Saturday, May 14, 2011

Rain, Birds and Computers--All are Problematic

Waiting on the rain. Should be here a-n-y m-i-n-u-t-e n-o-w. It's been threatening all day long but so far nothing but a slight misting every now and again. When it does arrive, AccuHunch is promising something near to 2 inches of rain in the next couple of days then scattered showers after that for the next week.

Almost makes you wish for a drought. Almost.

******

Birding was pretty slow today. Up at Colton Point the trees were indeed out in tiny new leaves and there were some warblers way up there hopping about, but things were so gray and overcast that the coloring couldn't be made out. And few seem to have been singing making song as a identifier a tad tricky, shall we say. With hardly a breath of a breeze and no thermal currents to speak of, even the vultures stayed home today. I came home with a short list from Colton Point SP.

I took a short walk along Pine Creek at Darling Run and got a second short list but this one included a couple of Bald Eagles and several Baltimore Orioles and King Birds. The fishermen in the creek didn't seem to be doing too well either. Of the 7 or 8 I spoke to, only one admitted to having caught a trout. This despite a recent hatch of mayflies that were still fluttering over the trail. Of course, the fishermen also had to contend with a flotilla of kayaks and canoes going down the river. Most of the boaters were smart enough to pass behind the wading fishermen.

When I get a chance to get time on line without crashing (see below), I'll enter my data in eBird and then post them here.

Oh, the Tiadaghton Audubon Society picnic was nice.

******

I've got some 'puter problems. Starting about a week ago, some gremlin crawled into the Toshiba laptop and started wrecking havoc upon that machine. It's crashing, freezing and generally locking up every few minutes while I'm online in Regular Mode. It's a little better in Safe Mode with Networking Capabilities but not much. I've tried everything I could think of including moving photo files over to the external hard drives to free up space, defraging the hard drive, and running a virus check using Webroot, Norton and Windows Defender. They all said things should be A-okay. Liars!

Looks like tomorrow I'll be heading out to see the Geek Squad. Of course, the problem with that is they also sell computers at Best Buy. I might decide to get the Toshiba fixed and then splurge on an upgrade. I mean, the current 110 GB hard drive and 2 GB RAM are adequate, but that 11.73 Ghz processor? Snails and slugs move faster. Oh, the temptation!

I flunked that test last time when the Apple PowerBook G4 went down. While it went out for repairs (new hard drive with all the data from the old one saved!) I ended up with the Toshiba Satellite. (Woefully underpowered, I might add.) Prices have fallen considerably since then and I could get a much nicer laptop--bigger, smarter, faster--for about 2/3 the price I paid for the Toshiba back then.

For now, I'm making do with the Apple PowerBook G4. I gots 'lectronics up the wazzo!

1 comment:

Rev. Paul said...

You're welcome to send some (all?) of the rain up here - we've had little, and it's been windy for the last week. That's unusual, and now there's a burn ban in effect due to the dry foliage. The leaves just started showing green in the last 48 hours.

Re: the computer, I feel your pain. Lost one desktop to something bad that 'grayed out' every executable file, and now ... now the new laptop I bought for Samantha is so much nicer than my 4-year-old desktop model that I'm drooling over ads, again. There's no real cure for this, is there? (/rhetorical questioning)