Author: doug

Today I recycled a couple of old computers at my town’s e-waste recycling center. First I opened them up, though, to remove & destroy the hard drives. It’s been long enough since I opened one of them — an old Dell — that I had forgotten how much sharp sheet metal is inside it: as it bit me today for the last time, I suddenly remembered all the other times when this particular computer case had drawn blood.

(I also discovered today that it’s pretty difficult to take a picture of the outside of one’s left hand).

In microprocessors, an Instruction Bus can lead to or from the Instruction Cache. I’m not sure what one is doing in Boston.

They don’t know me very well, do they?

Continuing on the birding theme this week: today I worked from home (recovering from our mini-trip). I was paid a visit by this female red-bellied woodpecker.

On day 2 of our mini-vacation to Newburyport, we went to the famous Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. While the tides were wrong for us to see much in the way of shore birds, we did see numerous egrets, herons, and waterfowl. But the highlight of the day once again easily stands out: for about 20 minutes we observed a family of Eastern towhees(*) foraging on the dune-forest floor, turning over leaves to uncover and eat insects, delivering some to the begging fledgling. The female, pictured here, was quite cooperative, and I also got a good picture of the male. Junior, though, stuck to the thickets out of reach of the camera lens.

(*) Formerly called rufous-sided towhee, a much more evocative name

Bonus picture: who knew, cormorants can actually look threatening, or at least like Klingon Birds of Prey

Lis and I took a mini-vacation to Newburyport, and on the first day we went to Maudslay State Park. The highlight of the day was definitely seeing this red-tailed hawk catch a meal, then fly up into a nearby tree to eat it.

I got a Full Tribble of fur off of the kitties this evening, which is surprising considering it’s been humid these past few days but not really all that hot.

I walked over to the Trillium brewery in Fort Point today at lunch, to pick up some beer to bring on the 4th. Little did I know they were debuting not ONE but TWO limited edition beers today, so the line was pretty long but moved quickly. I came away with the beer for Wednesday (Congress St.), plus All Hundred Thousand Trillion Everything and Apricot Soak. How could I resist?