never sit still. No more missed shots while waiting for my camera to focus.
The Digital Rebel XT is very easy to use. After receiving the camera, I immediately put the lens on, popped a cf card in, and was able to start shooting. Ashley was even able to pick it up and shoot without any instructions. I’ve been really happy with the camera so far and am very much looking forward to more opportunities to shoot with it, should be fun.
Flickr is back online after their unexpected downtime. I’m sure they’re still in the process of moving photos to the other datacenter. 20 terabytes is an amazing amount, although the one photo of mine that was unavailable is now displaying just fine.
Anyway, everything seems to be alright over at Flickr now. Wonder who’s gonna win the contest?
The main Flickr site is down, but it looks like all of the relatively new photos are still showing without problems. They had a “temporary storage failure”, which affected about 20 terabytes of older photos. That’s a freakin amazing amount of photos. And to add to that, they’re transferring that 20 terabytes from one of their datacenters to another, a few thousand miles away. That’s some serious data transfer right there, but probably not a whole lot more than Flickr sees on a normal day.
It sounds like they’re gonna be bringing the site back online shortly, just so they’re “up”. They say some photos will be “unavailable”. Those photos will show up once they’ve all made it to the other datacenter. Here’s an update from the Flickr blog:
UPDATE [4:59pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: Weather report – everything is still cool. We’re going to try to bring the site back online shortly (there will still be photos which appear as unavailable, and they will gradually fill in – no need to do anything on your part, dear user).
In the meantime, Flickr is running a contest. All you need to do is print the circles seen temporarily on the flickr homepage, color them in some neat way, and upload back to flickr once it’s back up. If your “coloring” gets picked you’ll get a free Flickr Pro account:
Because this sucks*, we thought you might like to enter an impromptu competition to win a FREE PRO ACCOUNT!
Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with “flickrcolourcontest”.
Team Flickr will pick a winner in the next couple of days, and that lucky duck will get a free year of Pro.
I won’t be participating as I purchased my pro account quite some time ago. I miss you Flickr! Please come back soon, I got some new photos for ya!
UPDATE: Looks like they’re having some issues with bringing the site back online, but the photos are still nice and safe:
UPDATE 2 [5:52pm, pacific time (GMT-8)]: We’ve had some issues bringing the site back online without this storage system but everything is still quite safe and we are working hard to get back as soon as humanly possible. One thousand apologies!
UPDATE 2: Looks like Flickr is back.
Stephen Dupont, an Australian photojournalist, snapped some photos of American soldiers burning the bodies of some Taliban terrorists. Throughout the media, this is being portrayed as evidence of American atrocities in the middle east. Apparently, Mr. Dupont says it was clear the bodies were being burned for sanitary reasons.
I don’t know how I’ve missed this bit of news over the last week, there’s people blogging it all freakin over the place. Almost too much information for me to sort out right now. Anyway, the media is being blamed for spinning this story at least 180 degrees. There’s reports that people within the U.S. military psy-ops divisions burned the bodies in an attempt to lure out other Taliban fighters. There seems to be debate going on as to wether or not burning the bodies for psy-ops purposes was “ethical” I guess.
I really hope that’s not what all the fuss is really about. It’s one of the most effective forms of psy-ops. Saddam used it, the Taliban uses it. When Saddam was into chopping off womens heads, he’d have their heads placed on poles outside their homes for everyone to see. In turn sending the message that your head could be on a pole should you go against his regime.
And remember when the those American contractors were hung from the bridge in Fallujah? Yet another classic example of psy-ops, only it’s not being used by U.S. troops, so it’s OK. That’s basically what this all boils down to I think. It’s OK for everyone else to employ every tactic possible, but when the U.S. does it, it’s evil and we must be taught a lesson.
And that just brings us back to the fundamental problems with Islam and the MSM’s willingness to tear down the United States. Both of which are deep rooted problems that can’t be dealt with without taking extreme actions.
That’s probably it for me on this. Check out what everyone else has to say, it’s probably much more relavent to this story than the generalities I spoke of. Cao and Euphoric Reality have probably the most comprehensive posts:
Cao’s Blog
Euphoric Reality
The Jawa Report
Flopping Aces
The Political Pitbull
California Conservative
MacStansbury
Post linked @ the following:
Stop the ACLU
Mudville Gazette
The Political Teen
Wizbang
Jo’s Cafe
