Moving the bird feeder away from trees and other things that a squirrel could use seems to have helped. There’s less spilled seed (but still quite a bit), and consumption is down to the point where I only need to refill it every second day. Then again, part of that may be due to the fact that the feeder is more exposed, plus there’s an awful lot of spilled birdseed on the ground where it used to be – the birds seem to go there about as often as to the feeder (for now). I’ve also added a couple pigeons to the roster of birds eating from the droppings under the feeder. If there were to try and land on it, they’d definitely be heavy enough to cause a spill, so we’ll see how things develop.
The birds got an extra treat yesterday, too. I cleaned out the fridge a bit and found some blackberries that were left over from my housewarming party on January 31st. I figured it would make a nice treat for them. They seemed to agree.
My back is still hurting, but I’m coping. A trip yesterday to Cub yielded a new bottle of ibuprofen that ought to last me a day or two, along with some extra food that’s easier to prepare, and more seed for the birdies.
The ice-dam in the alley broke yesterday. The water is now running into the alley, rather than pooling right in front of my garage. I’m just hoping I’ll be in good enough shape to shovel the slushy snow that’s coming today out of the way tomorrow morning.
- Flowers from the Heartland is Jim’s write-up on the people giving flowers to random couples who are getting married in San Francisco. I haven’t had a lot to say about it, since I basically think that the real problem is that marriage is given special legal status. I’m of the opinion that there are two separate functions in marriage. One is the personal commitment between two people, and the other is the commitment in the eyes of the law (which results in things like being able to put someone on your benefits, visit them in the hospital, or have to pay alimony when things go wrong). I think the first is probably something best handled by bodies other than the government. The second is a government function, and should be open to any couple, whether their relationship is sexual or not.
- Here’s the connection between Trojans and Spam that I kinda figured had to be out there. The virus and trojan writers infect the computers, then sell the addresses to spammers who use them to send out their spam. I was figuring there had to be some way people were getting paid to develop viruses and trojans. [slashdot]
- Says here, Mac OS X makes the most secure servers along with the other BSD variants. But the really surprising news is that in the most recent survey, Linux was hacked more often than Windows was. Mind you, this is just looking at servers, so it could be that there are fewer Windows servers out there to get hacked than before. [slashdot]
- More license troubles for OpenBSD team? Looks like it, as the license for Apache changes and now the OpenBSD version of httpd will probably fork. [openbsd]
- Seems as the economy improves (albeit slowly), employees are jumping ship when new jobs come along. They’re tired of working bunches of unpaid overtime and picking up the slack for people who’ve been laid off. [press-patch]
- Kane County tells bicyclist thanks, but stop plowing trail in suburban Chicago that he uses to ride to Fermilab. They’re worried that someone else will slip and fall on the trail, which is officially closed in the winter, and sue them. No good deed goes unpunished. [fark!]