Squirrel Busting

Squirrel Busting

Originally uploaded by srcleaves.

We received this SquirrelBuster Plus bird feeder as a gift last year but just got the hanger for it this past weekend. It didn’t take the birds any time at all to find it and as you can see the food level is down appreciably in three days. So far we’re regularly visited by chickadees, cardinals, and tutfted titmouse and occasionally by a couple I haven’t identified yet. Of course it was no surprise when the squirrels turned up. While we are using high quality bird seed with no filler some of the birds are picky and just toss things to the ground. One of the squirrels seemed quite content to collect what he could find. The other was far more daring as you can see from this photo. That is a tufted titmouse in the background. (Photo was taken through a window.)

Edit: I have nothing against squirrels eating, if they can get the food out more power to them, but I do want the birds to get their fair share. I have no proof of this yet, but I suspect the design flaw of this feeder will be that just swinging it from the top will cause seed to drop out of the holes. The way it is intended to stop squirrels (and anything heavier than a certain weight) from taking food is that the entire perch drops and shuts off access to the food. I found on the first day that I had set the weight too low because it closed when a cardinal landed on it. Compared to birds a squirrel weighs quite a lot, but how much difference is there between a big blue jay and a cardinal?

Three female wild turkeys

Three female wild turkeys

Originally uploaded by srcleaves.

I was eating lunch and looking out the kitchen window on this dreary November day when suddenly a large bird walked into view. I was stunned momentarily but quickly raced to get my digital camera. By the time I got back to the window there were these three. I confirmed in my Audobon guide that they are female wild turkeys. I know this isn’t the best shot, it was through a window and with a very slow shutter speed without a tripod.

Quite an interesting visit given that Sara and I are getting our first turkey this weekend from a local farm that raises them as sustainably and humanely as possible. We’ve both been vegetarians for many years but the fact of the matter is that locally (and organically) raised meat is far more sustainable than packaged and processed vegetarian substitutes from California.

Taking the Plunge: TextMate

I’ve been intrigued by TextMate for quite some time now. I’ve read about it and watched a number of the screencasts but so far I haven’t started using it. Back before IDEs were prevalent I was an Emacs user and I still use Emacs for editing when I’m in a command line interface. For code editing I switched to an IDE when Eclipse came on the scene and I was writing enterprise Java code. When I switched to the Mac and began writing Cocoa applications I used Project Builder and later Xcode. Eclipse was quite terrible on Mac OS X back then so any pure Java I was writing was done on a PC. I guess this brief history is meant to illustrate why TextMate might be so appealing. It seems to be something of a combination of an Emacs philosophy applied to Mac OS X. Emacs does of course work on OS X and there are GUI implementations of it but any elisp I knew is long forgotten and the TextMate approach to extensibility seems a bit more friendly.

Starting today I’ve decided to begin using TextMate and what better place to start than with a blog entry. To me that meant learning John Gruber’s Markdown syntax. It isn’t strictly necessary but it was another technology I had kept an eye on but had not yet done anything with. Compared to HTML it is a delight to write, but then what isn’t. I’ll probably make some other TextMate-related posts to detail my experiences with it.

Update: Well it appears that WordPress.com doesn’t support Markdown so until I am hosting my own WordPress install I won’t be able to use it.

MacGourmet 2 Public Beta

Michael has made the first public beta of MacGourmet 2 available. Lots of good stuff in this release. Check it out!

Microsoft… Still Evil

It came to light today that Microsoft will pay Universal for every Zune sold. Of course the representative from Universal thinks this is a good idea:

We felt that any business that’s built on the bedrock of music we should share in

Apparently selling music isn’t enough for them anymore. Do you suppose Universal are getting paid for every radio sold? I doubt it. Yet when it comes to digital music they feel entitled because as we all know anyone who uses a digital music player is really a pirate. The music industry has pushed for a tax on devices that could be used to pirate music. Now it appears that they will simply negotiate (force) the charge into the contract with the music resellers. Greedy.

So Microsoft is making two statements with this agreement. First to their potential ( though it is beyond me why anyone would buy this thing ) customers: You are thieves. Second to Apple: We’ve got billions of dollars to lose on this thing, how much do you have?

Update: Excellent analysis of this whole thing.

Update 2: John Gruber’s take on the Microsoft/Universal deal.