Well, here it is, Wednesday morning. In spite of my vague threats the other day, I’ve been sticking to my normal morning ritual of surfing the web and putting together some links while I wake up. That’s going to be a tough habit to break, and I don’t think I feel strongly enough about it to even try yet.
Only a few more days remain before the evenings get dark much sooner, though. That’s a drag, but it will mean that I won’t be spending the entire morning in darkness, as I have the past few days. At least not until we’re a lot deeper into winter, and my urge to go outside will be roughly non-existant.
Folks have pointed out that I haven’t commented much around here on the World Series. Well, I’m rooting for Boston, and they’re doing well, and while I’ve been watching the games in the evening, it feels more like a pleasant diversion to me than real baseball fannishness. The biggest thing about it is that when the series is over, there won’t be any more baseball for months. At least I’ll have a couple issues of Elysian Fields Quarterly to get me through the winter.
That brings me to the feeling for the week. It feels very autumnal. The temperatures have been pleasant enough during the day that I’ve been doing some things outside, but my body is feeling the transition and I’m mentally starting to hunker down for the winter already. I’ve almost got the fireplace ready to go for the winter, and have bought a couple hundred pounds of bird seed to keep the feeders full (and mouse-proof containers to keep my garage rodent-free this winter). Since I started filling the bird-feeders again last week, I’ve already attracted a bluejay and a cardinal who are regulars. And I’ve got a squirrel who’s able to climb the metal pole the feeders hang from. I’m tempted to coat the pole in grease or wrap it in flypaper to discourage the tree-rat, but for now I’m willing to live and let live. If nothing else, the bluejay seems willing to serve as enforcer, and has attacked a fuzzy tail more than once. I’ll leave it in his hands for now.
As for the birdseed, I’m feeding them a mix of black-oil and striped sunflower seeds in one feeder, and “peanut parts” in the other feeder. The house-swallows mostly go after the sunflowers, and the cardinal and bluejay both seem to like the peanuts. It was something different to try, and I think I’m relatively happy with things for now. But if you have a suggestion for something to put in the feeders that will attract birds I’d like to watch, feel free to send it along.
- Hey, there’s a Total Lunar Eclipse tonight, beginning about 9:23 CDT. The weather probably won’t coöperate and let you see it here in Minneapolis, though. Drat.
- Down in New Mexico, there’s Silence in church, thanks to a nifty Israeli cell-phone jammer. Sadly, the church is almost certainly breaking the law by doing this. [endwar]
- In Network Solutions, your SECURE registrar, steveo illustrates why you really don’t want your domains registered with them. I’m trying to work with a client who’s got similar issues, except he didn’t start out with Yahoo, and hadn’t thought to get the domain in his own name years ago. I’m really hoping we can save his domain-name, but I’m starting to think it’s a lost cause. Then again, maybe we can use NetSol’s SECURITY…. [steveo]
- Here’s a cool site that tracks the Origin Of Spam, with a ton of statistics. Interesting to see when/where it’s coming from. Sadly, it hasn’t been updated since February.
- Bruce Schneier has a tale of A Sensible Elected Official who has actually rolled back some of the sham security put in place in Madison, Alabama after 9/11. Pointing out that some of the “security” measures were nothing but a pain in the tuchus, he allows parking close to city hall again, and eliminated the guest register, since there was nothing that made people actually enter their real names. Putting “O. B. Laden” into such a register seems like a nice bit of monkey-wrenching to me.