loud bird [m4a]
(a little bit of echo makes it … very)
loud bird
Reply
Tag Archives: bird
two observations
A tiny green birdlet with yellow eye rings hit our window, and the flew off a few minutes later.
A girl with a pink scarf sits asleep on the train, a tiny trickle of drool escaping from the corner of her mouth.
All the printers I’ve ever owned …
- An ancient (even in 1985) Centronics serial dot-matrix printer that we never got working with the CPC464. The print head was driven along a rack, and when it hit the right margin, an idler gear was wedged in place, forcing the carriage to return. Crude, noisy but effective.
- Amstrad DMP-2000. Plasticky but remarkably good 9-pin printer. Had an open-loop ribbon that we used to re-ink with thick oily endorsing ink until the ribbons wore through.
- NEC Pinwriter P20. A potentially lovely 24-pin printer ruined by a design flaw. Print head pins would get caught in the ribbon, and snap off. It didn’t help that the dealer that sold it to me wouldn’t refund my money, and required gentle persuasion from a lawyer to do so.
- Kodak-Diconix 300 inkjet printer. I got this to review for Amiga Computing, and the dealer never wanted it back. It used HP ThinkJet print gear which used tiny cartridges that sucked ink like no tomorrow; you could hear the droplets hit the page.
- HP DeskJet 500. I got this for my MSc thesis. Approximately the shape of Torness nuclear power station (and only slightly smaller), last I heard it was still running.
- Canon BJ 200. A little mono inkjet printer that ran to 360dpi, or 720 if you had all the time in the world and an unlimited ink budget.
- Epson Stylus Colour. My first colour printer. It definitely couldn’t print photos very well.
- HP LaserJet II. Big, heavy, slow, and crackling with ozone, this was retired from Glasgow University. Made the lights dim when it started to print. Came with a clone PostScript cartridge that turned it into the world’s second-slowest PS printer. We did all our Canadian visa paperwork on it.
- Epson Stylus C80. This one could print photos tolerably well, but the cartridges dried out quickly, runing the quality and making it expensive to run.
- Okidata OL-410e PS. The world’s slowest PostScript printer. Sold by someone on tortech who should’ve known better (and bought by someone who also should’ve known better), this printer jams on every sheet fed into it due to a damaged paper path. Unusually, it uses an LED imaging system instead of laser xerography, and has a weird open-hopper toner system that makes transporting a part-used print cartridge a hazard.
- HP LaserJet 4M Plus. With its duplexer and extra paper tray it’s huge and heavy, but it still produces crisp pages after nearly 1,000,000 page impressions. I actually have two of these; one was bought for $99 refurbished, and the other (which doesn’t print nearly so well) was got on eBay for $45, including duplexer and 500-sheet tray. Combining the two (and judiciously adding a bunch of RAM) has given me a monster network printer which lets you know it’s running by dimming the lights from here to Etobicoke.
- IBM Wheelwriter typewriter/ daisywheel printer. I’ve only ever produced a couple of pages on this, but this is the ultimate letter-quality printer. It also sounds like someone slowly machine-gunning the neighbourhood, so mostly lives under wraps.
- HP PhotoSmart C5180. It’s a network photo printer/scanner that I bought yesterday. Really does print indistinguishably from photos, and prints direct from memory cards. When first installed, makes an amusing array of howls, boinks, squeals, beeps and sproings as it primes the print heads.
tunes I must learn (eventually)
Not all of these could be classed as banjo tunes, but I’d want to try, anyway:
- The Coo-Coo Bird (it’s not optional)
- The Old Plank Road (Uncle Dave’s delivery, which was more demented than the Rounders)
- Hot Corn, Cold Corn (like HMR; just how does one spell moo’m moo’m moo’m de boo’m boo’m de boo’m?)
- I’m Going In A Field (Nic Jones style)
- Bridges & Balloons (Joanna’s song’s just crying out to be covered with a broad Glasgow accent)
- Needle of Death (too many banjo tunes are too happy)
- Ghost (the Neutral Milk Hotel one)
- something by Sufjan (even if Peter Stampfel says he plays banjo kind of boringly)
- I Love How You Love Me (like Mangum, not Spector)
a tiny stub-tailed birdlet
Our tree is filled with Ruby-crowned Kinglets, and the title is Peterson’s poetic description of them. I guess they’re feeding up to migrate a bit south. Give news of yourselves when you bring spring back with you!
people are stupid
There’s going to be some ranting here, so I advise folks to look at this nice picture of a monarch butterfly I took at Bluffer’s Park today, and move along:
In the park there was a gull that wasn’t moving like the others. I got close to it, and discovered there was a large fishing lure lodged through its beak. I had no way of helping it, and a nearby parks crew couldn’t do anything either. It could fly, just, but the big lure slowed it down, and the trailing fishing line mad it stumble.
I know gulls are often seen as nuisance birds, but no animal deserved
this fate. There’s no fishing and no kite flying in this park because there are so many birds. I’m angry that someone could be so thoughtless.
There’s a picture below the fold. You probably don’t want to see it.
Wind Blog » Blog Archive » On Birds
This is good: Wind Blog » Blog Archive » On Birds.
Imagine Me & You, and a redwing
We just saw Imagine Me & You; fairly amusing, mostly harmless. But there’s a problem; in a scene (Hec & Rachel’s breakup, if you must know) a red-winged blackbird can be clearly heard. There are no redwings in England …
deadly windows
Millions of birds perish every year from crashing into glass windows. And architects don’t need to do costly and time-consuming migration studies.
But us wind guys get it in the neck.
queen west
Went to Canzine today after meeting. Can you belive it, an almost full house and it was a silent meeting?
Anyway, Canzine was full. Bought a couple of Spacing TTC buttons to show my commuter tribe affiliation (Kennedy — Union), and also a m@b book. Eveyone’s favourite Bramptonian Friendly Rich was there, being friendly and well-dressed. Jim Munroe looked in his element in his No Media Kings room.
After that, I walked down to the turbine. The warm weather had brought the ladybirds out. They were all over the deck.
importing mail from Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux to Mac
How lucky that Thunderbird uses the same text mail format for storing messages. All I needed to do was scp individual server directories from under .thunderbird to ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/saltname.default/Mail — that did the job!
I didn’t use the shared global inbox that Thunderbird uses by default. If you do what I did, you probably shouldn’t either.
broken bird
Walked by two agitated starlings. A third starling was on its back in the road, legs kicking. It looked like a fledgling, maybe fallen and couldn’t get up. I went over to pick it up. Red stuff had come out its head. A vehicle had hit it. The parents were hopping about, screaming. There was nothing I could do; nothing to pick it up with. Couldn’t dispatch it with sandals.
I walked back to the verge. There was another starling fledgling hiding in the grass, a sibling maybe. It had soft grey nest-fuzz among its feathers, the wide yellow slash of a nestling’s beak. It ran close to me for comfort, then stopped. Not all moving things might be friends. We watched one another, the parents still screaming. I had to leave.
bird, ice
red tail hawk flying over frozen credit river.
half a turbine: wee deid speug
We found a dead sparrow (= speug, in Scots, pr. sp-yug) outside the front window when we took the recycling out. It had hit the window. Sorry, little dude.
So that’s me used six months of the avian mortality of the ExPlace wind turbine.