For the Fourth of July weekend I went with some friends, Elene & Adam, to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.   One of the attractions at Six Flags is the Wild Safari.  The Wild Safari is really pretty cool.  It's basically an African Safari in the middle of New Jersey.  They've got Camels, Ostrich (who wanted to eat my windshield wipers), Elephants, Rhinos, Kalabaw (Water Buffalo), Giraffe, Bears, Lions, Tigers, Llamas and Zebras - you name it.  I only wish that 1) I had a lens with a bigger zoom, and 2) I didn't have to shoot through the windows of my car.  I still managed to get a few good shots, so here they are for your enjoyment.

 

View the Wild Safari album. 

 

Alright, this will have to be my last update for the night because it's getting rather late.  A couple of weeks ago I went to a Mets game along with a lot of other church members in the New York area.  The Missionaries sang the National Anthem so we all were able to get in at a discount.  It was a lot of fun and my first major league game.  Heavy rain had been forecasted that night and it did start to rain in the 7th inning.  At that point everybody started to leave and I was going to as well but I stuck around for a little longer (it helped that I had an umbrella).  Then, shortly after it started the rain stopped so I stayed for the rest of the game.  Unfortunately the Mets weren't able to pull out a win but it was a good night anyway.
 
I got some nice shots with the fisheye lens.  The last few shots are of the McAdams family (and their twins) who I've become good friends with.
 
View the Family Night with the Mets album.

 

A few weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a Roomba.  Roomba is one of the greatest inventions ever created, especially for people that are lazy like me and own pets that shed like Pungi.  So, now all I need to do to clean up all the Pungi hair that inevitably gets scattered all throughout the apartment is set Roomba loose.  And when it's done cleaning it automatically returns to its charging station to recharge the battery!  It doesn't get better than that.

 

Anyway, what happens when you set Roomba loose while Pungi is relaxing?  Well, it's best to just view the photos.

 

View the Pungi and Roomba album. 

 

Still catching up with getting old photos online the next installment brings photos from the Raptor Project sponsored by Nikon.  We were lucky enough to have our own little show around lunch time a few weeks ago.  I got a few good photos of some birds that I'll probably never get this close to again so that was quite fun.

 

View the Raptor Show album. 

 

I've been trying to get around to uploading some more pictures and I just went through the photos I took during Fleet Week/Memorial Day weekend.  There aren't too many, but there are a few good shots of an aircraft carrier that was visiting New York.

 

View the Fleet Week album.

 

OK, to start this off I must admit that I'm a Screen Rat - the digital version of a Pack Rat.  I keep tons of applications open at once with literally dozens and dozens of windows open (I just counted and I have 26 applications and almost a hundred windows open right now, and that's after I just quit Safari).  But with 5.5 GB of RAM I can afford to have everything open at once.  Safari though, like no other application, just seems to gobble up RAM like a goat in a petting zoo (watch out for those fingers kids).

The first rule of being a Screen Rat is to never quit an application, NEVER!  You should only quit an application when you need to shutdown your computer, there's no other excuse.  Well, that is unless that application is Safari.  For some reason if you keep Safari running for a few days its memory footprint will just keep increasing.  Sure, it'll start off using a nice cool 20-30 MB, but after a few days of browsing and countless windows open it will balloon to 1.3 GB.  1.3 GB of RAM!  For a web browser!  That's actual RAM in use, not the virtual address space, the virtual address space is well over 2 GB. 

Normally what you do when an application starts hogging RAM is release some of its resources.  In this case, you start closing those dozens of windows that you've opened over the last few days.  That would be enough for most apps, but not Safari.  No, just now I closed all but one window in Safari and the RAM usage went from 1.3 GB to 1.2 GB - 100 MB.  Sure 100 MB is a good chunk of RAM, but it's only about 8% of what Safari was using.  How could the last remaining window be using 1.2 GB of RAM?

Anyway, at that point I was fed up, I'd need to quit Safari to reclaim my RAM.  I repeat this cycle every few days and the only solution I've found is to quit Safari.  I've tried emptying the cache, closing all the windows, clearing the history and using the Debug menu to empty all of the caches (WebFoundation, WebCore, JavaScript, etc.).  Nothing works.  Once Safari has ballooned into a memory gobbling behemoth there's no way to reclaim the memory short of quitting the application.  This is utterly depressing for us Screen Rats. Maybe I'll have to try using Camino or Firefox instead to see how well they behave.  I do use them both often, but not nearly as much and as long as I use Safari.  They seem fairly well behaved right now, but I wonder how well they hold up after a week of continuous use and dozens of windows opened.  Can any fellow Screen Rats comment?