Birds were not my friends as a child. For some reason birdsong in my backyard was an annoyance. I knew how to distinguish a handful of birds from one another, but they simply held no fascination. Reptiles were much more interesting. In hindsight, I think it was the call of the Northern Cardinal — possibly awakening me in the early hours — that caused my mild disdain. So how did I arrive at this point where birding brings me such joy?

Back in October I started playing around with a few technologies, resulting in my first code posted to GitHub: safnetDirectory. I must say that it is not the most impressive bit of coding that I've ever done. However, the urge to learn sometimes needs an unencumbered, no-strings-attached, digital canvas on which to exercise. That urge is requited through the experimentation and the lessons learned, rather than the completion of an opus.

The end result: I have a prototype of a mixed Angular.Js / ASP.Net MVC application that provides a simple directory and simple administrative functionality. And it is Hosted on Azure.

Nature-lovers often speak about transcendent moments, occasions where some experience moved them to a profound awareness of life, the universe, and everything in it. For some, these are timeless minutes, forever memorable, forever inspiring. All of the senses align in memory, and perhaps a bit of wisdom descends in epiphany.

My transcendent moments are not so strong; perhaps that is from a weak sense of smell. Or perhaps because I seek out a low level extraordinary at every turn: the senses are not so overwhelmed in these daily moments, as the ordinary passes beyond rationality. These peek experiences do exist however, and as I sift through the shoebox of memory, two stand out at very different scales.

Beware, o ye who walks in the woods with me. For I cannot help myself: I must share. Look at this little fern over here. This is a nice soapberry tree. So many ant lion nests here! Did you hear the tsip sound? Do you think it's a Dark-eyed Junco or a Yellow-rumped Warbler?

I pray that it is not a subconscious showing-off, know-it-all thing. That accusation has stung me before, in the middle-school classroom. Consciously, I simply love drawing people's attention to that which fascinates me (and yes, please do return the favor). There is a wonder about the natural world, a wonder and a joy that is so great that it often cannot be contained. This joy is reason enough to share with friends and family.

Some folks grow up in households of privilege where trips to the family cabin / ranch / lake-house are common. We had the next best thing: a family friend generous enough to invite us along to The Ranch. Now, The Ranch has a more formal name, but its legend and personal history are best distinguished by turning the general, specific.

My earliest experiences of nature were of playing in the yard — and out back — as a child in a Houston suburb. As I recall it, our backyard had a pecan and some young oaks, along with multiple gardens. There was a red oak — or perhaps a maple? — planted out front, and a sweet gum tree whose seed casings would bring forth caution in even the most carefree of barefoot children. And of course there was the St. Augustine grass. This was all conducive to much play outside. But the best part was behind the fence: The Ditch.

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

Time to turn that Node.js test green. In Part 2, I succeeded in publishing a message to RabbitMQ using Node.js. However, my automated test failed: the .Net test runner could not handle the generated message. Three key elements were missing, which are required for the MassTransit .Net library to interpret the message correctly:

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

And now, I finally get back to blogging about the ASP.Net Web API code that I wrote for this head-to-head comparison of REST service and message bus integration. The official tutorials were my guide for Web API, and as with the test runner in part 1, I used MassTransit as a convenient library for publishing from .Net code to RabbitMQ. Owin was my solution for self-hosting the web application.

Thanks to recent mowing, I was able to access the west-side of the pond at Sam Houston Trail Park in Irving, TX this morning. The pond is drying up — creating a wonderful concentration of aquatic creatures for the the shorebirds to eat. These photos are as good as I can do. Positively identified:

• American Avocet
• Snowy Egret
• Least Sandpiper
• Stilt Sandpiper (pretty sure, not absolutely sure)
• Greater Yellowlegs
• Northern Shoveler
• Killdeer

I encountered a few more common birds, and just as I was leaving ran into a group of three Lark Sparrows to cap off the muddy morning.

A small group gathered at the Bahá'í­ Center of Irving last night in our second meeting on the discourses of society, reflecting on climate change. The first meeting in the series was too much of a slide-based lecture, so for this second one we chose two videos and facilitated an open discussion. The conversation was robust, heartfelt, and meaningful — yet in reflection, it raises some key questions about how to have a productive, spiritually-oriented conversation.