Sometimes befuddlement settles deep into my cranium and all I can manage is a little walk around the yard and a scrounge through old images to find a scattering of thoughts and images to exercise my chosen writer’s discipline and fill some space. Each day I leave something here and take something away. The beauty of it is what I need please only me. The down-side is that if I find my own efforts unpleasing, I have nothing to show for my efforts but dissatisfaction. So, I muddle through.

But first, a sunrise:

My creative writing professor at uni was a hard taskmistress. We had to write 1,000 words every day in a jornal. It didn’t matter what it was about and it wasn’t graded. However we had to turn it in for checking each week and then we got it back to continue on. Most weeks I would review what I had written and a familiar phrase would pop into my mind, “What a dog’s breakfast!”

An unappealing mixture of many things… a hodgepodge… a disorganised mess… but probably still usable (or consumable in the case of food.) From the idea that a dog will eat anything and feeding it a mixture of whatever is on hand. (Unappealing because only the dog finds its breakfast appealing… if you see or smell the dog food in the morning, as you’re feeding the dog, it may well turn your stomach.)

“Those contractors didn’t do very good work and they made a real dog’s breakfast of that job.”

Not that I insinuate that my readers are canine. No. I simply mean that there are good days and bad.

So, off we go into visual pandemonium.

Let’s add a canoe to the sunrise:

This was a very mediocre shot right out of the camera. I had to jazz it up a bit. I decided to make it nearly monochrome and take advantage of the brilliant red-orange tugboats across the harbour to complement the colours of the sunrise.

It looks as if warm colours are going to be the theme today. Here is a nice red hibiscus right outside our front door:

The brown mass to the left is the trunk of one of our Fishtail Palm trees.

Speaking of which, they are fruiting continuously now. In this shot I am standing directly underneath the oldest inflorescence, pointing my G11 straight up. You are looking into the bottom of it from about six metres away:

I am amazed how long it takes for the fruit to ripen. This inflorescence developed in October of 2008. You can find an image of it here.

Over the last three months, fruit has been dropping from this inflorescence. They are bright red to maroon in colour and average about five or six centimetres in diameter:Our haus meri, Juli, tells me that they are “not for humans” but some birds eat them. Of course, I had to try one. They are intensely sweet and fig-like. I tried only a small amount. After a few seconds you get a chili-like burning sensation on the tongue wherever the fruit was in contact. The strong sweetness lingers, but I take the burning as a warning. I decided that I had experimented enough. The seeds are one or two shiny black kernels which are so hard that you have to crack them with a hammer. Inside the thick shell is a nut-like core which is also very sweet.

In the garden this morning I found a spider who was willing to pose for a while. I got one very nice shot of it:

If you click the image to enlarge it you will see a water drop attached to its abdomen.

I felt like saying, “Shake it off, dude.”

Everybody is bored hearing how busy I am. Hey, I’m  bored with it! We’re working frantically this week to get the new network rolled out and all of the computers switched over to it. When it’s done, I’ll be able to get back to what passes for normal. I’ve been in a state for the last few months. The old system went back to Windows 2000 Server for Domain Controllers and had been upgraded, patched, hacked, glued together and thrown into a mix-o-matic with a bunch of Linux monstrosities that were supposed to be “enhancements”. Never again!

The new system has dual Windows Server 3008 R2 Domain Controllers and all workstations will be running Windows 7. Most of it is working already and it is sweet, sweet, sweet. I just have three mission-critical machines to move over to the new network. Then we have to get the big network printers switched over, do a little prettying up of bits and pieces and we’re done.

Then I have to get cracking writing some magazine articles and arrange for some bush walks to gather new material. I also plan to ride the Harley more. I’ve only been on it a couple of times in the last few months.

Today, to amuse ourselves, I have a few miscellaneous images that tickled my eyeballs over the last couple of weeks. I’ll start with an unusual view of a nice red hibiscus blossom:

Those water drops caught my eye from twenty metres away. I never pass up a chance to shoot drops. I love the way that they reflect the light. You can see some interesting reflections if you click to enlarge.

Here’s another of my ongoing series of “crazy foliage” shots:Sometime when I was a child I was brainwashed, probably by a gym teacher who was assigned to teach science – a common enough occurrence in the U S of A – that plants are green. Despite intense therapy, I’ve not gotten past this crippling mental defect. Plants here are all kinds of nutsy colours and it is deeply disturbing.

The shots above came from Blueblood as did this one of a man hurrying home during a brief rain shower:You can see the base of the huge Kar Kar Island  volcano at the right side of the frame. Click to enlarge and you can see the rain drops hitting the water and even a few streaks of rain drops against the darkness of the canoe. I took all of these shots with my new Canon G11.

You’ve seen the flower of the Sensitive Plant or Tickle-Me Plant (Mimosa pudica)  here before:

This is the nicest shot that I have of it. I attribute that to the increased dynamic range of the G11. It seems to capture many more tones of colour and brightness than the G10, as it should, given the massive changes to the sensor.

Here is another familiar to regular readers. It’s my favourite spider:This fellow was distinctly grumpy on the dull day when I shot him. They usually try to hide by crawling around on the opposite side of the flower. This guy turned to face me and raised his front legs in a menacing display of aggression. I have to admit that I didn’t feel greatly menaced, but I didn’t mention it to him.

Oh, yeah, back to water drops:This is one of my favourite water drop shots. I have others that are sharper, flashier, more colourful, blah, blah, blah. This one, however, makes me feel very relaxed and mellow. I’m strongly affected emotionally by images, always have been. I think that is why I love photography so much. When I look at my favourite images, I feel good.

I love sharing those good vibes with you. I hope you dig it too.

Christmas Day started off with a beautiful sunrise. No, I lie. It was a cloudy day that didn’t promise much and didn’t deliver either. The weather threatened to dump on us all day, but managed to hold its water. The morning sky didn’t look anything like this:Arriving at the beach house, we were greeted by the establishment’s cheery welcome sign unceremoniously nailed to a roof beam. There is a thatched roof over the lower deck. As you can see, it is made of palm leaves. In this case, they are the leaves of the Sago palm. The material, after it is ‘sewn’ into long mats, is called morota:The mats are then laid down across the rafters starting at the outer edge of the roof and moving toward the centre. Each mat is laid over the one below it. The result is that rain flows down the leaves and off the edge. Inside, it stays nice and dry. Before we get into the images of Christmas Day at Blueblood, I’ll show you what’s been happening with Madang – Ples Bilong Mi. I don’t dig around too much in the statistics, but at the end of the second full year it seems appropriate to have a look. First, who is reading? Here are numbers from December 1 – 26 of 2009:

Countries		Pages	Hits
United States	us	35583	298614
Australia	au	11241	70207
Netherlands	nl	7259	17353
Great Britain	gb	4655	40234
Canada	ca	3633	42595
Russian Federation	ru	2171	4509
India	in	2037	16155
Germany	de	1652	15347
France	fr	1112	10451
China	cn	1007	3471

I listed only the first ten countries. Papua New Guinea is 39th on the list. There are a few surprises. What is Netherlands doing way up there? I know far more people in Austria than the Netherlands, but Austria is 56th on the list. I know nobody in Russia or China, but there they are. The only way that I can explain this is by looking at the content of the journal. Though I try to appeal the broadest audience possible, I do have a lot of specialised content here and that makes for a lot of search engine hits. In fact, about 30% of the traffic comes just from Google, much of that from Google Images. You tenacious readers out there are giving us some healthy numbers:

Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits
25573	32718 (1.27 visits/visitor)	87556 (2.67 Pages/Visit)	700320 (21.4 Hits/Visit)

That’s not bad numbers for less than one month for a puny little site such as this. It’s getting up around 1,500 unique visitors per day. I can remember a year ago when I was doing cartwheels if we hit 200. I was rather pensive on Christmas Day, not my best time of year. Therefore, I didn’t take many pictures. Here is a cheery one of nearly the whole gang out swimming around the floatie thing:And here are two little angels in a rubber duckie:I like this one of Mike Cassell, as fine a mate as a bloke could have, and his grandson, Josh:As the day progressed and a little wine began to take the edges off my melancholy, I did sally forth with camera in hand to snatch the soul of this perfect hibiscus blossom:That’s me. The soul snatcher.

This morning the sunrise was distinctly unpromising. Being ever the optimist, I waddled out to the stern of Faded Glory and snapped a shot. I had to set my Canon G9 on manual and stop the lens down to f8 and shoot at 1/4000 for a shutter speed at ISO 80 to keep from blasting a hole through the camera:

UPDATE: Okay, okay, that’s just too, too horrible. Let me give it another try:

Wasn’t that interesting? Well, I went into all that blather for the photo geeks out there who will understand that, under those conditions, there’s precious little colour and luminance information left anywhere in the shot except near the sun. That’s the price we pay for being cheap. A $4,000 camera would do much better, but I don’t have that kind of money and probably wouldn’t spend it on a camera if I did. (I lie! If I were rich I’d have the best cameras on the planet.)

Anyway, all that is in the way of an apology for the excruciating, but somehow numbingly weird colours in the shot. I fiddled and fiddled and finally changed the title. That’s what photographers (and writers) do when a project fails miserably. I’m calling it Alien Sunrise.

There’s no mystery about this image. It’s clearly a lizard – a lizard frozen in terror. It’s desperately attempting to appear to be a part of the bush. I had a devil of a time getting this shot. In the wild, these things are masters of hide-and-seek unlike a squirrel:By holding my camera out at far from my body as possible and sticking it into the bush very slowly I managed to get off one good shot. I’d call this the luck one of the day.

UPDATE: a Facebook friend, Robert Sprackland (Ph.D., Zoology — Herpetology, Systematics — Evolution, Biogeography — Biodiscovery), a guy who knows his slithery critters, passed this information on to me: “It’s a New Guinea endemic, a green-blooded skink, genus Prasinohaema (Greek for – SURPRISE! – “green blooded.”) Can’t be sure of species from a single photo, but best guess is the yellow-footed green-blooded skink (lordy, that sounds colourful!), Prasinohaema flavipes. Thanks for that, Robert. I had no idea that I’d captured such an exotic little beastie.

Now for the Mystery Object. Tropical residents will have a better shot at guessing this:Didn’t get it?

How about this:Okay, I bet a lot of people are guessing some kind of wood. And right you are.

A coconut tree in our front yard was hit by lightning this year and killed. Part of it had already fallen and smashed the bow of Faded Glory. So, a few weeks ago, I had some guys come in to chop the rest of it down. As I was walking past this morning I noticed that some weird combination of tropical rot and last night’s rain, along with the warm rays of the rising sun, had made it glow bright red:

Sorry for the cheap shot.

I’ll make amends with this lovely hibiscus:As you can see, the sun is coming in from the back. I like this lighting with flowers. It makes the petals seem to glow with a light of their own.

If you click the hibiscus to enlarge it you will see one lonely little ant down in the left side of the dark centre area.

Because of my incredibly generous boss, with whom I sleep, I ended up with a five day holiday. Perhaps I should explain. My boss at the office also happens to be my wife. About the holiday, we had to skip one recently because of work loads, so she gave us that one back and another one following Independence Day. So, I was off from Wednesday and I don’t have to go back to the IT sweatshop until Monday. Hurah!

To celebrate, I’m going crazy (un . . . make that crazier). I worked on fourteen images this morning and I’m going to throw them at you in a more or less random order over the next two days. Some may amuse you. Some may not. Some may lead you to wonder what I’ve been smoking. All is well; it’s my job to amuse. It’s the only thing that I do with some degree of competency.

Let’s start out with this perfectly ordinary image of a perfectly ordinary object. It’s an Aussie barbecue. I can hear the Americans scoffing. Believe me, the Aussies scoff just as loudly at the Yank style. My friend Trevor Hattersley explained it yesterday:  “The Yanks got it upside down. They put the grill on top and the plate on the bottom. They do everything upside down up there in the Northern Hemisphere.”:

As a Yank, I’m not allowed closer than this to the barbecue. Sometimes they will allow me to start the fire, under close supervision. The white stuff on the big steel plate is sea salt left from the sea water used to ‘scrape’ the plate. The plate is never  cleaned. I’ve been told it sometimes takes years for the plate to develop the correct flavour. I case you’re wondering, the food that is cooked on this contraption is exquisite.

This shot of a hibiscus lit from behind with the coconut fronds and the dark blue sky in the background is exactly as it came from my Olympus SP-590UZ. Sometimes the camera is right. You don’t want to mess with it. I only did a little cropping:

As much as I like Flying Foxes, I’m shocked that I have no good shots of them. I’ll have to fix that someday. They are hard to shoot, because they are way up in tall trees, mostly beyond accurate slingshot range. Here is an early morning mob just settling in after a night out dining on the farmers’ papayas and bananas:

Here’s a shot a little closer in. You can see a couple of them flying around:

This is as close as I could get from where I was standing. You can begin to see individuals. The really pack themselves in:

Keeping with the day’s theme of randomness, here is a nice shot of an Indonesian style boat with Little Pig Island  in the background:

I would really love to have one of these. It’s a very pretty design. They travel thousands of miles over open ocean in these boats. I imagine that they must be very fuel efficient, since they are small and have a very long, slender hull. The outriggers make them very stable.

To finish up for today, here is a shot that I got on the way back from Blueblood on Wednesday. We had a birthday party up there for Di Cassell. We rode up and back on Mike Cassell’s boat. On the way back, the setting sun was glistening off of the water in a very magical way:

I particularly like the crazy angles in the shot. The horizon is level, but nothing else is straight. The Olympus did a nice job of exposing the image, even if the highlights are blown. You couldn’t expect much more from any camera given the dynamic range in the scene.

Unless you’re completely colour-blind, you’ll note that I converted the image to monochrome. Some things simply look better without the distraction of colour.

Today, I have more than enough images to show you of things that caught my eye on my recent visit to Nob Nob Mountain. There’s no particular order or theme here, so be prepared for more than the usual randomness.

Here is a rather amazing shot that I got from the communications tower ridge of the main wharf in Madang.  I’m guessing that the straight line distance is in excess of ten kilometres. I got the shot with the Olympus SP-590UZ at full 26x optical zoom. It points out the good and bad points of the cheap, but impressive zoom lens on the Olympus:

First, I should point out that it was a very hazy day. That hurt the quality of the image before it ever reached the camera. You can see some vignetting around the corners. The shot is slightly cropped, mostly vertically, so there was even more light fall-off at the corners and edges. Next, you’ll note that the shot is not very sharp. I did a bit of cleaning of noise and sharpening. The original was more blurry and noisy. I also had to increase the saturation of the colours, but that was mostly because of the haze. Still, despite the problems I think that it’s amazing that you can buy a camera for less than US$500 that has a lens equivalent to a 700mm hunk of glass on a 35mm camera. If you’re just shooting snapshots, but you always wanted that super-telephoto effect, you can get it for free on any of the new superzoom cameras. They cost no more than any of the top-of-the-line point and shoot cameras (such as the superb Canon G11) and they give you telephoto shots that will blow your socks off. You can see some other examples of the relative quality of the superzoom shots from the Olympus here, here and here.

Showing the random nature of today’s post, here is the biggest mass of coconuts that I have ever seen on one tree. I’m sure that it is nowhere near a record, but it did amaze me:

Many times on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi  I have told you about the Flying Fox. It is one of my favourite critters, though if I lived under a roosting tree, I might not feel so happy about them. Anyway, here is a papaya tree showing a nice, ripe papaya that nobody is going to want to eat. It’s half gone and the rest is covered by Flying Fox slobber:

I don’t often think of male and female trees. It’s something that just doesn’t come to mind. So, whenever I see a male papaya tree, I think what probably a lot of women think. Men – they’re so much bother. How many do we actually need, anyway? Here’s a lonely male papaya tree pitifully hoping that some of its pollen will be wafted on the wind to a receptive female:

As you can see, he does nothing useful except to produce flowers. Not a bad job, I guess, if you can get it.

Here’s another interesting plant. It’s the top of a tree fern. Many of you in temperate and cold climates may never have seen one. If you can image a fern as tall as your house with a trunk like a spiny tree, that’s a fairly good description:

Here is another kind of fern called a staghorn fern. They also grow to be huge. I’ve seen a few that were nearly the size of a Volkswagen. This Frangianpi tree is an unusual host. It won’t be long before the weight of the fern causes the tree to come crashing down.

Here is a coconut tree groaning under the weight of a staghorn fern. It will eventually grow so big that it will drag the tree down, destroying its host. There is no noticeable intelligence among staghorn ferns. It has that in common with the human race:

I think that this is a common house plant over much of the world. I don’t know what it’s called. It reminds me of taro. Whatever it is, it looks as if it has been too near to where the house painters have been working:

We must have a million colours of hibiscus here. This is one that I particularly like:

Finally, back to ferns one more time. There is a kind of vine with blue flowers on it that grows all over the trees around Nob Nob Mountain.  You saw it a couple of days ago on the Tree Monster. I saw this nice fern frond growing where I could get a shot of the blue flowers on the vine in the background:

I found it frustrating that I couldn’t get an angle on the frond that showed the lacyness of it the way that I wanted. I tried twisting it around, but it wouldn’t stay. Afraid of damaging it, I left it be and shot it as it was.

It was a good lesson for me for the day – take life as it comes. There’s little that you can change without making things worse.

I got up late this morning. By the time I was outside with my Canon G9 in my garden the sun was blazing horizontally across the flora and fauna that make up our little private jungle.

I always check out my chilies each morning. They are a very small variety, only about two or three centimetres long. They are very sweet and not too hot, just right for chili chicken and several other dishes that require the flavour, but not too much heat – at least that’s the way I like it (uh-Huh, uh-Huh). This little chili was casting a brave shadow on the leaf of a Bird of Paradise plant:

One of my favourite posts on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi is an old short one about chilies. I’m not sure where my head was that morning, but I’d sure like to get back in that place.

Another popular denizen of my jungle is the Tickle Me Plant. Its leaves fold up and hide at the slightest touch, and its blossoms would please any high-school cheerleader into a giggle:

They’re a bit small for pom-poms, being only about 2 cm high. The branches are thick with thorns too, so I have to watch where I’m stepping.

As I was walking around our central garden in the middle of the yard, I caught a grasshopper in the open on a leaf. As soon as he saw me, he ducked behind the leaf to hide from me. Little did he suspect that I an an old Cherokee stalker from way back. Little escapes my attention or the merciless eye of my camera. Whistling nonchalantly, I eased down on my bum and surreptitiously snaked my arm around behind some foliage to snap this shot:

The grasshopper is lit only by the light shining through the leaf. I don’t think that it ever noticed the camera. Sneakiness is a valuable attribute for a nature photographer.

Ah, yes, the bees, the bees – the main topic of today’s nonsense.

Well, as usual, as soon as the sun hits these strange little whitish hibiscus blooms they open up. The blossoms last for several days and close up tightly each night. When they open in the morning, the bees are there to greet them and go mining for nectar and pollen.

It’s devilishly difficult to shoot them. They buzz all around me as I sit there on the grass. I have about a half of a second to catch one entering a flower. Since the G9 has about a half-second lag between punching the shutter button and actually capturing the image, it is strictly a crap shoot whether you will get the bee or not. I took about fifty exposures this morning to get these three.

Here is a bee approaching the hibiscus flower which has just opened:

This bee has landed and is on his way down to the pollen mine:

This one has collected all that was available and is leaving the flower:

Though is was exasperating at moments, I had a lot of fun trying to get good shots of the bees feeding. You can clearly see the orange globs of pollen on their hind legs. The shots turned out considerably better than I had hoped.

All in all, a good time in the garden to put me in the right mind to tackle:

The domain name “PBTPNG” might be a NetBIOS domain name.  If this is the case, verify that the domain name is properly registered with WINS.

If you are certain that the name is not a NetBIOS domain name, then the following information can help you troubleshoot your DNS configuration.

The following error occurred when DNS was queried for the service location (SRV) resource record used to locate an Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC) for domain “PBTPNG”:

The error was: “DNS name does not exist.”
(error code 0x0000232B RCODE_NAME_ERROR)

The query was for the SRV record for _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.PBTPNG

Common causes of this error include the following:

- The DNS SRV records required to locate a AD DC for the domain are not registered in DNS. These records are registered with a DNS server automatically when a AD DC is added to a domain. They are updated by the AD DC at set intervals. This computer is configured to use DNS servers with the following IP addresses:

202.5.191.160
202.5.191.130
10.1.1.2
10.1.1.1

- One or more of the following zones do not include delegation to its child zone:

PBTPNG
. (the root zone)

Well, I know that something is awry with DNS on my two new Domain Controllers that I built. But what? I don’t want a lecture. I want a fix! Hopefully, something that I can actually understand well enough to accomplish.

Wish me luck. Anybody know where I can get a job digging ditches?