Beastie Boy the hummingbird

One of the things that has helped me get through 2024 is the ability to look back, with very little effort at the many pictures I have taken in years gone by.

Sometimes it is the subject of the photo that gives me a lift. Other times it's the fact that I was able to get the shot. 

This photo of a hummingbird that we named Beastie Boy is one of those other times. 

Beastie is the hummingbird that hung out all year-round on our 14th floor balcony in San Diego, circa 2012-2016.

I tried to capture a good portrait of him for nearly two years. While this one is not perfect, I think it was my best effort, and a pretty good result considering the inexpensive gear I used: a five-year-old Olympus Pen E-P1 digital camera with a 20 year-old Olympus 200mm Zuiko OM lens.

If the bird in that photo looks too fat to be a hummingbird, you've just learned something I didn't realize about hummingbirds until our balcony gave me a chance to study them: their appearance can change a lot. In the photo above, Beastie has fluffed up his feathers to create insulating pockets of air because the weather is cold (yes it can get cool in San Diego during the winter months, and Beastie chose not to migrate south).

The changes in hummingbird appearance can be subtle and quick. The two images below were snapped with just seconds between the shots. For fellow photo geeks these images were captured with a handheld Olympus E-P1 (circa 2009), sporting an adapted manual F4 OM 200mm lens (20 years old at the time, $50 on eBay), shutterspeed 1/500 at f5.6, 1600 ISO.

Hummingbirds are one of the things about San Diego that I miss, so I'm very glad I spent some time to learned about and photograph them.

The Welcome Page

This post used to be pinned to the top of the blog but I decided to let it move down the stack. It's purpose was, and still is, to explain that I am Stephen Cobb and this is my personal blog. 

The blog was set up in 2005 but I didn't start regular blogging on it until 2006. That's because I had another blog, also started in 2005, where I covered my main interest back then: information security.

Over time, this blog became a place to talk about things other than cybersecurity. Things like dealing with several medical conditions: my primary aldosteronism, basal cell carcinoma, and very low grade prostate cancer; also my partner's hemochromatosis and Giant Cell Arteritis (UK readers can just add an 'a' after the 'e' in the hemo words).

Brief notes on 70+ years of life

I was born in a house in the medieval city of Coventry, in the middle of England, in the middle of the last century, to parents who survived heavy aerial bombardment in the global conflict known as World War Two, which ended seven years before my life began. 

After going to university—first in Leeds and then in Canada — I travelled the world for several decades before moving back to the city of my birth with my partner and our adopted cat, Lola (seen above).

My partner of 39 years, the phenomenal Chey Cobb, is a US citizen, legally resident in the UK. I am a citizen of both the UK and the US. We have both spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time researching how humans create and confront technology risks and health challenges. I write about my research for a variety of websites and publications, like:

• Cobbs on Security: cybersecurity articles, some written with Chey
• Medium: articles on technology, policy, cannabis, and more 
• LinkedIn: check my "Featured" articles
• ResearchGate: curated publications
• YouTube: narrated articles, personal views
• IEEE Technology & Society: perspective on technology

This blog is where I write about more personal stuff such as: the fact that I'm retired, although I'm still open to interesting projects; my plans to publish another book, but I'm not sure when; my attempts to raise awareness of the medical problems which disabled my partner; the role of registered carers and how it can be supported; my hopes for radical reform of the patriarchal medical establishment that continues to fail women so badly. 

On a lighter note, Chey thinks I should have a hobby to take my mind off things, so I'm been trying "classic glass" photography: using lenses from old 35mm film cameras to take pictures with modern digital cameras (for example, the Minolta lens on my Olympus camera shown here).

On a more serious note, I feel the need to use some of my "free" time to contribute to society. So in addition to sharing my knowledge about thwarting digital criminals, I serve on the board of a charity, Carers Trust Heart of England. 

I also do driving jobs for our local hospital as one of the hundreds of UHCW Volunteers. As I travel around Warwickshire collecting and delivering patients I engage in another hobby: sampling independent coffee shops and their menus.

Fortunately, I still find some time to continue my research at the nexus of ethics and technology. I am currently exploring the harm caused by abuse of technology, which I have written about here. and talked about here, on YouTube.

If you want to contact me, you can use the form on this page or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn. 

Note: I am aware of some formatting issues and missing images in the older articles on this site—a side-effect of moving this blog from WordPress to Blogger—I'm fixing them as and when I can.