Shallow Thoughts : : 25

Mocker chicks fledged!

One of the mockingbird chicks fledged today! I didn't think it was ready, but the parent mockers were unusually aggressive this morning, dive-bombing Dave or me whenever we went in or out of the house, which made me wonder if a baby had fallen out. Scanning the tree, I discovered a chick out of the nest and sitting on a branch right next to the porch (I took a few pictures on my way past).

Then a few minutes later, I looked out the office window and there was a strange looking bird sitting on the back porch. The chick had fallen or fluttered there from its perch. It hopped around a bit, and fell into the recycling bin. There ensued a few minutes of concerned conversation between parent (perched on the edge of the bin) and the unseen chick, punctuated by occasional aluminum can rattling sounds. I was just about reaching the point of rescuing the chick and putting it back in the tree when it succeeded in hopping out.

It then hopped decisively down the walkway toward the back of the yard, paused briefly at the dirt patch where the lawnmower is parked, then hopped into the patio. The parents followed its progress from on high, but didn't interfere. They were obviously afraid to follow it into the patio, but paced the wires outside, nervously wing-fluttering and head-cocking.

That was the last I saw of the alpha chick. Later in the afternoon, the parents have been aggressively protecting the orange tree outside the patio, and occasional cheeps sound from roughly that direction, so it looks like the chick probably did manage to fly up into the tree. I hope it's out of reach of cats.

Beta chick is still in the nest, showing not much interest in flapping, exploring, or leaving. It looks quite a bit smaller and fuzzier, and the parents are still feeding it.

Photos here.

In between mockwatching, I went over to Sarah's and we attempted to install various distros on her machine, with no success:

• Fedora Core 2 installs, but fails partway through boot apparently somewhere around fsck or "mounting local filesystems". Setting inittab to 3 to disable X (FC2's installer doesn't offer a non-X option) gets it a little farther, but not much.
• Libranet 2.7 and 2.8.1 both install the base system, install grub, prompt for a reboot, and then the reboot fails with:

  GRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUB
  UBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGRUBGR
  

  ... repeated forever. I have no idea what this means.
• The Woody installer tries to go into X, or do something with the screen at any rate, and becomes unreadable.
• The Sarge installer I took along was one of the bad betas, oops.

She may end up going back to RH8. Sigh.

Tags: nature, birds, urban wildlife
[ 17:00 Jun 25, 2004    More nature/birds | permalink to this entry | ]

PenLUG: Linux on Laptops

Great talk at PenLUG by Chander Kant of Linux Certified, on Linux on Laptops. It was much the same talk he gave a month ago at SVLUG, except at PenLUG he got to give his talk without being pestered by a bunch of irritating flamers, and it was possible for people to ask real questions and get answers.

The biggest revelation: "Suspend to Disk" in the 2.6 kernel is actually ACPI S4 suspend, and won't do anything on a machine that doesn't support ACPI S4. Why can't they say that in the help? Sheesh!

Tags: linux, laptop
[ 00:00 Jun 25, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]