From the Canyon Edge: Birds of Prey

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Birds of Prey

I was on a conference call this morning when I spotted these two gorgeous birds of prey in the canyon below my house.

In this picture, you might see two tiny dots right in the center of the frame. This is about 500m away, with no zoom.

In the next frame, you can see the birds a bit more clearly, at 12x zoom.

With digital enhancement to 36x, you can see these are truly huge, beautiful birds.

Can anyone identify what type of bird they are? This is in Austin, Texas, for what it's worth. Perhaps a little too white to be an eagle or an osprey. A hawk or a falcon of some kind?

I think this was solved in the comments below... A red-tailed hawk, it must be!

:-Dustin

4 comments:

AnonymousOctober 28, 2009 at 6:44 PM
Looks like a Red-Tailed Hawk to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Redtailedhawkschertztex.JPG
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BruceHOctober 28, 2009 at 6:59 PM
Looks like a type of red-tailed hawk, which are common throughout Texas.
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Dustin KirklandOctober 28, 2009 at 9:03 PM
BruceH, MetalCynic-

Yeah, good call! Thanks for the info. What a great bird...

:-Dustin
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AnonymousOctober 29, 2009 at 5:52 AM
What beautiful birds!
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Add comment

Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

About the Author

Dustin Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.

With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.

Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.

Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).

Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.

Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.

Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.

Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.

Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Birds of Prey

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