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?

Weird Al meets WoW

I was a long time World of Warcraft player starting from the 2nd beta up until about 4 months ago. I quit cold turkey because it was just chewing up too much of my time and scaling back prevented me from playing with guildmates with whom I’d been questing with for nearly a year. Today a friend of mine linked me to this video. The song itself is very fun and the WoW video is excellent work. Check it out.

Update: iTMS has the song if you are so inclined.

Pure Ihnatko

Ihnatko: Harsh Words for Windows (originally from Daring Fireball) won’t illuminate your life at all but it might be worth a chuckle. I’ve always loved his writing style and sense of humor.

Other Keynote Predictions

Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, what else can we expect during the keynote?

• Steve Jobs will have at least 3 bottles of (probably Smart) water on his demo machine desk.
• Steve Jobs will get a joke about stock options in, probably while he is showing us how great Dashboard works on Leopard.
• There will be at least one technical sentence that Steve Jobs admits to not understanding and the audience will chuckle.
• Steve Jobs will have learned an airline flight number but may not use it during his Dashboard presentation just to be safe.
• Roz Ho will not be on stage, she only comes for Macworld.
• There will be at least one technology that Steve Jobs is so obviously enamored of that he shows it multiple times. Let’s hope it isn’t Dashboard.
• Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World will be heard at some point.
• That guy in Paris will show up on iChat. We will know he is in Paris because the Eiffel Tower will be right outside his window. Audience members may wonder why Steve doesn’t know any hot French women to talk to instead.
• The word “amazing” will be uttered no less than 10 times.
• Anything that can be resized and/or scrolled will be exercised multiple times, just long enough for the audience to wish Steve would stop.
• Someone will be invited on stage to showcase a new technology that they got early access to. Bastards!