Has this ever happened to you?

You've just finished a Big project, and I mean a BIG, burdensome project that consumes all of your free time for weeks on end, and sometimes even consumes your sleeping, eating, and chore time, or if it doesn't, it makes you feel guilty for not allowing it to consume all of your free time. So then the moment when said BIG project is no longer on your plate, you feel like celebrating! You're suddenly free, like a bird, to do whatever it is that you've been wanting to do, or whatever it is that you have been doing instead, but now you can fully enjoy it without that little twinge of guilt for not focusing on the Big project instead.

So what do you do first? Maybe you go out with friends all night and celebrate, or you stare at the TV for hours just because you can. You might also do all those little chores that you'd been wanting to do, but couldn't because they weren't as important as the Big project. Maybe you even take a mid-day...

I am witnessing at least 8 different types of birds eating seed just a few feet from where I type this! I am taking dozens of photographs, but I barely have time to upload them or type anything before more birds show up and there is more action to take pics of! I've got bird fights, male-female pairs, and multiple species eating together at once.
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Just as I was in mid-sentence up there the elusive European Starling showed up and raided the party of Morning Doves, House Sparrows, and House Finches that had been around!
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Well he only lasted 20 seconds and now the party is back. I have some very close up photos of all the species I've seen so far. Got the camera right next to the keyboard, which is right next to the window, which is right next to the birds. I have pics of most of these already, but the lighting at the moment is very golden and making it hard to stop taking pics.


The Cast:

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I never would have thought my life would have even a remote connection to the famous "X PRIZE", but yesterday, those connection wires were put in place. Let me back up and explain. . .

The X PRIZE was a $10 million dollar prize to be awarded to the first non-government organization to launch a reusable, manned spacecraft into outer space twice within two weeks. The prize and it's space challenge were set up in 1996, and over several years I saw more than one TV show about what a revolutionary idea it was to have such a prize, and what an unattainable feat it was (at that time) to complete the challenge that would win the prize. The prize went unclaimed for 8 years, until October of 2004!

What I did not know until yesterday, was the the X PRIZE had been officially renamed in May of 2004 to the "Ansari X PRIZE", in honor of entrepreneurs Anousheh Ansari and Amir Ansari, who made a multi-million dollar donation to the prize.

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In Part 2 of this Behind-the-Scenes blog series, I talked about my discovery of a secret new site feature and my ability to edit almost any pixel in the site. Admins were starting to help test out my settings, but it was time to get more people involved, and stir up some excitement in the masses. . .

With the base site settings and user group access permissions roughly in place we contacted a few dozen long-time site members and informed them of our plans to convert our old site into a new unified site. I think everyone was ecstatic about this news and was eager to get a sneak peak to help us test it out. We set up password protection on the new test site URL and let people have at it. Just one problem. . .

I realized when you send a bunch of people to a test site full of new features and tell them to use it as they normally do, yet keeping in mind anything they do there will get erased eventually, it seemed to create a rush-in-and-stand-still situation. Kinda...

In Part 1 of this Behind-the-Scenes blog series, I talked about how we started this new site design idea back in the summer of 2007. Part 1 took us from the initial idea, to product research, up through about day 2 of my work to customize the out-of-the-box settings and visual styles we purchased from vBulletin.

Around about that second day of playing with the new site, I was realizing just how much power and customization could be done with the tools at hand. truth and the other admins hadn't really gotten into the settings yet, so I was pretty much making and breaking every setting I could find.

I'll let you in on one secret feature that we have not (yet ) implemented. I discovered this setting in my initial setting-and-breaking everything test period, forgot about it, and just re-discovered today. This feature has the strangest name of any site setting, "Tachy Goes to Coventry". I have no idea what that phrase means, but *perhaps* members...