WELCOME to the personal home page/blog of Matthew La France. Please enjoy your stay.

5/30/2009



I just got a new vehicle (pictured above)! I'm very happy with it. It's in great condition and should last me longer than my last car which, thought it served me well, was in need of replacement. It should be better on back roads and winter conditions too although my last vehicle (a Grand AM) was not to shabby with some good tires on it.

Working more on PSAnimeGames.com which is coming along well. I posted my first substantial "review" of an anime based game for PS3 with some nice screenshots that I captured myself. I did some tweaking to some things like how I want staff reviews to work and splitting the calendar up into two calendar views. I re-enabled the forums. I figure it's not as fully-featured as vbulletin or phpbb but it's seems to be the forum system that drupal.org uses and it works ok there so I figure I'll go with it. I don't want people to have to make a different user account for the forums vs. the regular page. This way they are integrated.
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5/16/2009

I'm enjoying my new place very much. I'm out in the wilderness a little more in an area with some light forests and cornfields so there is a decent amount of wildlife around. We feed birds too so there are a lot in the trees and around the feeders. I took about 1 1/2 hours this afternoon to run around with my camera and see what I could catch.



The robin has a nest on the side of the house and the chipmunk is one of at least 3 that frequent the bird feeders. The deer just happened to take off across the field where I could see it, I wasn't even down that way at all. There are a few red-winged blackbirds around the pond especially. You can see one clinging to a reed and another visiting the feeder. The blue-jay was waaaay up in a tree but I still managed to get a descent shot of it. The hummingbird was also around a feeder. The mallard was in the pond that's not far from the house. I was hoping to lure it a little closer with some bread but it was very skittish and took off as soon as I emerged from the treeline. I managed to scare off it's female as well while wandering by the edge of the pond. I hope I didn't disturb them overly much.

I took these pictures with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7. I got it mostly for it's long (12X) optical zoom and stabilizer features precisely for taking pictures like these. I'm not entirely familiar with it still and I forget a lot of the photography knowledge I used to have. I'm looking forward to playing around with it some more. I'm hoping I might get some better shots if I work on blending in a little so I can be physically closer to my subjects. If I really enjoy it I may even invest in a nicer camera some day. For now it's a great excuse to get outside in the summer and get a little more familiar with the fauna in the area (aka. the yard ;) ).
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