Tiny Little Life

This is a farewell to the best and most functional piece of furniture I’ve ever owned: a homemade lofted bed that I built 6 years ago. Over that time, it grew into an important piece of my own life, combining a sleeping space, a work space (although not a home office), and all the functions of a bedroom in between. (Also, at one point it was disassembled into two pieces and moved across the house in an elaborate shuffle of furniture.)

This highly optimized piece of living space is proof of only one thing: you will not get it right on the first try. There is only one of you, and you are not a finished product; nobody can design your workspace but you.

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This boxelder bug was crawling on my windowsill. Somehow it found a way into my house while most of its family was stuck outside.

The short RJ45 cable is a crossover.

The East Coast suffered Hurricane Sandy today. With the lights flickering off for brief moments every half hour or so, I decided it was time to stop hastily typing “ping” commands to diagnose my connectivity problems and so I wrote something to do it better. The result is a script that intelligently tests your networking hardware for connectivity.

It does 3 things:

1. Ping the local gateway to make sure the hardware is working
2. Ping the ISP to make sure that link is working
3. Ping an Internet address to make sure that connectivity exists

Blasting ICMP packets at the Internet as fast as you can is not considerate. You want to ping your gateway quickly so that you know immediately when it comes up. Once you have internet connectivity though, you can ping more slowly.

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Just a spider, her egg sac (which was very slightly “crawling”), and a peppercorn.

The Montreal Insectarium is filled with both live and still insect exhibits.

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This ant is in some serious trouble. It’s caught in a spider web.

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It’s late summer in Vermont. Following a very dry few months, only a few bugs were out. This grasshopper had just escaped from a spiderweb; the spider decided to cut it out rather than risk further damage.

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Why I got to my destination at 3 A.M. is a story for another time, but when I got there I couldn’t resist the chance to take pictures of this large moth.


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I’m not sure what the conglomeration of green flies was doing on the subway platform, but this larger fly was eating it and paying very little mind to the camera. It seems to be a member of Calliphoridae, but I can’t find good information on exactly which one.

This Japanese beetle was relaxing on my kitchen window.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but this one seemed excessively fat. It also turned out to be covered in hair.